Elizabeth Costello and affective cosmopolitanism

pp. 69-96

in: Katherine Hallemeier, J. M. Coetzee and the limits of cosmopolitanism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

I have defined affective cosmopolitanism as cosmopolitanism that locates, in a purportedly "human" capacity to sympathize with others, a nascent or extant cosmopolitan community: one that enables us to envision an international political field that is more inclusionary and equitable than that imagined within existing international institutions. Such institutions arguably tend to rely on Enlightenment universalisms, including an abstract conception of "human" community. Affective cosmopolitanism, in contrast, purportedly registers the ways in which human beings are substantively engaged in conversation with distant others, so transnational politics can be seen to be composed of diverse, and often conflicting forces. Unlike rational cosmopolitanism, affective cosmopolitanism is not so concerned with how humans ought to feel, given the existence of global interdependence, as with how humans do feel, given the existence of global interdependence.