ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitanism is at the very least three things: an ethical stance, a political agenda, and a philosophical methodology (Mendieta 2009: 241-58). As the synergetic synthesis of these three elements, then, cosmopolitanism is a way of seeking an orientation, and trying to find a proper place in the world with others, and for others. It is a world making, a worlding, practice. Cosmopolitanism, therefore, challenges cartographies of exclusion based on teleologies, theologies and ontologies that support exceptionalisms and invidious hierarchies. We can think of cosmopolitanism as a practice of mapping cartographies of co-habitation, rather than of binding through boundary making and mapping topologies of exception. Yet, as transgressive and ‘cosmopolitan’ as recent debates and re-articulations of cosmopolitanism have been, very few thinkers have acknowledged the elephant in the room: can, should, must cosmopolitanism take up the question of animal others, of what Haraway has called ‘companion species’ (Haraway 2003)? It can be said that this imperative is already implied in the etymology of the world itself: cosmo-politics. The word means, literally, to be a citizen of the world, to be in the world, to cohabit the world, to be with, in companionship with others in and of the cosmos. Yet, the polis in cosmopolitics refers to a distinct set of human practices: political practices through which humans as members of self-determining and artificial units recognize each other. Politics is an eminently human practice that entails drawing distinctions that bound and bind by excluding while including and including while excluding. There is indeed something oxymoronic about cosmopolitics, for how can other beings in the cosmos enter into the political contract that is entailed by a cosmopolitical stance and agenda? Cosmopolitics, however, is more than a political agenda, or a political imperative. It is an ethical stance and a philosophical methodology that places in question the ground on which the political itself is drawn. Cosmopolitics is a meta-political reflection; it is the name for questioning of the political as such. In fact, as will be argued here, cosmopolitics is to a politics of co-habitation of ‘becoming-with-companions’ (Haraway 2008: 38) what political theology was to a politics of the exception, that is, its overcoming and dialectical sublation. As a politics of ‘becoming-with-companions’ that entails also a distinct form of worlding, of making worlds, this form of cosmopolitanism requires the enlightenment of cosmopolitics itself – cosmopolitanism has to become cosmopolitan. This means, above all, its becoming not simply a cosmopolitanism of the being-alone of humans, the egocentric, Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian cosmopolitanism of human exceptionalism, but an interspecies cosmopolitanism
that acknowledges from the outset that, to quote Anna Tsing, ‘Human nature is an interspecies relationship’ (quoted in Haraway 2008: 19). If cosmopolitanism in general challenges the cartographies that exclude other human being from the community of humanity, then interspecies cosmopolitanism challenges the most fundamental of cartographies, namely that which draws a boundary between human animals, and non-human animals.
