In memoriam: Glissant asserting a baroque nature

A few years one of the biggest surprises in my MA coursework was a Caribbean literature class, a course taken out of necessity without much previous knowledge, which still provides leads and insights (e.g. exposure to the poetics of José Lezama Lima).  A second unexpected gift was working through Édouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation.  Like many Carribean poets who take Deleuze and Guattari seriously into their account of archipelagic thinking, Glissant's work never seems as forced or militant (though he certainly engages multiple political fronts).  I recently ran into his short piece, "Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World".

What is important there is his attempt to pull the baroque crisis of subjectivity away from purely human qualifications.  His essay is fundamentally about a Nature as a representation that works through proliferation rather than depth.  The Baroque, understood as this crisis of meaning, also gives way to a rift between human history and Nature.  (A consequence was the proliferation of landscape paintings in the 17th century.)  Horror vaccui dictates extremes: anti-Nature, pro-Nature, counter-Nature, super-Nature.  A positive outcome of this psychosis might be a moment of reformulation.

 What Glissant means here is that the (historical) Baroque is an allergic reaction to the rationalist certainty of penetrating into the depths of things.  Neobaroque thinking argues that these are historical patterns, repeating like archipelagos.  Following William Egginton, among others, this seems to be good and bad -- depending on how the allergen and allergy is mobilized in a particular text.

Thus the Nature of the Baroque is about extreme inclusion.  For Glissant the possibly more horrifying inverse is also true because inclusion also means here expansion and absorption into a Master worldview.  To flip back again this absorption also folds in plurality into the monologic, fascist and centralized.  It insures that the World understood qua World (or even Word) is unstable, expanding and boiling over.  This points to the "moment of reformulation" mentioned above.