Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

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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 Kant’s Second Thoughts on Colonialism,”, in Kant and Colonialism, Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge Diagram used by Johannes Kepler to establish his laws of planetary motion. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. §1. Cosmopolitanism: Between Nature and Technology 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. The debate concerns the current use of the word and reflects the clear split between left and right Zionists in relations to Jewish colonization in the Territories. Historically two terms were used by Zionists to designate Jewish settlements: ישוב, yeshuv, and התנחלות, hitnakhalut. The first comes from the root ישב, y.sh.v, to settle, but also, according to its conjugations, simply, and generally, to sit, or, specifically, to sit down. The second comes from the verb נחל, n.kh.l, which connotes taking possession, acquiring, or inheriting. Nakhala is a piece of inherited or possessed land. The second term is biblical and has a clear colonial connotation. The Pentateuch (Numbers), for example, describes in great details the distribution of the land of Israel among Israel’s tribes, each with its own Nakhala, a land designated as belonging to this tribe by virtue of a divine promise even before it has been possessed.

A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide 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. 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 Dao is not a thing. It is not a concept. It is not the différance. In the Cixi of YiZhuan (易傳‧繫辭), Dao is simply said to be “above forms,” while Qi is what is “below forms.” 31 We should notice here that xin er shang xue (the study of what is above forms) is the word used to translate “metaphysics” (one of the equivalences that must be undone). Qi is something that takes space, as we can see from the character and also read in an etymological dictionary—it has four mouths or containers and in the middle there is a dog guarding the utensils. There are multiple meanings of Qi in different doctrines; for example, in classic Confucianism there is Li Qi (禮器), in which Qi is crucial for Li (a rite), which is not merely a ceremony but rather a search for unification between the heavens and the human. For our purposes, it will suffice to simply say that Dao belongs to the noumenon according to the Kantian distinction, while Qi belongs to the phenomenon. But it is possible to infinitize Qi so as to infinitize the self and enter into the noumenon—this is the question of art. 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

Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2016), p. 13. 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/ 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; Caraus, Tamara, and Elena Paris (eds.), 2018, Migration, Protest Movements and the Politics of Resistance: A Radical Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, New York: Routledge.

second, how to enjoy the labor of philosophy and science by undercutting such bifurcations, infusing these endeavors with passion and interest; 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. 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 Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta, “Introduction,” Cosmopolitanisms, ed. Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta (New York: New York University Press, 2017), p. 3. 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.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.

Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica, trans. Catherine Diehl and Jason Groves (New York: Fordham, 2015), p. 120n. Despret, Vinciane. 2015. “Thinking Like a Rat,” Trans. Jeffrey Bussolini. Angelaki. 20(2): 121-134. 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. See Silviano Santiago, “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor,” trans. Magdalena Edwards and Paulo Lemos Horta, in Cosmopolitanisms, pp. 21–39. 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.”

Hence, Pao Ding concludes that a good butcher doesn’t rely on the technical objects at his disposal, but rather on Dao, since Dao is more fundamental than Qi (the tool). Pao Ding adds that a good butcher has to change his knife once a year because he cuts through tendons, while a bad butcher has to change his knife every month because he cuts through bones. Pao Ding, on the other hand—an excellent butcher—has not changed his knife in nineteen years, and it looks as if it has just been sharpened with a whetstone. Whenever Pao Ding encounters any difficulty, he slows down the knife and gropes for the right place to move further. Arneson, Richard J., 2016, “Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19: 555–573. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal Metaphysics. Amerindian Perspectivism,” Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013), p. 21. 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.

Like Despret, Latour is also a long-term interlocutor of Stengers’s. This preface offers a taste of Latour’s own high esteem (philosophical as well as existential) for Stengers’s philosophy of science. Eminent contributors look at the present and future of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to nationalism. Laborde, Cécile, 2010, “Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch,” European Journal of Political Theory 9:48–69.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