Cosmopolitanism and cosmo-poethics: the cultural migrations of a 'concept'.

The paper deals with the interest nowadays played by the concept of cosmopolitanism in contemporary schools of critical thought through different and interconnected perspectives. The article reads some deconstructive, culturalist and postcolonial 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 Stuart 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 Ferreira 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 invention 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 people on earth, and to produce the cosmic thinking necessary to the surge of technology 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]