The Elemental Ground of the World Community

Susanna Lindberg Dr, Habil, University Lecturer Philosophy / School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tampere Abstract for the panel Globalization and Political Community: Beyond Universalism and Particularism of the section Democracy, History, Universality: Beyond the Decline of the West of ECPR Reykjavik Title: The elemental ground of the world community What kind of a "world" is presupposed in the so-called "world politics" and "international relations" today? It seems to me that it is hardly a world anymore: as J. Derrida says, "there is no world anymore". From a philosopher''s point of view, it seems to me that two main theoretical schemes articulate pertinently the contemporary global space: the scheme of globalisation and the scheme of cosmopolitanism. In my paper I compare the philosophical structures of these two models, referring the former to Marx and Heidegger and the latter to Kant, Derrida and Habermas. I show how both theories are constructed in function of the question of the political subjectivity, whether defective (globalisation) or enhanced (cosmopolitanism). It seems to me, however, that the factual political subjectivity of today''s human beings is too shattered to get a hold of today''s dispersed world: at least there is no global democracy. This is why I propose to shift the question from the social and political subjectivity onto the question of the world that the political subjects, wheter weak or strong, necessarily share. Only when the concept of the world has been cleared out, it is possible to rearticulate the political subjects in an effective way: in function of the "world", they will appear as the "inhabitants of the world". To put it very briefly, the paradigm shift would consist in interpreting ourselves as "inhabitants of the world" instead of "citizens of a country" or even of "world citizens" named by Kant. In this paper, I will examine only one of the factors that consitute today''s world – or non-world, as I will put it – namely, nature. I show how "nature", being the non-political other of politics as such, constitutes in a specific way the elemental ground of today''s world politics. I also show why, examined in this way, the fundamental quality of nature as hanged, and it actually functions today as a techno-natural elemental ground of the human lifeworld, rather than as a simple object of research, possession and politics.