Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys

to these two ideas. I attempt to confront the aporias that Derrida’s analysis reveals in order to theorize a political forgiveness that overcomes—as far as is theoretically possible—the paradoxes and pitfalls identified by a deconstruction of the faculty of forgiving. To do so, I use Arendt’s work to theorize forgiveness as a form of “caring for the world.” I demonstrate that in caring for worldly, public spaces—which are constituted by the relationships that are formed between actors in the political realm—forgiveness protects freedom and “power.” It is by thinking in terms of an Arendtian notion of power, and the experience of freedom which accompanies it, that we can pass through the aporetic impasse revealed by a Derridean deconstruction. A care-based conceptualization of forgiveness, as a political practice performed in public spaces and during moments which are thoroughly conditioned, is an approach that allows for the experience of a certain miraculousness associated with the seemingly preternatural power of this idea/practice.

3. Derrida: On Cosmopolitanism

      In the final section of this chapter, I focus on Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism, examining his understanding of cosmopolitanism by investigating three key aspects of his work, all of which frame my theorization of cosmopolitan theory in the latter half of this book. I cast light upon his understanding of (un)conditional hospitality, his argument for “cities of refuge,” and his perspective on mondialisation. Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism serves as an ideal departure point from which to begin constructing my own theory of this idea: a “caring cosmopolitanism” inspired by an Arendtian conception of “the political” and a Derridean understanding of radically welcoming the (unknown) Other.

      Derrida’s examination of cosmopolitan theory, like his discussion of the notion of forgiveness, uncovers the logical structure of cosmopolitanism that has been fundamentally shaped by Christian doctrine. In particular, he shows that cosmopolitanism is a notion that developed in terms of a Christianization of Stoic philosophy, before evolving as part of Kant’s conception of universal hospitality, which Derrida understood to be at the conceptual core of its contemporary manifestations. To provide an overview of his genealogical movement into the historical “text” that constitutes le héritage, Derrida writes:

      We could identify the cosmopolitan (cosmopolitique) tradition common to a certain Greek stoicism and a Pauline Christianity, of which the inheritors were the figures of the Enlightenment, and to which Kant will doubtlessly have given the most rigorous philosophical formulation in his famous Definitive Article in View of Perpetual Peace: “The law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality.”⁷⁴

      Kant’s account of hospitality holds special significance in the history of political thought, though it was the Apostle Paul, whose “language continues to structure and condition the modern concepts of the rights of man or crimes against humanity,”⁷⁵ and who transmuted a certain Ciceronian conception of cosmopolitanism.⁷⁶ Derrida aims to disentangle this notion from its religious roots in order to construct a secular, humanist form of cosmopolitan theory. According to Hent de Vries, Derrida “turns to religion” as a means of “trivializ[ing]” the role of the religious by “stripping” religion of its “ontological and axiological privilege.”⁷⁷ In line with Heidegger’s approach to Destruktion, which calls for a “shaking off the ontological tradition” and “staking out the positive possibilities of that tradition,” Derrida focuses upon the Christian character of cosmopolitanism because he seeks to emancipate cosmopolitan theory from the very tradition that propelled it through history. As with his conceptualization of forgiveness, the hyperbolic character of cosmopolitan hospitality formed from Christian teachings privileges the unconditional over the conditional: this is a relationship I seek to re-balance and re-world with the help of Arendt’s body of thought.