Critical Animal on Cosmopolitics

by Adam Robbert

A great post HERE. When I think about what philosophy is all about, James sums it up rather succinctly by asking the following series of questions:

How is it that we can extend our partial sympathies? How can we combat the known unknowns? How can we address, as William James put it, a certain blindness in human beings (also see Cary Wolfe’s short essay of the same name in The Death of the Animal, pp. 123-133)? What are the institutions, practices, and artifices we can create to overcome these limitations? What are the affects and the abstractions, the precepts and the concepts, we can multiply and circulate? This is why rhetoric and aesthetics are as important philosophical fields as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. To alter what Ranciere refers to as the partition and distribution of the sensible is always a cosmopolitical question.

Speculative philosophy is to me exactly the kind of exercise we are invited to engage through the above questions. We might define speculative philosophy as “the generation of more livable metaphors” and in that sense its about developing and deploying what Latour has recently called a cosmogram: an idea; a map; a practice; a cosmology that deploys itself as an actor ecologically situated to both interrupt and stabilize certain kinds of relations and not others.