In search of the world: literature and cinema as cosmotechnical dispositives and cosmopoetic apparatuses

Abstract:

Based on a critical foray through debates on world literature and world cinema in which I seek to interrogate the concept of world, this article elaborates a double argument, in which it is at stake the question of worlding, that is, the configuration of worlds as partitions of the common. On the one hand, it is a fundamentally theoretical argument. Literature and cinema operate as cosmotechnical dispositives whenever they work to unify cosmic order and moral order, inscribing the common (which is defined by contingency and indetermination) in the supposedly necessary order of an archive and determining it as community. When they disturb the unification of cosmos and morality, insinuating other partitions, literature and cinema operate as cosmopoetic apparatuses, which restitute the unsettling openness of the common’s contingency and indetermination. On the other hand, this is a methodological argument. The atlas, understood as a set of maps, has been claimed as an analytical tool in studies of world literature and world cinema. In these approaches, literature and cinema tend to be identified to their operation as cosmotechnical dispositives, defining a research program. To interrogate their operation as cosmopoetic apparatuses, it is necessary to supplement the atlas as a form of archiving the world by experimenting with the possibilities of a lineage associated with the atlas of images. This dual argument leads to the proposition of a research wander (instead of a program): an atlas of cosmopoetics.

Keywords: world literature; world cinema; cosmopolitics; cosmotechnics; cosmopoetics