CONTRAPUNTEO DELEUZE-GUATTARI / BENÍTEZ ROJO: DIFERENCIA Y REPETICIÓN DE LA ISLA EN LA GEOFILOSOFÍA DEL CARIBE

In this paper I shall address the connections between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and Caribbean thought. However, I will only focus on Antonio Benítez Rojo’s essay The Repeating Island (1998), since I have found in it the presence—or expression—of some key deleuzian and deleuzo-guattarian concepts. I will use the deleuzian concept of repetition to defend this stance, as well as to argue that one may find some of the most interesting readings of Deleuze’s texts in the work of Caribbean authors such as Benítez Rojo, not only in spite of their relative understanding and lack of exegetical rigour, but rather thanks to the fact that this is, in no case, their main intention. The angle I have chosen does not intend to point out consistencies or inconsistencies in Benítez Rojo’s “appropriations” or “rewritings” of Deleuze and Guattari, for this would only keep us within the logic of the copy versus the original. Instead, this reading tries to destabilize the boundaries between philosophy and literature as well as between French (“Western”, central, from the North) and Caribbean thought (supposedly non-Western, peripheral, and from the South). The undoing of these types of distinction intends to produce a new theatre of thought, a theatre of repetition, not of representation, in order to set up the scene for a contrapunteo (counterpointing: debate, quarrel, improvised versed duel) between two images of thought: one deleuzian, the other Caribbean. Thus, we embark upon this journey hoping to have an encounter that promises yet another becoming to Deleuze’s philosophy.