Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

Product Information

I’tiqal is the common word for arrests, military or criminal, and it is the verbal noun of the Form VIII verb for the root ‘a-qa-la. Interestingly, this root has two main meanings, one being ‘to arrest’ and the other ‘to speak.’ The first meaning, then, is “to hobble,” from ‘iqal (a tie for hobbling camels’ feet), clearly a derivation for the modern meaning of “to detain,” “to arrest,” etc. According to Edward Lane (2166, C19 classical English-Arabic dictionary) the camel would be restrained with the ‘iqal in the yard of the abode of the heir/next of kin, hence the association of ‘a-qa-la also with paying blood-money. Lane connects the sense of aqala (as restraint, extended to restraint from what is incorrect or immoral), to its second usage as “to reason,” “to realize,” or “to comprehend.” (Hans Wehr 737). In Lisan al-Arab (C13 dictionary) it is noted that a man who is ‘aqil has constraint over himself and specifically over his tongue (Lisan 3046), which he can ‘i’taqala,’ arrest (the Form VIII verb is used here). 47 For the discussion of how secularism is instrumentalized in these conflicts, see Stathis Gourgouris, “Crisis and the Ill Logic of Fortress Europe,” Uppsala Rhetorical Studies, pp. 40–41. In a talk, “A New Querelle of Universals,” (a condensed, English version of a chapter of Des universels: Essais et conférences [Paris: Editions Galilée, 2016], Balibar explains how any attempt to think the concept of the universal gives way to a translational problematic involving the contradictions that arise from any “saying” of universalism in a specific language or idiom: “My latent idea is that the universal is not really a concept or an idea, but it is always the correlative effect of an enunciation that, in given conditions, either asserts the differences or denies them (or even prohibits them), therefore leading to a conflictual modality of internal contestation of itself. But enunciations are always made in a specific language — an idiom — and idioms exist only in the form of a multiplicity of languages that are never isolated from one another, but continuously interacting, therefore inducing transformations within one another. “Translation” is the general name for this interaction, which as we know takes a number of different forms, involving cultural determinations and institutional power relations.”

Khader, Serene J., 2019, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. becomes, the more the role of the states will become negligible. 1.3 Cosmopolitanism in the 19th and 20th Centuries 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. Etienne Balibar, Europe, Constitution, frontière op. cit. See Chapter II, “L’Europe en panne?,” pp. 25–47.

Abstract

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. Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical—Today,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, p 32. Along these lines, Stengers often uses terms like “fiction” to describe how science works (1997, 83); such locutions make it easier to notice that scientists (like all thinkers) are driven, first and foremost, by interest and imagination. (There is blasphemy to this vocabulary, contravening the science/fiction binary as it does, that is as delightful as it is philosophically salient. I note below that Stengers grants a place in her thinking for heresy; it can be helpful to notice the many places in which she offers up blasphemies instead of established ideas. My own portrait of Freud, accompanying this essay, gestures to heresy along Stengers’s lines. Freud himself sought to banish placebos, and yet our affections for theorists like Freud surely express longings for placebo effects).

Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.By highlighting the relational dynamics of science, Stengers’s work can bridge political theology with “new materialists” like Karen Barad or Jane Bennett. When matters of fact turn into reliable witnesses for scientists (2005a, 165), they model the feeling and remembering that Barad describes so vividly. When scientists risk their own common, settled ground (2005a, 166), they enact a kind of sympathy, as conceptualized by Bennett. My own sense, though, is that Stengers’s account of recalcitrance, inflected as it is by a call for “spoilsport” scientists and other heretics, is even more directly relevant for affirming the often-untapped sources, rituals, and modes of belonging that tend to be classified as religious or theological. Isabelle Stengers is a continental philosopher of science, strongly influenced by the work of Deleuze and Whitehead, whose early work emerged in conversation with scientists about their experimental practices. In this way, she shares affinities with Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway—and is often an interlocutor of both theorists. Stengers’s work reads like a kind of engaged ethnography because she is so committed to scrutinizing the concrete practices by which science, philosophy, and other research endeavors take place. Her texts are lively, dramatic, and comedic, inviting the reader—at times explicitly—to laugh at the missteps, follies, and wonders by which thinking occurs. Chertok, Léon and Isabelle Stengers. 1992. A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan. Trans. Martha Noel Evans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Here we only want to show that as Kant develops his thinking towards universalism, his conceptualization of the relation between cosmopolitics and the purposiveness of nature is situated within a peculiar moment in history: the simultaneous enchantment and disenchantment of nature. On the one hand, Kant recognizes the importance of the concept of the organic for philosophy; discoveries in the natural sciences allowed him to connect the cosmos to the moral, as indicated by his famous analogy near the end of Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and constantly reflection concerns itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” 14 Howard Caygill makes an even stronger claim, arguing that this analogy points to a “Kantian physiology of the soul and the cosmos” that unites the “within me” (freedom) and the “above me.” 15 On the other hand, as we saw in Kant’s citation of Kepler and Newton in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” the affirmation of “universal history” and advancements in science and technology led in the eighteenth century to what Rémi Brague calls the “death of the cosmos”: 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.

Kristen M. Jones, “Yto Berrada,” Frieze 101, September 2, 2006 https://frieze.com/article/yto-barrada. exploitation, feudal hierarchy, and tutelage of various sorts. As the term ‘brothers’ indicates, however, this does not mean that their own thought was always free from bias and inconsistency. Indeed, numerous authors combined their moral cosmopolitanism with a defense of the superiority of men over women, or that of “whites” over other “races.” A notable example is Kant, who defended European colonialism before he became very critical of it in the mid 1790s (Kleingeld 2014), and who never gave up the view that women were inferior to men in morally relevant respects. 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

Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation

Deveaux, Monique, 2018, “Poor-Led Social Movements and Global Justice,” Political Theory 46: 698–725. Caraus, Tamara, and Elena Paris (eds.), 2018, Migration, Protest Movements and the Politics of Resistance: A Radical Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, New York: Routledge. Martina Tazzioli and Nicholas De Genova, “Europe/Crisis: Introducing New Keywords of ‘The Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe,’” in “Europe at the Crossroads,” Zone Books: Near Futures, http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/#europe-crisis. From Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory to Stephen Hawking’s belief that we ‘would know the mind of God’ through such a theory, contemporary science—and physics in particular—has claimed that it alone possesses absolute knowledge of the universe. In a sweeping work of philosophical inquiry, originally published in French in seven volumes, Isabelle Stengers builds on her previous intellectual accomplishments to explore the role and authority of science in modern societies and to challenge its pretensions to objectivity, rationality, and truth.

The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? 3 The concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics have increasingly gained scholarly attention, particularly in light of today’s urgent and troubling issues that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others, including the migration crisis, rise of populism on a global scale, homonationalist practices, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic ‘others’. This book aims to nuance this conversation by emphasising feminist and queer investments and interventions and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to ongoing debates around life/living and death/dying in the current political climate. In this way, we move forward toward envisioning feminist and queer futures that rethink categories such as ‘human’ and ‘subjectivity’ based on classical modern premises.

Like what you're reading?

Despret, Vinciane. 2015. “Thinking Like a Rat,” Trans. Jeffrey Bussolini. Angelaki. 20(2): 121-134. Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it; first, how to identify the bifurcating logics that pit “modern” aspirations against the premodern, dividing the secular from the religious in both tacit and overt ways; The main difficulty of all cosmopolitics is the reconciliation between the universal and the particular. The universal tends to contemplate the particulars from above, as in the way that Kant regarded the French Revolution, like a spectator considering a violent piece of theater from the mezzanine. Universality is the view of a spectator, never that of an actor. Kant writes, in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim”: The new astronomy, following Copernicus and his successors, had consequences for the modern view of the world … Ancient and medieval thinkers presented a synchronic schema of the structure of the physical world, which erased the traces of its own genesis; the Moderns, on the other hand, remembered the past and in addition provided a diachronic view of astronomy—as if the evolution of ideas about the cosmos was even more important than the truth about it … Can we still speak of cosmology? It seems that the West ceased to have a cosmology with the end of the world of Aristotle and Ptolemy, an end due to Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. The “world” then no longer formed a whole. 16