About the End of the World: Crises of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture and Theory

Harvard FAS

Cosmopolitanism and globalization, two master-concepts that were extremely useful to understand subjective universalistic desires and material processes of global dislocation, disjuncture and displacement (as well as fantasies of totality, transparent communication and interrelations, and fictions of totality) can no longer account for our present cultural-political situation; they are not useful to interrogate the global displacements and traumatic losses constitutive of the overwhelming…