Cosmopolitanism without a World? David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Abstract

This article argues that David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas equivocates between an optimistic articulation of a global public sphere and a more pessimistic inability to offer its readers a vision in which this public sphere can be realised. I attribute this equivocation to two competing imaginaries within the novel. The first—a cosmopolitan imaginary—wishes to dispense with teleological accounts of human beings, the societies they create and the world in which these societies are located. The second—an emancipatory imaginary—evidences deep concerns regarding the carceral conditions that increasingly dominate the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Mitchell’s text appears to evidence an awareness that the promises of freedom around which neoliberal governance has been instituted look increasingly hollow, and thus that the concept of freedom is ripe for reengagement. However, the fact that freedom represents a telos at odds with the novel’s cosmopolitan ethics produces a pessimistic philosophy of history that forecloses any hope for the realisation of human freedom. The cosmopolitan imaginary of Cloud Atlas thus acts as a brake on its emancipatory imaginary and lends the novel a characteristically cyclical structure in which acts of ethical commitment are stripped of ramification. Finally, the article argues that the impasse between the novel’s competing imaginaries is indicative of a larger challenge confronting cosmopolitan discourse today and suggests that a move beyond the ethical humanism at the heart of this discourse is necessary if an understanding of freedom-as-action is to have any place within it.