Neue Kollektivitä ten: Das Kosmopolitische bei Bruno Latour und Ulrich Beck

Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck draw on the notion of cosmopolitics for conceptualizing new forms of collectivity. This articles analyses how, in doing so, both authors conceive of the social and the political as co-constitutive. It shows that their approaches mirror each other: According to Latour the fabrication of planetary collectivity in the context of Gaia hinges on the distinction between friend and enemy. He thus emphasizes a cosmopolitical constitution of the social. For Beck, new collectives emerge under the universalizing influence of world risks. As opposed to Latour, he states a social constitution of the cosmopolitical. At the same time, a reversal of this contrast can be observed sporadically: While Beck takes into account the possibility of antagonistic risk conflicts, Latour ponders over feedback mechanisms designed to redirect ecological effects back at those who have caused them. Such techno-aesthetic procedures would generate the experience of collective connectedness in an earthly milieu. The paper shows that in each approach moral considerations play an important role in calibrating the oscillatory movement between a weak and a strong concept of the political.