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IN/VISIBLE

October 28, 2023
Full Moon Lunar Eclipse: This is a reality check.

In the lunar practices, we set our intentions at the New Moon, and amongst other things, release at the Full Moon. As it reflects the light of the Sun, the Full Moon illuminates our inner worlds, and reveals to us what we're hanging onto. Full Moons are a point when we can make space for the new by letting go of the old.

The relationship between the visible and invisible is a tentative one. When the two overlap both become visible in their sharing. This forces the visible community to deal with the issues presented and for the most part this means returning the invisible to their invisibility. 

Based on these premises, social invisibility characterizes individuals who are excluded from authorized visualities and majority visual discourses, and thus denied access to the social gaze. Invisible women and men are people “without”—without a face, without a voice—deprived of “the right to look” while paradoxically being the object of constant surveillance. They may include former colonized people, the poor, the disabled, ethnic and sexual minorities, as well as outsiders, rebels and refugees, but also people living precarious lives or simply anonymous existences, whose images and words are relegated to the sidelines of public expression. 

In several places across his work, the Martinican poet, novelist, and essayist Édouard Glissant calls for a “right to opacity,” which he vaguely explains as that which protects diversity across humankind. In this way, Glissant's right to opacity could be understood as a standard cultural rights claim.

The “right to opacity” (le droit à l’opacité) constitutes an important part of Glissant’s poetics of relation. As an antonym of transparency, this notion questions the possibilities of intercultural communication. In a multirelational world, recognizing difference does not mean understanding otherness by making it transparent, but accepting the unintelligibility, impenetrability and confusion that often characterize cross-cultural communication. 

Opacity thus tries to overcome the risk of reducing, normalizing and even assimilating the singularities of cultural differences by comprehension. Within this framework, Glissant challenges the rational epistemic of Enlightenment and its assumption of universal truths by calling into question the etymological meaning of ‘comprehension’ (com-prendere) as an act of appropriation. 

Opacity, instead, offers a de-hierarchized world-vision as well as a discourse complementary to universal or systemic approaches to globalization. It reflects on uncontrollable “confluences” and an increasing intermingling of diversities, both of which oppose monolithic worldviews.