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content/annex/abecedaire.md

@@ -640,6 +640,19 @@ As discussed by A.G. Conte in *Sociologia filosofica del diritto* (2011), the te
 
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+# Opacity
+
+Édouard Glissant’s seminal essay on “The Right to Opacity” (in *Poetics of Relation*, 1990) provides yet another key entry point to conceptualize practices of institutional tinkering. Glissant’s notion of opacity shatters one of the fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment project by arguing that clarity and transparency are far from being universal positive values. Rather, they have been routinely utilized in colonialism to reduce the texture of diverse realities. Stemming from the resistance of enslaved people to the master’s fixation on their measurability and knowability, the right to opacity is for Glissant the foundational theoretical concept for a philosophy of difference that can be summarized as the possibility of giving hospitality for the Other without pretension of reducing her to what can be known or understood. More recently, commentators have been re-activating the concept of opacity “not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political accomplishment” (Davis, 2019) relevant for the ongoing decolonial work that today is taking place in institutions such as the museum and the academy.
+
+**Reference:**
+
+Davis, Benjamin P. "The Politics of Édouard Glissant's Right to Opacity." The CLR James Journal 25.1/2 (2019): 59-70.
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 # Plebs
 
 Excerpt from: Tiqqun. This is not a Program, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Cambridge: Semiotext, 2011).