ECHO-MONDE

The postcolonial Caribbean-French philosopher, Édouard Glissant, begins his Poetics of Relation (1997) in an echoing womb-like structure of a different kind to the natal womb which gives birth to Nancy's listening subject:

This terrifying origin, where Glissant begins his text, is the boat of the Middle Passage, transporting African slaves towards the Americas. Whereas for Nancy, the womb is the origin in which a subject begins listening, where ‘the ear opens onto the sonorous cave that we become’ (2007: 34), for Glissant, the traumatic origin of the boat's womb is the point from which a future collective identity opens: the African diaspora created through slavery, subtended by the unknown terror of the Middle Passage and the clamour in the darkness between bodies. This clamour opens out, as Glissant goes on to develop through his text, into a world of echoes, an écho-monde: a way of conceiving identity not as substance but generated from the many contaminations, feedbacks and echoes of the Middle Passage. For Glissant, this boat and the ocean grave that subtends it is the groundless ground from which an écho-monde resonates forth, expanding and diffusing outwards, across space and time.