In 1795 Immanuel Kant proclaimed that the peoples of the earth have entered into a "universal community". Since Kant wrote this the processes of inter-connection between the peoples of the earth has grown even more pronounced and the notion of "cosmopolitics" has thus come to seem a defining one for the contemporary age. As such this volume makes a timely contribution to contemporary debates about international law, global ecology and economy and transnational synergies. The volume is inter-disciplinary and is intended to be a contribution to a debate that crosses borders and disciplines.
Eminent contributors look at the present and future of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to nationalism. 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. 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. 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.
While supporting the cosmopolitan pursuit of a world that respects all rights and interests, James D. Ingram believes political theorists have, in their approach to this project, compromised its egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Focusing on recent debates without losing sight of cosmopolitanism's ancient and Enlightenment roots, Ingram confronts the philosophical difficulties of defending universal ideals and the implications for ethics and political theory. In morality as in politics, theorists have generally focused first on discovering universal values and second on their implementation. Ingram argues that only by prioritizing the development and articulation of universal values through political action in the fight for freedom and equality can theorists do justice to these efforts and cosmopolitanism's universal vocation. Only by proceeding from the local to the global, from the bottom up rather than from the top down, on the basis of political practice rather than moral ideals, can we salvage moral and political universalism. In this book, Ingram provides the clearest, most systematic account yet of this schematic reversal and its radical possibilities.
This volume explores Kant's cosmopolitanism and its implications for a Kantian-inspired cosmopolitics. The contributors provide a definitive source and specification of key new areas in the field of Kantian cosmopolitanism and how it is integral to current debates in political theory, political philosophy and international relations.
An in-depth intellectual and historical analysis of Les Archives de la Planète, Albert Kahn's collection of early colour photography and documentary film. The book examines the extraordinary context of Kahn's work, considers archival theory and visual culture, and investigates the cosmopolitan strategies of Kahn and associates, e.g. Henri Bergson.
The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ‘from within.’ To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers’ own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of ‘cosmopolitically correct design’.
Cosmopolitanisms explores how social groups find ways of living productively with each other. This book analyzes theoretical approaches and research to give a new understanding of the cultural, personal, moral and legal dimensions of cosmopolitanism. This is a key critical guide to cosmopolitanism for all students of globalization and sociology.
This volume is initial reflections on the meaning and the implications of Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics, which opens up an anti-universalist and pluralist perspective on technology beyond the West. Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of the essence of technology as enframing and as rooted in ancient Greek techne has had a crucial influence on the understanding and critique of technological society and culture in the twentieth century. However, it is still unclear to what extent his analysis can also be applied to the development of technology outside of ‘the West’, e.g. in China, Africa, and Latin America, particularly against the backdrop of receding Western domination and impending global ecological disaster. Acknowledging the planetary expansion of Western technology already observed by Heidegger, yet also recognizing the existence of non-Western origins of technical relationships to the cosmos, Yuk Hui’s notion of cosmotechnics calls for a rethinking – in dialogue with decolonial studies and the so-called ontological turn in contemporary anthropology – of the question concerning technology which challenges the universality still present in Heidegger (as well as in Simondon and Stiegler) and proposes a radical technological or rather cosmotechnical pluralism or technodiversity. The contributors to this volume critically engage with this proposal and examine the possible implications of Hui’s cosmotechnical turn in thinking about technology as it becomes a planetary force in our current age of the Anthropocene. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism—the worldwide and the worldly? While cosmopolitan politics may seem inherently secular, existing forms of secularism risk undermining the universality of cosmopolitanism because they privilege the European tradition over all others and transform particular historical norms into enunciations of truth, valid for all cultures and all epochs. In this book, the noted philosopher Étienne Balibar explores the tensions lurking at this troubled nexus in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, which requires a secularization of secularism itself. Balibar argues for the idea of the universal against its particular dominant institutions. He questions the assumptions that underlie popular ideas of secularism and religion and outlines the importance of a new critique for the contemporary world. Balibar holds that conflicts between religious and secular discourses need to be reframed from a point of view that takes into account the cultural hybridization, migration and mobility, and transformation of borders that have reshaped the postcolonial age. Among the topics discussed are the uses and misuses of the category of religion and the religious, the paradoxical genealogy of monotheism, French laïcité’s identitarian turn, and the implications of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks for an extended definition of free speech. Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference that seeks to make room for a renewed political imagination.
Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics seeks to trace cosmopolitical aesthetics understood not only as the union of art, science, and the right to survive, but also as the prism through which artistic practices are developed around questions connected to transculturality, migration, nomadism, post-gender subjectivities, social and natural sustainability, and new digital technologies. This book’s authors fashion a narrative that moves in the territory of “inbetweenness”, between hospitality and hostility, between welcoming and conflict, between languages and intermediate languages, science, and survival in a world that is “common” more than global.
