Abstract
A theory of cosmopolitanism is often seen as perpetuating a totalising understanding of humanity and some demanding notions such as brotherhood, responsibility towards the Other with capital O, love of the neighbour, philanthropy, peace, etc. The chapter explores how this demandingness and threatening totalisation relate to radical cosmopolitics by examining the ‘impossible’ command to ‘Love your neighbour’. Freud and Lacan detected that this ‘impossibility’ comes from a traumatic experience of locating the evil or the ‘Inhuman’ in the neighbour and in us. Kristeva included this ‘impossibility’ in an invitation to think of a ‘cosmopolitanism of a new sort’ in the very act of locating the Inhuman or ‘the foreigner’ in us. However, cosmopolitanism was already born through an act of encountering the ‘evil in us’, inherent in the Cynic’ practices of self-destitution and humiliation, aimed at liberating himself and others from the conventions that hide the evil. The Cynic loves humanity in a radical way by altering its ‘currency’ and by a permanent questioning of what it means to be human; thus, radical cosmopolitics is the very way of preventing any totalising view of humanity.
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