Cosmopolitanism, translation and the experience of the foreign

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism has received in recent years renewed attention in the social sciences as an important component of the heightening of global consciousness, which Roland Robertson emphasised as the significant subjective dimension of globalisation (1992). The term is used not only to describe an empirical reality but also to question established disciplinary trends and to point to new methodological orientations. Thus, it denotes both an objectively existing social reality and a methodological approach to describing this reality. Cosmopolitanism is also viewed in its critical potential as embodying a transformative vision of an alternative society. This article considers some important theoretical insights of what has been called the new cosmopolitanism and elaborates on the importance of translation for any consideration of a cosmopolitan social reality or for methodological cosmopolitanism, inquiring into the important contribution of translation studies to an illumination of key aspects of cosmopolitan social theory. A first section sketches out key insights on cosmopolitanism today, while a second and third section elaborate further on the relevance of translation for a productive understanding of cosmopolitanism, exploring translation as the experience of the foreign and relating such an understanding to the notion of cosmopolitanism as openness to the other.