Home > Positioning > Subjects > Cosmopolitics

Cosmopolitics

Cosmopolitics is Isabelle Stengers’ concept, and the distinction from cosmopolitanism is sharp. Cosmos names the unknown constituted by multiple divergent worlds, not the unified citizen-world of Kantian cosmopolitanism. Politics names the question of how practices can coexist without being subordinated to a meta-frame that ranks them. Stengers explicitly disclaims any connection to Kant — the cosmos is not given in advance; it is what cosmopolitical practice makes room for.

The body of work: Cosmopolitiques in seven volumes (La Découverte, 1996–97), consolidated as two volumes in 2003 and translated as Cosmopolitics I (Minnesota, 2010) and Cosmopolitics II (Minnesota, 2011). The trajectory matters: volumes 1–3 work through the science wars and classical physics, 4–5 through quantum mechanics and time (the Prigogine inheritance), 6 through biology and emergence, 7 (Pour en finir avec la tolérance) lands the political payoff. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal” (2005, in Latour & Weibel eds., Making Things Public) is the most distilled statement and the most-cited entry point.

The Whitehead axis

Stengers’ cosmopolitics draws on her sustained reading of Whitehead. Thinking with Whitehead (2002, English 2011) is where she finds the metaphysical resources — process, prehension, the refusal of the bifurcation of nature, creativity as ultimate category. Cosmopolitics carries the process-relational line forward into contemporary terrain: the question of how practices that produce different realities can be held together without the move to a transcendent arbiter.

The apparatus

Ecology of practices. Practices as having their own modes of existence, their own obligations and constraints. The pluralism is of ways-of-practising, not of beliefs. The philosopher does not evaluate practices against a universal standard but studies how they present themselves to one another.

Reciprocal capture. How practices come into symbiotic relation through constraints — “a dual process of identity construction” (Cosmopolitics I, p. 36). Neither practice dictates the other’s internal organisation; both are changed by the encounter while remaining distinct.

The idiot. Borrowed from Deleuze. The conceptual persona who slows the others down — refuses to be authorised too quickly, holds onto a matter of concern that resists being simplified to a common good. Affirmative, not oppositional: the idiot is the one busy with their own concern, not the one resisting for the sake of resistance.

The cosmopolitical proposal. Adding a cosmopolitical dimension to political problems. Not the search for answers everyone must accept, but the practice of giving place to the cry of fright or the murmur of the idiot in the assemblage around a political issue.

The critique of tolerance. Tolerance is condescending — it places the tolerator above the tolerated and lets dominant frames keep their position by extending sufferance to challengers. Cosmopolitics requires taking the realities other practices produce seriously, not merely allowing them to be held.

The afterlife of the concept

Latour. Both Stengers and Bruno Latour use “cosmopolitics” but differ. Latour affirms a universal common world to be composed; Stengers rejects universality and stays with situated practice. The divergence runs through Latour’s “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” (Common Knowledge 10:3, 2004) and continues across both their corpora.

Pluriverse and the ontological turn. Cosmopolitics has been taken up beyond Stengers’ framing — Donna Haraway, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mario Blaser, Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena, Walter Mignolo — across STS, anthropology, ecology, and decolonial thought. The “pluriverse” figure travels across this cluster.

Decolonial reception. Mixed. Some readers (Mignolo) treat Stengers’ cosmopolitics as still too European. Others (de la Cadena on Andean cosmopolitics, Blaser) extend the concept into indigenous cosmopolitics. The relation is a live debate, not a settled extension.

Stengers’ own extensions. In Catastrophic Times (2009, English 2015) brings cosmopolitics to bear on ecological emergency. Capitalist Sorcery with Philippe Pignarre (2005, English 2011) develops the analysis of capitalism as an operation that captures and disrupts practices.

Persons

Stengers · Whitehead