Relating the Real: Markus Gabriel’s Fields of Sense Ontology and Édouard Glissant’s Theory of Tout-monde

This paper compares Gabriel’s new ontology after metaphysics to Martiniquan prose writer Édouard Glissant’s parallel endeavor to think the world beyond totality. It explores substantial affinities between the no-world view of field of sense ontology and Glissant’s pluralistic concept of “tout-monde,” proposed in the Traité du Tout-monde (1997; trans. Traktat über die Welt). Because Glissant’s background is in Caribbean culture and literature and his focus is on its characteristic trans-cultural dynamics, the analogies with fields of sense ontology are especially interesting. In the Traité, Glissant expands his theory of creolization to a theory of globalization. Reading Caribbean creolization as a blueprint for the cultural dynamics of the globalizing world, he argues that the mixed-race composite cultures of the Caribbean model the trans-cultural processes of globalization. Glissant’s cultural theory joins Gabriel’s philosophy in outlining a non-reductionist, pluralistic “new realist” ontology.