Theory & Event

Robbins, Bruce.
Cosmopolitanism and Boredom
Theory & Event - Volume 1, Issue 2, 1997

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Bruce Robbins | Cosmopolitanism and Boredom | Theory & Event 1:2 Cosmopolitanism and Boredom 1:2 | © 1997 Bruce Robbins Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Ed. Josh Cohen. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) 'In the course of my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be a Persian; but man I have never met.' De Maistre's genteel snubbing of 'man' is still remembered often and with satisfaction. But its propriety has never seemed so open to doubt. Recent history has made it difficult to pretend that humanity, assumed to be vague and ungraspable, can be clearly contrasted to particular nationalities, assumed to be indisputably palpable and real. Those Frenchmen De Maistre has seen with his own eyes: are we sure they weren't Alsatians or Occitanians of uncertain allegiance and identity? Could it be that his Russians were not really Russians at all, but Ukrainians or Georgians, Chechens or Abkhazians whose day of national recognition had not yet arrived-- and would arrive only to be contested in turn? Nationality, it would appear, is also an artifice, a fragile historical generalization rather than a given fact of nature. And precisely because France and Russia must be acknowledged to be abstractions, it is harder and harder to avoid at least a nodding acquaintance with 'man,' who is nothing but a more unruly, less institutionally grounded...