The figure of the tracée is significant for Ménil’s understanding of spatio-temporality, an understanding upon which rest, so this essay argues, his concepts of critique, poetic knowledge, and literary form. The argument takes as its starting point the work Ménil did to conceptualize history as the poesis of recuperation. In doing so, the essay argues for a renewed understanding of Ménil’s contribution to Caribbean philosophy as a whole. One of the most important components of this contribution, the essay claims, is (...) the manner in which Ménil shifts the focus from how linguistic and cultural identity forms in the Antilles to how history appears. What this means is that Ménil works to displace the centrality of folklore and orality to the construction of Antillean identity in order to imagine how Antillean culture comes also to be expressed non-discursively. In Ménil’s work, this displacement occurs primarily by his re-thinking the relationship of architecture to literature. Re-thinking this relationship entails for Ménil recuperating the traces of an Antillean “past passed over,” which unexpectedly appear in both architectural structures and literary works. Paying attention to this particular and peculiar intellectual focus in Ménil’s work, this essay ultimately reconsiders the roles played by both discursive and non-discursive arts in the constitution of a decolonized aesthetics in the Antilles. (shrink)

This essay reads Sylvia Wynter’s only novel The Hills of Hebron as a modern tragedy, one that both challenges and builds upon Raymond Williams’s concept of modern tragedy. The essay’s main argument is that tragedy, as a literary form, and the tragic, as a philosophical concept, are fundamental to Wynter’s project of creating forms of counterpoieses. Engaging Wynter’s interlocution with tragedy is crucial for comprehending how she is able to transform loss into a condition of possibility, primarily for the writing (...) of what she calls “traumatic time.” Instead of only blocking mental representation, traumatic loss in Wynter becomes the first gesture of a philosophical activity that makes presentable that which has been lost or abandoned to a state of ruin, an argument that Walter Benjamin, another writer in dark times, had earlier made in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Occupying the temporality of the tragic, Wynter has always made the re-assumption of the past—“slave, slave masters and all,” as she says—central to her project of critiquing and dismantling the “descriptive statement” of Man as the only permissible version of the Human. In my reading of The Hills of Hebron, I show how the novel utilizes the aesthetic, particularly the medium of theatricality, as the grounds for a theoretical framework that makes, in a manner redolent of Antigone, “the wretched of the earth” presentable not as “symbolic death” but rather as allegories of resistance. (shrink)