But as journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian discovered, the story of twenty-first-century citizenship is bigger than millionaires seeking their next passport. When Abrahamian learned that a group of mysterious middlemen were persuading island nations like the Comoros, St. Kitts, and Antigua to turn to selling citizenship as a new source of revenue after the financial crisis, she decided to follow the money trail to the Middle East.
She intertwines [her narrative with] the ancient idea of cosmopolitan citizenship and its idealistic modern advocates. She sees the growing market in citizenship as the corruption and commercialization of this idea by a global business elite.
The search for answers takes Abrahamian, a reporter for al-Jazeera, on a global mission. Rich globals can whisper through EU passport controls with a Maltese passport and their money can be shielded by US portfolio managers.
Most people will be waiting in line eternally, holding their wads of rupiahs and shillings. The Cosmopolites is remarkable for the way it teases out the very current contradictions of global citizenship, and for how it suggests that our notions of cosmopolitanism have become outdated and platitudinous. Rather, it is a clearer demand for a better set of contradictions, which support the identities and participation of people who are now stateless living in societies that seek to expel them.
A slim but powerful book of great interest to students of international law and current events. Citizenship cannot be reduced to a commodity—can it? This is that rare thing: a book filled with news. Like the best journalism, the best fiction, its telling reminds us that all the familiar furniture of our world—our economy, our politics—is temporary, purchased at a flea market not so long ago, destined to be shipped out again. The bizarre scheme to transform a remote island into the new Dubai — The Guardian.
It is through the almost ridiculously clear and blunt omission in the English text, that we can see something at work. For practical presences have little patience when dealing with that what cannot be done.
Admittedly this rendering of the French phrase is clumsy, but it does not make that much sense in French either; nevertheless it is not incomprehensible. Hence, there is no truly valid reason why a loyal translation should not render it, except for an ideological one.
On the epistemological, we have seen this presence orient the text it is grafted upon toward the political, practical realms. It is now time to turn toward an interpretation of this text, and see whether we can find the same logic at work there. This will be done after a slight detour, for there is a presence in this paper itself which begs for attention, and should be revealed before continuing our inquiries.
Van Overmeire 10 That presence is Paul de Man. What he finds, time and time again, is that at essential moments in the text, the translations fail. By killing it, they give it new life. It is more a signpost for what is going on in this paper itself, as it misinterprets de Man in an attempt to gain new insights cf. According to Culler , who quotes de Man extensively, the main thrust of the argument is that criticism mainly New Criticism, but also any other current can only gain insights by being blind to them, the implication being that, if they were not blind, the perception of said insight would disallow them to gain it in the first place.
Yet this insight, to which the New Critics were blind, could only be gained by those who analysed their works. The implications for the current analysis seem clear enough not to require further elaboration. Damai 92 What disturbs Damai can be summarized into two main points. Because in his analysis, that city is firmly European, and does not take into account many other views of cities and cosmopolitanism.
He thus reads Derrida as saying that only Europeans can truly be cosmopolitan All in all, he surveys some twenty-six works by Derrida, neatly connecting strains and symbols along the way to endow his argument with the necessary force. If one was going to accuse Derrida of Eurocentrism, one better do it very well or not at all. Yet no argument is without flaws, and here the flaws may be very interesting for our topic.
In order to see this flaw more clearly, we need to briefly return to the introduction of On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. This is supported by the fact that his word-use is highly contextual, which undermines any kind of abstraction, for this latter operation decontextualizes almost per definition. It corresponds to a condition of forces and translates a historical calculation.
Thus, over and above those that I have already defined, a certain number of givens belonging to the discourse of our time have progressively imposed this choice upon me. The word trace must refer to [sic] itself to a certain number of contemporary discourses whose force I intend to take into account.
Not that I accept them totally. But the word trace establishes the clearest connections with them and thus permits me to dispense with certain developments which have already demonstrated their effectiveness in those fields.
Date of consultation December 16, It should also be mentioned that, this time, the translation gets it clumsily, but nevertheless exactly, right. Furthermore, there is the nature of the word itself: cosmopolitanism consists of a general word cosmos and a very specific word polis , both of which are in sheer contradiction with each other. How can the local be global at the same time?
It might be fruitful to see this word as a mild version of the pharmakon, which has consistently, in its translations and interpretations, gone one way or the other, while in fact, at the root, being both and neither. It is within this context that the struggles of translators and critics of Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!
It had no time for nuances and generalizations, it belongs to the democracy and the striving of the polis. But there is never a wavering between the two, the hierarchy is clear and perhaps unavoidable. All the translation does is mobilize the original, but this can never be part of some originary quest for ultimate meaning, in this case for a pure language, a reine Sprache.
Yet such a limitation is exactly what has happened in this paper, and it is perhaps the only way of understanding a text cf. Firstly there was the vindication of the subject. Therefore I am inevitably caught up in a theological narrative that seeks to reclaim an always-already lost past for the present.
This tendency is of course far from unique to this text, and another example will illustrate it. In one single stroke, the logic of the text could not have been more misunderstood. Yet however critical this paper may be of this, it has already been made clear that it is caught up in a similar logic.
The quotations are never wholly placed in the framework they were excised from. Finally, the paper has also been blind. But it was this blindness that constituted it, forced it to construct a system of signifiers that, in turn, one hopes, will be misread. With this — perhaps tedious, but necessary — autodeconstruction, this paper can come to an end.
Accessed on December 16, More proper to the poem above is the opposite: de Man also analyses a poem by Yeats that ends in a rhetorical question. The whole poem seems to affirm the unity of dancer and dance. De Man however , eloquently shows that if we take the question literally, the whole issue of the connection between signifier and signified becomes evoked. The whole poem then has to be reread to demonstrate the fundamental break between signifier and signified. That the poem is able to generate these two meanings, does not render it merely ambiguous: the poem requires these two meanings, who, on every textual level without clear separation, interact with each other.
The classic reading in Flemish literary criticism assumes the final question to be rhetorical: yes, we can see the old man decay and it summons a taste of death in our mouths. The whole image is pathetic and threatening. It is silent. As an old man, a dead man already in his texts when he was alive cf. His voice becomes an object outside him. Supposing that we could see him, which we may not be able to. This is the irresolvable puzzle we are involved in, staring at a computer screen waiting for a conclusion that never truly arrives.
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, Critchley, Simon and Richard Kearney. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. By Jacques Derrida. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. Thinkers in Action. New York: Routledge, Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Cultural Memory in the Present.
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