A composite subject in the process of composting, cosmopolitics is an improbable and fascinating composition between two worlds: the cosmos and politics. A link between apparently distinct planets. Politics — that piece of wounded flesh — needs new unguents to heal old wounds, new spells to function again and in other forms, forces, codes, systems, saps, flows.
Cosmopolitics is an epistemic ginga*, a cosmic dance, a refusal to abandon the word — but, on the contrary, a struggle for it, in a gesture of re-enchantment, of reactivation of its mysteries. To compose with the word politics a cosmos, to reactivate from the word its forces dormant in time.
Cosmopolitics: a living noun, neither feminine nor masculine, living, transhuman, without borders. A politics of the earth, of all living beings, a politics of animals, of rivers, of forests, of bees, of beetles, a politics of packs, of flocks, of ants, of caracaras, of corals at the bottom of the sea, of human and non-human choruses in vital movements, a politics of peoples of all species, of crossroads, of crossings, of mixture, of encounter and of f(r)iction, a politics of small things and of stars, of worms that decompose matter and of comets, a politics of the cosmos. Politics is the cosmos, and we should not be surprised by this.
The philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers thinks cosmopolitics not exactly as a concept, but as a proposition — a proposition of practices for the invention of worlds, and worlds in common — and with her we align ourselves. Cosmopolitics: the act or effect of purging every and any attempt at monoculture of life. A gesture or action in space-time capable of short-circuiting systems of stupid unification of modes of life, be they necro- or neocolonial. It operates through composition, crossings and confluences, investigating the flow, the flux and the intensities that collide, permeate and traverse one another in the encounter of bodies, creating species of communities, companionships, constellations moving towards an ethics of mixture and of crossroads. Living matter seeks living matter.
By cosmopolitics we also understand the politics of the continuous instigation of perspectives and existences — no longer to segregate, but to create infinite compositions. Cosmopolitics is also the hands that plant and tend the earth, whether in an orchard, a vegetable garden, a pot, a forest, a mangrove… or wielding a sharpened machete, a sickle and a hammer. Cosmopolitics is to place in the dance, in the movement, at the centre of action, other subjects — the most unimaginable ones, for they are not identified as possessing desires and perspectives. It is the complete rupture between what is identified as rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious; it is what blurs borders, what dwells in ruins, in memory, in the here and now, in the transversal of time.
* In Capoeira, the movement that seeks to deceive and disorient the adversary, both to defend and to attack.
Cafira Zoé and Camila Mota