Édouard Glissant’s interest in the Antilles’ incomplete history which has been obliterated by the colonial system has led him to engage in a work of deciphering/clarifying any traces of the past that can be spotted in the Caribbean collective imagination and unconscious, and in the Caribbean space. Having started with these traces cum signs, which he has been inventorying since his first novels, Glissant moved on to the “thought of the trace”: according to him, it enabled the Africans enslaved in the Americas, “naked migrants”, to participate actively in the recreation of a culture that speaks to all. The trace strikes as one of the basic schemes of his poetics, an operator both reflexive and theoretical into which some of the key notions of his poetical and philosophical thought – creolisation, opacity, Whole-World (“Tout-Monde”), trembling thought, etc. –, which permeate his entire works, will fit. The trace, once seized by thought, is no longer associated with loss and disappearance but recovers its projective dimension. The thought of the trace thereby falls within a strategy of detour because it combines, through their sublation, loss and recreation, past/present/to come, fragility/strength and fleetingness/durability.