CFP: Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future
Stephen Clark
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 19:10:35 +0100
From: Bertold Bernreuter <bernr...@polylog.org>
Reply-To: Bertold Bernreuter <bernr...@polylog.org>
Subject: InterPhil: CFP: Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future
To: InterPhil <inte...@polylog.org>
From: Gary Banham <G.Ba...@mmu.ac.uk>
Dear All
I am writing to ask for contributors to the following collection:
"Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future"
edited by Gary Banham (Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K.) and
Diane Morgan (University College Northampton, U.K.)
This collection intends to make a strong contribution to the timely
issue of cosmopolitics.
Today’s political scene has seen growing controversy concerning the
role of international institutions such as the U.N. and bodies set up
to defend and define the notion of “International Law”. The relation
between such law and the notion of “Crimes against Humanity” has
further illustrated the problem of the normative status of conceptions
of the “international”. Whilst the proponents of these notions have
claimed a universal validity for conceptions of international law,
this has been resisted both by those who argue for an “end” to the
traditions of the Enlightenment on the basis of contemporary
theoretical developments and, in contrast, by those arguing for new
forms of “realism” in the comprehension of international affairs.
The notion of “war” has itself been re-invented recently through the
wide deployment of conceptions of “humanitarian intervention” in
contexts as diverse as Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. As part of the debate
concerning such questions we have witnessed a striking resurgence in
references to “just war” theory and, in relevant contrast, to notions
of political theology (which have provided one context of resistance
to arguments concerning the relevance and plausibility of the notion
of international law). Given the increased prevalence of moral,
political and cultural perspectives that pre-date modernity, it is one
of our hopes to raise the question concerning the cosmopolitical
condition as one that needs to be theorized beyond the perspectives of
the modern as launched by classical social contract theory or models
of state sovereignty.
Traditional objections to cosmopolitics and the humanist tradition
underpinning it have mainly taken the following forms:
1. Cosmopolitics presents itself as a commitment to the interests of
humanity as a whole. There is a fundamental assumption that humanity
can be perceived as a whole, i.e. that there are basic human
characteristics which we all share and should respect. This leads to a
dogmatic and monolithic sense of what it is to be human, one that runs
a risk of turning out to be merely a disguised assumption and
attribution of properties by a dominant culture (often European or
American) on other, different cultures. Indeed, the European dominated
tradition of humanism has tended to foist its socio-political and
cultural values on others in the name of a supposed universality of
interests.
2. The cosmopolitan thinker of cosmopolitics practises a form of
armchair participation in foreign events, a merely aesthetic
spectatorship of events in the world. The cosmopolitan is too
detached, too passive and ineffectual to contribute in any significant
way to what is actually being played out in real socio- political
terms.
3. Humanism itself is often criticised as being anthropocentric, a
reductive and irresponsible investment in the human at the expense of
other life forms. Equally, in overprivileging a supposedly eternal
human ‘essence’, humanism has very little to contribute to current
debates within philosophy, cultural and gender studies which posit a
going beyond the human(whether in the form of the posthuman or the
transhuman). Humanism is old- fashioned, out-of-date and reactionary
in its assumptions about the ascendancy of Man, his ineluctable
progress towards an ever increasing rationality and defence of
(Western dominated) traditions.
Resisting the orthodoxy of such readings we propose to demonstrate how
cosmopolitical thinking attempts not only to cut across national
borders, to think through and with differences but also to reveal how
the nature of the ‘human’ is concomitantly traversed with
unknowability and contingency whilst being combined with a compelling
injunction to think ethico-politically beyond the particular, as a
whole in some sense.
The focus of our collection will be two-fold:
1) Moral and political theory. Here there is a need to incorporate
material of a wide variety, from contemporary liberal theory as
spearheaded by Rawls’ conception of the law of peoples; Habermas’
codification of the law as an institutional form that transcends
morality and politics (incorporating his conception of the global
condition), the revival of Kantian models of “perpetual peace” and the
challenges to this in international relations theory; Carl Schmitt’s
model of political theology, the critical decline of “realist” models
of international relations and the potential challenges of
neo-conservative theory.
2) The relationship of cosmopolitics to cosmology and ecology;
universality and the universe; the thinking of the human through its
relation to other life forms (here on this planet and potentially
elsewhere). Goethe’s philosophy of nature, Bataille’s “general
economy”, Lyotard’s “the inhuman” and Derrida’s analysis of
“animality” would be pertinent here. Questions concerning
globalisation also have a focus that transcends the areas of
“politics” as such, bringing in wider ecological questions concerning
global citizenship and multiculturalism, refugee rights and
“hospitality.
Dr Gary Banham
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
the Manchester Metropolitan University
Dept of Politics and Philosophy
Geoffrey Manton Building
Manchester
M15 6LL
Tel: 0161 247 3036
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