Shame and cosmopolitanism

pp. 97-122

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

Abstrakt

I have argued that cosmopolitan theory can be divided into two strains according to two different models of sympathy. On the one hand, rational cosmopolitanism depends on a model of sympathy that imagines a self-mastering subject who becomes cosmopolitan through the extension of sympathy to "humanity." The cognitive-evaluative model of sympathy inhering in rational cosmopolitanism, I suggest, is comparable to paranoia, insofar as it exhorts the cosmopolitan subject to practice a relentless self-scrutiny of the cosmopolitan character of his sympathetic feeling. On the other hand, affective cosmopolitanism invokes an intersubjective model of sympathy that eschews the self-centeredness of paranoia in favor of the self-relinquishment of extrarational feeling. In this strain of cosmopolitan thought, "humanity" is cosmopolitan by virtue of its nascent capacity to affect and be affected by distant others. The affective cosmopolitan subject, who is both feminized and racialized within affective cosmopolitan theory, is one whose capacity for sympathetic exchange marks her feelings as humane.