ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitanism has become the subject of widespread debate in the humanities and the social sciences since the turn of the century, calling attention to the key role that translation plays in mediating between different traditions and modernities. A cursory glance at the existing literature on what has been referred to as aesthetic cosmopolitanism, which is relatively scarce compared with the proliferation of works on other aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism, reveals that, as Papastergiadis points out, “since the Stoics the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of cosmopolitanism have been slowly disregarded”. Translation has been conceptualized as a key element in accounts of the cosmopolitanization of reality in the literary field. The issue of linguistic diversity is becoming increasingly unavoidable in political theory in view of the growing relevance of forms of democratic politics beyond the state, as well as new challenges to prevalent, taken-for-granted notions of cultural homogeneity at the national level.
