Opacity lets communities absorb violence gradually where direct vision would overwhelm.

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

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Concretizes Glissant’s ‘opacity’ as a necessary masking/gradual-unveiling practice rather than obscurantism — directly relevant to the reader hunting detour/ruse/opacity as operative mechanisms for loosening fixed identity.
• XREF: Opacity-as-gradual-disclosure to avoid a ‘short-circuit of consciousness’ parallels the reader’s question of whether ironic identity performance can be collectively sustained — masking in tragedy reads like a collective, ritualized equivalent of individual irony.
• QUESTION: Is there a Spivak-adjacent gloss where this tragic unveiling-on-schedule maps onto strategic essentialism’s need to time the ‘we were never really that’ reveal?

Related

• Fundamental truths about collective violence must be unveiled gradually through opacity (similarity 0.94)

Broader Connections

• Populations adapt to pervasive violence until it seems ordinary #expands (0.80)
• Distant violence can become more graphic rather than more abstract #qualifies (0.70)