Abstract
A dense static understanding of self and cultural identity is not only phenomenologically difficult but could yield to idolatry of pure identity and the consequent violent resistance to the inherent ambivalences all notions of identity pose. Cosmopolitanism, if it truly is a “world citizenship”, needs to address the issue of respect for difference and human variety, which everyday nuances of the word affirm. However, the identity of cosmopolitanism itself is not a settled issue, and in all probability, much like questions of similar import, would always remain so – an “unsatisfied” yearning towards a utopia. This is not suggesting that the cosmopolitan project is ill-fated. As a moral appreciation of difference, there cannot be a “single cosmopolitanism”, but many different shades of cosmopolitanisms, many particular ways of “inhabiting the other’s world”. A porous, hybrid understanding of the self and culture is suggestive of such a multi-hued cosmopolitanism. Modernity’s grand project of “unification of the moral universe” has left an apocalyptic effect and a host of discontents. Drawing on contemporary continental and postcolonial theories and literature, the paper argues for the hybrid self’s transformational potential for inhabiting the other’s world in its own individual ways.
For in the most general form it [metaphysics] has assumed in the history of thought it appears as a movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us … toward an alien outside-of-oneself, toward a yonder.
Emmanuel Lévinas1
1Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Notes
- 1.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1996. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
- 2.
Benhabib, Seyla. 2006. Another Cosmopolitanism. New York: Oxford University Press.
- 3.
Ibid. 20.
- 4.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1996. op. cit. 14.
- 5.
Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2000. Cosmopolitanisms. Public Culture 12/3: 577–590: 587.
- 6.
Ibid. 577.
- 7.
Bhabha, Homi K. 2000. Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. In Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle, 38–52: 48. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
- 8.
Bhabha, Homi K. 2000. op. cit. 50.
- 9.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. op. cit. 21.
- 10.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
- 11.
Ibid. 14.
- 12.
Kant, Immanuel. 1917. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, trans. M. Campbell Smith. 137–138. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
- 13.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. op. cit. 215. Emphasis as in the original. See also the essay by An Verlinden in Chapter 6.
- 14.
Appiah raises the problematic paradox of liberal cosmopolitanism, but succumbs to it in his The Ethics of Identity (2007). He accepts “difference” from an instrumental, agency-oriented consideration, betraying thereby the West’s worst fears – the demons of uncivilized cannibal savages, always calling for western liberal cosmopolitan’s civilizing mission. He writes: “Cosmopolitanism values human variety for what it makes possible for human agency, and some kinds of cultural variety constrain more than they enable. The cosmopolitan’s high appraisal of variety flows… from the human choices it enables, but variety is not something we value no matter what. (This is one reason why I think it is not helpful to see cosmopolitanism as expressing an aesthetic ideal.)” (Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2007. The Ethics of Identity, 268. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.) Although we reject the instrumental view of accepting human difference, we shall emphasize that there is no need to ontologize difference, or, for that matter, cosmopolitanism itself. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the difficulty entailed in the liberal view that a moral eye for human difference should immediately evoke a normative paralysis regarding human evil. Such a view smacks of moral blame game, moral patronizing, the “without us the deluge” syndrome.
- 15.
Here we want to refer to the talk delivered by historian and novelist, Mukul Kesavan , “A Singular Nationalism”, in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay on 21 January 2008. Making the interesting point, Kesavan observed that the Indian National Congress, unable to represent the masses on account of its elitist image, enlisted people from India’s myriad communities to claim its representative nature. The Congress thus invented a “Noah’s Ark nationalism”, “a non-denominational nationalism that made a virtue out of diversity.” Such nationalism, according to Kesavan, has given rise to an Indian nation which can “deal with difference without hysteria because diversity was written into its being.” He writes in Secular common sense: “In its origins, the Congress was a self-consciously representative assembly of Indians from different parts of India… The congress never lost this sense that the nation was the sum of the sub-continent’s species; that the more Parsis, Muslims, Dalits, Marwaris, Sikhs, and Christians it could count in its ranks, the better was its claim to represent the nation.” (Kesavan, Mukul. 2001. Secular Common Sense. 3–4. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.) Kesavan goes on to argue that although such a domesticated version of secularism of respecting all religions (as against the West’s separation of church and state) has been integrated into the Indian Constitution, the gradual political assertion of Hindu majoritarianism is a threat looming large in India today. Alluding to the current controversy over raising a Ram Temple upon the site of the violently demolished Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, he commends that it won’t be apocalyptic to erect a Ram Mandir where the Sangh Parivar wants it, “but the common sense of the Republic will have shifted. It will begin to seem reasonable to us and our children that those counted in the majority have a right to have their sensibilities respected, to have their beliefs deferred to by others. Invisibly, we shall have become some other country.” (Kesavan, Mukul. 2001. op. cit. 136) Kesavan’s “secular common sense” certainly is a variety of the cosmopolitanism we are here striving to evoke.
- 16.
Derrida, Jacques. 2007. Onto-Theology of National-Humanism: Prolegomena to a Hypothesis. In Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, ed. Barry Stocker, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. 299–323, 312. Abingdon: Routledge.
- 17.
Ibid. 314.
- 18.
Ibid. 317.
- 19.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. 22–23. London: Routledge. Emphasis as in original.
- 20.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2004. An Interview with Martha Nussbaum. The Dualist: Stanford’s Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy 11: 65. http://www.stanford.edu/group/dualist/vol11/Nussbaum.pdf
- 21.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. Ethics in a World of Strangers: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism. The Berlin Journal 11: 23–26. http://www.americanacademy.de/uploads/media/BerlinJournal_11.pdf
- 22.
Fanon, Frantz. 1982. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. 314–315. New York: Grove Press.
- 23.
Ibid. 316.
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Gandhi, Mohandas Kiranchand. 2008. Gandhi: Essential Writings, ed. Gapalkrishna Gandhi, 316. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- 25.
Gandhi, Mohandas Kiranchand. 2006. Gandhi’s Life in His Own Words, ed. Krishna Kripalani, 56. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
- 26.
Gandhi, Mohandas Kiranchand. 2006. India of My Dreams. 300. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
- 27.
Ibid. 299.
- 28.
See Steger, Manfred. 2000. Ghandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power. New York: St. Martin’s Press; and Bajpai, Kanti. 2006. Indian Conceptions of Order/Justice in International Relations: Nehruvian, Gandhian, Hindutva and neo-liberal. Political Ideas in Modern India: Thematic Explorations, eds. V.R. Mehta and Thomas Pantham, of the Series History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, general ed. D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Vol. X, Part 7, 367–392. New Delhi: Sage Publications. See also Gandhi, Mohandas Kiranchand. 2006. Hind Swaraj. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House.
- 29.
Hardiman, David. 2003. Gandhi in His Time and Ours. 67–72. Delhi: Permanent Black.
- 30.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2001. Philosophy, Justice, and Love. In Is it Righteous to be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Michael B. Smith, ed. Jill Robbins, 165–181: 166. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- 31.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. 10. Boston, MA: Kluwer.
- 32.
Cohen, Richard A. 2007. Translator’s Introduction: Better Than Being. In Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, ed. Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. Richard A. Cohen, 1–16: 10. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Emphasis as in original.
- 33.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. op. cit. 73.
- 34.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1988. The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Lévinas – Tamra Wright, Peter Hayes and Alison Ainley. In The Provocation of Lévinas: Rethinking the Other, trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, eds. Robert Bernesconi and David Wood, 168–180: 178. London: Routledge.
- 35.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. op. cit. 27.
- 36.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. op. cit. 49.
- 37.
Lévinas’ engagement is meta-ethical and originary in the sense that he is speaking about what lies behind normative morality. He admits: “I have been speaking about that which stands behind practical morality; about the extraordinary relation between a man and his neighbour, a relation that continues to exist even when it is severely damaged.” (Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Ideology and Idealism. In The Lévinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, 235–248: 247. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
- 38.
Blum, Roland Paul. 1983. Emmanuel Lévinas’ Theory of Commitment. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44/2: 145–68; 147.
- 39.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1981. op. cit. 74.
- 40.
Ibid. 91.
- 41.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. op. cit. 213.
- 42.
Ibid. 214. We will refer to the notion of “desire for otherness” in the next section.
- 43.
Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas. 64. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- 44.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1981. op. cit. 91.
- 45.
Ibid. 92.
- 46.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. op. cit. 209.
- 47.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1981. op. cit. 91.
- 48.
Heidegger, Martin. 1973. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. 153. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Transcendence and Evil. In Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. 175–186: 179. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
- 50.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1987. God and philosophy. In Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis. 153–173: 165. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
- 51.
Rushdie, Salman. 1991a. Is nothing sacred? In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, ed. Salman Rushdie, 415–429: 421. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1991. Thanks to my colleague, Sudha Shastri, Associate Professor of English Literature, for introducing me, an amateur in the art of literature appreciation, to the work of Salman Rushdie as a wonderful exemplar of contemporary notions of identity.
- 52.
See Heidegger, Martin. 1961. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books; Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Letter on Humanism. In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, 213–265. New York: Harper Collins; Heidegger, Martin. 1993. The Question Concerning Technology. In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. William Lovitt, 307–341. New York: Harper Collins.
- 53.
Heidegger, Martin. 1966. Memorial Address. In Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, 43–57: 49. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Emphasis as in the original.
- 54.
Rushdie, Salman. 1995. Shame. 86. London: Vintage Books.
- 55.
An extreme possibility in the rejection of the solid identity of the self is to posit it as a real multiple. (See: Bloom, Paul. 2008. First Person Plural. The Atlantic November. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/multiple-personalities; Braude, Stephen. 1991. First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind. London: Routledge; Clark, Stephen R.L. 1991. How Many Selves Make Me? In Human Beings, ed. David Cockburn, 213–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Elster, Jon, ed. 1995. The Multiple Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Rowman, John and Mick Cooper, eds. 1999. The Plural Self: Multiplicity in Everyday Life. New Delhi: Sage Publications.) We have favored a hybrid self over a multiple self in this discussion for the sake of allowing the self a dimension of unity and identity, which is in no way “unitary”, homogenous or stable. We have used the “hybrid self” proposal to bring to light the ambivalences of the cosmopolitan self. Of course, we have also noted the phenomenological difficulty of a transparent, solid self identity.
- 56.
Rushdie, Salman. 1991b. In Good Faith. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, ed. Salman Rushdie, 393–414: 394. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
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Rushdie, Salman. 1992. The Satanic Verses. 534. Dover, DE: The Consortium.
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Rushdie, Salman. 2006a. The Moor’s Last Sigh. 388. London: Vintage Books.
- 59.
Rushdie, Salman. 2006b. Midnight’s Children. 431. London: Vintage Books.
- 60.
Rushdie, Salman. 1995. op. cit. 118.
- 61.
Rushdie, Salman. 2006b. op. cit. 535.
- 62.
Rushdie, Salman. 2006a. op. cit. 414.
- 63.
Ibid. 336.
- 64.
Pollock, Sheldon. 1998. The Cosmopolitan Vernacular. The Journal of Asian Studies 57/1: 6–38: 34.
- 65.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2000. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History. Public Culture 12/3: 591–626: 597.
- 66.
Ibid. 625.
- 67.
Bhabha, Homi K. 2000. op. cit. 42.
- 68.
Ibid. 47.
- 69.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1995. The Location of Culture. 173. London: Routledge.
- 70.
Ibid. 5.
- 71.
Rushdie, Salman. 1991c. The New Empire Within Britain. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, ed. Salman Rushdie, 129–138. New Delhi: Penguin Books India; Rushdie, Salman. 1991d. Home Front. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, ed. Salman Rushdie, 143–147. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
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Rushdie, Salman. 1991d. op. cit. 147.
- 73.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1981. op. cit. 75.
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George, S.K. (2010). The Cosmopolitan Self and the Fetishism of Identity. In: van Hooft, S., Vandekerckhove, W. (eds) Questioning Cosmopolitanism. Studies in Global Justice, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8704-1_5
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