Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

Product Information

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: Laborde, Cécile, 2010, “Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch,” European Journal of Political Theory 9:48–69. 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; Europe at a Crossroads,” ed. Michel Feher, William Callison, Milad Odabaei, Aurélie Windels, Zone Books: Near Futures 1 (March 2016).

Kristen M. Jones, “Yto Berrada,” Frieze 101, September 2, 2006 https://frieze.com/article/yto-barrada. 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. 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;Richter, Daniel S., 2011, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deveaux, Monique, 2018, “Poor-Led Social Movements and Global Justice,” Political Theory 46: 698–725. 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. If we approach human rights in terms of a biopolitical analysis, you can argue that what produces humanity and all its capacities such as needs, interests, the capacity to labour and so on, are biotechnologies that have now become globalized. Human rights or human rights instruments are the codification of these capacities in a juridical discourse, that is to say, in the language of right. Hence, we don’t begin with the human being who has rights, but with the production of fundamental human needs and capacities, which we subsequently understand in terms of rights that we can claim for ourselves or on behalf of others. But we can only claim these rights in the first place if the needs and capacities that these rights seek to protect were synthetically produced in us by biopolitical technologies. If you look at the new cosmopolitanism in this way, then things become more complicated. 7 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.

This re-enchantment shows itself in several places. Most obviously perhaps, it is in Stengers’s own suggestions to readers about how to think, gather, and mobilize in ways that impassion ourselves and our world. Moreover, before we even consider our own passions, she asks us to notice how passion is at play in science itself, in the events and the controversies by which innovations become scientific. Arneson, Richard J., 2016, “Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19: 555–573. A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s GenocideThe term for camp in common currency in Arabic, Mintaqat al-I’tiqal (منطقة لإعتقال), is approximatively translated according to Hannah Deutscher as “district of arrests.” Placebos exemplify this two-punch impact: excluded as unscientific because placebos appeal to the hopeful belief of patients, but then incorporated into clinical research trials because placebo-controls filter such beliefs out of scientifically valid treatments (1997; 2003; 2011).

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. 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 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. Settlement in Turkish is ‘yerleşim’ (pronounced ‘yérléshimme’) usually followed by ‘yeri.’ Yer-leş-im is literally “getting a location.” The Jewish settlements in Israel are referred to as “Israil’de Yahudi yerleşimi,” which registers as “location-getting.” By contrast, camp is “kamp” in Turkish, a loan word from French (with the same dual meaning of camp and “camp de détention”). Kamp signifies a temporary arrangement, as opposed to yerleşim which denotes a settlement of greater permanence. Detention camp is “tutuklu kampı”; and refugee camp is “mülteci kampı,” as in “Suriyeli mülteci kampı” = Syrian refugee camp. The principle semantic difference between yerlesim and kamp rests on differences of temporality. 46 Leopold Lambert, “Fortress Schengen: Report of the Wall as a Spectacular Rumor,” The Funambulist, Feb. 26, 2016, https://thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/fortress-schengen-report-of-the-wall-as-a-spectacular-rumor (accessed 11/28/17).Consider Kant’s example of the tree from §64 of the Critique of Judgment. First, the tree reproduces itself according to its genus, meaning that it reproduces another tree. Second, the tree produces itself as an individual; it absorbs energy from the environment and turns it into nutrients that sustain its life. Third, different parts of the tree establish reciprocal relations with one another and thus constitute the whole; as Kant writes, the “preservation of one part is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the other parts.” 11 In such a totality, a part is always constrained by the whole, and this is true of Kant’s understanding of cosmopolitical wholeness as well: “All states … are in danger of acting injuriously upon one another.” 12 Nature is not something that can be judged from a particular point of view, just as the French Revolution cannot be judged according to its actors. Rather, nature can only be comprehended as a complex whole, and the human species, as one part of it, will ultimately progress towards a universal history that coincides with the teleology of nature. 13 Why, then, do I think it’s necessary to turn to cosmotechnics? For a long time now we have operated with a very narrow—in fact, far too narrow—concept of technics. By following Heidegger’s essay, we can distinguish two notions of technics. First, we have the Greek notion of technē, which Heidegger develops through his reading of the ancient Greeks, notably the Pre-Socratics—more precisely, the three “inceptual” ( anfängliche) thinkers, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander. 28 In the 1949 lecture, Heidegger proposes to distinguish the essence of Greek technē from modern technology ( moderne Technik). 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. 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 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