The 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.” 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. 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 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. A Matter of lies and death – Necropolitics and the question of engagement with the aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide

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. 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. 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. Cheah underscored how countries in the global south, as part of the effort to attract capital investment, essentially subcontracted their citizens to countries abroad. In the name of developing their capacities as human resources through education and professional training, they ended up outsourcing their bodies for cheap labor. Cheah’s insight — that the language of cosmopolitan right produces forms of labor injustice — may hardly be a revelation, but it reinforced the need, already well articulated by Balibar, to revive cosmopolitics as a term accountable to the fallout of economized existence, and to the necessity for a language of rights to have rights capable of doubling down on the politics of the global south within Europe. Cosmopolitics in this ascription would curtail the baggy “cosmopolitanism” set loose in the 1980s (identified by Robbins and Paolo Lemos Horta in their introduction to Cosmopolitanisms), with “a plural descriptive understanding” comprising “any one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping, no one of them necessarily trumping the others,” 8 by aligning itself with “a cosmopolitanism of the poor” (Silviano Santiago), 9 associated with “nonelite collectivities that had cosmopolitanism thrust upon them by traumatic histories of dislocation and dispossession.” 10

§3. Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics

Latour, Bruno. 1997. “Foreword: Stengers’s Shibboleth,” Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science. Trans. Paul Bains. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xx. Khader, Serene J., 2019, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal Metaphysics. Amerindian Perspectivism,” Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013), p. 21. 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.

Isabelle Stengers is a continental philosopher of science, strongly influenced by the work of Deleuze and Whitehead, whose early work emerged in conversation with scientists about their experimental practices. In this way, she shares affinities with Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway—and is often an interlocutor of both theorists. Stengers’s work reads like a kind of engaged ethnography because she is so committed to scrutinizing the concrete practices by which science, philosophy, and other research endeavors take place. Her texts are lively, dramatic, and comedic, inviting the reader—at times explicitly—to laugh at the missteps, follies, and wonders by which thinking occurs. Dao is not a thing. It is not a concept. It is not the différance. In the Cixi of YiZhuan (易傳‧繫辭), Dao is simply said to be “above forms,” while Qi is what is “below forms.” 31 We should notice here that xin er shang xue (the study of what is above forms) is the word used to translate “metaphysics” (one of the equivalences that must be undone). Qi is something that takes space, as we can see from the character and also read in an etymological dictionary—it has four mouths or containers and in the middle there is a dog guarding the utensils. There are multiple meanings of Qi in different doctrines; for example, in classic Confucianism there is Li Qi (禮器), in which Qi is crucial for Li (a rite), which is not merely a ceremony but rather a search for unification between the heavens and the human. For our purposes, it will suffice to simply say that Dao belongs to the noumenon according to the Kantian distinction, while Qi belongs to the phenomenon. But it is possible to infinitize Qi so as to infinitize the self and enter into the noumenon—this is the question of art. 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.

Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation

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 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. 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; Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 177, 178. The debate concerns the current use of the word and reflects the clear split between left and right Zionists in relations to Jewish colonization in the Territories. Historically two terms were used by Zionists to designate Jewish settlements: ישוב, yeshuv, and התנחלות, hitnakhalut. The first comes from the root ישב, y.sh.v, to settle, but also, according to its conjugations, simply, and generally, to sit, or, specifically, to sit down. The second comes from the verb נחל, n.kh.l, which connotes taking possession, acquiring, or inheriting. Nakhala is a piece of inherited or possessed land. The second term is biblical and has a clear colonial connotation. The Pentateuch (Numbers), for example, describes in great details the distribution of the land of Israel among Israel’s tribes, each with its own Nakhala, a land designated as belonging to this tribe by virtue of a divine promise even before it has been possessed.

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 Another common objection to cosmopolitanism associates it with imperialism, colonialism, and paternalism. Some cosmopolitans, despite taking themselves to be opposed to imperialism, colonialism, and paternalism, are charged with focusing too narrowly on the responsibilities (and perspectives) of the affluent while conceiving of those living in poverty mainly as the passive recipients of their “aid.” Such focus indeed shows little sensitivity to questions of epistemic justice and to the wide range of perspectives that merit being taken seriously (Flikschuh 2017). These charges are often internal to cosmopolitanism, however, as they do not so much call into question the cosmopolitan ideal itself as reject certain limited instantiations of it. Cosmopolitans can and do examine the entitlements of those living in poverty (Caney 2015) and argue in favor of poor-led social movements (Deveaux 2018) and alternative forms of cosmopolitanism “from below” (Bailey 2017). Others point to the relevance, for cosmopolitan theorizing, of poverty-driven labor migration and migrant activism as acts of world citizenship (Caraus and Paris 2018). Caraus, Tamara, and Elena Paris (eds.), 2018, Migration, Protest Movements and the Politics of Resistance: A Radical Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, New York: Routledge. Flikschuh, Katrin, 2017, What is Orientation in Global Thinking? A Kantian Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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:Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics. Note, though, that this is a pragmatic call. “But you never resist in general,” Stengers explains. “You may resist as a poet, as a teacher, as an activist for animal rights” (2005c, 45). To study Stengers is to face vocational urgings to find our own modes of resistance, whether as poet or activist or something else entirely. Such adventures in discovery are emergent, by definition, since “[w]hat is unknowable is unknown” (2011, 261). Jean-Luc Nancy, “Euryopa: Le regard au loin,” (1994) in Cahiers de l’Europe 2 (Spring/Summer 1997), pp. 82–94. See chapters by Georges Van Den Abbele, “Lost Horizons and Uncommon Grounds: For a Poetics of Finitude in the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy,” and by Rodolphe Gasché, “Alongside the Horizon,” both in On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 19–31 and pp. 140–156, respectively. See also, Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of the Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Samuel Weber, “Europe and Its Others: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Relation of Reflexivity and Violence in Rodolphe Gasché’s Europe, or the Infinite Task.” CR: The New Centennial Review 8:3 (Winter 2008), pp. 71–83. Laborde, Cécile, 2010, “Republicanism and Global Justice: A Sketch,” European Journal of Political Theory 9:48–69. Peng Cheah, “Interview with Peng Cheah on Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Human Rights,” interview by Yuk Hui, Theory, Culture and Society (March 17, 2011) www.theoryculturesociety.org/interview-with-pheng-cheah-on-cosmopolitanism-nationalism-and-human-rights/

Kristen M. Jones, “Yto Berrada,” Frieze 101, September 2, 2006 https://frieze.com/article/yto-barrada.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 The modern West has lost faith in itself. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period, this loss of faith liberated enormous commercial and creative forces. At the same time, this loss has rendered the West vulnerable. Is there a way to fortify the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? 3 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).