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Robbin’s and Cheah’s Cosmopolitics departed from the premise that, since Goethe’s time, worldliness and ramified notions of cultural belonging and identification were predicated on a concept of the human as that which overcomes the limitations of immediate existence. The human derived from the universal feeling of sympathy (Kant), from the intrinsic value of communication (translatability), and from the belief in a common cultural compact. The editors critiqued this humanist tradition from the standpoint of “actually existing practices of cosmopolitanism,” characterized by “fragility of collectivity”; “long-distance nationalism” (Benedict Anderson); “Trojan nationalisms” (Arjun Appadurai); and conflictual identity politics in the place of a “gallery of virtuous, eligible identities.” 4 For Cheah, cosmopolitics was deputized to take on capitalist cosmopolitanism by pointing to “mass-based emancipatory forms of global consciousness, or actually existing imagined political world communities.” 5
A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide This re-enchantment shows itself in several places. Most obviously perhaps, it is in Stengers’s own suggestions to readers about how to think, gather, and mobilize in ways that impassion ourselves and our world. Moreover, before we even consider our own passions, she asks us to notice how passion is at play in science itself, in the events and the controversies by which innovations become scientific. Stengers’s recent work puts us all on the hook because cosmopolitics is an enterprise to which we each are invited: an ecology of practice, made up of minoritarian projects that all seek in various ways to resist the harms of capitalist imperialism.
Abstract
See Bruce Robbins, “Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 10–12.
Europe at a Crossroads,” ed. Michel Feher, William Callison, Milad Odabaei, Aurélie Windels, Zone Books: Near Futures 1 (March 2016). third, how to turn up the dial, in terms of the stakes of thinking, and find ways to redress the predatory imperatives and practices of capitalism. If, as Derrida argued and Bennington reconfirms, it is “the indecision of the frontier between the philosophical and the poetical that most provokes philosophy to think,” we might imagine Balibar’s frontières-mondes as cosmopolitical aporias that inaugurate a translingual rethinking of what a settlement is by means of acts of political philology. 45 Consider in this regard Ozen Nergis Dolcerocca’s commentary on the term “settlement” in Turkish, which underscores the politics of linguistic cosmopolitics:
§3. Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics
The “ontological turn” in anthropology is a movement associated with anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Bruno Latour, and Tim Ingold, and earlier, Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern, among others. 22 This ontological turn is an explicit response to the crisis of modernity that expresses itself largely in terms of ecological crisis, which is now closely associated with the Anthropocene. The ontological-turn movement is an effort to take seriously different ontologies in different cultures (we have to bear in mind that knowing there are different ontologies and taking them seriously are two different things). Descola has convincingly outlined four major ontologies, namely naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism. 23 The modern is characterized by what he calls “naturalism,” meaning an opposition between culture and nature, and the former’s mastery over the latter. Descola suggests that we must go beyond such an opposition and recognize that nature is no longer opposed or inferior to culture. Rather, in the different ontologies, we can see the different roles that nature plays; for example, in animism the role of nature is based on the continuity of spirituality, despite the discontinuity of physicality. 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.
Mintaqa’ means district, quarter, area—it’s most often used for area or quarter of a city, but in recent years it has taken on the legal and military connotations of ‘zone’: Mintaqat al-Ihtilal expresses ‘occupied territory’ or ‘occupied zone’. Unlike ‘zone,’ however, it is still also used colloquially to mean ‘area,’ without the threatening connotation. The word mintaqa derives from the triple consonantal root na-ta-qa, to utter or articulate, of which the second form na-tt-a-qa also means to girdle, or mark out (Hans Wehr 114). Related words are nataqiyy, (phonetic), mantaqiyy (logical/dialectical), and nitaq, (girdle, limit, belt, or boundary). Mintaqa is a noun of place (like mustawtana, settlement—the ‘m’ at the beginning denotes place) so it can be taken to signify a space that has been marked out, delineated, encircled. Laborde, Cécile, 2010, “Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch,” European Journal of Political Theory 9:48–69.
§1. Cosmopolitanism: Between Nature and Technology
In We, the People of Europe? Balibar discusses the concepts of “conflictual democracy” (where “heterogeneous constitutional principles are combined . . . contributing to a revival of the old notion of the ‘mixed constitution,’” and “expansive democracy” (a Gramscian notion referring to a politics that “remains open to the integration of new elements into the ‘common part’ of mankind, and there can be no ‘end of history’”) (p. 224). Flikschuh, Katrin, 2017, What is Orientation in Global Thinking? A Kantian Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ophir will have recourse to Agamben’s “zones of indistinction” and “states of exception” to hone the distinction between “camp” and “zone of detention” in Hebrew: Why, then, do I think it’s necessary to turn to cosmotechnics? For a long time now we have operated with a very narrow—in fact, far too narrow—concept of technics. By following Heidegger’s essay, we can distinguish two notions of technics. First, we have the Greek notion of technē, which Heidegger develops through his reading of the ancient Greeks, notably the Pre-Socratics—more precisely, the three “inceptual” ( anfängliche) thinkers, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander. 28 In the 1949 lecture, Heidegger proposes to distinguish the essence of Greek technē from modern technology ( moderne Technik).