Tracing Global Democracy : Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

"Vladimir Biti’s new book is a challenging read. To readers acquainted with his earlier publications this comes as no surprise; rather it confirms that Biti persists with the same rigor in his engagement with the past and present of human thinking. Nor does he in his new book relent with the demands he consistently makes of his readers. The minimum requirement to join him in his forays into thinking is an acquaintance with the greater part of Western thought."
Stipe Grgas in: Umjetnost riječi LIX, 1–2 (2015)