Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions

Notes

Notes A Little Bit of Tourism . . . 1. This is what Geoffrey Bennington forcefully recalls in his fine book Frontières kantiennes (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 16. “There will be peace (which must be perpetual in order to be peace) only in an international dynamic. . . . In order to be perpetual, peace must perpetually defer its perpetuity. Peace can thus not be declared but at most be announced as perpetually to come, in the guise of a promise promised forever and thus never kept” (TN: translation mine). My readings of Kant owe much to Bennington’s remarkable analyses, which also devote a few pages to Kant’s mentions of extraterrestrials (61–62). 2. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 54. 3. We who have become intercosmonauts since, though we cannot afford a trip to the moon, we can already explore the planet Mars with software such as Google Earth. 4. The idea of terraforming or ecogenesis has inspired a vast literature, not only in science fiction but also in scientific journals such as Science (where Carl Sagan published a 1960 article, “The Planet Venus,” that considered how planting algae might lead to a reduction of the greenhouse effect in Venus’s atmosphere). 5. An entirely relative and perhaps legendary panic, as Pierre Lagrange suggests. See “La guerre des mondes n’a pas eu lieu,” in the special edition of the Monde diplomatique (no. 664, July 2009) titled “Extraterrestrials between Science and Popular Culture.” 6. Steven J. Dick traces out this tradition in The Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984). Michael J. Crowe takes up the history of philosophical aliens where Dick ends his (see The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750–1900 [New York: Dover, 1999]), but one is forced to recognize that after Kant, the debate seems to have moved from philosophy to the history of science, with the exception of several brief remarks and parerga by Schopenhauer or Feuerbach. From Feuerbach, we will extract the following lines from The Essence of Christianity: “There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system [denkende Wesen auf den übrigen Planeten unseres Sonnensystems]. But by the supposition of such beings we do not change our standing point [verändern wir nicht unsern Standpunkt]. . . . In fact, we people [beleben] the other planets, not that we may place there different beings from ourselves, but more beings of our own or of a similar nature [mehr solche oder ähnliche Wesen,wie wir].” The Essence of Christianity, introduction by Wolfgang Vondey (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 13–14. With Kant, we will be arguing exactly the opposite case. 7. This is what the previously cited historical works of Steven J. Dick and Michael J. Crowe do not take into account. To my knowledge, the only people to have taken the pages Kant devotes to inhabitants of other worlds seriously philosophically are David L. Clark, in a remarkable article called “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others (Centennial Review 2 [Fall 2001]: 201–89); and Antoine Hatzenberger (“Kant, les extraterrestres et nous,” in Kant, les Lumières et nous, ed. Abdelaziz Labib and Jean Ferrari [Tunis: Maison arabe du livre, 2008]). I thank my friend Elie During for pointing out this second study. It overlaps in many aspects with the hypotheses I sketched out at the invitation of Cyril Neyrat for a brief essay that was already called “Kant chez les extraterrestres. La philosofiction du sujet assiégé” (Vertigo, no. 32 [2007]). 8. See Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, trans. G. L. Ulmen (1963; New York: Telos, 2007), 80 (Schmitt speaks of Kosmopiraten and of Kosmopartisanen). See also “El orden del mundo después de la segunda guerra mundial,” Revista de Estudios Politicos, no. 122 (1962):19–36, on the “appropriation of cosmic space.” These are 154 )) NOTES TO PAGES 5–6 questions we will have to patiently revisit using The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulmen (1950; New York: Telos, 2003). 9. Hannah Arendt, in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992), is no doubt the first to have shown that if Kant never wrote a “Fourth Critique,” if his late writing cannot be gathered into a veritable “political philosophy,” this is because this political philosophy is contained...