Cosmopolitics I (Posthumanities)

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Forst, Rainer, 2001, “Towards a Critical Theory of Transnational Justice,” Metaphilosophy 32:160–179. 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. 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. Richter, Daniel S., 2011, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. This co-written book offers a wealth of historical insights into the entanglement of medicine and modern epistemologies of science. It’s also a wonderful introduction to Stengers’s long-lasting interests in Mesmer, mesmerism, and psychoanalysis.

Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 177, 178. 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). This overview, useful as a way to categorize Stengers’s many publications, risks hiding from view themes that run throughout her work. Three intersecting concerns hold particular relevance to political theology:

Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2016), p. 13. Throughout his political writings, Kant maintains that this relation between nature and cosmopolitics is necessary. 8 If Kant sees the republican constitution and perpetual peace as political forms that may be able to bring forward a universal history of the human species, it is because he understands that such progress is also a progress of reason, the telos of nature. This progress toward an end goal—namely, universal history and a “perfect state constitution”—is the “completion of a hidden plan of nature” ( Vollziehung eines verborgenen Plans der Natur). What does it mean for nature to have a hidden plan? And why is the realization of cosmopolitics the teleology of nature? Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale. Whether you think of the question of Palestine, the settlements and the camps, or of the politics of raw materials and extraction; whether you think of ecology (and the rainforests) or the problems of federalism, citizenship and immigration, or whether it is a question of gentrification in the great cities as well as in the bidonvilles, the favelas, and the townships and of course the movement of the landless—today everything is about land. 53 We can find these analogues to religion all over the place, according to Stengers. Modern practices, ranging from science and medicine to pedagogy, deploy methods that work to disqualify their others. As some figures of authority like doctors or entrepreneurs (or professors, priests, or pastors) gain recognition as modern and lay claim to legitimacy, they rely upon the non-modern status of others, identified by Stengers as the “charlatan, populist, ideologue, astrologer, magician, hypnotist, charismatic teacher” (2010, 30). 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).

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.” 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. See Silviano Santiago, “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor,” trans. Magdalena Edwards and Paulo Lemos Horta, in Cosmopolitanisms, pp. 21–39. 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. Martina Tazzioli and Nicholas De Genova, “Europe/Crisis: Introducing New Keywords of ‘The Crisis’ in and of ‘Europe,’” in “Europe at the Crossroads,” Zone Books: Near Futures, http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-new-keywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/#europe-crisis.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 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. For the discussion of how secularism is instrumentalized in these conflicts, see Stathis Gourgouris, “Crisis and the Ill Logic of Fortress Europe,” Uppsala Rhetorical Studies, pp. 40–41. 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 Deveaux, Monique, 2018, “Poor-Led Social Movements and Global Justice,” Political Theory 46: 698–725.

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 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). In We, the People of Europe? Balibar discusses the concepts of “conflictual democracy” (where “heterogeneous constitutional principles are combined . . . contributing to a revival of the old notion of the ‘mixed constitution,’” and “expansive democracy” (a Gramscian notion referring to a politics that “remains open to the integration of new elements into the ‘common part’ of mankind, and there can be no ‘end of history’”) (p. 224). The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold: a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics

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Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal Metaphysics. Amerindian Perspectivism,” Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013), p. 21. Barry Malone, “Why Al Jazeera will not say Mediterranean ‘migrants’,” Al Jazeera, August 20, 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/editors-blog/2015/08/al-jazeera-mediterranean-migrants-150820082226309.html

Stengers’s recent work puts us all on the hook because cosmopolitics is an enterprise to which we each are invited: an ecology of practice, made up of minoritarian projects that all seek in various ways to resist the harms of capitalist imperialism. 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 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. See Bruce Robbins, “Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 10–12.

§1. Cosmopolitanism: Between Nature and Technology

Arneson, Richard J., 2016, “Extreme Cosmopolitanisms Defended,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19: 555–573. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 9. of freedom, equality, and independence, and that they live under their own laws. Their common laws, however, are the laws of morality, grounded