Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

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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. Europe at a Crossroads,” ed. Michel Feher, William Callison, Milad Odabaei, Aurélie Windels, Zone Books: Near Futures 1 (March 2016). These oppositions between nature and technics, mythology and reason, give rise to various illusions that belong to one of two extremes. On the one hand, there are rationalists or “progressivists” who hysterically struggle to maintain their monotheism after having murdered god, wishfully believing that the world process will stamp out differences and diversities and lead to a “theodicy.” On the other hand, there are left intellectuals who feel the need to extol indigenous ontology or biology as a way out of modernity. A French revolutionary thinker recently described this situation thus:

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.” After 1967, the new settlements in the Occupied Territories were called hitnakhluyot. I do not know how soon the political split appeared, but certainly after a few years the left insisted on this term to distinguish the illegitimate colonial project from the legitimate one within the green line, in “Israel Proper,” where all localities are called yeshuvim. For Zionists, no matter how leftist they are, this chapter in the history of Zionist colonization has never been understood as colonialist. The settlers themselves (mitnakhalim) rejected the term and insisted on yeshuvim and hityashvut. The main organ of the Jewish Agency working on constructing and developing new settlements in the Territories is called “the department for hityashvut.” 49 Richter, Daniel S., 2011, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.becomes, the more the role of the states will become negligible. 1.3 Cosmopolitanism in the 19th and 20th Centuries

As this tiny citation attests, Stengers’s wit infuses how she retraces historical processes and events. As another example, consider a passage in which Stengers describes the bureaucrats, experts, and procedures that enjoy scientific legitimacy. “ The emperor is wearing clothes” (2000, 44), she declares, inviting us to notice material trappings that are hidden in plain sight. Disinterestedness, contra its self-understanding, clothes itself in palpable signs of authority, like the white coat worn by physicians. ( I’ve become fascinated by this paradox, exemplified by placebo effects: the white coat is well-researched as a reliable placebo, and yet its efficacy underscores the persuasiveness of “impartial” power). 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. Etienne Balibar, Europe, Constitution, frontière op. cit. See Chapter II, “L’Europe en panne?,” pp. 25–47.These adventures are also collaborative. Undercutting the ivory tower’s habits of isolationism, Stengers asks us to stop excluding the public from the terrain of scientific and intellectual labor. “My dream,” Stengers writes, “is for a ‘public’ who would expect and demand ‘spoilsport’ scientists who could actively interest them in the way in which scientists work together and also in the way in which science and power may reciprocally invent each other” (2000, 51). There is a palpable hope here that new and impassioned science might emerge, as reflected in one of her recent book titles: Another Science is Possible (2019). 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. Eminent contributors look at the present and future of cosmopolitanism and its relationship to nationalism. In pointing to belonging as a condition of possibility for scientific inquiry, Stengers shares commitments with Vinciane Despret. Despret shows how scientific insights depend upon the interests of those who are being studied (whether they be cows, rats, or humans)—precisely because these “objects” of inquiry can ask scientists to pose better questions. Despret and Stengers each point to experiments like that of Stanley Milgram to get at the horrifying results of science that refuses to heed the import of belonging. Mutilation, torture, almost endless forms of injury: this is what emerges when scientific practices solicit only stark compliance from research subjects. There are no real stakes for the researcher, in such scenario, and there can be no generative heresies, only capitalist mandates of profit and conformity. 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.

Despret is a collaborator of Stengers (they co-wrote Women Who Make a Fuss, for example), and her work is just as philosophically lively. Like Stengers, Despret works closely with scientists, especially primatologists, and her publications are replete with gripping stories about science in the field. Kristen M. Jones, “Yto Berrada,” Frieze 101, September 2, 2006 https://frieze.com/article/yto-barrada.

Abstract

Arneson, Richard J., 2016, “Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19: 555–573. 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; 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 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 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.