Depoliticisation in Critical Dialogic Ontologies

Abstract

This chapter critically examines dialogic forms of critical cosmopolitanism that share the liberal ambition of a genuine engagement with difference, but strive to make the ontological and ethical terms of such a dialogic interaction with alterity even more inclusive. The central issue for these approaches remains the accommodation of difference within an all-inclusive and ever-expanding community of interlocutors that cultivates a cosmopolitanism of intercommunal understanding and solidarity. Both Andrew Linklater’s dialogic cosmopolitan project and Richard Shapcott’s philosophical hermeneutics examined in this chapter subscribe to a vision of cosmopolitan solidarity based on either linguistically grounded, commonly agreed universal conditions of conversation (Linklater) or language as the sufficiently universal ontological horizon of communication (Shapcott). Yet, they both find themselves entrapped in a self-inflicted trade-off between community and diversity, identity and difference, universality and particularity, cosmopolitan aspirations and sociological pragmatism. Their cosmopolitan pluralism, then, remains ontic, premised on a foundational, rather than a political ontology, which condemns their two objectives, the achievement of community and the attainment of justice to difference, to a mutual irreconcilability.