Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

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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. Noting the heated debates among Wikipedia Hebrew editors about the proper word for Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, Adi Ophir parses its political usages exegetically and historically: Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 9.

In search of another science, Stengers casts a wide net, invoking resources that are exciting for projects in political theology. Across her writings, she expresses interest in witches, magic, placebos, and other phenomena that make things happen without relying on modern epistemologies. Along these lines, Stengers at times identifies herself as a “heretic” (1992, xxi), and there is something here that is also important for political theology. (It is an insight that I’ve found invaluable myself, as someone who’s spent decades in religious community, leaving one tradition and then joining another). The insight is this: “you do not belong without knowing you belong” (2005b, 190). You can only be a heretic, on Stengers’s account, when you belong, and you only belong when you know that you do so.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. 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. There is no other way out for the philosopher—who, regarding human beings and their play in the large, cannot at all presuppose any rational aim of theirs—than to try whether he can discover an aim of nature in this nonsensical course of things human; from which aim a history in accordance with a determinate plan of nature might nevertheless be possible even of creatures who do not behave in accordance with their own plan … [Nature] did produce a Kepler, who subjected the eccentric paths of the planets in an unexpected way to determinate laws, and a Newton, who explained these laws from a universal natural cause. 7 Nationalism and the nation-state have recently come under siege, their political dominance gradually eroding under the strain of such forces as ethnic strife, religious fundamentalism, homogenizing global capitalism, and the unprecedented movements of people and populations across cultures, countries, even cyberspace. A resurgent cosmopolitanism has emerged as a viable and alternative political project. In Cosmopolitics, a renowned group of scholars and political theorists offers the first sustained examination of that project, its inclusive and often universalist claims, and its tangled and sometimes volatile relationship to nationalism.

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. 14 Eminent contributors look at the present and future of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to nationalism. The differences between “camp” and “settlement” in Turkish, hinging on temporal duration, give out onto the larger cosmopolitical problems of duration, endurance, and traumatically intertwined, yet morally incommensurate histories of “the camps.” Condorcet’s signature concept is hailed as an astonishing term for the reaction-formation of popular self-identity in the face of newly arrived strangers, see Étienne Balibar, Europe, Constitution, frontière (Bègles: Editions du Passant, 2005). p. 102.

What can homonationalism tell us about sexuality in South Africa?: Exploring the relationships between biopolitics, necropolitics, sexual exceptionalism and homonormativity Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica, trans. Catherine Diehl and Jason Groves (New York: Fordham, 2015), p. 120n.

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. Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics. This book is a significant new contribution to feminist and queer philosophy and politics, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of gender studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, philosophy, politics, and law. 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.” 5Arneson, Richard J., 2016, “Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19: 555–573. 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? This co-written book offers a wealth of historical insights into the entanglement of medicine and modern epistemologies of science. It’s also a wonderful introduction to Stengers’s long-lasting interests in Mesmer, mesmerism, and psychoanalysis. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale. Whether you think of the question of Palestine, the settlements and the camps, or of the politics of raw materials and extraction; whether you think of ecology (and the rainforests) or the problems of federalism, citizenship and immigration, or whether it is a question of gentrification in the great cities as well as in the bidonvilles, the favelas, and the townships and of course the movement of the landless—today everything is about land. 53