BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
We’re going to be discussing the second essay from last week’s reading group alongside a crit of a BICA Schooler’s work. David Foster Wallace had us immersed, we needed more time for Glissant.
Why should we have to fully understand someone to respect them?
Glissant pushes back on the idea that real connection requires total transparency—that we must fully grasp another person or culture in order to value them. He argues for a right to opacity instead: people and cultures can remain partly illegible to each other and still relate, still build solidarity, without one side having to dissolve into something fully knowable by the other. Short, poetic, and quietly radical—a useful counterpoint to Wallace, and to any framework that treats "understanding" as the only path to respect.