Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

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Note, though, that this is a pragmatic call. “But you never resist in general,” Stengers explains. “You may resist as a poet, as a teacher, as an activist for animal rights” (2005c, 45). To study Stengers is to face vocational urgings to find our own modes of resistance, whether as poet or activist or something else entirely. Such adventures in discovery are emergent, by definition, since “[w]hat is unknowable is unknown” (2011, 261). Understood generally as a fundamental commitment to the interests of humanity, traditional cosmopolitanism has been criticized as a privileged position, an aloof detachment from the obligations and affiliations that constrain nation-bound lives and move people to political action. Yet, as these essays make clear, contemporary cosmopolitanism arises not from a disengagement but rather from well-defined cultural, historical, and political contexts. The contributors explore a feasible cosmopolitanism now beginning to emerge, and consider the question of whether it can or will displace nationalism, which needs to be rethought rather than dismissed as obsolete.

of freedom, equality, and independence, and that they live under their own laws. Their common laws, however, are the laws of morality, grounded Jean-Luc Nancy, “Euryopa: Le regard au loin,” (1994) in Cahiers de l’Europe 2 (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 82–94. See chapters by Georges Van Den Abbele, “Lost Horizons and Uncommon Grounds: For a Poetics of Finitude in the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy,” and by Rodolphe Gasché, “Alongside the Horizon,” both in On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 19–31 and pp. 140–156, respectively. See also, Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of the Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Samuel Weber, “Europe and Its Others: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Relation of Reflexivity and Violence in Rodolphe Gasché’s Europe, or the Infinite Task.” CR: The New Centennial Review 8:3 (Winter 2008), pp. 71–83. Ransomed, deported, parked in transit camps or abandoned in the no man’s land of train and port zones, sometimes shot or robbed of their life savings, they die or give up before one barrier or another, but obstinately, from henceforth on, they are there. 14In pointing to belonging as a condition of possibility for scientific inquiry, Stengers shares commitments with Vinciane Despret. Despret shows how scientific insights depend upon the interests of those who are being studied (whether they be cows, rats, or humans)—precisely because these “objects” of inquiry can ask scientists to pose better questions. Despret and Stengers each point to experiments like that of Stanley Milgram to get at the horrifying results of science that refuses to heed the import of belonging. Mutilation, torture, almost endless forms of injury: this is what emerges when scientific practices solicit only stark compliance from research subjects. There are no real stakes for the researcher, in such scenario, and there can be no generative heresies, only capitalist mandates of profit and conformity. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal Metaphysics. Amerindian Perspectivism,” Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013), p. 21.

The term for camp in common currency in Arabic, Mintaqat al-I’tiqal (منطقة لإعتقال), is approximatively translated according to Hannah Deutscher as “district of arrests.” Deveaux, Monique, 2018, “Poor-Led Social Movements and Global Justice,” Political Theory 46: 698–725. Peng Cheah, “Interview with Peng Cheah on Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Human Rights,” interview by Yuk Hui, Theory, Culture and Society (March 17, 2011) www.theoryculturesociety.org/interview-with-pheng-cheah-on-cosmopolitanism-nationalism-and-human-rights/ Intellectually provocative and erudite, this interdisciplinary volume presents a diverse array of critical perspectives, assessing both the ideal enterprise and the current realities of the rapidly developing cosmopolitical movement. The end of unilateral globalization and the arrival of the Anthropocene force us to talk about cosmopolitics. These two factors correlate with one another and correspond to two different senses of the word “cosmopolitics”: cosmopolitics as a commercial regime, and cosmopolitics as a politics of nature.Balibar emphasizes that Europe as such corresponds, technically speaking, to no unique territorial identification: the EU coincides neither with the Council of Europe (which includes Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the Balkan states), nor with NATO (which includes the US, Norway, and Turkey, and which is charged with protecting European territory), nor with the Schengen (which includes Switzerland but not the UK), nor with the Eurozone (which still includes Greece but not the UK, Sweden, or Poland). 18 As there will never be congruent delimitation, Europe is simply not definable as a discrete territory. Throughout his political writings, Kant maintains that this relation between nature and cosmopolitics is necessary. 8 If Kant sees the republican constitution and perpetual peace as political forms that may be able to bring forward a universal history of the human species, it is because he understands that such progress is also a progress of reason, the telos of nature. This progress toward an end goal—namely, universal history and a “perfect state constitution”—is the “completion of a hidden plan of nature” ( Vollziehung eines verborgenen Plans der Natur). What does it mean for nature to have a hidden plan? And why is the realization of cosmopolitics the teleology of nature? If we approach human rights in terms of a biopolitical analysis, you can argue that what produces humanity and all its capacities such as needs, interests, the capacity to labour and so on, are biotechnologies that have now become globalized. Human rights or human rights instruments are the codification of these capacities in a juridical discourse, that is to say, in the language of right. Hence, we don’t begin with the human being who has rights, but with the production of fundamental human needs and capacities, which we subsequently understand in terms of rights that we can claim for ourselves or on behalf of others. But we can only claim these rights in the first place if the needs and capacities that these rights seek to protect were synthetically produced in us by biopolitical technologies. If you look at the new cosmopolitanism in this way, then things become more complicated. 7 Etienne Balibar, Europe, Constitution, frontière op. cit. See Chapter II, “L’Europe en panne?,” pp. 25–47.

Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. conventional poleis do not, strictly speaking, deserve the name, and human beings who are not wise and virtuous do not count as citizens of the cosmos. But In this way, Stengers makes the ontological bases of scientific work available for scrutiny. There is theological import to such scrutiny. Science disenchants the world, on Stengers’s account, because it defies the world (1997, 34), denying the role of relationships, affects, and practices. Stengers, in turn, refuses such defiance. We can look to Stengers’s writings, in other words, for resources for a kind of re-enchantment. A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide

Khader, Serene J., 2019, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical—Today,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, p 32.