Epilogue

Herbert Spiegelberg

pp. 153-166

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

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism endeavors to articulate a universal humanity while acknowledging singular difference, most often in the name of egalitarian justice. For Kant, human feeling abets human reason in a quest for perpetual peace. For contemporary cosmopolitan theorists, human feeling attests to an extant global interdependence that complicates nationalist and internationalist paradigms for imagining the world. Cosmopolitanism assumes the possibility of the project of understanding "humanity," in all its likeness and unlikeness, and takes it as quintessentially salutary. Yet as I have shown, claiming the rightfulness of an essential vision of "humanity" potentially works against the cosmopolitan goal of realizing equality. Appeals to human feeling, like appeals to human reason before them, perpetuate problematically gendered conceptions of humanity, whereby the masculine subject is assumed to be fully human and the feminine subject merely humane. Coetzee's fiction queers the persistent gendering of particular models of the feeling cosmopolitan subject, and in the process suggests the inadequacy of a cosmopolitanism grounded in "human(e)" feeling. The rational cosmopolitanism of John Coetzee in Summertime is as unself-conscious in its expression as the feelings of those "feminine" subjects to whom the character opposes himself; the affective cosmopolitan Elizabeth Costello feels as self-consciously as the masculinized rational cosmopolitan subject, despite her claims to the contrary.