Cosmopolitan dice recast

Abstract

This article argues that hegemonic cosmopolitan narrativity fails to frame a complex cosmopolitan normativity. The hegemonic cosmopolitan narrative celebrates a mobile selfhood merely hospitable to the encountered, mobile diversity that comes ashore. A recent educational-theoretical ‘refugee-crisis’ initiative serves as an illustration of the normative shortcomings of the new cosmopolitanism. The implicit normativity of the dominant cosmopolitan narrativity is, I claim, politically too weak to cover the normative surplus of a more critical cosmo-politics. Cosmopolitanism should be recast to make higher ethico-political demands on the global self and world for the cultivation of neglected ecological and relational sensibilities.

Keywords:

• Rights
• refugee crisis
• hospitality
• deliberation
• migration
• responsibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For reasons of manageability of my material and to limit the length of this article, I leave aside bibliographic corroboration of this brief, indeed, skeletal and introductory sketch of how cosmopolitanism is typically conceptualized. The generality of the depicted cosmopolitanism here affords this skipping of textual evidence. For such bibliographical corroboration, however, see Papastephanou (2013).

2. Some established tools for deconstructing educational initiatives of ethico-political relevance often obfuscate global problems instead of radicalizing our outlooks precisely by mistaking deconstruction for downright dismissal of the initiative in question.

3. My critical response to the special section is by no means based on an ad hominem critique of the contributors as supposedly lacking personal compassion for people dying in warfare. And it is also not based on a polemical and faulty rationale that, if you focus on the refugee-crisis, you are by definition blind to the suffering of those who stay in place.

4. A self-reflective admission here is that the narrative which is reconstructed as hegemonic and deployed in this section is inevitably produced by textual operations which reproduce what Jean-Francois Lyotard theorized as ‘redigere’, that is, a narrativity which, in its effort to recount something puts down and leaves aside other things which could have complicated the produced narrativity. I see such ‘trials of narrativity’ as unavoidable side-effects of the effort to tell a story of hegemony and to open paths for counter-hegemonies.

5. For the acknowledgement of the relevance of the notion of the imaginary in this context I am indebted to Niclas Rönnström (personal communication).