Abstract
This concluding chapter (coda) begins with a brief account of the geometrical metaphor of concentric circles, its employment in cosmopolitan literature and its relevance to selfhood. Then, polycentric challenges to this model such as Homi Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism and W. E. Connolly’s rhizomatic cosmopolitanism are discussed. Against the concentric metaphor and its polycentric challenges, a third option is explored: the metaphor of eccentric circles. Since eccentric circles are not drawn around the same centre, some new possibilities emerge for illustrating the relation of cosmopolitanism with multiple allegiances. As figures of such allegiances, eccentric circles can also disrupt the harmonious and proportionate geometrical order of concentricity and thus better accommodate the more dissonant, unruly, and fluctuating character of real human entanglement. Ultimately, the ‘ec’ of the eccentric goes beyond the ‘poly’-centric because it denotes a departure from a centre rather than a mere enrichment that may not disrupt the centrality of the ego enough.
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Notes
- 1.
In Papastephanou (2013), I develop a more detailed critical discussion of the declarative self-description and its operations in the cosmopolitanisms of Diogenes, M. Nussbaum, J. Waldron and K. A. Appiah. The ground that is covered there is presupposed here; it is not repeated for reasons of space as well as for purposes of providing new, original material.
- 2.
An explanation of these terms follows in the next section.
- 3.
Notice here the modernist (and ultimately un-cosmopolitan) undertones of each term in the construction: ‘to advance my own aims effectively’.
- 4.
It is a question that Michael Peters raised to me at an interview and which elicited an answer that I am adapting here; see Peters and Papastephanou (2013).
- 5.
My critique of Nussbaum on the point of unacknowledged historical (and often traumatic) positionality differs from Bhabha’s critique. Let me indicate this in a skeletal way with the example of colonialism and with a very brief contrast of Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism with Frantz Fanon’s insights (Papastephanou 2012). While Nussbaum takes the self as a given and unproblematic centre whose ethical gap from distant others should be narrowed, Fanon showed that resistance to colonialism was, amongst other things, a subjectivation process against the self-denying impact that colonialism had on the colonized. The identity of the colonized had to be redeemed from the confusions that colonialism had so methodically and ruthlessly cultivated (or “employed” in a less intentional sense of governmentality) in order to keep control over the colonies. In other words, instead of holding a uniform conception of the self of all cosmopolitans-to-be, Fanon exposed that the self of the dominated was not a given, a stable centre from which all else moved outward. It was an identity that had suffered attacks and damages and that, precisely because of this, had then to be ‘healed’, restored (qua de-traumatized) and reconstructed through national insurrection as a first, yet not final, stage and through an enlargement of consciousness as an end point (which would save the colonized from the risk of remaining a people trapped in a prolonged past and from chauvinistically consolidating identity). The image of eccentric circles can do more justice to this possible road to cosmopolitanism, I believe, than that of concentric circles.
- 6.
As a case in point, consider here also the people of Chagos who, instead of asking citizenship rights in exile, they demand their right of return to their islands from which they were expelled by US and UK governments. Chagossians have failed to become metonymies and to crop up in sets of examples by academic cosmopolitans, vernacular or other. More on their case, in Papastephanou (2015).
- 7.
True, during liminal periods of life, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved and continuity of tradition may become uncertain. But this does not quite amount to wholesale freedom from local affect.
- 8.
The experience of most refugees and of many migrants is heart-rending, and this is more reason for many of them to ‘carry along’ their affect for their original locality/collectivity (and often to idealize and romanticize it) instead of ‘overcoming’ it in a deterritorializing mode.
- 9.
As such a challenging case, we may consider the processes by which the Chagossians were ‘deterritorialized’. The Chagossians themselves use the Creole verb: ‘deraciner’ (Vine 2009).
- 10.
Notice, however, how the above phrasing (as well as Connolly’s relevant text as a whole) reduces the immediate circles of family and state to household economy of need and to a household management of government, respectively. What is missing is any ideality that would make belonging in such collectivities ethico-politically more demanding and critical. Hence, the concentric circles are still interpreted in traditional, politically mainstream and uninspiring ways.
- 11.
Let us recall it: ‘the peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (Kant 1992): 107–8).
- 12.
As I am writing this coda (early 2015), Kissinger’s new book on world order has already received the astonishing number of 40 citations although it appeared as late as 2014.
- 13.
In evoking Democritus’ view (that goodness and wisdom make any part of cosmos a patria for those who strive for such goodness and wisdom, see more in Papastephanou 2013) one might say that the conception of cosmopolitanism explored here is in fact rather old instead of new.
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Papastephanou, M. (2016). Concentric, Vernacular and Rhizomatic Cosmopolitanisms. In: Papastephanou, M. (eds) Cosmopolitanism: Educational, Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30430-4_16
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