Édouard Glissant calls them “flash agents” (agents d’éclat).114 The French term combines the connotations of “flashy” or “dazzling,” and “explosive.” Flash agents emit signs that strike: that hit with impact and produce a shock. They are point-sign bombers. They scatter-bomb the media, hoping for a large impact, but most often settling for an accumulation of micro-shocks. The current moniker for them is “social media influencers.” They vie for attention as if it were a rare natural resource, and extract surplus-value from it. p 269
Relay agents have always functioned in the contact between cultures as operators of an “active relay” staging an interaction between the differing tendencies that make themselves felt in the encounter. But it is “not just the interaction of [the cultures’] tendencies . . . but the workings of their inner structures that become modified.” The encounters play out in such a way that the real internal constitution of the cultures mutually modify. Their respective powers resonate in each other, reciprocally inflecting. Relay agents, Glissant says, “are échos-monde [world echoes] working the matter of Relation.” p 217
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It might be possible, if not necessarily advisable, to say that the will-to-believe is the province of the right and belief in the world the province of the left. It is not necessarily advisable to say so because although the first part of the assertion about the right seems incontrovertible, it is not certain that the left has earned the honor of the second. May it become equal to itself, by becoming adequate to the event. p 273
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Dismantling the master’s house means dismantling this notion of identity. It means recognizing that the first identity politics was the identity politics of white colonial European Man, and that this derivation has left its structural mark on all subsequent versions, even of the left. It means finding another logic of resistance. p 277