“All Them Aliens Had It”: Pinter’s Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Throughout his life Pinter always showed, both as artist and as social being, a profound respect for the rights of the individual and human dignity. His dramatic output as well as his overt political activity demonstrate his unbroken adherence to the ideology and behaviour of a citizen of the world. My endeavour in this paper will be to argue about what I shall call Pinter’s visceral cosmopolitanism. This approach, on the one hand, reads his political actions through the highly politicized agenda of the contemporary cosmopolitan discourse and, on the other hand, it adopts a more retrospective point of view, which seeks to find a fundamental correspondence between the Pinteresque uncertainty, fear and ambiguity and Immanuel Kant’s rather more ethical understanding of cosmopolitanism, especially his novel idea of hospitality.