Resisting the Pedagogical Domestication of Cosmopolitanism: From Nussbaum’s Concentric Circles of Humanity to Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics of Hospitality

Abstract

THE TOPOS OF CULTURE IN THINKING COSMOPOLITANISM Between globalism and nationalism, the hegemonic Westernization of cultures and the — no less tyrannical— indigenization of non-Western cultures, the economic logic of globalization’s inevitability and grassroots efforts to “globalize from below,” cosmopolitanism re-emerges today as a guiding ideal for envisioning and institutionalizing an international civil society. Whereas modernist debates on cosmopolitanism were fueled by antinomies such as engagement versus estrangement, patriotism versus universalism, sentiment versus detached reason, today cosmopolitanism is endorsed as a dialectic that resolves such antinomies. This dialectic reconciliation of the local and the global in the cosmopolitan ideal has been transcribed pedagogically in Martha Nussbaum’s organic figure of the concentric circles. According to this cosmopolitan figure of growth and learning, the ethical self orients itself from smaller circles of local identifications and cultural affiliations to larger circles, to reach the outer and also broadest circle of belongingness, that of “humanity as a whole.” Considering local identifications and affiliations as a “source of richness” in cosmopolitan life rather than the departure point for a journey of uprootedness towards the cosmopolitan self, Nussbaum articulates the dialectic in a regressive rather than linear manner: “Our task as citizens of the world will be to ‘draw the circles somehow toward the center,’ making all human beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so forth. In general, we should think of nobody as a stranger, as outside our sphere of concern and obligation.”