Fundamental truths about collective violence must be unveiled gradually through opacity
Evidence
Tragic action is progressive and carried out within opacity, because the violence linked to filiation (the absolute exclusion of the other) cannot be faced head on nor aIl at once. Such a conh’Ontation would have left the communitl’ reeling from a surfeit of understanding, a sort of short-circuit of consciousness. Wars and conquests mask for the community the violence of this exclusion of the other. But things that one can valiantly endure in battle, whose pretext has been calculated or improvised, becorne unbearable in the sacred contemplation of the root. Whence the importance in tragedy of the art of unveiling. Oedipus would be incapable of conceiving “at first sight” the truth that lies within him. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 312
Categorization
- DEFINE: Concrete use of ‘opacity’ and its necessity for gradual, non-collapsing disclosure — a candidate mechanism for holding identity in a non-literal register.
- XREF: connects to: Opacity lets communities absorb violence gradually where direct vision would overwhelm.