The Cosmopolitan Self and the Fetishism of Identity

Abstract

A dense static understanding of self and cultural identity is not only phenomenologically difficult but could yield to idolatry of pure identity and the consequent violent resistance to the inherent ambivalences all notions of identity pose. Cosmopolitanism, if it truly is a “world citizenship”, needs to address the issue of respect for difference and human variety, which everyday nuances of the word affirm. However, the identity of cosmopolitanism itself is not a settled issue, and in all probability, much like questions of similar import, would always remain so – an “unsatisfied” yearning towards a utopia. This is not suggesting that the cosmopolitan project is ill-fated. As a moral appreciation of difference, there cannot be a “single cosmopolitanism”, but many different shades of cosmopolitanisms, many particular ways of “inhabiting the other’s world”. A porous, hybrid understanding of the self and culture is suggestive of such a multi-hued cosmopolitanism. Modernity’s grand project of “unification of the moral universe” has left an apocalyptic effect and a host of discontents. Drawing on contemporary continental and postcolonial theories and literature, the paper argues for the hybrid self’s transformational potential for inhabiting the other’s world in its own individual ways.

For in the most general form it [metaphysics] has assumed in the history of thought it appears as a movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us … toward an alien outside-of-oneself, toward a yonder.

Emmanuel Lévinas¹

¹Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

1 Introduction: Celebrating Difference

Today, we are witnesses to a steady, if disparate, revival of the ancient philosophy of cosmopolitanism. The exigencies of growing globalism, of the visibility of cultural mixing that is so characteristic of our times, and cracks in modernity’s hallowed foundations of liberal nationalism and rigorous individualism have led to this revival. The current discourse on cosmopolitanism usually asks either what it is or how it is to be practiced; and many times both these discourses overlap. Our questioning of cosmopolitanism in this essay shall concern only an aspect of the former: a questioning (admittedly, among many such questionings) of the essence and meaning of cosmopolitanism. And more particularly, in questioning the essence of cosmopolitanism, we shall ask the following: does the human self manifest any positive tendency in its structure, even an ambivalent one, to rise above its own world, its “personalized space”, to inhabit the other’s world? So, the question is about the essence of the cosmopolitan self, even if that essence finally unfolds itself as a non-essence, an inherent discomfort in settled identity.

A few things should become immediately clear to us. One of these – which we need to state strongly at the outset – is that this discussion is not about the kind of “normative cosmopolitanism” which would articulate a coherent set of norms for a “cosmo-polity”, as one might find while reading the much discussed essays by Martha Nussbaum and her respondents in the volume For love of country,¹ or the Tanner Lecture by Seyla Benhabib and the responses to that lecture in the collection Another cosmopolitanism.² Here we are not thinking about “the emergence of norms that ought to govern relations among individuals in a global civil society.”³ Nor are we asking why values that “instruct us to join hands across boundaries of ethnicity, class, gender, and race, [should] lose steam when they get to the borders of the nation.”⁴ Rather, we are thinking about the essence of the cosmopolitan self from a phenomenological vantage point. In doing so, we are taking a perspective opposed to a single, reductionist, totalizing cosmopolitanism in the belief that there is a way of “living at home abroad or abroad at home – ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller.”⁵ The idea is to explore the power (or the lack of it) of the self to inhabit the other under its skin.

An assumed position of this enquiry, therefore, is to look at difference with respect – a way of honoring the plural pluralistically. To begin with, it is beneficial to view cosmopolitanism in the plural , for there are varieties of cosmopolitanisms and the issue of this “ism” is not settled yet – neither conceptually nor in practice.

We may also ask: can it be so settled; settled once and for all? Cosmopolitanism is “yet to come, something awaiting realization.”⁶ We want to evoke the “unsatisfaction” that Homi Bhabha suggests in his discussion of cosmopolitanism:

Unsatisfied … because “unsatisfaction” is a sign of the movement or relocation of revision of the “universal” or the general, such that it is producing a process of “unanticipated transformation” of what is local and what is global.⁷

Bhabha locates a possibility of such an “unanticipated transformation” in the debates on neoliberal secularism in the West: debates that have yet to integrate the perspectives of those who have been excluded from the “egalitarian and tolerant values of liberal individualism”⁸ such as migrants, minorities and refugees. Such discussions would involve a postmodern celebration of difference – unabashed, unremorseful, unscrupulous embracing, taking in of difference rather than passively tolerating it. Is there any need for another militant, all-conquering universalism, at least in these unsettling times? Agreeing with Emmanuel Lévinas ’ clarion call not to be “duped by morality”,⁹ and opposing the modern tendency to respond to breaches of morality with violence, Zygmunt Bauman ’s Postmodern ethics ¹⁰ argues that “… the postmodern perspective succeeded in…pierc[ing] through the thick veil of myths down to the common moral condition that precedes all diversifying effects of the social administration of moral capacity … [and] similarly administered ‘universalization’.”¹¹

2 Cosmopolitanism as Moral Regard for Difference

Let us now turn to the ability of the self to have the other within itself. Behind every idea of cosmopolitanism – whether it is political, economic or cultural – there lies a primarily moral idea of rising beyond one’s home and hearth, kin and kith to embrace the other or the world, in big ways and small. It is realized that the moral impulse as in postmodernism, or moral reason as in modernism, is too artificially, too narrowly constrained by boundaries of home, hamlet and homeland – all fences of affinity, affection or association. The acknowledged moral unity of the human species across boundaries may be based on enlightenment reason as typified in Kant, or it could be based on the Lévinasian idea of the self’s infinite responsibility for the irreducible, alien other. Kant argues that one can speak of a “right of visitation”, which entitles all humans the right to hospitality in foreign lands, because originally the right of possession of the earth is held equally by all, and the necessity for existence in a particular portion of the earth arises from the fact that we cannot infinitely spread across a finite, spherical earth.¹² Or, one can speak, like Lévinas , of the self’s infinite responsibility for the other on account of  “the inevitable orientation of being ‘starting from oneself’ toward ‘the Other’”.¹³ We need cosmopolitan political norms, cultural acceptance and affirmation, and economic hope for every citizen of the world because the cosmopolitan reason or impulse, as may be the case, is moral through and through. Although separated by political borders – artificially or not, although separated by cultural landscapes – essentially or not, although separated by economic inequalities – avoidably or not, we are not separated as moral beings. Our moral agency or sensibility is our hope.

Even so, it appears that what truly is honored in the colloquial, everyday usage of the word “cosmopolitan” is not the moral solidarity or fundamental sameness of the human species, but rather a taste for human difference in a Lévinasian sense – a moral acknowledgement, acceptance and affirmation of the very homely and spicy fact of human variety. It is not merely about the aesthetics of variety, but the ethics of it.¹⁴ When we say “a cosmopolitan city/neighborhood” or a cosmo-polis, are we not speaking of an “anthropological museum”, a Noah’s Ark, a place where people of different and even opposed backgrounds and cultures come and cohabit? A cosmopolitan place manages and affirms human diversity; it celebrates the many ways people choose to be human. Moral cosmopolitanism is a confirmed celebration of difference.

No doubt, there is an air of sophistication, an elitism , concerning the word “cosmopolitan”. The word breathes the air of urbane tastes, discreet manners and refined sagacity for getting on with the world in any corner of the globe. This sharply distinguishes the cosmopolitan from the commoner who is nostalgic about home food, homely faces, bathing in the countryside river. The cosmopolitan is a citizen of the world and feels at home anywhere. She has tuned herself for different tastes and styles and does not want to project the uniqueness of her human situation as superior to any other. If this is indeed the case, then what is essential to the cosmopolitan is not so much elitism as it is a respect for difference; an acknowledgement that beyond a priority of affections that are authentic and valid on account of human embeddedness, there is no priority of value among persons and what make them unique. The constitution building process of India – a true cosmo-polis , a paradise of multiplicity that many intensively globalized pockets of the world still cannot visualize – and its very struggle for freedom, are representative of such a celebration of difference. Despite the partition pogrom and simmering communalism ever since, both religious and linguistic, an interesting form of the idea of the celebration of human difference (“unity in diversity”) has been integrated into the Indian constitution, though one may question whether the very last in India ’s supposedly stringent social hierarchy or those outside it were taken into confidence in this process.¹⁵

3 Ambivalence: The Case of Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

It has also been pointed out that within enlightenment nationalism , which formalized the boundaries of the nation-state as the moral universe of the individual, glimmers of cosmopolitanism were already present. Cosmopolitanism as such is an extremely ambivalent notion. We have already acknowledged this ambivalence and its unsettled, unfinished mode of making itself present and will later speak of this ambivalence as a way of being of the self. As for the conceptual ambiguities in the notion of cosmopolitanism, let us here refer to Derrida ’s essay “Onto-theology of national-humanism”. Closely reading Fichte ’s central text from 1808 in the philosophy of nationalism, Addresses to the German nation, Derrida notices Fichte’s aporetic aim of articulating a philosophy of nationalism which is at once “nationalistic, patriotic and cosmopolitan, universalistic.”¹⁶ The aporia here is a “cosmopolitan nationalism”. For Fichte’s linguistic German nationalism, the empirical fact of not belonging to the German nation did not exclude someone “from participation in some originary Germanity.” “…whoever shares in this originary philosophy…is German … whereas on the contrary a de facto German is foreign to it if he is not a philosopher of that philosophy.”¹⁷ Derrida is deeply concerned about the paradoxes hidden within both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and observes that modern cosmopolitanism is a “fearfully ambiguous value: it can be annexionist and expansionist, and combat in the name of nationalism the enemies within…”¹⁸ This is truly a warning signal for all forms of normative globalism, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. In his later writings, drawing on Lévinas, Derrida speaks extensively about unconditional hospitality , but insists on the necessity to “transform and improve” cosmopolitan law in the spirit of unconditional hospitality, which is nothing less than a serious attempt at balancing between “the Law of unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other … and the conditional laws of right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire…”¹⁹

Several other writers have also discussed the tension between cosmopolitan and nationalist ideals, but have tried to argue that they can nevertheless be bedfellows. Martha Nussbaum observes in an interview that cosmopolitanism does not require one to relinquish all particular loves. She argues that, just as parents who love their own children can, at the same time, strive to give other children a decent life, so people can love their nation and at the same time work towards a better world. She also makes the important distinction between the normative structures of cosmopolitanism and the primacy of a moral cosmopolitan disposition which precedes the former.²⁰

Another interesting way of overcoming the stubborn ambiguity of the cosmopolitan ideal is to draw lessons from the creative practice of major historical figures. Anthony Appiah ’s essay “Ethics in a world of strangers: W. E. B. Du Bois and the spirit of cosmopolitanism” is an attempt in this direction. Appiah argues that Du Bois, the black American activist and author of The souls of the black folk (1903), always accepted his duties towards the blacks as well as to those of other races simultaneously. Du Bois celebrated the achievements and culture of other civilizations and, like all cosmopolitans, believed that people have the right to choose and live their own lives; the very thesis of “cosmopolitanism as regard for difference” we have propounded above.²¹ The case of Frantz Fanon , the revolutionary African thinker, was no different. His call to the Africans was to make themselves anew within a broad human perspective that is at once local and global. He writes in The wretched of the earth (1961): “No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men.”²² However, his globalism was deeply rooted and did not betray a uniform notion of progress or civility: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”²³

Mohandas Gandhi , the architect of the Indian freedom movement, was no less cosmopolitan (as were Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore ). Gandhi always took great pains to demonstrate that he opposed only the colonial system and not the colonizers. To a question, “How far would you cut India off from the (British) Empire?” he answered readily: “From the Empire entirely: from the British nation not at all.”²⁴ Undoubtedly Gandhi drew his moral cosmopolitanism from a tolerant version of Hindu universalism . He believed that his message of non-violent struggle for political freedom was a universal message, but at the same time, he did not feel an urge to preach his message everywhere: “I believe my message to be universal but as yet I feel that I can best deliver it through my work in my own country.”²⁵ As an authentic cosmopolitan, Gandhi thought that one’s right to freedom implied one’s duty to allow the same freedom for all others. He wrote in India of my dreams: “If I want that freedom for my country, I would not be deserving of that freedom if I did not cherish and treasure the equal right of every other race, weak or strong, to the same freedom.”²⁶ In line with today’s political cosmopolitanism, he believed that the world should ultimately move toward a friendly non-warring federation of interdependent states.²⁷ However, voices of dissent against this reading of Gandhi’s negotiation of nationalism and cosmopolitanism often point the finger at his onslaught against western civilization in the Hind Swaraj (1909) – a potentially anti-cosmopolitan tirade.²⁸ But the charge loses steam when we consider Gandhi’s life, writings and engagements in their entirety. His exalting of Indian civilization was the rhetorical tool of a nationalist leader designed to unite a beleaguered people against the oppressor and divisive forces within, to reinvent India’s self-faith. When he became aware of the misreading of his critique of modernity and its civilization, Gandhi reframed his Hind Swaraj views, pointing out that wisdom was not any culture’s monopoly and there was much to learn from the West. What he questioned were the fetishizing of technology and science, the colonizing hegemony of the West and the mindless imitation of things Western by Indians.²⁹

Such a personal-history-centered view of the cosmopolitan ideal is helpful in understanding the Derridian aporia we have discussed above. However, it is also profitable to note that the dangerous end of the same aporia might also be observed in carefully reading the life of self-professed cosmopolitans who are unable to remove certain rugged edges from their obdurate prejudice and chauvinism. Of course, there is an incurable ambivalence we can notice in the ideal of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan self is never so sure, never completely satisfied, and so its moral project of openness towards the different other is never completed.

4 Alterity: Questioning “Resemblance” as the Foundation for Human Fraternity

There is ambivalence in embeddedness and transcendence as real possibilities of the self. When we speak of cosmopolitanism as “regard or respect for difference”, the moral ability of the human person to get into the other’s world demands our attention. This esteem for difference is neither mechanical nor merely aesthetic. It is moral. The morality of respect for human difference can be either arranged into a unity in a basically Kantian fashion with its many recent varieties, or in the Lévinasian sense of an anarchic goodness of the subject that is held hostage by the other’s moral proximity. Without embarrassment, we consider the latter view more welcoming of difference than the former, and so more suited to our study. For Lévinas , this proximity is not so much spatial as it is moral, and it is captured in the singularity of humanity anywhere, to which the subject relates morally. It is not correct to say that “fundamental humanity” beckons the Lévinasian subject to be responsible. Rather, it is the fundamental difference of the other (of the face from the subject’s totalizing desire) and the other’s vulnerability and wretchedness expressed as moral height over the self that gives birth to the ethics of relation – a radical ethics of sociality indeed.

Here, the priority of the other is uncompromised and her alterity is radical. Stressing the asymmetry of human relation, Lévinas sees responsibility for the other as non-reciprocal: “… I hardly care what the Other is with respect to me, that is his own business…”³⁰ Lévinas does not found this idea of the self’s responsibility for the other in any prior concept or reason in the way that existentialism founds it in commitment, or in the way that Kant founds it in the self’s freedom. In fact, he works against the search for universal moral foundations, which is the hallowed enlightenment project. For him, the moral sense of responsibility for the other comes

from the hither side of my freedom, from a “prior to every memory,” an “ulterior to every accomplishment,” from the non-present par excellence, the non-original, the anarchical, prior to or beyond essence. The responsibility for the other is the locus in which is situated the null-site of subjectivity, where the privilege of the question “Where?” no longer holds.³¹

So, he truly destabilizes the question of ethics’ foundation as one of his translators notes: “Ethics does not have an essence, its ‘essence’… is precisely not to have an essence, to unsettle essences… Its ‘identity’ is precisely not to have an identity, to undo identities. Its ‘being’ is not to be but to be better than being.”³² That is why Bauman reads Lévinas ’ writings as “postmodern ethics” filled with a deep sense of incredulity toward foundations. “Morality has no ‘ground’, no ‘foundation’… It is born and dies in the act of transcendence, in the self-elevation over ‘realities of being’ and ‘facts of the case’…”³³ Lévinas acknowledges this as a radical, utopian ethics if ever there was one: “There is no moral life without utopianism.”³⁴ Lévinas’ cosmopolitan responsibility toward the other, ethics as “welcoming the Other, as hospitality”,³⁵ however, is “post”-modern in the sense of being a radical improvement over Kant ’s ethics founded on the rationality of the self. Kant’s discovery of the internal moral laws of respect for humanity is radicalized as respect for the other, so that “milder versions of post-Kantian ethical theory can hardly match the enormity of the moral demand which Kant’s conception entails”.³⁶

But, is Lévinas’ sensational and unbounded ethical rhapsody untouched by a concern for actual situations, particular others? Lévinas’ aim is not to point out the limits of human obligations. Rather, his aim is to paint a picture of unlimited obligations – an ethics that is never finished, a moral guilt that the human person is never cleansed of.³⁷ Kant acknowledges limits to human obligations. But in Lévinas, responsibility to the other is a “permanent fact about oneself. It has never been consciously assumed and it can never be discharged.”³⁸ Existence is weighed down by the weight, the burden of alien existence. Nevertheless, Lévinas is not a philosopher of being; his thesis is not that “being a person who does not wish to murder the other without any action from the subject’s part” is ethical enough. He is not saying that some indeterminate inner disposition will generate a person’s ethics or that a finely composed constitution that takes care of political ethics would make a nation moral. Ethics is both disposition and action. “It is openness, not only of one’s pocketbook, but of the doors of one’s home, a ‘sharing of your bread with the famished,’ a ‘welcoming of the wretched into your house’ (Isaiah 58).”³⁹ Even as this is the case, no action, however hallowed, is enough to release the subject from responsibility. Morality is not a day’s work. It is a continuous shattering of one’s freedom and enjoyment in the giving of precedence to the other.

For Lévinas, the other person, whether my next-door neighbor or the distant other, is equally a stranger, completely different from my conception of her: the “absolutely other, the stranger whom I have ‘neither conceived nor given birth to’.”⁴⁰ But it is always from the concrete that universality arises; “the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.”⁴¹ Accordingly, there really is no reason why I should not take responsibility for someone from a strange land or for someone unknown to me. In order to maintain the singularity of each human existent and human fraternity simultaneously, Lévinas destabilizes the notion of “a humanity united by resemblance” and bases human fraternity on monotheism, the fatherhood of the infinitely other, and the desire of the self for otherness, which is already visible in any face-to-face relation.⁴² Here, we see that Lévinas has opened the doors for a cosmopolitan ethics and politics from the perspective of the other’s difference. Lévinas’ intention was to defeat the ethical fencing off within nations and communities that depends on resemblance and similarity.

If everyone is a stranger, completely different from my conception of her, then where is the need to exclude some strangers from my moral universe? The difficulties of thinking practically about this extension of the moral universe are immense. But that should not hamper our moral creativity, our thinking of alternatives. There is no doubt that the plight of the homeless and the destitute inspired this radical and expansive ethics. Derrida confirms that “Lévinas never turned his eyes away from” the persecution of “the foreigner, the immigrant (with or without papers), the exile, the refugee, those without a country, or a State, the displaced person or population.”⁴³ Lévinas refers to the plight of the universal stranger in this way: “He has no other place, is not autochthonous, is uprooted, without a country, not an inhabitant, exposed to the cold and the heat of the seasons. To be reduced to having recourse to me is the homelessness or strangeness of the neighbour.”⁴⁴

Can the moral subject enter the world of the destitute other? Can her very at-homeness be challenged? For Lévinas, to be oneself is to be challenged by the other in one’s very identity: “It is to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one’s home, contested in one’s own identity and one’s very poverty, which, like a skin still enclosing the self, would set it up in an inwardness, already settled on itself, already a substance.”⁴⁵ Hence, in thinking of “getting inside the other’s world”, it is difficult to imagine another perspective than the Lévinasian one. His conception of a morality explained in terms of alterity and the self’s struggle to embrace the other’s radical alterity through hospitality, welcoming and openness, for which language is the medium, (host of the other in Totality and Infinity: “The subject is a host”⁴⁶) and through responsibility and substitution (hostage of the other in Otherwise than being: “A subject is a hostage”⁴⁷), is a rich perspective for conceptualizing cosmopolitanism as moral regard for difference. If cosmopolitanism entails citizenship of a world community, irrespective of the acknowledged differences that separate human communities from each other, then, accepting their difference morally and matching up that acceptance with actions and practices would surely be a cosmopolitan project.

This program of action, as clarified earlier, is not our area of concern in this study. Rather, our concern is the self’s ability to enter and immerse itself in the alien world of the other. Whence comes the self’s cosmopolitan ability to enter the other’s “world”?

5 Habitation of the Other’s World

Entering the ethical space that Lévinas opens up for the self’s moral prerogative that comes from yonder, from beyond itself, let us now explore how contemporary subjects, with their hybrid porous selves, become capable of entering the other’s world. How does the self inhabit the world of the other? What really is behind its cosmopolitan impetus? First of all, we may note here that taking a traditional solid notion of the self would throw up many hurdles to our present study of the self’s cosmopolitan comportment, delimited as a positive and ethical affirmation of the other’s difference in terms of responsibility for that other. Hence, in agreement with Heidegger ’s observations in Being and Time (1927), “man’s ‘substance’ is not spirit as a synthesis of soul and body; it is rather existence”,⁴⁸ we accept a non-substantial view of the phenomenologically given entity that we call “self”. Understanding the self as a solid substance, a substratum of the stream of experiences, or a cogito, which philosophy invented by the rigorous employment of the regress argument, is an extremely limited way of conceptualizing human identity. On the other hand, the existential notion of becoming, a phenomenological fact in itself, does not really help us explain how the self becomes capable of inhabiting the other’s different world. Rather, it only shows that the self is not a hard unchanging substance incapable of movement. But, Heidegger’s analysis would suggest that this movement is comprehensively within its own particularized world. Nevertheless, the idea of a solid identity is already shattered in this conception. Lévinas uses this notion to unsettle the idea of identity. “There is a consuming of human identity, which is not an inviolable spirit charged with a perishable body, but incarnation, in all the gravity of an identity which alters itself.”⁴⁹

In the title quote we have adopted for this study, Lévinas sees transcendence as a “movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us… toward a yonder”, which is nothing but the human desire for otherness. In religion and the spiritual sciences, this human capacity for transcendence is explained spiritually. But it is not only an authentically spiritual experience that is transcendental; an authentically ethical or aesthetic experience could equally be so. For Lévinas , “Transcendence is ethics.”⁵⁰ Indo-British novelist, Salman Rushdie , argues that transcendence is secular; merely “the flight of the human spirit outside the confines of its material, physical existence…”⁵¹ The capacity for transcendence should, then, explain the human ability to inhabit another’s world by way of transcending one’s own immediate existence.

Now, broadly speaking, we may notice two kinds of views with regard to this latter capacity of the human person to transcend her natural, given existence and dwell in another’s land and world, and be seriously part of both. Heidegger ’s ontology of Dasein and his nostalgia for the ground of Being leans toward a strong sense of place, of roots and of a definitive homestead in which the human person can be human. His engagement with “enframing” as the essence of technology in “The question concerning technology” (1954), and his wistful reflections on homelessness as in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and “Letter on Humanism” (1946), come across more as a mourning for the loss of Being’s ground rather than as an acknowledgement of radical homelessness as an existential characteristic of Dasein.⁵² The theme of nostalgia for home and roots recurs consistently in many later essays of Heidegger. The “Memorial Address” (1955) says: “… the rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core!... The loss of autochthony springs from the spirit of the age into which all of us were born.”⁵³ Despite his existential and “becoming”-oriented understanding of the human person, Heidegger’s human person is closely rooted in her own world with a strong sense of historicality and heritage.

It is well known that Lévinas’ ethics was a pronounced tirade against Heidegger’s “philosophy of the neuter” (non-ethical ontology) and, his oeuvre as a whole may be read as a response to Heidegger’s brief but unfortunate association with Nazism (certainly, a response to the Holocaust as such). For Lévinas , the fetishizing of identity and rootedness is directly opposed to subjectivity. The ego, questioned in its spontaneity and enjoyment, becomes a hostage of the other. Human desire for otherness is insufficiency of homeliness; the ego’s metaphysical restlessness for otherness is met only in the ethical act of assuming responsibility for the other. The never-to-be-saturated condition of metaphysical desire for otherness is, therefore, the clue to the human capacity for inhabiting the other’s world.

6 Our Hybrid Selves

If we are embedded beings, does not the “yearning for roots” challenge and destroy what we have called the “capacity for transcendence” and habitation of the other’s world? The question of roots is an ever nebulous one, over which much blood has already been shed. The essentialist reading of human embeddedness is neither factual nor profitable. We need to look at such foundationalist understandings of the human condition with suspicion. Our sense of belonging to a home and homestead, and our ability to fly away from it are both to be taken account of, as Salman Rushdie does in his novels. Evoking the experience of migrants, Rushdie expounds the essential ambivalence regarding the question of roots (rootedness) and flight (flying away from home) in Shame.⁵⁴ For him, both are inexplicable. The facticity of the human condition is indeed a “natural” endowment in the sense that it is the only available and proximate plane of human relations and of life. But it is not “natural” in the sense of being the only or intrinsic possibility of the self, or in the sense that it follows naturally from the self. The self in fact is potentially driven out of itself, and so the essentialist argument of culturalism that something intrinsically and inescapably ties the individual to her culture is not sound. We do value our cultural proximities and they, in turn, shape our notion of the self in some ways, but not in any absolute way. We need to conserve and preserve cultures and communities because of the very lack of any inherently worthy “pure culture” as an entity in itself. Their difference and variety is worthy of respect because of the absence of a single culture that is uniquely valid.

Looking a bit closer at the self, and having relinquished its solidity, identity and substantiality, we may conceive the self at any given point in time as a “hybrid”. Many ideas and streams of thought can be suggestive here: Lacan’s concept of the Other as primary for the constitution of the self, Bhabha ’s notion of cultural hybridity, postcolonial, postmodern fiction that celebrates hybridity , Lévinas’ notion of human desire for otherness, Derrida’s deconstruction of self and identity. The boundaries of the self are so porous that its becoming is constantly shifting between worlds – at least potentially. Is this porous self more than a hybrid, but a real multiple?⁵⁵ While this possibility need not be rejected outright, what we need to acknowledge here is the porosity and hybridity of the self, in varying degrees, taking inspiration from postcolonial literature and theories – a perspective that looks beyond a narrow fetishism of identity. Regarding the celebration of the crisscrossing of cultures and selves in The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie says that this controversial novel is a celebration of “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs”. It extols the mongrel self and fears the “absolutism of the Pure”, which in history has “wrought havoc” and asserts that we are “mere mixed-up human beings … black and brown and white, leaking into one another…”⁵⁶ However, if anything, The Satanic Verses is thoroughly ambivalent about the transformational potential of the hybrid self and also of the notions of good and evil. Of its two heroes, Saladin Chamcha, who longs for a metamorphosed English self, the evil one with the horns, is finally back home in his native village, having stopped “acting” and bidding farewell to “His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils….”⁵⁷ On the other hand, Gibreel Farishta, the one with the halo, the one who played gods on the silver screen, finally frees himself by pulling the trigger upon himself. Another of Rushdie’s narrator-protagonists, Moraes Zogoiby in the The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), is more positive about the transformational potential of the hybrid self. He ponders as he migrates to Spain: “I was a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging to nothing… All my ties had loosened. I had reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away. A place that did not bind, but dissolved.”⁵⁸

Rushdie’s writings are stamped with a fear of identity fetish and with the unremitting exaltation of hybrid identities, porosity of selves, existential ambiguity, postmodern fragmentation and impurity. We find this disapproval of identity fetish in Midnight’s Children (1981) and its graphic description of the transformation of Saleem Sinai’s sister, the Brass Monkey, into Jamila Singer, the nightingale and symbol of the land of the pure; in Saleem’s disbelief on seeing the processions of college-goers in his new home “demanding more-rules-not-less”, unlike students elsewhere; in Saleem’s parents resolution to become a “new people” in the land of the pure; in the face of Saleem’s own personal fact of being “forever tainted with Bombayness”, with his mind “full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s;”⁵⁹ and, similarly, in the soliloquies of the narrator of Shame: “… something puritan and violent sat on their foreheads and it was frightening to walk amongst their disillusions in the heat”.⁶⁰

It is not only the fetish of a pure identity of the individual that Rushdie attacks. He also targets a fascist nationalistic euphoria over cultural revival, mono-culturalism and the parochial call for group identity. Undoubtedly, he holds essentialist identity notions suspect. Saleem Sinai, the prototype of independent India, dialogues with himself: “Who what am I? … I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me… everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude… to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”⁶¹ We can hear a lamentation for the gradual loss of India’s pluralistic fabric in the following passage:

Not even an Indian was safe in Indian country; not if he was the wrong sort of Indian, anyway – wearing the wrong sort of head-dress, speaking the wrong language, dancing the wrong dances, worshipping the wrong gods, traveling in the wrong company … there was no room for a man who didn’t want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond; of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity … the flayed and naked unity of the flesh.⁶²

An anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist understanding of the human self and nation is helpful in giving expression to a transformational understanding of identity that is more meaningfully cosmopolitan than a substantive and solid notion of identity. Solidity of identity militates against change, movement and open acceptance. Idolatry of identity is inherently violent, constantly prone to scathing moral comparisons between the self and other, leading to a self-righteous desire to punish the villainous other or at least keep her in a moral underground, cast off from the self’s care and responsibility. A loose sense of hybrid, porous identity is helpful in imagining the other within and catching a glimpse of the self, torn and fractured, bereft of identity and certainty, in the visage of the other, however different she is from the self’s porous collection of an uncertain, fabricated unity. A consciously eclectic identity is humble, realistic, transformational and capable of multiple loyalties, like Rushdie’s Moor, who could rise above family loyalty and “make a non-negotiable refusal” to his father’s bomb proposal.⁶³ An uncertainty or ambivalence about any strong moralistic polarization of good and bad is instrumental in avoiding an overtly judgmental posturing of the self vis-à-vis the other. Although the self is already plural, fragmented, unsure, and a bundle of strong and weak leanings, taking advantage of this existential predicament is another matter – which means that there is no ontological certainty about the self’s nature as such. It is a phenomenological eye, an intuitive understanding of experience that is instructive of the self’s cosmopolitan blending, its ability to inhabit the other’s world through making itself in part like the other, and neither a rational ordering of experience nor a rationalization of the phenomenological facts can achieve this. Responding to the moral impulse of inhabiting the other’s world is non-rational, asymmetric and destabilizing of order and of calculations of gain and loss which evoke any exterior principle or norm. Such a transformational possibility is hidden within the self as one of its primarily constructive possibilities of sociality. There really can be an at-homeness about not being at home anywhere, and the lessons of this “not-at-home” need to be learned from the disarming power of ontological ambiguity.

7 Global Versus Local Cosmopolitanisms

As we have noted at the outset, there are varieties of cosmopolitanisms and accounting for these myriad cultural attempts to inhabit the other’s world, of becoming a citizen of the world (of the available world) in the political idiom, does the cosmopolitan project immense good. If fetishizing identity is perilous, the apocalyptic effects of the fetishizing of cosmopolitanism as a simple uniform reified transnationalism also need to be recognized. This point has been argued strongly by those who have described “vernacular cosmopolitanism”, an idea that speaks of the hybridity of cultures and of the interplay between the global and the local. Sheldon Pollock notes:

… “indigenous” cultures are produced in the course of long term translocal interactions by the very same processes that produce the global itself. The local/global dualism, therefore, needs to be historicized out of existence, both because nothing is globally self-identical and because the local is always “newly different differences,” while each becomes the other in constantly new ways.⁶⁴

However, Pollock’s point is more subtle. It is a long drawn process of interaction, emulation and differentiation that creates communities. Claims to indigenousness are unfounded, often based on ignorance of the sources of the indigenous. But Pollock’s argument does not simply support the hybridity of cultures or the cosmopolitan flow of ideas across cultural spheres. His account of vernacular cosmopolitanism is not an “exemplification of ‘hybridity’ in its usual connotations of mélange or mongrelization – a banal concept and a dangerous one, implying an amalgamation of unalloyed, pure forms, whether vernacular or cosmopolitan, that have never existed.”⁶⁵ In his study of Sanskritic cosmopolitanism and vernacular cosmopolitanism in the southern states of India, he never postulates an origin of the interaction between the cosmopolitan and the local. Instead of hybridity across pure forms, he speaks of hybridity ad infinitum: “a tactical reversal of domination – a resistance-through-appropriation”, by which he means the very process of pre-modern vernacularization .⁶⁶

As Homi Bhabha notes, a “postcolonial translation of the relation between the patriotic and the cosmopolitan, the home and the world” articulates a “border – narrower than the human horizon”; “[T]his space that somehow stops short (not falls short) of the transcendent human universal, and for that very reason provides an ethical entitlement to, and enactment of, the sense of community.”⁶⁷ As in Lévinas, Bhabha yearns not for a “world made whole” but for an otherness that prompts us in our ontological ambiguity to cross boundaries and recognize the insufficiencies in the self. For him, occupying the space of the “unsatisfied” means “hybridization of identity as an effect of the articulation of an ‘unexpected transformation’ in the very structure of selfhood”.⁶⁸ Bhabha sees that this is the only way of facing up to the paradox of the located self and of the self in flight, the inward and the outward self. Elsewhere he observes that the postcolonial perspective “resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation” and insists on a “hybrid location of cultural value – the transnational as the translational”.⁶⁹ But there is not to be a fetishizing of “hybridity” either. It is by no means a uniform, universalizable, totalizable phenomenon. Rather, hybridity is brought to the fore in the sustained encounter with the truly other, as the experience of migrants shows. It is a product of interactions of the self and other; not any a priori structure of the self as such, which is, as we have noted above, bereft of substance. Hence,

What is striking about the “new” internationalism is that the move from the specific to the general, from the material to the metaphoric, is not a smooth passage of transition and transcendence. The “middle passage” of contemporary culture … is a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize experience.⁷⁰

8 Making Sense of the Porous Self

If our identity is so radically porous, is there no room at all for coherence or unity within the self? The self experiences the ambivalence of an inward and an outward drive within itself. We experience any coherence only within these opposing poles of inwardness and outwardness. The outward pull towards otherness would not occur if our inward pull, including our relation to all that is homely, were so radically substantial and natural. As the outward pull of the self demonstrates, this is not the case, and so there is no ground for reifying the culture-person relation. Hence the world of such a self is not a “uni-verse” of meaning but rather a “multi-verse” of incredible variety. The self is potentially capable of being at ease with another world different from its immediate surroundings because its identity, which is not an essence, is porous, permeable, and in Bhabha ’s idiom, “a borderline experience”. The inescapability of embeddedness is only another form of the notion of facticity, givenness and thrownness found in the existentialist writers. The mere fact of human dynamism inherent in our ability to reconstitute the self in response to changes in our environment shows, not an accidental survival instinct, but one of our constitutional ambivalences, a truly cosmopolitan impulse.

Does such a conception militate against all efforts to conceive normative frameworks for cosmopolitan practices? In the foregoing discussion, we have only touched upon the ambivalence of the cosmopolitan self and this self’s potential power to inhabit the other’s world. As such, this conception strives to integrate different cosmopolitanisms, which a typically totalized cosmopolitan political framework would not envisage. In any case, what is visualized here is a respect for difference, in response to the ambivalent instability of identity within the self. Hence, a totalized systemic framework of cosmopolitanism may not be the ideal we are after. Moreover, this is the lesson of a serious evaluation of modernity. However, the cosmopolitanisms we have tried to articulate are potentially valuable when thinking about the various faces and shades of the cosmopolitan ideal, including its normative political practices. Derrida speaks of “cities of refuge or asylum” in his On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), while trying to think normatively about the cosmopolitan ideal. The result is a national institution with a cosmopolitan ethos. Likewise, in any attempt to think normatively about cosmopolitanism, what governing systems of nations may start with is to deliberate and spell out their own brand of cosmopolitanism. More than a normative totality of cosmopolitanism, the cosmopolitan respect for difference could be profitably taken up as an educational subject for citizens. If patriotic goals are consciously integrated elements of the educational agenda of nations, a cosmopolitan ethos could equally be such an agenda. This observation should be viewed alongside the need for highlighting the vernacular cosmopolitan ideals of communities. Education, popular culture and international advocacy rather than norms per se could be rethought from the angle of respect for difference. Homogenizing and essentializing of political ideals, whether it be multiculturalism , secularism or communitarianism , could turn out to be a counterproductive strategy, as ideals, unless constantly revisited and revised and unless their aporetic nature is constantly borne in mind, have a perennial tendency to overstretch their own positive pole and make themselves pure presences, as Derrida has successfully shown.

9 Conclusion: Porosity of Boundaries

What if the self is ambivalent, porous and hybrid? What if we are potentially capable of inhabiting the other’s world? What if we are constitutionally blessed with both the inward and the outward throws? What if we exist in between these poles of the self? Is not the world drastically limited for each individual? What is the potential of this laying bare of the in-betweenness of the self? The finitude of the world, its limit vis-à-vis the individual, is neither a fact that is settled nor a fact that is unchangeable. In fact, “facts” of the current times are themselves seen to lose identity and focus. The continuity of the human environment is increasingly being destabilized by our contemporary truth. A world that was fiction yesterday is a world that is fact today. We now have porous national boundaries, and transactions among peoples of different nations, cultures, languages, religions and races have increased. Pockets of the world with homogenous human populations are now brimming with multiplicity, but it is not certain whether attitudes and comportments towards the “other” have thereby changed. The creative potential of the self’s moral impulse is yet to be exploited. Communication and the information revolution, trade, travel, technology and television have made the real the virtual, but the reality of the virtual other, the cry of the distant other, is still falling on deaf ears. Our world is now porous through and through. This is not a way of settling the issue of the desirability of the direction towards which the wind of change is blowing, but we now have the door open for increased mixtures, hybridities and the morphing of the self in gleeful eclectic élan. Cosmopolitanism is defilement of purity’s dubious shine, profanation of the santum sanctorium of identity, pollution of the waters of separation, contamination of the ego’s secession from the other, breaking into the narcissistic vanity of the self, inhabiting the other under its skin. Conceit of wholeness and contentment of the ego is called into question. Cosmopolitanism is secularizing the self’s sacredness. Not that nothing is thus left sacred. What is sacred is the self’s ability to transcend and enter the other’s world. The sacrilege of the “I” is the sanctity of the moral self.

The grandeur of the whole and the big deludes us. There is still nostalgia for the grand narratives of all-pervading reason. Where is there space for the little, the non-central before the dazzling splendor of transnational cosmopolitanism? Reality, however, is different; totality is a myth, the ultimate utopia, which sustains the little and the non-central. What gives meaning to the illusory “whole” is the “little”. Hence, let us have the little cosmopolitanisms first, the many vernacular, situated cosmopolitanisms that could change the world. The danger is the forgetting of the little in search of the illusory whole. Alongside the rise of globalism, there is also the reclaiming of particular identities. Fear of the erasure of these particulars by the “all conquering whole” could be inviting the demons of parochialism. India, which takes pride in a heritage of tolerance and in over sixty continuous years of democratic process despite all odds, is increasingly becoming intolerant of difference. A recent spate of bombings, attacks on Christians in Orissa, the assault against north Indians in Mumbai, the conscious legitimizing of cultural homogeneity under the ideological umbrella of Hindutva and recurrent invoking of linguistic, religious, ethnic and caste chauvinism have posed strong challenges to the resilience of the founding principles of the republic. Moreover, festering, shrouded caste prejudices play spoilsport on India’s little cosmopolitan triumphs. Similar defeats of cosmopolitanism in the many countries of the world would only further help the defeat of the already besieged cosmopolitan ideal. Rushdie speaks of white racial prejudice in his second homeland, Britain, in two essays – “The New Empire within Britain” (1982) and “Home Front” (1984) – of the volume Imaginary Homelands.⁷¹ This prejudice, according to him, has invaded every institution and most white British hearts, leading to stereotyping of various minorities, and to perceiving them according to these fabricated images. However, Rushdie makes this interesting cosmopolitan point in the essay “Home Front”: “We live in ideas. Through images we seek to comprehend our world. And through images we sometimes seek to subjugate and dominate others. But picture-making, imagining, can also be a process of celebration, even of liberation. New images can chase out the old.”⁷² This blessed project of changing cultural images surely is a cosmopolitanism that cannot be called merely “little”.

Finally, we have overlooked the problem of violence in this understanding of cosmopolitanism as celebration of difference in response to the porosity of self and the world. The problem of violence is conspicuous by its absence in our treatment. Is this not overtly simplistic or too benign and oblivious of “ground realities”? This is truly a question of significance. But has violence been curbed or disarmed through the normative, calculative application of juridical reason, nationally or internationally? Have modernity’s achievements like law and the rationalization of the public space successfully healed human wounds? Has not the delimiting of unconditional principles, the very law-making process itself, prevented the realization of the unconditional, and thus disfigured ideas unrecognizably? Has not the systemic approach to internationalism, the normative application of calculative rationality, created a reasonable alibi for the enactment of inhuman violence even in recent times? There still is incredulity towards the grand narrative of majestic reason. There is thus the suspicion of the grand project of cosmopolitanism as “another modernity”, until the little cosmopolitanisms are endorsed and made “actionable”. Until then, is it now the season of “the anarchy of the Good”?⁷³