Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitan Worldliness

Abstract

An emerging cosmopolitan worldliness has always been coterminous with the project of colonial modernity upon which nations were being formed and in conversation or contestation with colonialism invariably articulated themselves. That worldliness, from which a renewed pact with history is today enabled, has always existed in multivariate forms, but it becomes more evident in moments of large-scale social crisis—a military coup, a war, a revolution, and so on—when the nation retrieves and reactivates its aesthetic intuition of transcendence. Dominant ideologies like Islamism, anticolonial nationalism, or Third World socialism have always been at once enabling and misleading. My principal argument has always been, and still remains, that all these ideologies, including those that posited themselves as “secular” as opposed to “Islamic,” were in fact the side effects, the by-products, and even unanticipated consequences of colonialism, and thus paradoxically colonial in their nature and disposition. All these ideologies were invented in combative conversation and contestation with and against a colonial modernity, a colonizing interlocutor that code-named itself, and was thus called, “the West.” In the age of globalized capital, that “West” has imploded, so that dialogical modus operandi that had paradoxically enabled it has been dissolved. The center cannot hold, and instead of mere anarchy, we in fact have retrieved the multiple worlds that have existed before “the West” covered them up. The task today is to theorize and articulate those already evident worlds, for it is upon their normative and moral topography that nations reassert themselves.