Cosmopolitanism and cosmo-poethics: the cultural migration of a concept

The paper deals with the interest nowadays played by the concept of cosmopoli- tanism in contemporary schools of critical thought through different and intercon- nected perspectives. The article reads some deconstructive, culturalist and post- colonial rewritings of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism, with a focus on the network of ‘refuge-cities’ functioning on global cooperation, as offered by Jacques Derrida; with the cosmopolitanism ‘from below’ indicated by the sociologist Stu- art Hall; with the ‘plurality’ of cosmopolitanisms claimed by Gayatry C. Spivak to be taught in formal education. The paper’s attention then follows what Achille Mbembe claims as the political urge to the institution of a ‘cosmo-nationality’, and the necessity of a ‘planetary thinking’ conceived for the advent of ‘cosmotechnics’ as it is advocated by the influential scholar Yuk Hui. The main idea of the paper develops in the section devoted to ‘cosmo-po/ethics’, which played the focus of the critical attention of the International Conference organized on the emergence of its theme, in 2010, at the University of Durham, in Britain, to then migrate into some radical contributions to the debate; here those signed by the philosopher Denise Fer- reira da Silva, who uses its address to the ethics of black feminist thought, and those ‘proudly’ performed by the poet Sanjlia Patel in her ‘Migritude’. At the heart of the article’s interest lies the conviction that, nowadays, philosophy, critical thinking and aesthetics constitute the arenas where it is possible to think and practice the inven- tion of forms of cosmopolitanism that might contribute to a different respect for the ‘other’, where to shape the rights for the planetary mobility experienced by all peo- ple on earth, and to produce the cosmic thinking necessary to the surge of technol- ogy which is still unresolved, unconfronted and uncontrolled by modernity, finally, experiencing and experimenting the vision of the ethics of liberation and justice for all living creatures in the cosmos.