Cosmopolitan Love: The One and the World in Hari Kunzru's Transmission

Most critics will agree that the adjective cosmopolitan describes not just a way of organizing the world or a type of subject position but also a stance that pertains, in particular, to the ethical relation to the other. Few critics, however, in their explorations of the ethics of cosmopolitanism, inquire into what one might call the fundamental analytical category of ethics: love. This stands out as a curious omission insofar as the discourse of loving one's neighbor stages, first and foremost, a debate about the status of ethics itself, suggesting that "love" and "ethics" are terms that cannot be thought about without reference to each other. In this essay, I examine the concepts of cosmopolitanism and love, the latter of which seems inseparable from the former, if we consider "cosmopolitan" to register a particular sort of ethical relation. Hari Kunzru's Transmission (2004) explores the idea of a specifically "cosmopolitan love," which does necessarily partake of a conventional ethical relation to the other. I argue that Kunzru takes up a truism about love—that it is a "universal" emotion—in order to offer a critique not only of this conception of love, not only of the homogenizing force of this idea, but also of the idea of cosmopolitanism itself. For Kunzru, cosmopolitanism might well promise to produce a global ethics that allows for the admission of difference without demanding the assimilation of these differences to universal sameness. The work of the philosopher Alain Badiou, particularly his theories of the "truth procedure" of love and universality, helps to expand my interpretation of Transmission by complicating this notion of global ethics. Kunzru importantly suggests that the ethics of cosmopolitanism— indeed, cosmopolitan love—can manifest as a corrosive and divisive stance toward the otherness of the other.

Transmission centers on three characters, who ostensibly have no relation to one another: Arjun Mehta, a young computer engineer from New Delhi, who travels for work to America; Guy Swift, an English businessman, desperately trying to save his fading company, Tomorrow*; and Leela Zahir, an Indian film star, who happens also to be Mehta's favorite Bollywood actress. Eventually, Mehta, Swift, and Zahir come into close relation with each other by way of the computer virus that Mehta creates seemingly in order to keep his job at the American computer company that hired him, Virugenix. The virus—which comes to be known as "Leela," because it appears at first as an innocuous clip of Leela Zahir from one of her films—multiplies and morphs in such a way that it cannot be contained and spreads quickly across the globe. Despite the fact that Mehta has no connection to Swift or Zahir, separated as they are not only by geography but also class (Mehta futilely aspires to achieve wealth and status like Swift's and Zahir's), the corrosive force of the virus ultimately affects them all, just as it affects everyone in the world of the novel. The "Leela" virus hampers not just the functioning of individual computers but also mobile phone networks, global transportation, and all institutions that rely on the Internet. I argue that the "Leela" virus becomes, in this novel, the central figure for what I am calling "cosmopolitan love." In this way, Kunzru offers a critique of love as a universal emotion that would appear to unite all people across the globe, making of the world a single culture, a single place. He also offers a critique of the idea of cosmopolitanism as simply a beneficent model for an ethical relation to the other. By figuring love as a computer virus that does not so much connect as sever the links in the global chain of communication, Kunzru challenges the idea of cosmopolitan love as that which promotes tolerance of, and even celebrates, differences. In other words, Transmission's cosmopolitan love corrodes connections even as it creates them; destroys bonds in the process of forging them; and instantiates fissures and gaps between discrete entities in the moment in which it may also seem to suture them.

The Love of...