ABSTRACT
As it develops into a fully-fledged subfield, cosmopolitanism studies starts to harden around structural distinctions. One that is quite useful in grasping pivotal differences in subject and approach is that between aesthetic and ethical cosmopolitanism. Needless to say, although there are dissenting voices (see in particular Papastergiadis in this volume), ethical cosmopolitanism – which often informs normative political theories (Nash 2006) – comes out as the good side. Aesthetic versions – also variously associated with empirical or ‘really existing’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘banal’ dimensions – tend to be dismissed, as the chosen qualifiers reveal. In fact, this seems to be a good example of an evaluative dichotomy, as what it refers to in the two dimensions so defined is not simply difference or an articulated set of interrelations, rather it is a distinction which, explicitly or implicitly, serves the purpose of valorizing one side at the expense of the other. Or, to put it even more drastically, one side is, whilst the other appears as an effect of the distinction, being simply marked by the lack of what the first represents, imagined as an empty, or at least ‘thin’, category. Focusing on the distinction between aesthetic and ethical cosmopolitanism allows us to appreciate and scrutinize this evaluative dimension, which the two more commonly used expressions addressing a largely overlapping set of binary oppositions – namely, cultural and political cosmopolitanism – rather tend to understate or hide. How and why both this connotation and its scarce thematization came to characterize the intellectual and historical context of the rise of cosmopolitan studies is worth considering, as it can allow us to expose assumptions that have mostly remained implicit in the way cosmopolitanism is theorized.
