Shared abyss experience converts exception into ordinary peoplehood

Evidence

For though this experience made you, O1iginal victim floating toward the sea’s abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 107

Categorization

• DEFINE: Glissant’s resolution of the exception/identity bind: what was an exceptional (essentializing) experience becomes, through sharing, ordinary peoplehood — the collective conversion of singular suffering into Relation.
• XREF: This is arguably Glissant’s answer to the collective-ironic-identity problem in the reader’s project: the bind is loosened not by irony but by de-exceptionalizing through shared (though not identical) experience. — connects to: Abyss-tested peoples live Relation without claiming chosenness — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 106; Shared humanity overcomes preconceived enemy divisions between strangers — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 190; Shared catastrophe briefly unites people across difference before giving way to division and reprisal (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Shared humanity overcomes preconceived enemy divisions between strangers #expands (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 190
• Shared suffering in the slave-ship belly generated collective unanimity #exemplifies (0.85) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 90
• Shared catastrophe briefly unites people across difference before giving way to division and reprisal #qualifies (0.80)
• A sudden common spectacle can dissolve interpersonal conflict into ‘we’ experience #expands (0.80)