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Thinking Beyond Cosmopolitan Ghosts: On the Relevance of the Avant-Garde

Specters of all sorts are haunting global politics—cosmopolitan ghosts for whom global conferences are being convened, transnational protests, waged and global blueprints drawn.¹ Variously called "international public opinion," "the peoples of the earth," or "the global NGO community," today's planetary subjects are akin to Rousseau's and Diderot's world citizens, Kant's or Tristan's wandering foreigners, Marx's proletariat and other cosmopolitan creatures—all abstractions elevated by rhetorical, moral, scientific, or philosophical means to make a point, for sake of political credence, or to serve as heuristic devices.

When global capitalism was a "minority phenomenon"—of consequence to many, but steered by few—inventing cosmopolitan surrogates...