Reading For The Planet

Reading for the Planet
Reading for the Planet f

Toward a Geomethodology
Christian Moraru
university of michigan press • ann arbor

Copyright © Christian Moraru 2015
All rights reserved
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To see a World in a Grain of Sand . . .
—william blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective,

to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance
so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be
generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and
understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our
own affair. This distancing of some things and bridging the abysses to
others is part of the dialogue of understanding, for whose purposes
direct experience establishes too close a contact and mere knowledge
erects artificial barriers.
Without this kind of imagination, which actually is understanding,
we would never be able to take our bearings in the world. It is the only
inner compass we have. We are contemporaries only so far as our
understanding reaches.
—hannah arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954:
Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism
Planetarity is not a threat[. I]t is an opportunity. It means leaving the

comfort zone for the contact zone.
—susan stanford friedman, “Planetarity: Musing
Modernist Studies”
Contents
Prologue • A Well-Tempered Manifesto 1

§1. A Book with an Edge 1
§2. Cosmodernism and the Planet 5
§3. Planetarism: History, the Cultural Imaginary, and the
Problem of Interpretation 8
§4. Steps toward a Geomethodology: Brief Outline 10
Part 1 • World, Globe, Planet 19

I
§5. Wording the World, Worlding the Word 19
§6. Post–Cold War Globalization 26
§7. “World” into “Globe” 28
§8. The Global Paradigm 31
§9. The Rise of the Netosphere 36
II
§10. Planetary Studies 39
§11. “World” Reloaded 47
§12. “Globe” into “Planet” 48
§13. The Planetary Paradigm 55
§14. Politics, Poetics, Epistemology 67
Part 2 • Geomethodology: Theory and Practice 77

I
§15. The Face of the Earth 77
§16. The Infinite and the Infinitesimal, Cosmos and Cosmetics 80
§17. “A Single Embrace”: Turn of the Planet, Turn to the Planet 82
§18. The Space of Method 88
§19. Getting the Picture: Rationality, Relationality, Distance 91
§20. The Telescopic, the Microscopic, and Planetary
“Quilting Points” 94
viii • contents
II
§21. Cosmology and Cosmallogy 112
§22. “Mondializing” the City: Blueprints and Constellations 116
§23. The Origami Face 118
§24. Balzacian Reeducation 125
§25. Freudian Reeducation: Mao, Muo, and “Geopsychoanalysis” 134
§26. Taking Shelter 140
§27. “Greetings from Other Worlds” 145
§28. Snowflakes: The Imagination as Geopositioning Technology 154
§29. The Beirut Wall 158
§30. Chiasmic Spatiality, Planetarity, and the “Monumental”
Novel 163
§31. “Where the Print Is Finest” 168
Epilogue • Criticism as Planetary Stewardship 174

§32. Strings of Life 174
§33. Mastering the Mystery 177
Notes183
Bibliography209
Index225
Prologue f A Well-Tempered Manifesto
[T[he world has moved back to [the] centre of political consciousness,
not in the traditional sense of the “earth as garden,” but as new
technologically worlded and neo-stoic cosmopolitical percept of the
“earth-as-planet.”
—neil turnbull, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus”
Both theoretically and historically-culturally, literature furnishes the

display or screen affording the dominant systems of ideology, might,
social administration, and technology, what might be termed the
Prevailing Operating System of their place and moment, their most vivid
and unfettered registration or tracing. Literatures, then, are not merely
the basis for a broad range of institutions configured around cultural
and aesthetic contracts, those concerning, for instance, sciences,
technologies, historical phenomena, and art forms and their notable
practitioners. They open the very arena, platform, or space for the
critical registration, recapitulation, analysis, and reimagination or
supplementation of the prevailing systems of actuality.
—henry sussman, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy
§1. A Book with an Edge

Hailed as the first “to perfectly capture the bizarre collection of emotional
modes we juggled . . . after the [initial] shocks of September 11,”1 Frédéric
Beigbeder’s 2003 novel Windows on the World has Frédéric, one of the two
narrators and pseudo-alter ego of the author, and his friend Troy chat in
New York City’s Life Café. The place is “aptly named” not only because it is
“full of highbrow claptrap that makes you want to change the world” but
also because Troy does want to change the world.2 Revolving around his
world governance project, the conversation goes like this:
“Tell me, Troy, what are you going to call this idea of yours? You know
you’ve got to have an ‘ism,’ otherwise no one will take your utopia seri-
ously. I suggest ‘alt-globalism’ to contrast with globalization, or maybe
2 • reading for the planet
‘Internationalism.’ Except that sounds too commie. . . . ‘Multilateralism’?

‘Cosmopolitanism’? ‘Globalism’? No, sounds too capitalist.”
“Well, I hadn’t really thought about it, but it seems to me it’s pretty
incidental . . .”
“Oh, no! Not at all. It’s very important to have a name that makes
people want to get involved. ‘Universalism’? No, sounds too much like
Vivendi. I’ve got it: ‘Planetarism.’ There you go. We’re all planetarists.”3
Indubitably, we are not. And I am not sure we should all become des plané-
taristes right away either. More modestly, Reading for the Planet proposes in-
stead that we give some thought to a planetary model of cultural production
and interpretation. Neither Troy nor Frédéric has this model in mind. One is
too “utopian”; the other, too cynical. Besides, the “planetarism” I am offering
for consideration has nothing to do with Troy’s “World Parliament”4 or with
Frédéric’s planétarisme for that matter. But the French author’s stance on
things planetary should not be confused with his hero’s.5 Beigbeder’s light,
acidly humorous, and self-deprecating tone can be, and has been, misleading.
Running underneath it is a serious, genuine dedication to the world and its
humanity, as well as an uncommon sense of urgency.
I share them both, which is why my book has a bit of an edge to it. A
“bleeding edge,” possibly. This is more than a wink to the Thomas Pynchon
aficionados out there. It is also a formal statement to the effect that Reading
for the Planet participates in several genre protocols. Argument remains, of
course, decisive in these pages. Making a case, step by step, is what they fun-
damentally do. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for rigorous mar-
shaling of evidence, in British and North American essay tradition, as well as
in others. But, at the same time, the argumentative, along with its exposi-
torily sanguine, primarily denotative register, bleeds occasionally into more
poetic tonalities and, with greater frequency toward the end, into a slightly
more “activist” tone. Consequently, there is something of a manifesto ele-
ment to my intervention, in which, on this account, “nowness” and “new-
ness” intersect rhetorically, as genre expert Mary Ann Caws might say.6
I would like to think, along these lines, of Reading for the Planet as a
somewhat impassioned essay pertaining chiefly to literary-cultural theory
and criticism, calling first and foremost on fellow theorists and critics, but
taking up issues broader than literature and addressing a larger public.7
Otherwise, whoever my audiences are—literati in general, dedicated “pla-
niterati,”8 or non-specialists—I trust they will find the platform laid out
here also historicized, theorized, and implemented in a book that takes its
prologue • 3
time with the discussion proper but only to submit that we are running out
of time. The prevalent, nationalist- territorialist (nation-
state-
bounded)
methodologies do seem to be, throughout the humanities, out of time, out
of sync with our supra-and transnational times. Retooling or, as I put it,
“planetarizing” this methodology so as to bring it in line with our times,
that is, with the post-1989 world, cannot wait. This world is both highly
webbed and decentered, prone to volatility and entropy and fraught with
considerable dangers. Following the deep freeze of the Cold War, we have
entered an era where reaching others, into their lives, homes, and cultures,
is easier than ever but also an ambiguous gesture that can result in mutually
enriching exchanges, genocide, and anything in between. Equivocal, work-
ing alongside—and sometimes furthering—the weakening of nation-states
and other decentralizing processes, interconnectivity and the policies and
technologies making it possible have fostered contacts on an unprecedented
scale but have also triggered or compounded a flurry of geopolitical crises
worldwide since the 1990s: wild expansions and contractions of corpora-
tions, financial markets, and economic activity overall inside, across, and
even against nations; the regional rekindling of religious sectarianism, eth-
nic separatism, and similar conflicts on most continents; explosive, often
quasi-instantaneous global spread of viruses, diseases, and epidemics, but
also of ideas, images, lifestyles, and culture overall, of pathogenic and non-
pathogenic agents and phenomena up until now either “endemic,” corralled
inside their places of origin, or contaminating literally or metaphorically
other places and people at a slower pace; at-distance, cross-statal, cultural
and political censorship, which is de facto what North Korean hackers ap-
parently managed to inflict, at least initially, on Sony Pictures, its comedy
The Interview, and moviegoers alike in late November 2014; brash land
grabs and other attempts by transnationally networked terrorism and em-
pires such as Russia and China to redraw state borders in the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, and the South China Sea; and, indeed, one border incident
after another, whether on the southern frontier of the United States, in
Gaza, Anatolia, West Africa, or Ukraine. Picked out at random from a much
longer litany, such disasters, emergencies, and aggressions speak to a cer-
tain worldview, to a way of settling thorny issues of location, limit, and spa-
tiality, and their articulations—territorializations—of identity, belonging,
sovereignty, community, and culture. More to the point, these incidents
betray a worrisome grasp of the dialectic of place and “situated” humanity
(“here,” “me,” “us,” “ours,” “our tradition”), on one side, and the larger world
of places and collectivities, on the other.
However, this skewed view of the world and of being in it is, fortunately,
not the only one, as contemporary art, literature, and philosophy prove.
Alongside more encouraging sociopolitical and economic responses to the
turbulence of our times, the world images many literary works paint are
critical, implicitly and explicitly, of the world mappings and politics behind
the catastrophic and bellicose occurrences listed above. If, as David Harvey
concludes in his epilogue to Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Free-
dom, “our geography has been made and remade again and again by human
endeavor, then it can be remade yet again to accord more fully with our
political ambitions.”9 Harvey’s own “relational” reconstruction of place and
community, as well as of the world and of its cartographic representation, is
instrumental to this remaking, and so are a plethora of landmarks in late
twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature.10
To be sure, this is heartening. But do these artistic interventions, these
planetary “counter-images,” show up on our critical radars? Further, if they
do, are we up to the epistemological challenges they pose? What do they
look like to us: meaningless blips or meaningful structures? These questions
are pressing, and the stakes of the answers could not be bigger. This is why,
analytic for the most part, the considerations that follow become some-
times mildly exhortative. They set forth a personal understanding or critical
awareness that presupposes taking up a stance—a prise de conscience, as the
French call it, and a prise de position, all rolled into one. That said, Reading
for the Planet will probably strike many as a rather lame, perhaps stylisti-
cally toothless manifesto if compared to the genre’s early twentieth-century
incendiary masterpieces. That would be a correct assessment because, all in
all, the book aspires to be at once tightly reasoned and thought-provoking,
compelling as a demonstration and ethical option. It does not purport to
stir up and appeal through fiery language, rash extrapolations, and grandi-
ose claims, but by virtue of its specific, painstakingly theorized and contex-
tualized contentions and of the critical prose couching them.
For this reason, too, this monograph is shorter than my previous one.
Nevertheless, its relative conciseness does not rule out, at the other end of
the formal spectrum, arborescent syntax, punnily self-indulging language,
and strategic reiterations, all designed to drive home, consolidate, and qual-
ify my central points. Rhetorical gambits aside, Reading for the Planet does
not shy away from a more condensed and precise mode of enunciation;
more accurately, it seeks to occupy a middle ground between the nuanced
and the axiomatic. This is because it behooves a project like this to cultivate
the sort of biting brevitas that cuts to the chase without oversimplifying
prologue • 5
things, but also because extensive historical and theoretical expatiations, if

sound, usually lend themselves to compacting into pronouncements intel-
lectually and, here and there, typographically “italicized”: trenchant, clear,
and ambitiously systematic, as they both attend to the incrementally world-
systemic literary-cultural phenomenology and organize themselves into a
theoretical system. And yet, I believe, they are never gratuitously apodictic.
The reader familiar with my work will also discover that they come on
the heels of my recent research. In fact, beginning with “Authors in Debt:
Credit Lines in the Global Economy of Representation,” the conclusion to
my 2005 Memorious Discourse, my main publications have variously paved
the road to the present book’s argument for a planetary epistemology neces-
sarily underwritten by an apposite ethics.11 Setting out to think through the
problem of how to read with and for the planet whatever we happen to be
reading (viewing, listening to, and so forth), of how to look at or turn to the
planet and “face it,” in every sense of the word, as the planet itself is turning
to us, this volume extends particularly the line of inquiry of my 2011 Cosmo-
dernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural
Imaginary and of the 2015 essay collection, The Planetary Turn: Relationality
and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century.12 Co-edited with Amy J.
Elias, The Planetary Turn features, as acknowledged below, a piece of mine
that draws out some methodological implications of Cosmodernism’s core
concept for the planetary paradigm. Centered on post–September 11, 2001
American and world literature, philosophy, and cultural theory, Reading for
the Planet expands that article with an eye to theorizing a geocultural model
of interpretation—a geomethodology—in a fashion that, to reemphasize,
both elaborates a full-dress critical rationale and issues a call to action in-
side and outside literary-cultural criticism.
§2. Cosmodernism and the Planet

Neither the sole “new thing” to supersede postmodernism nor a distinct
movement or school so far, cosmodernism is, as I introduce it in my 2011
book, (a) a more and more recognizable imaginary pattern, to wit, a modal-
ity of mapping out today’s world as a cultural geography of relationality; (b)
by the same token, an also better, and better-marked, scenario of discourse
and subjectivity formation; (c) an ethical imperative pointing to the present
as much as to the future; and (d) a critical technique for interpreting and
assembling a range of post-1989 narrative and theoretical U.S. imaginings
into a coherent and ahead-looking model.
Building on these meanings, Reading for the Planet adds a fifth: as an

inchoate, still “soft” trend, cosmodernism is for American and other Eu-
roatlantic cultures a transition to, harbinger of, and sometimes a blueprint
for that which planetarism is becoming for the entire world on the thresh-
old of the twenty-first century. That is to say, the North American “cosmo-
dernization” (cosmodern-becoming) of the postmodern—a subject tackled
more insistently in Cosmodernism’s epilogue and in a couple of other places
after that13—is a world-fractal phenomenon, namely, an isomorphic subset
of a highly complex, fairly discontinuous, and at times contradictory shift of
larger proportions and longer-lasting consequences; cosmodernity and
cosmodernization are to the United States and the West generally what
planetarity and planetarization are becoming to the world, its present, and
its foreseeable future.
Therefore—and most notably—while the cosmodern can be described
as a planetary synecdoche, cosmodernism is not the Ur-paradigm the rest
of the world replicates. Planetarism is scarcely cultural imperialism redivi-
vus even though writers’ intimations of planetarity are not wholly immune
to imperial lapses and neoimperialist, totalist-globalist temptations. It is the
other way around, rather: socioaesthetic mutations in North America, Eu-
rope, and elsewhere cannot circumvent the broader, ecumenical transfor-
mations affecting how artists, thinkers, and laypeople worldwide see them-
selves, their places, and the world. Thus, Reading for the Planet restages the
cosmodern “algorithm” of interpretation discriminately, rehearses some of
its tenets (e.g., the role of relationality), and revamps, repurposes, or casts
aside others to work out a mechanism for reading planetarism—for teasing
out the inscriptions of planetarity, the world’s reemergence qua planet, in
early twenty-first-century literary, cultural, and theoretical practices.
The structure of this presence rests, as we shall notice repeatedly, on a
characteristic geocultural logic: the heterotopic co-presence deployed by the
greater elsewhere’s ever more aggressive bid for redefining the cultural
“here”—nearness, locality, the “regionally specific,” and the putative, and usu-
ally problematic, autochthonous—topologically as well as typologically (an-
thropologically). This logic has been behind one of the most salient world
developments since the collapse of the Berlin Wall: the overhaul of the tradi-
tional dynamic of place and culture. Some critics have indeed underscored
the weakening of the “umbilical cord” between determinate locations, on one
side, and, on the other, cultural formations such as discourse, identity, and
community, which have been customarily deemed as “stemming” or “coming
from” a particular, well-contoured, and largely stable territory whose politi-
prologue • 7
cal, economic, and epistemological sovereignty has been enforced by the

nation-state and its administrative-corporatist and educational institutions.
Others have hypothesized that this link has been severed altogether cultur-
ally, politically, and in many other ways—witness the 2014 Romanian presi-
dential elections, whose outcome was reportedly decided by voters residing
outside Romania. Still others have maintained that such ties have been sup-
planted by a less bounded model of cultural origination. According to this
model, indigenous roots become rerouted first cross-regionally, trans-and
inter-continentally, and then globally, while inherited filiation yields to vol-
untary affiliation and “vertical” derivation to horizontal dérive (“drift”) and its
sometimes cosmopolitan fantasies of playful self-fashioning. In any case,
there is little doubt that the path, makeup, functioning, and understanding of
the locus-culture nexus have been shifting, faster and faster, across countries,
cultures, as well as disciplines, where, consequently, we are running into
problems testing the effectiveness of our approaches, the boundaries of our
discourses and of the “scholarly” more generally, the limitations of our episte-
mologies, and the germane limits of our academic setups and units.
Both concomitant and homologous to the geopolitical shifts and trou-
bles enumerated earlier, these problems too bear witness to the staggering
upswing in interconnectedness and mobility around the world, in the
quasi-universal instability and vulnerability of borders, in the fluidity of
territorial-institutional jurisdiction, in the growing “fuzziness” of location,
and in the cultural-discursive and socioeconomic unmooring of formerly
dependable, “steadfast” categories such as place, origin, tradition, and the
like. They include the risks taken by the reader of Yoko Tawada’s “Metamor-
phosen des Heidenrösleins,” whose “language games,” as Marjorie Perloff
has shown with great display of erudition, put one on a “cultural collision”
course with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as much as with Japan’s history,
literature, and national idiom;14 the revelation of the Faulknerian scholar
forced to travel these days, methodologically if not physically also, to Haiti
and even farther away, to western Africa to uncover the sources of the
southern anxieties buried deep in Absalom, Absalom!; the bemusement of
the critic who, alongside the characters of White Noise and other, later Don
DeLillo novels, might wonder if the American heartland’s glorious sunsets
are no more than “fallout from a war in China”;15 or the conundrum one
faces in Joseph O’Neill’s masterpiece Netherland, where, as we will learn
later in the epilogue (§32), the bigger world becomes legible in the unlikely
yet refreshing “civility” spectacle put up for our benefit on a Long Island
cricket field.16
§3. Planetarism: History, the Cultural Imaginary,

and the Problem of Interpretation
Neither such critical provocations nor the world realities mounting them
are entirely new. Their European origins, for instance, can be traced to the
voyages of the fourteenth-century Venetian and Portuguese explorers if not
farther back. Nevertheless, as I stress throughout, both the omnipresence of
these realities and the intensity with which they level such challenges day in
and day out at the dawn of the third millennium are historically unmatched
and demand solutions without delay. In that, they tell or highlight one way
of telling both the world’s time and our cultural-intellectual time in the
world. They attest to the world’s “condition” or modality of being: planetar-
ity. Embodying this ontology is the planet, which my book defines as the
geocultural matrix increasingly fashioning human expressivity and compre-
hension worldwide, the emerging “single unit” of cultural discourse and anal-
ysis, of world-writing and world-reading.17
Reading for the Planet, then, is not an ecocritical inquiry. Here, the
planet is not an environmental concept even though, as I will clarify later
on, one of its main parameters is spatiality and, further, it would not be pos-
sible without the concept nor without the recent work done around it by
critics such as Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen L. Kilcup. The
kind of ecology that concerns my foray into the planetary, as it does critics
such as Henry Sussman, Hubert Zapf, Michael Wutz, and Joseph Tabbi, is
cultural, more exactly, geocultural. Conversely, I am interested in a plane-
tarily framed practice of culture, in culture defined as a world “ecosystem” to
whose welfare the socio-discursive, ethno-racial, and gender-, class-, and
faith-inflected here-there and self-other relations, and relationality more
broadly, are crucial. Obviously, the ecosystem is more than a metaphor for
cultural give-and-take within the human sphere. Nor can human relation-
ality be fully conceptualized without factoring into it our dealings with
non-human others such as the animal, the biosphere largely, the inanimate,
the divine, and so on. But, again, my discussion focuses, here as elsewhere
in my work, on intra-anthropological relatedness, deliberately narrowing
down alterity to the cultural, more exactly, the geocultural other.18
With this important proviso, one can look, I think, at the tellings, narra-
tions, representations, and measurements mentioned above, and also at the
critical struggles to make sense of them, as the characteristic “species” of
the human ecosystem, all of them subsisting—expressing something, pro-
ducing meaning, or trying to figure this meaning out—according to a cer-
prologue • 9
tain figuring or imagining protocol: planetarism. The cultural imaginary of

planetarity, planetarism constitutes both a reality and a metareality, a his-
torical phenomenon and an aesthetic-conceptual construal thereof. Further,
as constructions, the stories and figurations of planetarism are simultane-
ously descriptive and normative, contemporary and future, a reality, “under
construction” as it may be, and a reality to be or set of directives for present
reality’s change. Ontologically, as already existing reality, the planet is par-
tially already in place (“in the world”) and can be described as such; most
significantly, this partial presence is being augmented aesthetically and
critically, as subject to a prescriptive planetary imagination. As cultural
form, imaginary configuration, and Weltanschauung, planetarism is then
both aligned and at odds with the historical and political circumstances of
its birth. The post-1990s, ever-accelerating de-linking and unorthodox re-
coupling of locale and material-discursive production in manufacturing,
trade, finance, communications, sciences, and the arts are the backdrop
against which new, planetary ways of experiencing and viewing the world
have risen and with them the possibility of a new cultural paradigm inside
and outside the United States. Thus, at the core of what may well amount to
a sea change “out there,” in the “real world,” planetarism is, more and more
markedly every day, the twenty-first-century imaginary’s “Prevailing Oper-
ating System,” to borrow Sussman’s term.19 Neither entirely unprecedented
nor everywhere the same nor subtending the entire earth, the planetary is
the pivotal dimension in which the world’s cultures are fostered. In this sense,
rather than in the more holistic-integrative one, of which critics like Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak remain understandably leery, this dimension is unique
in terms of the force with which it leaves its imprint on how people are now
picturing themselves and their environments.20 A highly complex, material-
aesthetic operator, the planet is becoming a dominant, shaping, as well as
illuminating context, an arena, a modulating drive, and a mode of cultural
production. No question about it.
The question is how to tackle this output. More precisely, the question
is—aesthetically, ethically, and politically—how to handle the imagination
system so as to enlist its own episteme in a “reimagination” of the world’s
“prevailing systems of actuality.”21 One might ask, therefore, how are we to
respond to planetarism critically? How are we to sort out a planetary cul-
tural symptomatology ranging from free-floating, disembodied fantasies of
fluidity, hyperconnectivity, and “contagious” mode and modality of affect
and aesthetic self-definition to the nitty-gritty of migrant lives and quasi-
generalized diaspora of a world that seems to be, as we shall see in part 1
under §13, in search of the postcolonial’s “beyond”; from extreme forms of

“time-space compression” (Harvey) to the global “spectacle society” and
the world panopticon of touristic voyeurism, military surveillance, inter-
vention, annexation, and aggressive data gathering by government agen-
cies; from the shrinking-cum-dilation and the conflict-ridden intermin-
gling of private and public spheres to the ebb and flow of identities—from
the deterritorialization of subjectivities to the reterritorialization of alle-
giances as supra-national consumer options, fashion statements, and pro-
fessional memberships? How are we to make sense of cultures’ pathos of
being in the bigger world—how do we understand them in their patent or
disguised worldliness—while distinguishing between this legitimate aspira-
tion and the homogenization and “banalization of the world” that Baudril-
lardian “telemorphosis” and other categories of overmediatization threaten
as with?22 How do we interpret novel X from culture Y geoculturally? Once
again, how do we read “with” the planet, and what would be the intellectual
mechanics as well as the ethical ramifications of such a planetary form of
interpretation?
§4. Steps toward a Geomethodology: Brief Outline

A drop of blood is like a novel, it contains the world.
—Bharati Mukherjee, The Tree Bride
In answering these questions, the book builds toward a reading model for
the projections of planetarity encrypted in cultural practices or artifacts.
Putting together the planetary interpretive grid takes a two-step process.
The steps are Reading for the Planet’s main parts, which in turn are split into
two sub-parts or chapters. Part 1 lays the groundwork for the geomethodol-
ogy developed in part 2. Part 1’s opening chapter (§5–§9) comprises the
critique of globalist theory and terminology, thus setting the stage for part
1, II, in which I articulate—again, based on the previous section’s theoretical-
conceptual “housecleaning”—the planetary paradigm. This paradigm is
completed in part 2, I, where I lay out its key feature: the planetary reading
model. I show how this works in part 2, II, while the epilogue details the
ethical ramifications of the model’s applications—how reading with the
planet can become reading for the planet or “critical stewardship.”
Specifically, the book’s prolegomena (§5–§14) consists of a series of his-
torical and conceptual dissociations helping contextualize the rise of plan-
etarism and define its core critical lexicon over and against post–Cold War
prologue • 11
globalization, global studies, and the latter’s “global” family vocabulary. By

no means synonymous although routinely conflated, world (the broadest
term), globe, and planet make up this part’s fundamental notional triad,
with the last two understood as intertwined processings (“worldings”) of
the first: the world has to undergo a process to become globe, planet, or
something else. While, similarly to “planetarism,” “planet,” and the like,
“globalism,” “global,” and their brethren do correspond to either fully
shaped or emerging empirical realities, to how things are or are about to be
in the world, Reading for the Planet remains keen on such worldly signifiers
as discourse formations, ways of talking about what is happening to the
world. For it is on this world-performative terrain, where the contemporary
world is construed, discursively formed, and, in an important yet often ne-
glected sense, also produced, that alternate formations and reformations are
first envisioned.23
The end result of these deconstructive/reconstructive procedures can be
described as a critical equivalent to linguistic back-formation. Needless to
say, “globe” and “planet” did not come into being, nor were they defined
ontologically, in what they are and do, as globalism and planetarism had
their multiple suffixes clipped (by whom?); it was the other way around,
actually. But, if globalism, globalization, and globality, on one side, and
planetarism, planetarization, and planetarity, on the other side, entail
worldly maneuverings, certain ways of fashioning the world, then planetar-
ism may be well poised to refashion, reimagine, or reworld the world into a
shape, structure, or meaning distinct from, if not outright critical of, the
shape, structure, or meaning “world” acquired (or lost) as it “worlded” as
“globe” (as it “globalized”), and as it was “worded” as such by global studies.
This is why “globe” and “planet” are so insistently treated here as competing
constructions of the worlding world, of the world that is coming together, or,
in brief, the world-as-world. They are alike insofar as they share the relational
modus operandi, and they diverge in their different management of relation-
ality. My book both queries and dwells on this contrast to take a stand by
putting forth its own planetary alternative. This makes Reading for the
Planet a critical-theoretical counteroffer twice: while not restricted to issues
of discourse, textuality, and perusal, literary or otherwise, its greater objec-
tive is another—planetary—reading. The critical review of global studies in
part 1’s first half, especially the revisiting of this scholarship’s rhetorical pro-
duction of globalization, is a stepping-stone toward this reading.
“Idiosyncratic” on occasion, and so not unlike all new (or “newish”) ter-
minology, the planetarity repertoire is introduced and defined in part 1’s
final segments (§10-§14) and then put to work accordingly. As far as I know,
neither the definitions—at least these definitions—nor their uses have been
attempted more systematically elsewhere although Spivak’s “globe”-“planet”
dyad, Eric Hayot’s work on “world” semantics, and Emily Apter’s exquisite
inquiry into “Untranslatables” (Barbara Cassin’s intraduisibles) like “Welt,
Mundus, World, Terre, Cosmos, Chôra, Globe[,] Planetarity, [and] irdisch”
move all in this direction.24 I realize that getting into the wooly business of
such terminologically contrastive elucidations as I am ups the ante once
more in a book that, as I have said, insists on walking the fine line between
high-stakes claims and theoretical sobriety. Nonetheless, these differentia-
tions must be undertaken. They are key to my discussion overall, in par-
ticular to its critical retrofitting of the more established, perhaps already
ossified dictionary that also comes into play alongside and in tension with
the planetary nomenclature: “culture,” “cultural practice,” “originality,” “tra-
dition,” “patrimony,” “sovereignty,” “community,” “identity,” “subjectivity,”
“contemporary”/“present,” “space”/“territory,” and so on. As with “globe”
and “globalization,” the overabundance of scare quotes signals an awareness
of the conventions— assumptions, expectations, and agendas, in sum,
rhetoricity—these words body forth. Thus, in conjunction with the distinc-
tions introduced under §10-§14, this older and broader category of notions
is inevitably “planetarized” throughout: reassessed, complicated, and other-
wise fine-tuned for a historical moment (planetary) and for an endeavor
(planetary reading) that were lying well beyond the horizon of the 1970s
and early 1980s, when critical theory originally forged this class of terms.
Obviously, some theoretical and terminological heavy lifting is to be ex-
pected here too, as is the relative density of reasoning and style. But I think
the patient reader will agree that they all pay off in what comes next. He or
she will also appreciate, I hope, not only the hoops my argument is going
through but also the moves it declines to make. Either way, the goal remains
setting up, as clearly and effectively as possible, the planetary reading model.
In concert with the historical and conceptual revisionism of part 1, the
following step taken by Reading for the Planet arises from the conviction
that a planetarily minded reading should work out a flexibly comparatist
interpretive modality able to approach ethically, with an epistemologically
auspicious humility, a culture’s planetary “fine print” and thus unscramble
or decompress the encodings of planetarity—turn to the planet’s face, dis-
tinguish and make it visible for others also—in the putatively or “genuinely”
local, regional, cloistered, and culturally-anthropologically peerless. I flesh
out this interpretive apparatus or geomethodology in the first half of part 2
prologue • 13
(§15–§20). Still theoretical in its ambitions, the second half (§21–§31) can-
vases mainly early twenty-first-century fiction alongside some criticism
and philosophy. In particular, I attend to writers of various backgrounds to
formulate, back up, and illustrate planetary reading’s main contentions,
components, and operations. I am drawn, admittedly, to a certain type of
fictional prose. However, despite the important specifications under §14,
there is no planetary genre per se at this stage in world literary history, and
so I cannot claim I am focusing on a particular form. What I examine—
appositely, “planetarily”—is novels that (a) belong to what I call in part 1
(§13) “the planetary age,” most of them having come out after 9/11; (b) are,
characteristically, as exemplars of our time’s world network culture, inter-
textually and interculturally supersaturated; (c) project, oftentimes criti-
cally, a planetary vision on recent, post–World War II and especially post-
1980s events in the form of certain narrativizations of world space
(“geoaesthetics”) suspicious of the rationales behind ongoing geopolitics,
geoeconomics, and their official or implied cartographies; and, therefore,
(d) as upshots of such intellectual-affective mappings of the world,25 present
themselves, overtly in writers like Bharati Mukherjee, less so in others, as
ethical “world containers” subtended not only by a geoaesthetics but also by
a geoethics. Like a speck of somebody’s blood or a raindrop in a haiku, these
narratives piece together the world’s broken body and cradle multitudes;
they are “hemo-synecdoche[s] of the world,” as Mukherjee has a character
reflect in her 2004 novel The Tree Bride.26 I also contend that they “want” to
be read this way. Obligingly, my planetary reading model measures this
synecdochic dimension, the fervor and ability of such world-containing,
world-heavy, or, more simply, “worlded” works to take in the world while
their immediate concerns may or may not be, at first blush at least, the wide
world as such.
Of late, the number of this kind of works has skyrocketed. As far as I can
tell, the trend foregrounds national literatures’ deepening worldliness rather
than their imperialist propensities. In this regard, U.S. literature is no ex-
ception. Nor should it receive special treatment. True, I tend to look pri-
marily at American works, but I am an Americanist first and a comparatist
next—and because I am an Americanist. The model’s applications in part 2,
II, show that, and in a good way too, I would like to think. What I seek to
build, though, as an American literature specialist in conversation with his-
toire croisée advocates, comparatists, world literature proponents, global
studies scholars, “neocosmopolitans” and their critique of epistemological
nationalism, ecocritics, and translation theorists, is a methodological basis
for “planetary criticism,” viz., for coming to terms with the literature and
culture of the planet.
I wish to clarify the ambiguous genitive right away, for it is less presump-
tuous than it sounds. What I have in mind is not all “worlded” literature and
culture on the planet, in the sweeping-quantitative sense that has all-too-
often discounted, or has just been unable to see, the qualitatively unique,
the singular. My ambition is not another critical grand narrative. It is not
this kind of literary production from “all over the world” that I bring under
the epistemological purview of my geomethodology. Actually, this is not
“world literature” either. Or, if it is, it is insofar the world’s literature, no
matter where in the world it hails from, is more and more becoming worlded
literature or a literature of worldedness in a planetarily discursive, thematic,
and at times even formal sense: novels, plays, poetry, and other evocations
of cultural-historical incidents and sites in which, however small, unassum-
ing, and geographically and politically circumscribed these gestures, occa-
sions, and places may be, the world “worlds” itself nevertheless, gathers it-
self together, and, in displaying the animate and inanimate texture of this
throbbing, ever-changing, and kaleidoscopic worldly togetherness, shows
its face as world.
In closing, I underline the ethical import of the geomethodological. To
this end, the epilogue trades on Emmanuel Levinas’s response to the Hei-
deggerian critique of “planetarized” technology to propose a linguistic-
deontological retooling of “reading-with” as “reading-for” the planet and of
literary-cultural criticism as planetary stewardship. Does this put on the
book a spin that is ultimately ethical rather than political? The question is
not unwarranted. There is no shortage of political agendas and proposals
these days, though. In fact, there is an abundance of them even if we check
only within the liberal quarters where Reading for the Planet too stakes out
its territory. What the majority of these different initiatives are lacking, it
seems to me, is an ethically shared ground in whose absence they hardly
stand a chance of changing much in today’s worlded world. This foundation
is not a depoliticizing commonality, a politically disabling “consensus” that,
as Jacques Rancière claims, “transform[s] . . . [t]he political community . . .
into an ethical community” and allegedly cancels the political out.27 This is,
instead, a loose communality of thought and attitude; this is, digitally, geo-
culturally, and otherwise, a worldly mise ensemble that opens up a meeting
space and thereby “instigates” a coming together—if not a wholly new “so-
cial contract,” then surely new forms, possibilities, and arenas of sociality;28
thus, this is a togetherness that, before being and in order to be some day
prologue • 15
strategically coalitional by buying into a single, clearly identified, and vastly

accommodating political option, must be ethical. In other words, it must be
by being-with first, in an ethical with-world, one whose topoethical struc-
ture of “conviviality,” we shall note in part 1, great minds like Goethe had
already foreseen.29 Before remapping the world, we have to think about the
cartographic ethic of such a political gesture.
It is by carrying on and refining this trajectory of thought that I also
maintain—programmatically against recent rejections of the ethical by
Rancière and his ilk—that what we, cultural critics and theorists of plane-
tarity, need to accomplish first, but for political reasons also, is ground our-
selves in an ethic. Oriented by Levinas in its “consideration” of and for the
planet’s luminously elusive yet exigent face and the geophenomenological
relationality embedded in it, this ethic is here principally one of critical-
theoretical practice. Its ethos obtains as a corollary of the literary and cul-
turally “decompressive” analysis of the “telescoping” scenes surveyed in
part 2. But, in keeping with this book’s inter-and supra-disciplinary de-
signs, the conclusion offers up this ethos as a plausible rallying hypothesis
for all humanists, inside, across, and outside the humanities.
On the other hand, affirming this ethos implies an unapologetic reaffir-
mation, albeit rather unfashionable these days, of culture as a vigorously
transformative force in the world, of culture’s worldedness in a geoontological
and political sense. Planetarism, a counter-imagination, can be, and often is,
oppositional. As suggested in §1 and amply illustrated in part 2, planetary
spatial poetics often upsets the spatial politics “on the ground.” In turn, plan-
etary reading, the rigorous reading of planetarism’s counter-imaginings, can-
not miss the seeds of such oppositions, affirmations, and transformations, the
eventfulness potential in all those small and unassuming places and scenes.
In theorizing and reading planetarity, this book’s main efforts, then, deliber-
ately bring culture back to the center of a world-system usually dismissive, in
its classical—and classically economistic articulations—of culture’s systemic
value and, hence, of its political relevance. Are these endeavors “culturalist”?
They may well be, but that hardly makes them systemically or, I should say,
planetarily irrelevant. At any rate, the answer to the question is less important
than what they ultimately accomplish as they throw light on literary-aesthetic
representation’s centrality to both what the world is and to what planetarism
shows that the world can be.
I could not have brought this project to fruition without the generous help
of many people and institutions. My first thanks go to Amy J. Elias, distin-
guished Americanist, widely recognized authority in postmodern and digi-

tal studies, and good friend. In 2011, as I was still reeling from having just
wrapped up Cosmodernism, she approached me with an idea that led to The
Planetary Turn. For that collection, I wrote an essay, which I then reworked
into this book’s part 2, and I also composed an earlier form of the introduc-
tion. Eventually, only some of that version went into the opening piece of
The Planetary Turn. I have revised and augmented that initial draft quite a
bit, and the outcome—virtually a new text—has become Reading for the
Planet’s part 1. These revisions, expansions, and the like do not document
only a personal preoccupation traceable, as I have noted, to my earlier work.
They are also a testimony to three years of working with Amy, to hundreds
of e-mails, phone calls, editorial dilemmas, and, on the more substantial
side, to theoretical problems and even to language that Reading for the
Planet and its companion, The Planetary Turn, unavoidably share. In this
sense, our collaboration goes on within this individually authored book,
one for whose shortcomings I remain otherwise exclusively responsible.
I also want to recognize the following institutions, programs, and per-
sons who have provided much-needed funding, guidance, and venues of
critical exchange: the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Bureau of
Education and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State,
and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for a 2014 Fulbright
Specialist Grant in U.S. Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the
Netherlands; the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, for a 2012
research stipend locally, and most generously, sponsored in Munich by
Raoul Eshelman; the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, for a 2012
Summer Excellence Fellowship and a fall 2014 research assignment leave;
also at UNCG, the College of Arts and Sciences, specifically for the assis-
tance generously extended by the College’s Dean, Timothy Johnston, over
the past few years; UNCG’s English Department, its past and present heads,
Professor Anne Wallace and Professor Scott Romine, and its superbly col-
legial faculty; UNCG’s dynamic Atlantic World Research Network and its
Director, Professor Christopher Hodgkins, whose support, encouragement,
and genuine interest in the thorny issues broached in Reading for the Planet
have been invaluable; UNCG’s Office of Research and Economic Develop-
ment and its Vice Chancellor, Dr. Terri L. Shelton, for vital help throughout;
UNCG’s International Programs Center, for a 2012 Kohler Research Award
and other grants enabling travel and work leading to this book, and the
University’s Walter Clinton Jackson Interlibrary Loan Department staff;
colleagues and graceful hosts at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich,
prologue • 17
the University of Konstanz, and the University of Freiburg (Germany), the

University of Limoges (France), the University of Maryland, Ohio State
University, the University of Bucharest, the University of Cluj-Napoca (Ro-
mania), and Radboud University and the University of Amsterdam (the
Netherlands). John McGowan, John Protevi, and Jeffrey J. Williams have
given useful feedback on an earlier draft of Reading for the Planet’s closing
pages (§31–§33). In the summer of 2014, I enjoyed the opportunity to dis-
cuss my geomethodology at Petru Maior University, Târgu-Mureş, Transyl-
vania University, Braşov, and Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu (Romania), in
particular with members of the new Romanian “school” of global studies
such as Andrei Terian, Alex Goldiş, and Oana Strugaru.
Gratefully acknowledged is also the support of Liedeke Plate and Timo-
theus Vermeulen, my gracious Radboud hosts. Marjorie Perloff, David
Cowart, Paul Allen Miller, Brian McHale, Ursula Heise, Paul Maltby, Ber-
trand Westphal, Emily Apter, Brian Richardson, Jerome Klinkowitz, John
Frow, Vincent B. Leitch, Zahi Zalloua, Nicole Simek, Keith Cushman, Karen
Kilcup, Stephen Yarbrough, Hephzibah Roskelly, Monika Fludernik, Jan
Alber, Robin van der Akker, Yra van Dijk, Basarab Nicolescu, Jean-Michel
Rabaté, Rodica Mihăilă, Mircea Martin, Ștefan Borbely, Corin Braga, An-
drei Bodiu, Caius Dobrescu, Alexandru Muşina, Adrian Lăcătuș, Iulian
Boldea, and Alexandra Mitrea have offered advice, assistance, and fellow-
ship. I am thankful too to Radu Ţurcanu, leading psychoanalyst and old
friend, for extending his hospitality, humor, and wisdom when I needed
them. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, distinguished cultural theorist and Executive Di-
rector of the Society for Critical Exchange, has been my generous host at
University of Houston–Victoria’s Winter Theory Institute, where, over the
last couple of years, I have presented portions and versions of Reading for
the Planet’s argument. Kir Kuiken deserves credit for mentioning to me Ro-
dolphe Gasché’s latest book. And Henry Sussman’s inspiring scholarship
and kindness remain the luminous and firm guide that, directly and indi-
rectly, has saved this book innumerable hesitations and about-faces.
Some of the insights set forth here have been tested out in my classes. I
am thankful, therefore, to my UNCG undergraduate and graduate students
in post-2010 courses such as English 208: “Topics in Global Literature,”
English 740: “Studies in Contemporary and Postmodern American Litera-
ture,” and English 704: “Studies in Contemporary Literary and Cultural
Theory.” Finally, I appreciate the unwavering support and interest in my
work shown at the University of Michigan Press by Editorial Director Aaron
McCollough. I am also indebted to Christopher Dreyer, Tom Dwyer, the
copyediting and marketing staff, and the Press’s three anonymous external
readers for their constructive comments.
Finally, a few sections of Reading for the Planet have originally appeared,
in different form, as follows: “‘A foreign tongue to unite us’: Book Traveling
with Dai Sijie,” in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 36, no. 2 (June
2009): 120–136; “Melancholy Nation,” in American Book Review 35, no. 1
(November–December 2013): 19–20; part 2’s §21–§23 fragments have been
adapted from my essay “Decompressing Culture: Three Steps toward a Geo-
methodology,” text included in The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geo-
aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian
Moraru. Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published
2015. All rights reserved; “The Forster Connection or, Cosmopolitanism
Redux: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Howards End, and the Schlegels.” Adapted
from the Comparatist, 35 (May 2011): 133–147. Copyright © 2011 by the
Southern Comparative Literature Association. Used by permission of the
University of North Carolina Press. I am grateful to these publications, their
editors, and publishers for permission to reprint modified segments of
these articles, as I am to Elke Claus (www.elkeworks.com) and Chicago’s
Morpho Gallery (www.morphogallery.com) for allowing me to use a visual
reproduction of Claus’s mixed media on paper “To You Alone” on this
book’s front cover. Also, all translations from German, French, Romanian,
and other languages are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Part 1 f World, Globe, Planet
planaō (Gk.): “lead astray,” “wander,” “wander in mind,” “be at a loss”
—Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary
The globe is not the world.

—pheng cheah, “What Is a World? On World Literature
as World-Making Activity”
§5. Wording the World, Worlding the Word

Can we now identify an emergent planetary optic that can be
grounded anywhere and that creates historical possibilities not
available before?
—Mary Louise Pratt, “Planetary Longings: Sitting in the
Light of the Great Solar TV”
In his 1964 article on Wallace Stevens, “The Planetary Poet,” John Crowe
Ransom made a point to cut the commentary short and close with the “epi-
logue” Stevens himself had “deliver[ed] . . . in a roundabout manner” two
years before he died.1 A resplendent coda to the poet’s career, the four stan-
zas of “The Planet on the Table” feature one of his alter egos, Ariel. In doing
Prospero’s bidding, Ariel steps into the role of a master of natural ceremo-
nies, an illusion maker and thereby an imitator or, in Ancient Greek, mime-
tés. In brief, Stevens’s Ariel is a poet. But the spirit is a special type of poet:
his “self and the sun were one.” His poems, Stevens further discloses, “al-
though makings” of Ariel’s own “self,” “[w]ere no less makings of the sun.”
As Stevens glosses,
It was not important that they survive.

What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament of character,
19
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,

In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.2
Both friend and handler of the sun and the elements, elementary (“aery”)
himself, Ariel is in the planet-writing business. Arguably, so is Stevens.
Conjuring up the planet, the 1953 poem performs an act as magical as it is
aesthetic.
Central to this aesthetic performance is a geoscopic protocol. At once an
invocation of the planet and a textual convocation, “The Planet on the Ta-
ble” is a twofold calling forth that actualizes the planet by looking at it, more
exactly, by gazing into the planet’s face and treating it as a legible object—
one that lends itself to reading. Poiēsis here entails and can ultimately be
defined as “facing.” Largely speaking, it boils down to an art of looking. In
particular, it designates an aesthetic retraining of the ordinary gaze on the
planet. More specifically still, it institutes an ethoscopy, a contemplation of
the planet as planet, a multiple, creative-interpretive consideration of the
planet’s planetary “aspect” or adspectum, namely, of that which, on earth,
makes for a worldly “expressive” face or figura. The latter is a material and
cultural configuration at once planetarily pertinent (while fluctuating
across the planet, its relevance overall seizes hold on a planetary scale), op-
tically “remarkable” (it is visible, stands out “scopically”), semiotically
meaningful (it signifies something), and, last but not least, ethically com-
pelling. Thus, poetic writing, and any variety of artistic mimesis for that
matter, whatever its subject, is not only planet-oriented (a commonplace,
after all), but it also regards (“looks at”) and portrays planetarity. It exam-
ines, in other words, the earth’s face to draw its planetary portrait, to map
out the planet poetically so that, on and between the poem’s lines, the per-
spicacious reader might make out the planet’s own, coherent and coherence-
inducing, “lineaments.” These are not—or not just—ethnoscopies. They do
not trace coordinates, borders, boundaries, natural and political wrinkles
and divides, scars and fault lines, itineraries, and historical tracks of change,
suffering, and élan that mark off locations, positions, or venues of discrete
ethnolinguistic groups (organized into national entities or not). They are,
again, ethoscopies. For they bring out in high relief planetary “characters”
or letters “re-lettering” all such locales, histories, and geopolitical units,
“worlding” them into the geoscript of the planetary supra-unit. This geo-
script, this poetic cartography, indexes a planetary consciousness.
In keeping with the neo-Romantic aesthetics Stevens carries so memo-
world, globe, planet • 21
rably to a modernist extreme, the rhetorical longitudes and latitudes of this

sublime world-mapping remain oftentimes hesitant, blurry, and thus “half-
perceived,” for these “ma(r)kings” are quasi-mystical, obscurely allusive,
highly metaphorical. The poem’s words do embody the planet’s appearance
in some measure, but, more than anything else, they make up an introvert
exercise in self-embodiment. Exquisite as they may be, their self-reflexivity
lessens extrovert reflectiveness and its wealth of detail, which a more capa-
cious, world-inclusive wording of the 1950s planet requires. Therefore,
while they do testify to the greater world outside and the mimetic self be-
hind them, the poems are planetary synecdoches (“part[s] . . . of the planet”)
rather allegorically. All its splendor notwithstanding, their metaphorics be-
trays, and at times deliberately cultivates, a paradoxical poverty—
sketchiness, imprecision, abstruseness—of planetary representation. Self-
acknowledged, as one might expect, this poetic paucity yields an apposite
world picture, one in which an analogous scarcity, a certain studied reti-
cence of planetary mimesis, is brought to bear on the planet’s image.
At issue here is not just how Stevens’s poetry is wording the world—for
it is—but, conversely, also how and to what extent Stevens’s world itself af-
fords it, in what form and to what degree a sufficiently and adequately
“worlded” post–World War II modernism—a “planetarized” modernism
receptive to the world-as-world—is effectively and fully possible during the
author’s lifetime. The question, then, is not only style and, more broadly,
aesthetics, but also history and the insights the particular historical mo-
ment enables in modernists like Stevens. Intriguingly enough, the poet sets
about to put the planet on the table the way an ordinary worker might with
the family’s daily bread. And yet, partaking in the “solar” life of the world-
as-world and sharing in the planet’s planetarity to the point of rendering it
a domestic item are affective and imaginary exploits neither the “makings”
(poetics) of Stevens’s late modernism nor the Cold War’s adversarial-
disjunctive, either-or geopolitics wholeheartedly sponsored.
At the height of the Cold War confrontation, Philip Roth also speaks
directly to the era’s geopolitical bearings on the private, the emotional, and
their expression. One might say—in anticipation of the introduction of the
“netosphere” concept in §9—that he is, as great artists often are, onto some-
thing here, to wit, onto a certain Cold War world configuration of what
Lauren Berlant describes as “affectsphere.”3 A character of Roth’s 1961 novel
Letting Go complains, in fact, that nobody can love anybody anymore be-
cause “we are all of us living in the shadow of the Bomb” and its conse-
quences: “emotional anarchy, separation, a withdrawal of people from peo-
ple. A kind of moral isolationism.”4 This feeling of “feelinglessness” flies in

the face of New Age “free love” and the like. More notably, and way ahead
of the “affective turn” in the humanities and, subsequently, of the recent
inquiries into the “geopolitics of emotions” and the interplay of the ideo-
logical and the emotional during and after the Cold War, the feeling under-
scores that individual affect and its representation are colored by the world-
as-world, or, differently put, that people’s emotional “withdrawal” from
other people is articulated with, if not utterly touched off, by the forced,
“politicized” separation of peoples from peoples: the love affair with the
Bomb has profoundly alienating if not geoalienating upshots insofar as it
tends to map private affairs onto world affairs—or something like that.5 Of
course, Roth is not alone in his insight. Pynchon, John Updike, Robert
Coover, and Don DeLillo “feel” the same throughout their work. Likewise,
Ian McEwan has a character of his 2012 Cold War novel Sweet Tooth dismiss
as “monstrous solipsism” the temptation to “broo[d] about a stranger who
caressed [her] palm with his thumb” while “civilization [is being] threat-
ened by nuclear war.”6
To be clear: even though, as Fredric Jameson and others have argued,
“[l]ate modernism is a product of the Cold War,”7 the period from the 1950s
through the 1980s did witness, in works by Stevens and other visionaries of
the era, wordings of a worlding world courageously and farsightedly over-
flowing the schismatic territorialities, bounded ideologies, and hemmed-in
loyalties into which the actual post–World War II world was split. But such
wordings were, to a notable extent, fleeting amphibologies, “intimations,”
“anticipations,” and “premonitions” of planetarity. By and large peripheral
in the economy of the modernist aesthetic system, these worldly tropisms
were also geopolitically “impaired,” as it were, understandably imprecise in
their planetary “vision.” When they did have the world-as-world in their
sights, they typically provided figurative approximations of it, not in the
least because a worlded world was not there yet to intrigue and guide them.
Following Martin Heidegger, thinkers and critics across disciplines
tackle “worlding” as the world’s rush toward worldedness, an innate ten-
dency to juxtapose its pieces and thus morph into a worlded ontosyntax.
This need not be a macro-entity monolithically “one,” as even ethically
minded “one-world” descriptions seem to suggest, but, as Jacques Derrida
would say, a “haptical” world in which most if not all of its parts touch one
another, interact and modify each other, derive their meanings from other
parts within the whole as well as from this whole itself, and otherwise hang
together so much so that the negotiation of their being-together is an axial
routine of the everyday.8 Compared to this worlded setup, Stevens’s world—

both the world in which he lived and that limned by his poetry, his Eastern
influences notwithstanding—was at an earlier stage of worlding.9 The de-
cades coming immediately after the war were— again, comparatively
speaking—poorly worlded. In some situations, the Cold War standoff made
writers, especially on the other side of the Iron Curtain, world-hungry, but
it overall put a check on the relational makeup of the world, and it could not
but dampen—directly in the notorious case of socialist realism, obliquely in
others—the relationality of the world’s literary wordings. This poverty, this
limitedness, this censorship even, did not quite stimulate artists’ endeavors
to “make out” the world-as-world, as it often inhibited the mar(k)ings, the
poems’ and stories’ line(ament)s and wordings rather overtly.
By contrast, a world in which worlding (“togethering”) has picked up
speed, and still more so a worlded world, where worlding has entered an ad-
vanced phase, is a structurally relational world. This world is characterized
by relationality at two levels. One is systemic. Here, the relational structure
ensures that the majority if not all of this world’s ingredients, places, and
forms of life and expression thereof are, can be, or are likely to become one
day interconnected and interdependent. The other is sub-systemic. At this
level, everything or almost everything in this world is, can be, or is likely to
become connected to and dependent on the broader world-system in terms
of function and meaning. We will see below that the relational can also lead
to differently worlded worlds depending on what type of worlding, global or
planetary, is in play, which is in turn determined by the relational practice
involved, by how relationality is understood, and by how it is carried out.
Suffice it to say for now that, for aesthetic, political-economic, and techno-
logical reasons, relational wordings of the world—world pictures keen on
the world’s worldedness, on the world-as-world—did not supply, regardless
of their orientation and despite the inevitable exceptions, the “cultural dom-
inant” of Stevens’s time. Neither would they become mainstream with late
modernism’s successor, postmodernism, which, of late, more and more
scholars have been approaching as a Cold War phenomenon.10
It is only with the end of the Cold War that, in the United States and
elsewhere, the panoply of world-relational imaginings starts taking center
stage and their expressive dearth begins to give way to a less ambiguous
plenitude: to more abundant, better-made and -marked makings and mark-
ings aspiring to paradigm-defining and even canonical status, to bolder lin-
eaments and more distinct mappings, in sum, to a cornucopia of planetary
representations and ultimately to a need to theorize them and deal with
them systematically within a critical “field” of their own. In their most etho-
scopically consistent manifestations, these figurations will bring about a
whole rhetorical-thematic class in which “The Planet on the Table” would
fit only with some approximation along other poems both anticipatory of,
and geopolitically, culturally, and otherwise contemporary with, the late
twentieth century: W. H. Auden’s “Prologue at Sixty,” Derek Walcott’s “The
Fortunate Traveller,” Seamus Heaney’s “Alphabets,” and, to add just one ex-
ample from outside the English-speaking world, Jorge Carrera Andrade’s
“geophysical,” post-Whitmanesque lyrical monologue “Hombre Planetario”
(Planetary Man), among others.11 They all are, as Jahan Ramazani labels
them, “planetary poems” in that they keep “figur[ing] the world as ‘O,’”
limning it as a complex unit, a “coloured,” “singular, lucent O,” as Heaney
writes. 12 Not only a wooden globe but a planet, this “O” is a rounded letter
and the letter of worldly roundness also, containing the entire alphabet, all
characters, human and typographic, and all possible lines and lineaments of
life: a world emphatically lettered and worded into worldedness. This
worlding, this picturing of our common world as a relational space—albeit
one in which the ethical content of relationality remains to be assessed—
lies at the heart of the planetary imaginary. In poetry, fiction (as we shall see
in part 2, II), and other genres, this imaginary is getting more and more
culturally endemic on a world scale with the advent of the post-1989 period
known as “accelerated,” “strong,” or “late globalization.”13
A question, however, presents itself right away: What is it that we “know”
about the world worlding itself faster and faster over the past two decades
or so? The standard and by no means implausible answer is that this world
has entered a qualitatively new phase of globalization. If this is true, then
one could also claim, as I am, that, as a burgeoning world also brought
about or more loosely “contextualized” or “occasioned” by worlding devel-
opments, and further, as a world vision, as an imaginary, and as a thematic-
stylistic repertoire, “planet,” “planetarity,” and “planetarism” have emerged
in an uneasy, concurrently symbiotic and oppositional association with
“global” and the rest of the “globalization” cluster of terms and designated
phenomena. Critics like David Held and Ramazani have in fact no qualms
about defining globalization’s interconnective arrangements as “the neces-
sary condition for the lived experience of planetarity.”14 Likewise, one could
suggest, and legitimately so, that planetary concerns are a global studies
offshoot. What is less clear, though, is to what extent the hegemonic rheto-
ric of “globe,” “globalism,” and so on, irrespective of the political or moral
construction—pro-or anti-neoliberal—it puts on globalization, already
construes the world’s worlding processes in a certain way and so ends up,
oftentimes against its own critical agenda, further globalizing the world,
that is, making it into a homogenous, conquerable, and commodifiable
place rather than remaking it anew and allowing for its change. As couched
in this uniformity-inducing rhetoric, globalization is treated, approvingly
or not, as the only way in which a worlding scenario has played out or as the
only form of globalization possible. This is not to say that globalization, as we
“know” it, is pure “invention” of this rhetorical apparatus. Above, I do not
write “construction” idly. “[D]debates over globalization are discursive”15 as
debates (form of discourse), but they would be pointless if they merely de-
bated themselves. And yet the description or discourse in question has
played up one way of looking at our world and, more broadly, one way of
looking at the relation between culture and this world, so much so that see-
ing the world’s face in literary-cultural artifacts, styles, and cultural prac-
tices has reached a serious impasse. To get out of it, we can begin by backing
out of this rhetorical corner, and we should not let an otherwise under-
standable global babble fatigue get in the way. Lexical rigor and the distinc-
tions it affords do provide, especially in times of terminological inflation, a
foothold for serious critical action about and in the world.
Whether globalization, as articulated by its rhetoric, does justice to one
dimension of worlding; whether, as the world’s putatively sole modality of
worlding, becoming-globe has more than one facet; or whether it means the
same thing to all people and in all places—these are not minor concerns.
They have been raised often too.16 And yet, in my view, they are less impor-
tant than this: planetarism and planetarity are well poised to supply another
worlding narrative, an alternative—an alternate imagination of worlding
and an alternate world altogether—over and against their own historical-
genetic circumstances in general and counter to the more deleterious in-
stantiations of post–Cold War geopolitics surveyed in this book’s prologue
(§1). As discourse, planetarism essentially points to, and encourages, we
shall note, another worlding, other worlding vectors, and other worlding
outcomes. But, to no negligible degree, this worldly otherness, this other to
both the euphoric and the teratological world pictures painted by globaliza-
tion scholars, cannot take hold as long as “globe,” its phraseology, and
worldview make up the default theoretical and linguistic conduit—and by
the same token the foregone conclusion—for all sorts of world theoriza-
tions and pronouncements, be they “anti-globalization,” anti-neoliberal,
“altermondialist,” and so forth. My first stop, then, has to be the naturalizing
upshots of this rhetoric: what its terms have come to signify and perform
rather than what they mean in abstracto, how their use shapes the world
and the field, global studies, in which, willy-nilly, planetary studies had to
lodge itself.
§6. Post–Cold War Globalization

Most political scientists and historians, and more and more critics would
probably agree today that one need not be a hopeless “presentist” to accept
that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a major milestone in modern world his-
tory. The post–Cold War crumbling and intensified porousness of all man-
ner of walls, fences, borders, national sovereignties, and alliances worldwide,
the wildfire spread of digital technologies, the previously unmatched circu-
lation of people, capital, goods, ideas, and data are all symptoms of a world
reaching a new world-systemic stage. By comparison, the pre-1989 period—
virtually the entire twentieth century—had been moderately (if increasingly)
connected. A loose system, the Cold War world was counterintuitively kept
together by a Manichean template whose keystone was the nation-state. This
conglomerate of nation-states and national subsystems (“blocs”) was frac-
tured along territorial, economic, and ideological fault lines within and
without the East-West geography of divisiveness. Both conflictual and stabi-
lizing in its repercussions, division was, in effect, the very logic of the Cold
War-era geopolitical assemblage. If this was a world asunder, as some would
insist, it was so because it was divided, carved out into more or less walled-in
“influence zones” balancing each other out precariously yet, it turned out,
efficiently, and functioning centripetally, under the jurisdiction of territori-
ally secure, politically recognized, relatively sovereign, and reasonably op-
erational political nodes, not because it was “fragmented” in a twenty-first-
century, multicentric, centrifugal, trans-and postnational sort of way. Held
in place by its mutually “deterring” antinomies of power, “common markets,”
pacts, and treaties, that world was nonetheless inferiorly worlded if not ut-
terly “unworlded” in many of its aspects and regions.
That world largely ended with World War II’s actual if protracted end,
namely, the Cold War’s conclusion. The new world professed to be rationally
and beneficially worlded, viz., to grow more patently into a reassuring
worldly togetherness, to evolve into a worldedness liable to close economic
gaps and heal humanity’s historical wounds. This is how the rising world
liked to bill itself: as a postconflictual and even post-political, indeed, post-
historical (à la Francis Fukuyama) state of affairs of a world decreasingly
apart, in which the polarizing and disconnective impetus of the Cold War
and of modernity overall took a back seat to a worldly connectedness that

would allow more and more individuals—laypeople, artists, and academ-
ics—to see themselves “in relation,” sub specie coniunctionis. This utopianism
got big-time traction in sweeping, “new world order” pronouncements made
by Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush. Both were echoing Wood-
row Wilson’s 1918 “new world” rhetoric, and both were soon to be countered
by Ken Jowitt’s “new world disorder” and then by Zygmunt Bauman, Tz-
vetan Todorov, Amin Maalouf, Immanuel Wallerstein, and other chroniclers
of “le Nouveau Désordre mondial.”17 If the latter often painted an entropic,
world-scale pandemonium, the new world order enthusiasts, soon to be all
but co-opted by neoliberalism, availed themselves of the by now classical,
late 1980s–early 1990s roll call of postcommunist “achievements”: the tearing
down of the Iron Curtain and, with it, the greatest human-rights headway of
the century; the 1993 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA); the 1995 consolidation of the Bretton Woods institutions and
agreements through the World Trade Organization (WTO); the new initia-
tives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank; the
expansion of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-
tion (NATO), which admitted most of the former members of the Warsaw
Pact; new nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) cropping up all over the
world while the older ones bolstered their activities inside and outside the
United Nations; the Internet and other advances in communications, com-
merce, finance, and afferent digital technologies.
Are the quotation marks around such “accomplishments” warranted?
Has the wish list of the 1970s turned out to be a dismayingly mixed bag?
Does it also account for a “Balkanizing,” ever-in-crisis world whose new,
high-tech, economic, cultural, and geopolitical borders and fences replace
the old ones? Does the same triumphalist enumeration register the spread-
ing of regional conflicts, ethno-religious strife, and violent fundamental-
ism, the cyclical financial meltdowns, rising unemployment, pandemics,
and the other bio- socioeconomic troubles making headlines after the
breakup of former regimes, markets, barriers, and supranational and impe-
rial entities such as the Eastern bloc, the Warsaw Pact, the USSR, and Yugo-
slavia? Even if we answer “yes” to the first two questions and “no” to the rest,
as we probably should, it became undeniable around the mid-1990s that
1989 had been a tipping point in history. A new world had indeed been
worlded into being. It was, and is, a messy one, no doubt, but many writers
have responded to it. Analyzed in part 2, some of these responses showcase
the kind of imaginary I call planetary.
I have explored this world in detail elsewhere and will go back to it a bit
later. For now, I only wish to underscore its reverberations across the hu-
manities, for this novelty was so sharply felt “out there in the world” that
many concluded that, to deal with this new reality, a new interpretive appa-
ratus and a new vocabulary were also needed. Before long, the top if highly
controversial contender proved to be “global” along with “globalization,”
“globalism,” “global age,” and the rest of the “globe” family. The discourse
coalescing around them sent shock waves across theory and the human sci-
ences, which thus underwent a “global turn” comparable to the paradigm-
changing, “linguistic,” “postmodern,” and “cultural” turns of decades past.18
What I revisit, very succinctly, in this part’s next section is this discourse,
more to the point, what I take to be the prevailing trend inside it. Because,
one more time, the planetary model of inquiry and attendant critical idiom
arose as global subcategories and, as I venture, are on their way to establish-
ing themselves as an undisciplined subdiscipline counter to globalization
studies, I would like to think of the following overview of global terminology
as requisite conceptual housecleaning. This is important not only because of
global rhetoric’s tendency to globalize itself across and at the expense of all
the other ways of talking about and acting in the worlding world of the late
twentieth century, but also because, more basically, “world,” “globe,” “planet,”
“earth,” “transnational,” and the like are not synonymous, and therefore they
should not be used interchangeably, as they frequently are. My case for an-
other critical paradigm and terminology must start out as a case for termi-
nological discipline precisely because the differences between the discourses
of “globe” and “planet,” while not absolute, do not boil down to a paltry que-
relle des mots either. Otherwise, this is hardly the place for an exhaustive
treatment of the multidisciplinary scholarship accumulated over decades.
Unlike other dictionaries of the globalization debate, mine will be both more
selective in rehashing some of the commonplaces of the literature and more
tactical, in that the clearing of conceptual decks it seeks is preparatory to the
subsequent articulation of the planetary alternative.19
§7. “World” into “Globe”

Borrowed by globalization enthusiasts from astronomy, geography, mari-
time navigation, and cartography, globe and global were the first to capture
critics’ imagination, essentially by subjecting the more generic “world” tem-
plate to an ontologically, ecologically, and socioeconomically relational
transformation or worlding process of which, conspicuously engrained in
the word’s etymology, geometry was already multiply symbolic. As most

globalization scholars would point out, the process can be summed up as
totalization. A rhetorically “perfect word” for the ideological purposes of
globalization, “globe” and “global” are suggestive of a “frictionless,” com-
plete and completed, perfect world.20 The large-scale multiplication and
strengthening of relatedness— ties, connections, and barterings among
people—reinscribe the world as globe by “rounding off ” the latter’s body, by
setting in train a regularizing “agglomeration” (from the Latin glomerō, “to
mass together”) and “fashioning” of the polymorphic world into a “rounded,”
sphere-like (globus) totality whose “smooth surface allo[w] the unimpeded
flow of capital, information[,] and language.”21
Thus, as “globe,” “world” is neither an open biocultural system nor our
natural environment and elemental habitat, turf, or ground (this is [the]
“earth”) nor our cosmic address (“Earth”), but a mundane whole that flaunts
its totality. Hardly dynamic or change-prone, this totality is also achieved,
an immutability. The global world is, and purports to be, a well-rounded,
integrated, definitive—and in that existentially and politically hopeless—
closed system and happily confirmed teleology enforced from a political
and economic if not geometrical center or centers and by a plethora of feed-
back loops, symmetries, parallels, and exchange procedures effectuated and
conveyed across a relational web progressively overlapping with the world
itself. The world worlds into globe, goes global, once the infinite, the unlim-
ited, the multitudinous, the boundless, and the boundlessly different—the
unqualified potentiality of worldly ontology—have been “qualified” and re-
purposed materially and conceptually as domains of the one, the homoge-
neous, the circular, the repetitive, and the selfsame. Topologically, both the
world (the empirical world, at least) and the globe are measurable, even
though, metaphorically and, I would argue, ontologically also, the world
remains a resilient trope and space of the variegated, mysterious, and illim-
itable and thus considerably more complex as structure than the globe,
whose terrestrial (or “library”) variety was designed not only to represent
the world more accurately but also to measure it, to fix, pin down (“posi-
tion”), and hold it. The difference between them does not lie in volume,
scope, or geometry but in ontology, culture, and politics; not in magnitude
but in what this does or makes possible inside its bulk. Redolent of the “cen-
tering” and “smoothing” technology of control, command, and monitoring
that went into its making, the globe is, again, a controlled and controlling
system, and thus a containment fantasy also, a disciplined panopticon and
a limit—a terminus not only, and perhaps not in the first place, to the world
as journey, complexity, and meaning, to where the world can be spatially,

but to what one can see and “envision” in it, to what the world and those
inside it can be socially, culturally, and otherwise. The globe is or rather
becomes, through the very rhetoric presuming to critique it in a number of
disciplines, a multitude, a multiplicity, and a potentiality shrunk down to
the measurable and the measured, to the classifiable, the charted, and the
known or the seemingly known: an ontology of relational possibilities ra-
tionalized into a limited and limiting ontic setup. The world and the globe
are both immensities; both boggle the mind quantitatively. But, unlike the
world and insofar as it results from relationally totalizing reinscriptions of
the world, the globe is no longer a worldly opera aperta, an open-ended
boundlessness or project. Once it has been brought under the regime of ra-
tional calculability as globe, largely on economic, administrative, and tech-
nological grounds—whether, once more, through truly occurring worldly
developments such as neo-imperial geopolitics and unification of financial
markets or through rhetorical overadjudications—“world” is “reduced” on-
tologically and does not function as an endless space of qualitative leaps, as
a playground of being any more. Fairly or not, this ontological reduction
marks globe’s entire kin, beginning with “(the) global.”
The latter has been used more often, in fact, and more pejoratively, both
as a modifier and independently. As an adjective, and along the lines of the
same loaded—rather than “abstract”—geometry, it is descriptive of a form,
state, situation, status, purview, capability, hyperconnective drive, and at-
distance reach of a certain sociodemographical, geopolitical, economic,
and technocultural megastructure capable or deemed capable to order,
oversee, and otherwise bear on its microdomains.22 These are specific, hith-
erto more or less isolated, sufficiently well delimited, and reasonably au-
tonomous venues and communities of race, citizenship, ethnicity, language,
and religious and aesthetic custom, which all have traditionally been be-
holden to the territorially defined and politically reinforced epistemological
authority of nation-states. As a noun, but participating in the same family
semantics as the globe, the global stresses the macro makeup and defini-
tional leverage of the macrostructure. It engages its correlative, the local, in
a whole spectrum of relationships, interchanges, transformations, and syn-
theses from the more nocuous to the more auspicious. Because these dy-
namics have been described by the students of globalization in their various
fields quasi exhaustively, here I will only list the main categories. They in-
clude sheer substitution of indigenous practices; their displacement or dis-
location; more thorough de- localization (in the extreme situation of
globalization-as-homogenization) and its variety, dis-localization (which,

according to Sarika Chandra, results in “dislocalism”); on the more positive
side, “heterogenizing” interplays à la Roland Robertson’s famous “glocaliza-
tion” and more pronounced “creolizations” where the global is further cus-
tomized, blends into native mixtures more aggressively, and even goes
“slumming” (when it does not go native or local—is Milan’s Vittorio Eman-
uele Gallery McDonald’s a McDonald’s any more, one wonders).23
§8. The Global Paradigm

Globality. It is the global’s abstract cousin. It “means,” according to Ulrich
Beck, “that we have been living for a long time in a world society, in the
sense that the notion of closed spaces has become illusory.” “No country or
group,” the German sociologist goes on, “can shut itself off from others” any
longer. As a globally reached historical situation or new human condition,
globality also implies “that from now on nothing which happens on our
planet is only a local and limited event; all inventions, victories and catas-
trophes affect the whole world.”24 Otherwise treading carefully, Beck is get-
ting here on a slippery slope toward a “one-worldist” grand narrative of the
world as wholly integrated “totality.” Like Anthony Giddens and other risk
theorists, Beck is an unrepentant modernist. Not very much taken with
postmodern claims, he is a Habermasian keen, if not on rationality’s ques-
tionable track record, then on its unfulfilled dreams, and this accounts for
the somewhat unchecked pathos of his holist-totalist rhetoric.
Globalized vs. Globalizing. We live on a globe that has not gone wholly
global despite blanket statements to the contrary and the “global agendas”
presumably pursued by various economic and political actors. That explains
some critics’ preference to refer to a “globalizing” rather than (fully) “glo-
balized” world, thus highlighting the continuative, fluid aspect of the global
state of affairs, stage, or morphology while toning down the perfective “glo-
balized.” To many, myself included, the latter smacks of a fait accompli,
which strikes me as both historically inaccurate and politically disabling. It
is precisely because the world is still worlding, coming together—because
the world is (also) “planetarizing” rather than (only) globalizing—that one
can take a critical-“progressive” look at it and possibly “perfect” it along
these lines, that is, not hone it into utopic perfection but complete it by
harnessing it to a vision more inspiring and empowering than that at work
in many of today’s corporatist and neoimperialist-territorialist adventures.
To do so, however, globalization must be either de-completed or, more

likely, reclassified as an “incomplete project.” As I detail below, my hope is
that the project will be carried through under the aegis of the planetary.
Globalism. In response to the “terminological quandary” evident in the in-

terchangeable use of “globalization,” “globality,” and “globalism,” Marshall
Brown specifies that “[b]y globalism I understand an idea, an image, a po-
tential; by globalization a process, a material phenomenon, a destiny.”25
Mentioning the “age-old phenomenon” of “globalism” in an obvious refer-
ence to globalization, Brown does not make the distinction consistently,
though.26 However, as more than one critic has suggested, globalism is to
globality and globalization what modernism is to modernity and modern-
ization and postmodernism is to postmodernity and postmodernization,
respectively. My preference, then, is to look at globalism first mainly as a
cosa mentale. To me, it represents, more than any other member of the
global series, primarily a subjective, reflexive-evaluative position, possibly
the rudiments of another “ism.” It denotes an attitude or mode of perceiving
things “in global perspective,” a life philosophy and an epistemological
stance toward a global conglomerate wherein the parts communicate and
must face up to their interdependence. In the last sentence’s italicized word,
some stress the adjective as referencing a thoroughly solidified totality—a
globally “saturated” world—whereas others, of the localist, anti-, and alter-
globalist (altermondialiste) persuasion, point up the noun’s dynamism and
how the possibilities harbored therein are hampered by the world qua
globe. In Robertson’s middle-of-the-road assessment, this philosophy and
epistemology would leave room both for globalist “relativism”—a sense that
cultures are “bound-up”—and for “worldism,” which he sums up as “the
claim that it is possible and, indeed, desirable to grasp the world as a whole
analytically” while keeping in mind that no “reference t[o] the dynamics of
the entire ‘world-system’” can afford to lose sight of the complexities, con-
tradictions, and other asystemic features that might leap at us whenever we
do not ground the analysis too strictly in a “world-systemic, economic
realm.”27
Globalization. If “globe” is a systemic, world totality and “globalism” the “vi-

sion thing” underpinning and overlaying, promoting, and conceptualizing
this ensemble, globalization is the historical evolution through which both
have come into existence. Lopsided, scarcely affecting all people and places
with the same force or in the same fashion, its benefits unevenly distributed,
darkly ambiguous and self-contradictory, globalization is both structurally

and historically controversial, and, since the “how” and “what” of
globalization—how it has come about and evolved across time and what it
signifies today—are impossible to tackle separately, some discussion of glo-
balization history and historiography is in order.
Here, the main split is between those who take a Braudelian “long view”
of the phenomenon and those who deem it more recent. The divide roughly
corresponds to, and therefore bears addressing alongside, another schism
among global studies critics, which pits those who see globalization nega-
tively against those who look at it, also with some approximation, positively.
There are, I might add, some who have trouble noticing it at all. In Allan
Cochrane and Kathy Pain’s taxonomy, the “pessimistic globalists” are also
sometimes “traditionalists” like Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson,28
who “believe that globalization is a myth, or at any rate is much exaggerated
as a distinctively new phenomenon.”29 I will touch on such differentiations
very briefly not because the pessimists/traditionalists’ participation in glo-
balization rhetoric has had entirely nugatory effects but because such cate-
gorizations further this discussion as long as they help demarcate the devel-
opments said rhetoric inherently ascribes to the described world, regardless
of the description’s optimism or pessimism, from the worldly transforma-
tions the same rhetoric makes allowances for, beyond the construing pur-
view of its core terminology.
Unsurprisingly, historians too have resorted to this nomenclature as a
kind of lexical placeholder, which has often disabled those discriminations
that would bring into play, inside, outside, across, and possibly against glo-
balization as defined earlier—“totalist” globalization—other globalizing sce-
narios or different worlding categories altogether. If such alternatives or
worlding histories are still awaiting their historians, their cultural historians
in particular, the history of globalization of the totalist sort is better known,
all the more so that, in line with the placeholder logic, it has come to be
known by and large as globalization history tout court. This logic’s moves
remain both questionable and undisclosed. In turn, its lack of disclosure, its
covert semantics, sets up a discursive apparatus in which “globe,” “globaliza-
tion,” and the rest operate rhetorically as abusive synecdoches, namely, by
routinely claiming more than what they account for in reality, by encroach-
ing on other semantic vicinities (“planet,” “world,” “ecumene”/“ecumenical,”
“universal”), or by tacitly annexing them altogether: as used ordinarily, the
global paradigm is intent on monopolizing all worlding phenomena and
their description, in the humanities in particular.
On the other hand, abusive and deceptive as they may be, the paradigm’s
components are not solely hopeless misnomers either, for they are not
purely fictional. They are not inventions but, as I say, “constructions,” and
they are so in mainstream criticism as well as in historical scholarship. So,
while going over various histories of globalization—“globalization,” one is
tempted to write—I for one would like to keep in mind that these narratives
are neither fictions nor factual reports, that they produce, in a quasi-
theatrical sense, globalization as they narrate its historical course, and that
such productions tell as much as they “un-tell,” bring the world’s worlding
record into the historiographical focus as much as they obscure it and keep
it in the wings. Not only are “world history” (“polycentric,” less teleological)
and “global[ization] history” (“economistic,” narratively shaped by Western
standards of progress, and in that both ethnocentric and teleological) not
the same thing, as historians like Bo Stråth rightly insist, but, even if we ac-
cept that world history is a history of worlding, this history can be written
in more than one way.30 This is what planetarity as a “world theory” and the
fictions of planetarity taken up in part 2’s second half strive to accomplish.
And yet, not unlike most critics, many historians have lumped together
the wide range of worlding mutations under the heading of “globalization,”
which, as some argue, has been in full swing for a while now, if not for ages.
Thus, the longue durée perspective of a number of authors influenced by the
French Annales school stresses that modernity had been “globalizing” since
late medieval–early Renaissance times and that it only became conspicu-
ously “global” and thereby lent itself more readily to a “globalist” interpreta-
tion after World War II. These critics’ broad-compass approach spans geo-
graphical and geopolitical units (countries, regions, continents) as much as
historical units (centuries, epochs, periods). Its main concepts are Waller-
stein’s “world-system” and its “stagist” biography. In Wallerstein—and this
gets overlooked frequently—the world-system and the global are not equiv-
alent initially; they would become so in the nineteenth century. Modeled on
the Mediterranean world investigated by Fernand Braudel, the world-
system may have “originated,” as Wallerstein submits in Geopolitics and
Geoculture, “in Europe in the 16th century,” but it gets truly global hundreds
of years later, following several globalizing stages.31
Even critics who reject world-systems theory have tacitly or overtly ad-
opted Wallerstein’s perspective and, selectively or entirely, his “phases.” This
has resulted in the mildly divergent “timings of globalization” offered, at one
end, by historians who push its advent centuries if not millennia further
back, and, at the other, by those who do little more than modify Wallerstein’s
phase brakedown even though they seem aware of the flaws of the long-view
narrative. I spare the reader a rundown of their complaints. I will only say
that, unlike Martin Albrow, I believe our current world situation—global,
planetary, or otherwise—does constitute a “culmination” of events past.
However, and this time in agreement with him, I do not equate those events
nor their remote past of many centuries or even millennia prior to our mod-
ern era with globalization itself, no matter how one defines it, let alone with
globalization in a “strong,” “webbed,” or contemporary sense. Like Albrow, I
do think the process is more recent and, in any case, our immediate present
opens an original chapter in it. I would retain, therefore, Albrow’s hypothesis
of a “Global Age” closer to us and distinguishable in its traits. Yet again, I
would also place its uniqueness within an ampler time framework because
this balances issues of continuity and discontinuity more effectively.32
“Global Age”: “Thick” or “Late” Globalization. Our worldly makeup is not

entirely new. It is new overall. This novelty does have a history, albeit shorter
than some might think, and even a prehistory, possibly longer than others
might fancy. To my mind, the longue durée tack uncovers the latter. The
long view becomes less helpful, though, if, while laying disproportionate
emphasis on occurrences like the Big Bang or the great migrations of the
first centuries AD, it shortchanges the paradigm-setting and epoch-making
role of late twentieth-century genuinely world events—events or event,
rather, the kind that reveals its Foucauldian “extreme point of singularity”
or unique “presence” across the phantasmatic cycle of repetitive occur-
rences and, in so doing, marks off a present moment from other presents,
past or future.33
In this “eventful” and singularizing sense, numerous historians have con-
cluded that the “global era” or “age” proper begins, with some approxima-
tion, after 1989 and is the stage of “thick” globalization. The latter arrives on
the heels of a set of quantitatively and qualitatively largely unprecedented
developments. What came before 1989 was, we are told, “looser,” less tech-
nologized and webbed, less conspicuous, slower, more region-focused—in a
nutshell, “thin” globalization. What goes on after is increasingly, if far from
completely, systemic, more technology-driven and networked, growingly
cross-regional, more fast-paced, “in-your-face,” and superiorly marked by
the cultural, economic, and military presence of the United States in the
world. With these historians, and setting philosophical and terminological
differences aside once again, I place the transition from a less to a notably
more worlded if inevitably messier world in the geopolitically and techno-
culturally determining interval between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, to
be more exact, between late fall 1989 and late December 1991, when the for-
mer USSR officially expired. Thus, 1989 is, to me also, what “mondialization”
critic Jean-Pierre Warnier would call une année charnière. Two centuries af-
ter the 1789 French Revolution, arguably modernity’s political kickoff, 1989
is the “hinge” on which turns the door opening onto “thick,” “revved-up,” or
late globalization.34 This year marks our entering the later phase of a mo-
mentous shift away from a world, by comparison, still “cubicular”—Pierre
Chaunu’s univers cloisonné—to one experienced and conceptualized as an
incrementally all-pervasive “network.”35
§9. The Rise of the Netosphere

I am emphasizing a new reality that can be summarized in very
simple terms: In the age of globalization the relationship with the
Other has become more fundamental than ever.
—Dominique Moïsi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of
Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the World
Our newly interdependent global society, with its remarkable
possibilities for linking people around the planet, gives us the
material basis for a new ethic.
—Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization
“20 Years of Collapse” reads the title of the op-ed Slavoj Žižek published in
the November 9, 2009, issue of the New York Times, on the twentieth anni-
versary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. A cynical headline, to say the
least. No matter how critical one is of what has followed 1989, the year sig-
nals, in Berlin and worldwide—urbi et orbi—a radical reshuffling of time,
space, and life across a world less and less held back and compartmental-
ized by the disassociative logic of the Cold War and modernity generally
and more and more pulled together by a logic of connectiveness,36 and it is
in this sense that, as Jameson writes, “[r]adical alternatives, systemic trans-
formations, cannot be theorized or even imagined within the conceptual
field governed by the word ‘modern.’”37 On many levels, the Berlin Wall’s
fall—an eminently world-systemic, transforming event—heralds both the
world’s “fall into relation” and the relation’s fall into the world. The ensuing
“postlapsarian” regime of existence ontologizes relation, and this ontology
gets more ecumenical in scope every day. Under the sway of this ontology,
being in the world reveals itself as being-with-an-other—Miteinandersein,
in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit—more powerfully than ever.38 The human is,
fully, as relational embodiment. In what they do, in how they respond to the
world, in how they see it and themselves, people behave, willingly or less so,
as vehicles, receptacles, agents, and objects of a highly complex, existential,
cultural, and intellectual relationality. They think relationally, correlatively,
“in context,” with the world as that context or cogitative framework, and act
relationally too, steadily using, testing, and building up the world’s rela-
tional structure and way of being—the netosphere.39 The “networked” imag-
ination and behavior—the netospherical—is now officially part and parcel
of the “human phenomenon,” to recall Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.40
Slightly paronymous to Teilhard de Chardin’s Neoplatonist-Thomist
“noosphere” (from nóos, the Ancient Greek for “mind,” “understanding,”
and “reason”), the netosphere designates a complex reality, also somewhat
parallel to Teilhard’s treatment of the noospherical as a sign of planetary
integration or “planetarization” (planétisation).41 A technological and bio-
cultural incorporation of world-systemic rationality, relationality become
world, this is more than a state of mind although its sphericalness—
ominously suggestive, as we know, of physical and political completion—is
metaphorical rather than indicative of the existence of an actual “global
public sphere.”42 But the netosphere’s unevenness does not exclude a mate-
rial actuality. This accrues across a relational spectrum that includes both
the “hard,” geocommunicational and commercial kind known to humanity
for millennia, as well as “softer” varieties consisting of recent, visibly and
invisibly routed, wired, “knotted,” “clouded,” and otherwise digitalized,
traced, and politically and economically mapped cyberspace, complete
with its connections, itineraries, channels, languages, encoding systems,
and the novel forms of sociality they enable. However, what we are talking
about when we talk about the new world in a netospherical sense is essen-
tially unparalleled density and extensiveness of connectedness, of what re-
lates, joins, and binds together often above, across, and, as I have said,
against ordinary, nation- state-territorialized and akin administrative-
epistemological units, bonds, ties, and allegiances. Classical relations work
predominantly in the immediate vicinity of those thus related (typically by
blood, location, and language) and connected, woven together, and often-
times tied down into a Gemeinschaft type of collective. Primarily world-
systemic, netospherical relations function through and over space, from a
distance. Relationally, our world still has to reach a saturation point; this is
why the “sphere” in the netospherical is an approximation, a trope more
than anything else. In its imperfection, it is nonetheless rendering the
world, day in and day out, a cultural geography of distance management, a
spectacle of orchestrated intervals and charting vectors across and by which

people position and reposition themselves in relation with one another.
Absolutely vital to freedom, to difference, and to genuine pluralism, the
interval, the limit, and the singularities effectively or allegedly protected
this or that side of various borders and fences prior to the collapse lamented
by Žižek are, indisputably, as important if not more important in a world
whose continuum is much less interrupted by divides like the Berlin Wall
and in which the connection, the nexus, the relay, and the intermeshing of
lives and human expressions over all sorts of gaps have become the onto-
cultural norm. “You wonder,” writes Mukherjee in The Tree Bride, “if every-
one and everything in the world is intimately related. . . . You pluck a thread
and it leads to . . . everywhere.” And she goes on to ask: “Is there a limit to
relatedness?”43
Yes, would reply Bish, The Tree Bride’s telecommunication “mystic,”
there is one: “death.” And this is where it gets tricky. This is also where
planetary studies and the planetary paradigm, fluid and disciplinarily un-
structured as they are, come in: as a reaction to the rather unconvincing
effort within globalization criticism to get a handle on relation, more spe-
cifically, not on its presence as such in the worldly, netospherical sense,
but on what it does or, better still, on what it can and should do, on what
it could mean beyond the commonplaces piling up in the gargantuan bib-
liography already available. For, it became pretty evident, to the point of
banality, that the global, its “age,” and world-changing processes were
quintessentially and intensely relational, that, one way or the other, from
finance and economics to travel, leisure, research, and online education,
they come down to a high-density, steadily widening phenomenology of
relations. Relatedness had been indeed pivotal to our world, and it had
been looking the part too, with a vengeance. And so, to many, it had been
perhaps too obvious, too intimately embroidered in the world’s neto-
spherical girdle not to be taken for granted and dealt with as a matter of
course, at the level of the superficial mechanics easily available, one might
think, to the naked eye. Thus, the favorite approach to it had been techni-
cal and economic (not to say “economistic”). This means less that its stu-
dents had focused exclusively on technological relations and more that
they had been happy to give an account of its nuts-and-bolts workings in
industrial, commercial, and entertainment sites, in the light style of the
celebratory jet-setting reportage whose market niche had been quickly
claimed by Pico Iyer, Thomas L. Friedman, and other global writers of
neoliberal persuasion.44
The case against their uncritical enthusiasms has been made. I have
made it too, and I do not think repeating myself here would be a good time
investment.45 I will say, though, that, if authors like Iyer and Friedman be-
came very controversial very fast, it also happened because their narratives
seldom cut through the technical to the political and, more generally, to the
ethical. It is not that all their reports were ill-informed or disingenuous.
They were incomplete, and not merely because they did not have the where-
withal to look around patiently or impartially enough and thus do justice to
the omnipresence of the relational in the world’s life, but because they
seemed less sensitive to relationality’s hand in the world’s life and death.
Bish’s answer hardly holds up to scrutiny, in fact. Relation and death do not
make up a clear-cut dichotomy. Relation is not opposite to death the way
life is in their more hackneyed accounts. “Limited” by death and its delete-
rious manifestations in the world—destruction, fanaticism, exploitation,
environmental degradation, trade inequities and other chronic forms of
violence and injustice—relation is inherently shaped both by life and death.
Relation, one’s link to another place, one’s ties and access to other worlds
can be equally life-giving and life-threatening, nurturing and baleful, em-
powering and disenfranchising. Instituting a fundamental ethical amphib-
ology, this “can,” this potentiality, is or has the capacity of being at once
emboldening and forbidding. It bodes well for the future as much as invites
harangues of the “20 Years of Collapse” sort if not outright Stalinist nostal-
gias (unsurprisingly, also featured in Žižek’s repertoire). In opening up the
global play of connective rationality, this potenza destabilizes and multi-
plies the meaning of relation and, by the same movement, challenges us to
stabilize, to construe relational ontosemantics—what relationality does or
may be able to do and stand for in the netospherical world—into an ethical
reading, namely, into an interpretation at once descriptive and prescriptive,
sound analytically as well as indicative of a vision for the world commons
and of an authentic commitment to that worldview.46 Hyperrelational in its
unstable and highly ambivalent phenomenology, the netosphere is thus
both a reality and a provocation.
II
§10. Planetary Studies

[L]iterature and literary studies now have one basis and goal: to
nurture our common bonds to the planet.
—Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity,
and Totality”
Responding to this provocation, planetary criticism brings us to a cross-

roads in the history of critical theory. It is noteworthy, though, that when,
in his 1994 Théorèmes poétiques, French polymath Basarab Nicolescu
pressed into service his planetarily and cosmically minded “vision of the
world”47 to open up the modern concept of territorially-politically and
culturally- disciplinarily circumscribed discourse, the “planetary” series
(“planetarized,” “planetarization,” etc.) had been part of the conversation in
the arts and the humanities for some time but not as an approach-or field-
specific vocabulary. Thus, “planet” was a cosmo-theological and mystic-
esoteric concept à la Teilhard de Chardin and Jean D’Argoun, who also talks
about a “planetary transformation” (mutation planétaire);48 another name
for Gaia and thus part of a spiritual-environmentalist movement that later,
in alliance with a spectacularly resurgent cosmopolitanism, will take up
“terrapolitan” forms;49 or, most frequently, and inside global studies, a vari-
ously qualified synonym to “cosmos,” “cosmopolitan,” “earth,” “ecumene”
and “ecumenical,” “world” and “world-systemic,” and so on. More fre-
quently, globalization studies conflated “planet” and “globe,” a confusion
that persists today.
Among Nicolescu’s more influential precursors, albeit not in his area,
Wallerstein has not been keen on the distinction either. Neither “planet”
nor “globe” appeals to him. In The Modern World-System,”“globe” is barely
used, the author’s disclaimer notwithstanding. Likewise, World-Systems
Analysis mentions “globalization” just once, at the end, and, characteristi-
cally of worlds-systems rhetoric itself, only to dismiss the term offhand as a
rhetorical maneuver of neoliberalism.50 As early as the first volume of The
Modern World-System (1974), the economics historian seemed particular to
“world” instead and, to a much lesser degree, “cosmos” and “cosmology,”
which he described as “the study of the functioning of the system as a
whole” and deployed to work out a geoeconomic framework, a hermeneu-
tic “totality distinguished” from “completeness,”51 and a political “utopis-
tics” or future, world-scale, material-affective arrangements in which par-
ticularisms would restore “the universal reality of liberty and equality.”52
However, “cosmos” and its family, far from running out of steam, gained
significant momentum with Yi-Fu Tuan’s Cosmos and Hearth, Gérard Rau-
let’s Critical Cosmology, which counters Americanizing “neo-universalism”
with a citizenship notion intersecting multiple national traditions, Félix
Guattari’s “chaosmotic,” “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” (Chaosmose), Anne
Phillips’s valiant endeavor to rebuild multiculturalism according to a “cos-
mic” rather than “discrete-cultures” scheme (Multiculturalism without Cul-

ture), and other similar, late 1990s–early 2000s interventions.53
In hindsight, this looks like a significant and logical transition. For, on
the one hand, the planetary is a celestial subheading as Earth, a cosmic body
and part of a megasystem whose systematicity the planet carries over into its
own, intra-planetary constitution. On the other hand, some literary and cul-
tural theorists felt that the cosmos remained an exceedingly broad, fuzzy
category: too “physicalist” as an astronomical notion, too spiritualist, aes-
theticist (“cosmetic”), too “mechanicist” as (logical) “Order” and therefore
too “timeless” (even when compared to “globe”), too “unspecific” from the
standpoint of an “intermediate” (Nicolescu), anthropologically and histori-
cally meaningful scalarity, and so too nebulous semantically not to lend itself
both to disembodied metaphysical speculation and scientific-rationalist
colonization.54 Thus, Elias is right to note that “the planetary model” and the
new “chronotope” it has provided to the arts and their interpretation were
“opposed to the dehumanizing context of cosmic space constructed by sci-
ence and then, as a metaphor for the cybernetic, to scientific rationality.”55
“Cosmos” has somewhat stabilized semantically in two emerging para-
digms, both of them outgrowths of global studies. One is cosmopolitanism,
which is not so much an “ism” but the social, political, and moral philoso-
phy built around a cosmopolite’s view of the world and the scholarship
sponsored by this philosophy, namely, (neo)cosmopolitan studies. As is
well known, the cosmopolitan has, in the West and elsewhere, a long and
contested biography. This is the multimillennial life story of a highly com-
plex, metaphysical, moral, and cosmological idea; of a set of sociocultural
and aesthetic practices; and, lately, of a full-blown critical methodology
with ethical, political, and anthropological ramifications. One way or the
other, all these still feed off and communicate with older and broader con-
cepts, ideologies, moments, and movements such as classical or more re-
cent humanism, the Enlightenment, modernity, modernization, urbaniza-
tion, colonization, decolonization, and globalization. With some of these or
with darker episodes thereof like Nazism and Communism—Soviet-and
Chinese-style alike, pre-and post–World War II, when people would be
sent to various gulags and laogai camps on “cosmopolitan” charges—
cosmopolitanism’s basic tenets have been openly and commendably at log-
gerheads. However, in other instances, old and new, one can pinpoint em-
barrassing, “culturocentric,” and hence ironically “provincializing”
complicities, which no longer warrant an unqualified use of the term. Con-
sequently, what distinguishes overall post–Cold War cosmopolitan criti-

cism from an earlier scholarship centered on the notion is that the former
has gone out of its way to localize, pluralize, and “culturalize” the cosmo-
politan paradigm.56 As a result, these days we are talking about cosmopoli-
tanisms, most of which are “committed,” ready to acknowledge cosmopoli-
tanism’s variations and contradictions across centuries and places but also
to reenergize it politically through revisionary and eclectic approaches that
absorb inventively elements of cultural, identity, and postcolonial studies.
The cosmopolitan has thus indeed proven recyclable into a critical model.
(Neo)cosmopolitan scholars have found the model empowering analyti-
cally in a contemporary world that, in spite of its incongruities, disparities,
incomplete national projects, and fundamentalist nostalgias, does make
available a stage for new cosmopolitan venues, sodalities, worldviews, and
discourses. It must be said also, though, that, outside the circle of true cos-
mopolitan believers (most of them sociologists), a great deal of skepticism
about the language, methodology, concrete outcomes, and even about the
timing of their undertaking persists. Never in short supply, anti-
cosmopolitan rebuttals feature, now as in decades past, references to elit-
ism, classism, ethnocentrism, utopianism, a-topianism (the old “view from
nowhere” charge), snobbism, non-and even anti-communitarianism, uni-
versalism, and so forth. On the whole, Robert Fine is right on target: “Even
if cosmopolitanism becomes stuck at the level of conceptual thinking, it
remains superior to a criticism that has no understanding of the concept
and sees in world history nothing but power, self-interest[,] and contin-
gency.”57 The comment does allow, however, that even if most of cosmo-
politanism’s rap sheet evinces the prosecution’s ignorance in the matter,
today’s cosmopolitan critics are nonetheless struggling to come up with the
most effective ways of presenting themselves and their project.
The other paradigm is planetary studies. As a philosophically and astro-
nomically informed concept, the cosmos also appealed to certain critics,
who, despite its abstractness, mined it for fertile, ecological-culturological
and even political-ethical tropes, which in turn paved the way to “planet,”
its lexical constellation, and the more theoretically individualizing claims
made around them.58 Among those scholars, Masao Miyoshi was probably
the first to ground programmatic, manifestly “epochalist,” and epistemo-
logical contentions in what he saw as a veritable and inevitable planetary
Paradigmenwechsel. In his 2001 article “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Di-
versity, and Totality,” he observes that a change of historical proportions
had been afoot since the mid-1980s. Further, as Neil Turnbull would ven-
ture in his own Copernican pronouncements five years thereafter, this
change had “heighten[ed] the conceptual importance of the earth” across
all forms and arenas of material and cultural practice.59 Turnbull rightly
reminds us that “[t]he premodern idea of the earth as ‘the centre’ of the
cosmos did not, contrary to popular belief, suggest that ‘the earth’ was an
important concept, either spiritually or politically. In medieval cosmology,
the earth was given this position, not because [the earth] was the most, but
because it was the least significant entity.”60
The shift has been described often in terms of high-gear globalization
and global age. Both are “exclusionist,” Miyoshi propounds, insofar as the
interconnectedness driving them is underpinned by global economics. In
his opinion, to be genuinely global is to be inclusive, which the global is not.
Actually, globalism falls short of its own, stated agenda. Its problem or par-
adoxical excess, says Miyoshi, is a structural insufficiency, and so the global
world is found wanting; it is indeed global—shared in, lucrative, accessible,
enjoyable—but only for those for whom relatedness operates beneficially.
Thus, the globalized world is not, nor is likely to beget, a “true totality that
includes everyone.” Neither is, for the purpose of this inclusiveness, “the
return to the nation-state” a realistic solution. “There is,” however, accord-
ing to Miyoshi, “one such core site for organizing such an inclusiveness,
though entirely negative at present: the future of the global environment.
For the first time in human history, one single commonality involves all
those living on the planet: environmental deterioration as a result of the
human consumption of natural resources. Whether rich or poor, in the East
or the West, progressive or conservative, religious or atheist, none of us can
escape from the all-encompassing process of air pollution, ozone layer de-
pletion, ocean contamination, toxic accumulation, and global warming.”61
Acknowledging this “total commonality” as the premise for “map[ping] out
our world and [for] engag[ing] in research and scholarship” leads to the
recognition that
literature and literary studies now have one basis and goal: to nurture
our common bonds to the planet—to replace the imaginaries of exclu-
sionary familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture,
regionalism, “globalization,” or even humanism, with the ideal of plan-
etarianism. Once we accept this planet-based totality, we might for once
agree in humility to devise a way to share with all the rest our only true
public space and resources.62
As one can notice, the global is concurrently ascertained (as “environment”)

and rebuffed. It is, we saw, an assuming totality—a pseudototality, more
bluntly put—whose flaw is not, thinks Miyosi, its inherent totalism but, to
the contrary, the failure to achieve a real totality, an “allness” in which all
could equally participate. Should that achievement occur, it would happen
in a future whose seeds can be sown once we have “reimagine[d] our com-
mon and universal culture, as we have never done in our common history.”63
Totality and universalism; humanism; ethno-national identitarianism;
and, more generally, cultural difference seized, ironically enough, not un-
like the global itself, that is, as “exclusionary,” a wrench jamming the works
of the internationalism required by the daunting job at hand: this is the
kind of language Spivak and other planetary studies proponents are not
very comfortable with. Also intent on “us[ing] the planetary—if such a
thing can be used!—to control globalization interruptively, to locate the im-
perative in the indefinite radical alterity of the other space of [the] planet[,]
to deflect the rational imperative of capitalist globalization,” and thus “to
displace dialogics into this set of contradictions,” Spivak had already made
clear, two years before Miyoshi’s article, her uneasiness with the leveling,
totalist-universalist legacy of Western rationalism whether in economic
globalism or in cultural analysis.64 In her view, life on the planet is or must
be “lived as the call of the wholly other.” If we lead it that way, then “we must
also think” of our living “Space” or “individual home as written on the
planet as planet,” in other words, across a “cosmopolitheia” in which the
planet as astronomical body and astronomy more broadly are no more than
a “defracted view of ethics” and where, accordingly, “Space” must be capital-
ized because it is another name for “alterity.”65
Highlighting planetary studies’ reorientation inside, against, and even-
tually away from global studies, the emphasis on ethics will remain charac-
teristically crucial to the planetarity project. To quote Spivak’s 1999 essay
title, “the Imperative to Re-imagine the Planet” is profoundly ethical—and,
I might add, inevitably ethical insofar as the reorientation in question acti-
vates relationality and, subsequently, the problematic of otherness. An up-
shot of the “planet-as-planet” notion, the Spivakian “imperative” is, unlike
Miyoshi’s, non-totalist because the ontologized relatedness built into it and
its ontology largely conceived stand on, and reaffirm, a Levinasian, non-
rationalizing ethics of alterity. In warranting descriptions of relational ar-
rangements, planetary ontology by the same token calls—this time around,
like in Miyoshi and deliberately at variance with globalist arrogance—for
humility, sharing, and other ways of owning up to the otherness that made
relationality possible in the first place. Also in indirect reaction to Miyoshi,
specifically to his admission that a planetarily minded research is still a
nebulous concept,66 Spivak’s 2003 Death of a Discipline takes the next step
by offering up, farther and farther away from the epistemologically patron-
izing and analytically confusing proximity of “global” and “globalization,”
the “planetary” as a remedy to the protracted crisis in comparative litera-
ture and cultural studies generally. To this day, this slim volume has re-
mained a milestone in planetary studies. While below (§11 and §12) I take
exception to some of the implications of Death of a Discipline’s argument, I
find the book’s emphasis on ethics quite salutary.
Since Spivak’s turn-of-the-millennium interventions, the planet, plane-
tary, and their lexical-methodological cognates have made inroads into dis-
ciplines and debates old and new: globalization studies with various foci
and political-theoretical leanings from neoliberalism to antiglobalization;
trans-and postnationalism; ecocriticism, (neo)cosmopolitanism, their
“eco-cosmopolitan” cross (Ursula K. Heise), and related, systems-theory-
based studies of “planetary autopoiesis” that, according to Bruce Clarke,
pays attention to both “micro” and “macro” systemic modalities, a critical
sensitivity also instrumental to my project;67 “planetary thought” (Planeten-
denken) inquiries of the kind pursued by the late Sonja A. J. Neef in her
fascinating yet unfinished 2013 study Der babylonische Planet (The Babylo-
nian planet) at the intersection of cosmopolitanism, translation studies,
and Spivak’s ethical distinction between global totality (Globus) and the
planet (Planet) understood as world committed to its “others” (Welt-
Anderen);68 “world risk society sociology” (Beck) and “network society”
economics and communication theory (Manuel Castells); human rights,
ethics, and world governance; the “empire”/“new commons” critique of
Deleuzian-Guattarian persuasion in the Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
vein; studies of (post)ethnicity and “voluntary affiliation” à la David Hol-
linger; some approaches within postcolonialism, drawn by the challenge a
planetary scope of discussion poses to the old colony/metropolis binary
(Paul Gilroy); new comparatism, world literature (David Damrosch, John
Pizer, Pascale Casanova, Apter, Hayot), “planetary literary history” (Frances
Ferguson), studies of genre as a world-system formation (Franco Moretti,
Wai Chee Dimock), and “global modernism.” Speaking directly to the
growing role played by the planetary as an analytic metaphor are also the
rise of larger topo-interpretive units, fields, and concerns in comparative
cultural studies and the advent of geocriticism as a whole. Just a few exam-
ples from a recent and much longer list in which vaster spaces, world spati-
ality itself as a critical problem, liminal zones, and critical grids take center
stage would include Christopher Schedler’s Border Modernism (2002); Ste-
phen Clingman’s The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the
Nature of the Boundary (2009); Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and espe-
cially Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), and the transatlantic cosmopolitan-
ism reconstituted by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor in their Transat-
lantic Literary Studies (2007) and by Kwame Anthony Appiah in
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) and elsewhere; the
contributions to Hemispheric American Studies edited by Caroline Field
Levander and Robert S. Levine (2008); Yunte Huang’s books, chiefly Trans-
pacific Displacement (2002), Apter’s The Translation Zone (2006), and Julio
Ortega’s 2003 article “Transatlantic Translations”; Paul Jay’s Global Matters:
The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (2010); the Spring 2003 Modern
Fiction Studies special- topic issue on the “trans- American imaginary,”
guest-edited by Paula M. L. Moya and Ramón Saldivar. On geocriticism,
topocultural spatiality, and the geopolitical interpretation of literature and
art, worth calling attention to are Jameson’s earlier book The Geopolitical
Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992), Gearóid Ó Tu-
athail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge’s The Geopolitics Reader (1998),
Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s anthology Geomodernisms: Race, Mod-
ernism, Modernity (2005), Caren Irr’s Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S.
Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Paul Giles’s Antipodean America:
Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (2014), Dominique Moïsi,
La Géopolitique de l’émotion (2009), and Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Geocritical Ex-
plorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (2011).
Tally is also the English translator of Bertrand Westphal’s La Géocritique:
Réel, Fiction, Espace (2007), the field’s founding text. Peter Sloterdijk’s
Spheres series is part of this trend too. I would also list here scholars such as
Peter Singer, Lawrence Buell, Susan Stanford Friedman, Elias, Mary Louise
Pratt, Leerom Medovoi, Mary Lou Emery, Tariq Jazeel, Joni Adamson,
Mark Poster, and Min Hyoung Song. Over the last decade, these “planetary
critics” have been relying consistently and characteristically on the planet as
a platform for fresh analysis.69 With them, in particular with the work put
out recently by Dimock, Heise, Apter, Moretti, Westphal, Irr, Hayot, and
Susan Stanford Friedman, planetary criticism has reached critical mass. In-
deed, we may be witnessing at this point a sweeping “planetary turn.”70
§11. “World” Reloaded

This means that, historically co-articulated with the global lexicon and con-
cerns as it has been, the planet model may be, at last, well positioned to
fulfill Spivak’s dream and “interrupt” or “overwrite the globe” across disci-
plines. Such critical operation would supplant, throughout the humanities,
globalization and globality by planetarization and planetarity, the global
world-system by the planet’s own system—“which,” Spivak underscores,
“we inhabit . . . on loan”—“global agents” by “planetary subjects,”71 and glo-
balism’s rationality by planetary relationality72 or “planet-thought.”73
I propose that, to complete this sequence of terminological-rhetorical,
epistemological, and ethical- political displacements, renegotiate if not
sever altogether its ties with the discourse of globalization, and possibly
usher in a planetary, “postglobal age”74 in literary-cultural analysis, this
thought first must formulate a planetary paradigm sufficiently emancipated
rhetorically and theoretically from the global. The latter’s tutelage is still
visible in Spivak, who routinely couches the planetary project in a language
of cumbersome derivativeness. In her work, the global supplies the ground
and the continuum, the metaphysical Grund and the sociocultural surface.
Even when they are “written over” and “interrupted,” or perhaps especially
when they are so, these tend to render such “oppositional” gestures mere
accretions, accidents, and exceptions to an otherwise minimally impacted,
and hence reconfirmed, status quo whose “overwriting” turns out to under-
write it. Now, unable neither to step outside the historical context that made
it possible in the first place nor, more specifically, to unwrite its own rela-
tional genealogy, the planetary is not likely to shed its derivative skin com-
pletely either. This guilt by association, this onto-conceptual hubris, should
be recognized too. To the extent that it also rests on the relational, the plan-
etary both critiques and gives the global, or at least a part or aspect of it, a
new lease on life: reminiscent of deconstruction’s innermost aporia, this has
been and will ever be its double bind. While the objective of the planetary
with respect to the global remains emancipatory and even oppositional, the
planet and the globe do not make up a crude opposition other than rhe-
torically, despite the impression critics like Spivak might leave. As Emery
admits, the “planetary” is “[n]either equivalent to the global nor opposed to
it.”75 The global-planetary connection is somewhat symbiotic, and the idea
is to revamp it critically, to remake it into a truly critical symbiosis. Like
postmodernism, which, in its best aesthetic, theoretical, and philosophical
instantiations, did manage to speak against the dominant languages it had

to speak (mimic, parody, creolize) in order to speak at all, planetarism can
and has to ransom itself conceptually while rescuing the global, wholly or
partly, from itself in the bargain.
To do so, “planet-thought” needs to “reload” (rethink) the world plane-
tarily. That is, along the lines of my argument thus far, planetarism must
appropriate the global’s netospheric idiom of relationality so as to re-
reinscribe critically—more precisely, ethically—the world qua reality, de-
scriptive language thereof, and project. I attempt this appropriation, this
ethical conceptualization of the planetary and, by the same movement, re-
worlding of the world as planet, in the remainder of this part by fleshing out
“planetarism” and the rest of the planet paradigm. Similarly sketchy, the
outline of the “planet” and its cognates following right below parallels
roughly the item-by-item presentation of the global set of terms so as to
create a starker contrast and thus weave philosophical-historical issues and
interpretive considerations into a better- defined and more productive
theoretical-analytic model. Of course, such theorizations, if meaningful,
have to pass the test of critical practice. To that end, thinking of planetary
persuasion must come up with an apposite interpretive methodology, with
a modality of reading aesthetic and cultural “symptoms” of planetarity. As I
show in this book’s second half, the workings of this modality or critical
apparatus are germane to the planetary ethics of relationality.
§12. “Globe” into “Planet”

[A]n interlude of togetherness . . .
—Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
Introducing the key concepts of Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy confesses

in the book’s preface that he has “opted for . . . ‘planetarity’ over the more
familiar notion of ‘globalization’ because those regularly confused terms,
‘planetary’ and ‘global’—which do point to some of the same varieties of
social phenomena—resonate quite differently.” In his estimation, planet and
its adjective, the planetary, “sugges[t] both contingency and movement.”
They “specif[y] a smaller scale than the global, which transmits all the tri-
umphalism and complacency of ever-expanding imperial universals.”76
Drawing from Postcolonial Melancholia, Carl Schmitt’s controversial The
Nomos of the Earth, and Hardt and Negri’s three-volume opus on global-
era multitudes, Min Hyoung Song concurs that “[t]here is . . . something
sovereign about what gets signified by globalization, a nomos that divides,

restricts, hierarchizes, and criminalizes. It is a royal epistemology, a stria-
tion.” “Planetarity, then,” Song concludes, “might be thought of as a differ-
ent order of connection, an interrelatedness that runs along smooth sur-
faces, comprises multitudes, and manifests movement.”77
Tentative in certain places, arbitrary elsewhere, passages like these cap-
ture the dominant tone in a field still struggling to set its conceptual bound-
aries. The critics presume that the planetary “suggests” this while the global
“transmits” that (the opposite). The actual demonstration is, here and in
other commentators, by and large lacking (why and how exactly does the
planetary “specif[y] a smaller scale than the global”?). Instead, it outsources
its reasoning labor to cavalier speculations on the supposedly self-evident
global semantics gelled in the global discourse that otherwise planetary
criticism professes to displace. Drawing from global phenomena or aspects
of global phenomena whose critique proved incontrovertibly legitimate,
this discourse’s rhetoric of ominous totality has virtually condemned the
global, in the sense, if you will, in which neglect or abuse might condemn a
building. Unredeemingly compromised as both object and language, as
what it can represent in the transnational world and as critical representa-
tion thereof, the global as such, construed so uniformly “monological” de-
spite protests by Ramazani and others, has nonetheless all but globalized
discursively if not ontologically.78 Rejected in toto and as a maleficent to-
tum, the global has returned the compliment by casting the shadow of its
rhetorical “totality” onto the whole field. Via critics’ work, and—supreme
irony—against this work’s anti-neoliberal and antiglobalization grain, it has
taken over the world of globalization studies if not over the world itself,
homogenizing both the discourse of the world (by indirectly validating a
single worlding narrative) and the world of discourse (by assigning, also
indirectly, a single, totalist signified to “globe” and its relatives). Under-
standably enough under such circumstances, Gilroy, Song, Spivak, and oth-
ers think they have no choice but to write the global off altogether. It is not
on its terrain, we are told, not on this compromised ground, on the ruins of
the condemned dwelling, that the planetary project can be founded, even
though the very ambition to “overwrite” the planetary, to lay, palimpsest-
like, the critical writing of planetarity over globality, practically predicates
the former on the latter.
The palimpsest trope might help elucidate and perhaps work out the
predicament. Wish as it may to start from a clean slate, “planet-thought”
will always be an overlay: historically, it makes, as we have seen, for a global
studies development; ontologically, the planetary, its central concept, is, like
the global, a worlding possibility, a netospherical formation, although a na-
scent one, unlike the global, whose histories, contentious and schematic as
many of them are, span centuries if not millennia. To my mind, an acknowl-
edgment of both ties, as well as of the antecedences and filiations woven
into them, is more fruitful than a vainglorious attempt to start from scratch.
Or, to put it differently, the planetary project can try and scrape the global
ontology off the sheet on which it strives to reinscribe the world, but it
should embark on this operation fully aware that the relational, the very
woof and warp of that ontology, will stick and eventually show through,
rendering any planetary reinscription of the world an onto-intertextual af-
fair. Furthermore, the world’s un-scription as globe and reinscription as
planet—the world’s “deglobalization” and subsequent “planetarization”—is
possible, in fact becomes even more feasible once it recognizes its palimp-
sestic condition, namely, the preexisting language, the relational idiom it
has to speak so it can speak, and write, the world differently, into new rela-
tional arrangements and consequences. As argued previously, “globe” and
“planet” are both relational scripts. These scripts set in motion relational
processes through which the world is “worlding,” but, depending on the
relationality type they ultimately afford in the rising “worlded” world, they
can bring about either “globalization” as defined (and indicted) by preva-
lent rhetoric or “planetarization.”
This relational type, the actual content and outcome of being- in-
relation—otherwise a very abstract notion—hinges on relatedness manage-
ment. Under the auspices of “globalization,” this management is indeed
quasi managerial quite often and, more broadly, falls under the purview of
economics, finance, technology (primarily informatics), media, and com-
munication. Driven by profit-taking, this handling of relation is orches-
trated and understood in terms that rationalize the relational by subordi-
nating it to a lucrative rationality interested— we are informed either
appreciatively or depreciatively, as the case may be—in the non-lucrative,
the (apparently) gratuitous, the nonpareil, the exception, the idiomatic, the
ambiguous, the elusive, and ultimately in the cultural itself just as long as
they can be co-opted into the computing scheme that totals as much as it
totalizes, squeezing the world’s face into the unethical—simplifying, reduc-
tively explanatory—framework, chart, diagram, or any other data analysis
format.
If the whole point is, as Reading for the Planet basically contends, to
scrutinize this face— to work out the worlding world’s aspects and
expressions—then another relational concept, and approach thereto, is re-

quired, which would re-world the world into planet by resetting the neto-
sphere ethically rather than by discarding it. But how can we rethink being-
in-relation beyond the nationalist, imperialist, and, of late, globalist nexus,
beyond the relational logos that, for such a long time, has underlain the
main form of linking up here and there, self and other, ours and theirs? And
how are we, artists and critics, to embark on such a radical rebuilding of our
epistemologies and deontologies so as to deal with the surging availability
of the imaginary museum, of the planetary archive, of sites of life and cul-
ture suddenly handy, vulnerable, ready to be annexed, googled, disembed-
ded and disemboweled, exposed, toured, and sampled, intertextually used
and commercially abused? Can we even “stop and think” when confronted
with the world’s overwhelming and hyperexposed Heideggerian Bestand?
And, if so, for how long can we put our response off—for how long can we
not look the world squarely in the face? To my mind, neither the old nor the
delayed responses will do.
Proof that the world’s totalizing worlding is not irreversible and that the
globe’s closed geometry is not geoculture’s destiny, the world’s relational re-
set as planet and, by the same token, fresh answers to the questions just
raised are indeed possible. What makes them so, I maintain, is a planetary
counterdiscourse susceptible to rethinking the rationalization of relational-
ity into its contrary, that is, into, or as, a relationalization of rationality.
Once ethicized, the impersonal, defacing, and equivalence-engendering re-
latedness of the netosphere becomes nethospherical and in that particularly
sensitive to formations, workings, and implications of world relationality
that escape or are disadvantaged by the co-opting fury of corporations,
markets, and empires, by the serial, the formulaic, the routine, the “univer-
sal,” the easily or apparently classifiable and profitable. Thus, in counterdis-
tinction to the “globe” and “global,” I define the “planet” and “(the) plane-
tary” as a noun and an attribute, respectively, signifying and qualifying a
fluid, multicentric, plural, and pluralizing worldly structure of relatedness
unfolding in the triple dimension of a geocultural space, discourse modality,
and critical-imaginative framework or episteme, all of which are keyed to
non-totalist, non-homogenizing, and anti-hegemonic operations existentially
as well as culturally cognitive in nature. As such, wherever and whatever the
planet is structurally or ontologically in the world—for it is not the world’s
synonym, as we shall see immediately—it is “in the species of alterity,” viz.,
underpinned and warranted by an ethical infrastructure.79 Deflecting the
equalizing-totalist thrust of a globalization that is both focused on and the-
orized, even critiqued, predominantly, disproportionately perhaps, qua

market, profit, and finance apparatus that “impos[es] the same system of
exchange everywhere,”80 the planetary, because it pivots on otherness, on a
phenomenology of individuation generally, is of necessity neither solely
economic nor simplistically deterministic in its actual links to capital, trade,
and market share nor monological culturally, aesthetically, and otherwise.
As Elias has aptly stressed, its relationality is, nurtures, and, critically speak-
ing, prompts dialogism, and a multiple one at that.81
This also explains why some critics prefer, alongside “planet,” “planetar-
ity,” and their like, the Jean-Luc Nancy–Derrida-backed monde (cf. Latin
mundus), mondiale, and mondialisation. As Apter comments, “Nancy’s
philosophical worlding asks,” indeed, “to be read with Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity.’”82 I will not elaborate on what this entails
because I have done so elsewhere.83 Reinforcing an important point also
made by Apter, I will only repeat that we are not simply dealing with termi-
nological squabbles, and I will also add that this is not a case of ethnolin-
guistic bias either. Major semantic differences are here in play, and they all
follow from the ethos of the planetary “superscript”—from how the planet
reworks relations à rebours, over and against global rhetoric’s inscriptions
of relatedness. Endorsing the mundane concept present in the French phi-
losophers of mondialité, this ethos makes the planet a relationalized rather
than a rationalized system. This has seven major implications.
First, the planet is not an accomplished oneness, an entity accompli
(completed and irrevocably so), a structured, coherently administered, and
measured geopolitical expanse, but a relational world-system at once “cal-
culable and beyond reckoning,” as Herman Rapaport echoes Alain Badiou’s
Being and Event and Logics of Worlds.84
Second, and on this very ground, this system is characterized, both geo-
culturally and epistemologically, by multiplicity, open-endedness, and so-
ciocultural and political potentialities, as Rapaport also glosses.85 The planet
is not a “closed system” properly speaking. Its spatial, shareable finitude only
begins to reveal itself gradually to humans, from outer space or on the
ground, in the second half of the twentieth century. This system is mutating,
and its architecture and meaning do remain exceptionally complex, multi-
farious, topoculturally shifty, and thus “necessarily . . . difficult to define.”86
Third, our world is not a complete system. “The literature around us” is
not already and “unmistakably a planetary system” either, as Moretti
claims.87 But they are both evolving into one. Neither closed nor finished,
neither an attained finitude nor a teleology, the planet is a soft system: young
(surely younger than the global, no matter how one writes globalization’s
biography), evolving and expanding, a world but not the world, a “webbed
interrelatedness”88 covering most of the world but not overlapping with the
world itself. If it is a world-system, the planet is so under the aegis of the
toposystemic “relativity” Wallerstein foregrounds when he draws attention
to the spelling of his celebrated catchphrase. “Putting in the hyphen was
intended,” he avers, “to underline that we are talking not about systems,
economies, empires of the (whole) world, but about systems, economies,
empires that are a world (but quite possibly, and indeed usually, not encom-
passing the entire globe).”89 Not a globality, the planet is not the (whole)
world. Ontologically and philosophically, it is not coextensive with our ex-
istential and cognitional gamut as humans, with all we can be and envisage.
We are and dream of being and doing things, as philosophers from Hei-
degger to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and from the existential phenomenolo-
gists to thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari keep repeating, al-
ways within a world’s “with” and “and” relational ambiance.90 It is inside the
latter that the Dasein pursues its potential. Neither does the planet span the
entire world understood, in a more Wallersteinean sense, as geophysical
earth, which is only the planet’s cosmic background, physical foundation,
and natural stage. As a world-system, the planet looks like a “spatial/tempo-
ral zone which cuts across many political and cultural units.”91 The plane-
tary system is, then, “relative,” that is to say, approximate, partially system-
atic in its extensity and loosely systematic in its intensity (functioning), and
so only somewhat “worldly” from a scalar standpoint; it does warrant a
quasi-holistic perspective on cultural representation, but, in and of itself, it
is not a “wholism.”
Fourth, because it is not a whole even though—or precisely because—it
pieces together parts and features of many geocultural units (actual or pre-
sumed “wholes”), the planet geomodel is not of one piece, and in that it is
not one, or in one place, or the same in all places either. It can be, geograph-
ically, culturally, and philosophically, many worlds or parts of worlds,
“nested” inside each other at once rather than hierarchically (“vertically”)
organized, and it can be so in one spot no matter how little, as we shall see
later (§21–§31). This spatial deployment of the planetary—this re-or cross-
spatialization and, of course, re-and cross-historicization of the world—
entails a geometry and, relatedly, an ontological distribution of life very dif-
ferent from the global. Correspondingly, the planetary mind-set or the
individual committed to a planetary Weltanschauung may be or see himself
or herself, not unlike the Greek and Roman Stoics, as participating in a
number of worlds and world orders in the cosmos while physically located
in a particular polis.92 The planet is thus a geodiscursive projection athwart—
across, astride, and sometimes against—the one fixed on modern world maps.
In fact, spearheading as it does a cultural-imaginary remapping of the em-
pirical world, the planetary often messes with the world’s official cartogra-
phy by opening up, de-limiting, and rearranging the topographic and geo-
political distribution of space on our road atlases, print and digital maps,
and GPSs so as to challenge, as noted in the prologue (§4), the worldviews
of such spatial encodings. In that, Pheng Cheah is right to point out below
that what we ordinarily mean when we talk about the world’s mapping is
not “world” but “globe.” If this is true, then postmodern fiction’s notorious
cartographic plays in authors from Pynchon, Guy Davenport, David Foster
Wallace, and Michael Chabon to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Georges
Perec, and Milorad Pavić anticipate the more decidedly deglobalizing, plan-
etary recharting of world spaces, boundaries, and itineraries.93
Fifth, relativism as a measure of how much the system covers and how it
works and relationalism as an index of the system’s makeup go hand in
hand. The latter indicates that, as netosphere, the planetary consists of rela-
tions, but these are of the kind afforded by the former, which in turn is built
into the ethos of the planetary superscript.
Sixth, retrofitting the relational “underscript” ethically, the planetary
ethos unyokes the world as foundational-totalistic ground—centered, self-
reproductive, rationally developed and managed—from the world as rela-
tional, onto- culturally productive playground. As Cheah has shown,
Goethe’s Weltliteratur theory had already differentiated between the two
world models and, by the same movement, set the stage for a planetary de-
coupling of the globe and the world. The German thinker, Cheah com-
ments, “distinguishes between two different senses of the world: the world
as an object of great physical extensiveness (that is, the expanse of the mun-
dane or the diffusion of what is pleasing to the crowd [der Menge]), and the
world as a normative phenomenon, a higher intellectual community that
opens up a new universal horizon.” “Goethe’s distinction between two
senses of the world,” the critic continues, “is significant for us today because
it cautions us from obscuring the normative dimension of worldhood by
conflating worldliness with globalization. The world in the higher sense is
spiritual intercourse, transaction, and exchange aimed at bringing out uni-
versal humanity. It does not abolish national differences but takes place and
is to be found in the intervals, mediations, passages, and crossings between
national borders.” The world, then, can be understood as “a form of relating
or being with. The globe, on the other hand, the totality produced by pro-
cesses of globalization, is a bounded object or entity in Mercatorian space.
When we say ‘map of the world,’ we really mean ‘map of the globe.’ It is as-
sumed that the spatial diffusion and extensiveness achieved through global
media and markets give rise to a sense of belonging to a shared world, when
one might argue that such developments lead instead to greater polariza-
tion and division of nations and regions. The globe is not the world.”94
Seventh, the world is not enough, however; not this one, at any rate. I
determine it—the world as we know it—as pre-planetary or potentially
planetary because what occurs in and through said “intervals, mediations,
passages, and crossings” is netospherical but not yet or not necessarily ne-
thospherical. Again, world relations, their venues, and technologies are not
the point. Or, they are just the starting point, the palimpsest-like canvas and
pre-textual premise of the planetary superscript. The actual point has to do
with the pragmatics and, derived from it, the ethics of relations: what they
all perform in and on the world, how they reword it, and how the ensuing
script reworlds the world; how it makes “world” into a transitive verb with
“world” itself as its object, by “salvaging” mundane relatedness for a worldly
relational constellation in which sharing, belonging, and togetherness are
more than heart-warming “assumptions.”95 Neocosmopolitan projects of
demotic world togetherness have also met, as most critics agree, with mod-
est success. Nor have anti-cosmopolitan (Stalinist or postcolonial) and,
more recently, “postcosmopolitan” counterprojects fared any better. They
have failed, more exactly, have been failed either by their own ideologies of
fetishized, individual and collective identity—and more resoundingly still
by history—or by their inability to grasp “cosmos,” “globe,” “planet” as sepa-
rate and subsequently to realize that looking for the same “practices of plan-
etary interrelation” across these categories is no less misleading.96
§13. The Planetary Paradigm

We are no longer going towards postmodernity. Or rather, we have
gone beyond all the “post,” we are in contemporaneity.
—Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude
Planetary-Becoming, Planetarization, Planetarized. Spurred by such prac-

tices, world-and planetary-becoming—becoming-world and becoming-
planet—are not identical either.97 As mentioned earlier, these developments
are not parallel. Nor do they run on the same level. The world’s worlding
can yield, as specified previously, divergent relational configurations. Plan-

etarity is only one of them. Its onset is a function of the nethosperical re-
framing of the netosphere. I call this transformation planetary-becoming or
planetarization. Again, the world is not “always-already” a planet, as some
think. It may fall, “devolve,” or “unworld” into “globe,” as so many others
fear today, but it can also rise again by reworlding itself into “planet.” This
world-globe-planet sequence traces not only the dialectical deglobalization-
cum-planetarization of the world or, as Song puts it, the world’s “perpetual
and implacable planetary-becoming”98 over and against globalist injunc-
tions, but also another twofold process, in which the ethical and the cultural
dovetail, sustain, and illuminate each other. If, on one side, the world is
“worlding” into the ethical, “diversal,” and thus “worlded” relational ensem-
ble of the planet, on the other side, the natural and cosmological world—
the world as earth and Earth, as geographical and astronomical entity—
starts infiltrating the culturally and aesthetically oriented humanities far
beyond the by now “classical” area of ecology.
I am indeed weary, as noted before, of “one-world” declarations, some
of which did come out of environmentalism. But I am so only to the degree
that their language risks erasing, paradoxically enough, the “diversality,” the
multi-worldedness so vital to the blossoming world commons. Otherwise,
the ecological world and ecocriticism definitely remain, in spite of their
shortcomings, among the most significant precursors of the planet model
and planetary studies, especially where the unit of analysis is concerned.
Having run head-on into the “epistemology of state-centrism,”99 ecocritics
have gone to great lengths to develop, within their field, an alternate model
of critical aggregation of the world against the nation-state territorialist
knowledge claims and beyond the theoretical and political dead end where
rudimentary oppositions such as those between local and global, particular
and general, country and world, place and planet, and so forth are certain
to take us. In this vein, it is hardly surprising that Heise’s Sense of Place and
Sense of Planet, which compellingly reterritorializes place as planetary site
to offer a solution to the “theoretical stalemate” embedded in such dyads,
stands out as a trailblazing contribution to planetary and environmental
scholarship alike.100
It bears reaffirming, though, that, insofar as this worldedness is evolving
in time (“defers” its “hard” oneness), there is no fully constituted “planetar-
ized” order or spatial planetarity. What we have instead is an ongoing, poly-
directional, and uncoordinated planetarization process whose twin axis is
spatial and temporal depth: “deep space” and scope, scale, and spatiality
overall, and Dimock’s “deep time,” both unfolding over and against global-
ization’s compression of cultural spaces and temporalities, respectively. But
this process’s phenomenology is one of world-scale cultural debt, a living,
evolving, transgressively disseminating culture driven, as suggested in part
2 (§20), by an ecumenical logic of ceaselessly mounting, mutual indebted-
ness. If “globalized” activates a rhetoric of developmental Messianism and
thereby an ad quem, a teleology, and a material finalism ossified into a
painstakingly calculated, all-too-symmetric world de facto tilted to the ben-
efit of some, “planetarized” is an accomplished objective, endpoint, ulti-
mate state of affairs, or fulfilled utopia neither temporally nor spatially. In
having made their peace, apparently, with the incompleteness of the world-
system, Wallerstein and his followers continue to be helpful in understand-
ing “planetarized,” counterintuitive as this may be, in a non-perfective and
thus non-global mode. At the same time, and much as they publicly shun
“global,” its rhetoric, and longue durée narrative, the story of the world’s
system-becoming reads like a linear, popular globalization history turned
on its head. “Developmentalism,” the center-periphery, three-tier world
model, a catastrophist teleology ignoring events that do not fit the story or
tell an entirely different one—1989, to which Wallerstein and others conve-
niently substitute the geopolitically quasi-inconsequential 1968 (unless it is
Prague, not Paris), the rise of China and further consolidation, rather than
crisis, of world capitalism, etc.—then an economic determinism absolutely
disabling analytically (and world-analytically too) insofar as it has no place
for culture and even for geoculture no matter how often it refers to it: not
only do all these make Wallersteinian narrative “grand” (its author ac-
knowledges that much), but they also render it obsolete as a plausible ac-
count of the world-becoming historical process.101 Stuck in the 1970s, more
exactly in a version of them, itself anachronistic, Wallerstein’s worlding sce-
nario is indelibly dated doctrinally by an orthodox Marxism’s view of the
world and world history. Imputable to that dogmatic outlook are a skewed
worlding story and the partial worldliness of the world with which that story
culminates, predictably anticlimactic as that culmination turns out to be.
This partiality is a historical, Cold War-era half-worldedness with an untold
tale of two worlds in subtext that compounds the “hyphenal” (“natural”)
incompleteness addressed under §12. Developmentalist and yet in all actu-
ality a fable of regression, gladly registering change as long as it is a change
for worse, as Bruce Robbins astutely notes, that story is not the pathway we
can walk to what below I describe as a “planetary age.”102 Planetarization
follows a different trajectory. The world-system concept, however, remains
useful to Reading for the Planet as well, provided we consider, as I will mo-
mentarily, its cultural retrofitting—provided we take geoculture seriously,
in fact more seriously than most Wallersteinians themselves.103 Indeed, and
with another paradox, the more you look at world-systems theory, the more
you come to appreciate what it can do today for the system’s Cinderella,
namely, for cultural representation. The theory itself hardly shows any ap-
preciation of this sort, but its premises are there for the critic careful enough
not to throw out the cultural baby with the bathwater of a “culturalist” cri-
tique of Wallerstein’s worlding model, a critique this part will put forth in its
conclusion.104
Planetarity and the “Planetary Condition.” What reaches quasi-planetary

proportions and gets roughly planetarized—what becomes a world, in,
over, and across the empirical one without being one world itself, whether
as a paranoid-globalist “oneworldedness” (Apter), as the already existing
world, or as the (ideal, utopian) world105—is both a biomaterial netospheri-
cal setup, the world of linkages and interchanges of the network society, and
a penchant, an eagerness, in brief, a netospherical intentionality: not only
the inevitability to be in relation, which critic after critic deems a planetary
hallmark, but also the will to “only connect” nethospherically so as to
“counteract” the sometimes “spurious and perverse” kind of “interconnect-
edness” of the “global condition.”106 I see this as a tendency, “predisposi-
tion,” or condition of world relatedness to foster certain configurations of
sociality on the “planet-as-planet” and more broadly to frame the human at
the dawn at the twenty-first century. “Tendency” is here paramount. The
“condition” does not condition, actually; it only exhibits a yearning, a struc-
tural leaning, albeit a vigorous one. A core planetary prerogative and shap-
ing force of cultural discourse on the threshold of the third millennium,
this “netho-propensity” or world condition of relationality must be ac-
counted for—explored, historicized, and theorized—as thoroughly as post-
modern thinkers such as Jean- François Lyotard, Ihab Hassan, Brian
McHale, Matei Calinescu, Theo D’Haen, Steven Best, Douglass Kellner,
Linda Hutcheon, Jameson, and Harvey did decades ago with the “postmod-
ern condition.” Alongside interventions in planetary criticism by Spivak,
Dimock, Heise, and others, this book takes the initial steps in this direction.
The first and decisive one co-articulates the ontological and the political
ethically. Indeed, the ethical is the keystone of the maneuver. In performing
it, the planetary theorist both takes stock of the present world and, by laying
down a relational decorum, a code of netospherical conduct, as it were,
imagines a world yet to come. Because the lucid assessment of the world
and its imaginative transformation are the two faces of the same coin, one
should probably start out in a realistic mode, with the recognition that the
condition and, as we will see, the cultural dominant corroborating it, plan-
etary culture, are in statu nascendi. We are fortunate to witness their birth
much as we are baffled by what we are seeing or maybe are only beginning
to see, and not very clearly either. As critics, we are diagnosing signs of new
life. But the cultural diagnostician, deontologically honest as he or she must
stay in the world field, can and perhaps should be a dreamer, a thinker who
takes chances and thinks big, even “fantastic,” like one of O’Neill characters,
as we will learn in part 2. Run through the world-engendering, prismatic
iridescence of such thinking, diagnosis—the diagnosis of planetarity—
accrues a prognosis dimension where the ethical (what one should do in the
world as described) acts as a hinge joint or behavioral conduit between the
descriptive (what this world is) and the normative (the planet this world
should be). In other words, one reads the planet’s future, and one can—one
should—conjure this future up in the world’s cultural present. For cultural
manifestations of planetarity are more than epiphenomena. They are so not
only because culture is life-giving, because it spawns life—and therefore it
is structurally world- making rather than “superstructurally” world-
reflecting—but also because they are demonstrably grounded ontologically
as they paint the picture of a burgeoning world, more precisely, of some-
thing existing in that world, within it and in genetic tension with it, and
planetary in essence and potential. At the same time, they are aspirational.
I say “aspirational” and not “utopian,” for they do capture a reality, or at least
its seeds, and, critical of its world context, point concurrently to a different
world in the offing.
With another vocabulary, planetarity is both a historical situation and a
critique; a conceptualization (of this world), poised for a critical interven-
tion (in the world also); an intellectual elaboration and a worlding gesture
itself. It is in this complex, empirical and conceptual, associative and dis-
sociative, descriptive and prescriptive, present and continuous, contempo-
rary and futural sense that planetary terminology will be employed here. It
is in this sense also that what I label our “geocultural matrix” is—is and is
becoming—the planet itself, that the ontology of the dreams, visions, and
stories underpinned by this matrix is one of planetarity, and that the time
these images and projections measure more and more as they are couched
at this juncture in literature, in the humanities, and in everyday private and
communal routines is planetary. Of this world, brought about, as we will
see, by certain world mutations, planetarity underlies those processes, in-

tervenes in them culturally and thus reprocesses them politically, coordi-
nates their production, and supplies their interpretive framework.
The Planetary Age. Similarly to postmodernity and postmodernism during

the Cold War, neither planetarity nor planetarism has sprung, like battle-
gear-clad Athena from Zeus’s skull, from post-Cold War globalization as a
neatly recognizable moment or full-dress cultural movement, imagination
protocol, or style. We need to keep this in mind while also insisting, as I do,
that, ontologically, planetarity is in this world already. It may not be a com-
pletely crystallized ontological structures but is moving— by leaps and
bounds or just inching along sometimes—in that direction by actively mak-
ing and remaking, worlding and reworlding the world according to its ne-
thospherical Zeitgeist. This is another way of saying that the planetary era
has largely arrived and is to be expected—is in the cards, texts, and dis-
courses of planetarism—if we understand it as the temporality in which this
gradual, both occurring and forthcoming making-cum-remaking plays out.
As Stevens’s Ariel helped us observe in §5, the latter process was not
culturally “remarkable,” did not make for the bulk of aesthetic “makings”
and “markings” of Cold War literature and art. I maintain that it is and does
now, and more and more so every day. Limning what the next pages refer to
as planetary culture, this abundance fleshes out this culture’s “deep struc-
ture,” the planetary imaginary or planetarism. In parallel with some main-
stream stories of globalization, if at odds with some of their morals, this
cultural dominant or “aesthetic majority” has been on the rise after 1989.
Having suddenly expanded and thickened in the post–Cold War world, the
netospherical reaches the ethically tipping point where its nethospherical
retooling and with it another worlding model become imaginable in spite of
worlding trends, tragedies, crises, and relapses that, in Pynchon’s words,
adding “late-capitalist planetary insults” to older injuries, seem to veer off
course when they do not backpedal straight into the past.107 I too am con-
cerned that, as Derrida allows in his spectral reading of Marxism and Marx-
ist regimes’ demise in Central and Eastern Europe, the ghost of the Cold
War and its ideologies might return in repetitive rather than progressive
ways.108 And yet, I underscore, the cautionary tone of Derridean hauntolol-
ogy should not prevent us from seeing the demolition of the Berlin Wall for
what it is: a true event, an “event-world” (événement-monde) in the stron-
gest sense of the term. This development is unique, far from predictable,
and a-serial, as post-Heideggerian thinkers of eventfulness from Michel
Foucault to Žižek, Badiou, Negri, and Ernesto Laclau have theorized it. But,
in the same vein, it is also world-eventful—an Ereignis (event) and an An-
fang (new beginning) in the world.109 Where a history (not History) “ends,”
another gets under way worldwide under the auspices of this occurrence.
“Regional” or localized (better still, “localizable”) as it originally was in
space and time (in East Germany’s Berlin and in a certain November 1989),
the Berlin Wall’s fall had the typical worldwide impact of a “universal sin-
gular.” As such, it marked a radical break with the past all over the world,
proving not only capable of re-eventing the world as a set of sequential
events but also of re-inventing, re-worlding it into a new “world-culture.”110
Thus, at the risk of painting the last one hundred years or so of cultural
history with some exceedingly epochalist and broad brushstrokes, I pro-
pose that this period has coalesced around three pivotal moments or para-
digms. The first was the modern, which extended into the early 1960s; then
came the postmodern, which lasted, in its strongest and best-marked con-
figuration, for the next thirty odd years and way past its années folles (the
1970s and 1980s); and the postmodern was—is being—succeeded by the
cosmodern and, on the world scale, by the planetary—the cultural or para-
digmatic dominant on the rise since 1989 and picking up speed more sa-
liently after 9/11.111 Practiced, no doubt, urbi et orbi, the first two stages and
their respective “conditions,” modernity and postmodernity, have been con-
ceptualized primarily in Western, Euro-American, and chiefly North Atlan-
tic discourse forms and sites, with the nation-state assuming the role of
axial epistemological trope, venue, and sponsor across disciplines. Antici-
pated and, to some extent, even made possible by the protracted critique of
imperialism in postcolonial venues around the world, the third—the plan-
etary—no longer revolves around the West’s geopolitical center, methodol-
ogies, and vocabularies, which goes to show not only that planetarization
and globalization are different kettles of fish but that planetary literature
may well be the kind of “literature after globalization” some critics are al-
ready looking for.112 Under the impact of various trans-and postnational-
izing trends during but especially after the Cold War, former centers do not
hold any more or, at the very least, they no longer do as they used to. De-
monstrably, they have been weakened, broken up, disseminated, and other-
wise transformed and displaced at the hands of various postcolonial dis-
courses. The ensuing, countless creolizations, recyclings, and overhauls of
the postmodern have no doubt played a role in laying the groundwork for a
new condition, planetarity, and for a new, planetary epoch.113 The postcolo-
nial itself has made room for its “beyond,” namely, for the condition of
planetarity, in a process that entailed not only the post-postmodernizing

tenor of postcolonial critique but also the post-postcolonialization of the
postcolonial vehicle itself. Thus, as Simon Gikandi remarked in a 2001 ar-
ticle, while the vocabulary of postcolonial theory has not been cast aside,114
a whole range of mutations have occurred, and with them an overall
transition—surely incomplete, uneven, often imperceptible, and yet no less
real for that—out of the postcolonial and the cultural-epistemological para-
digm associated with it. These include the “worlding” of diaspora, by which
this community formation spread and became a socio-ethnocultural struc-
ture of life worldwide; the complication of the classical margin-periphery
and “dependency” dynamic, by which the (post)colony-metropolis give-
and-take highway’s traffic, previously controlled by the mimesis-mimicry/
imitation-resistance model of creativity-as-subversion, got too congested
not to be rerouted into a world maze of itineraries, trajectories, way sta-
tions, and “driving styles”; the at-distance, networked interaction that, as
Poster suggested, begins to compete with the typically colonial and postco-
lonial “proximal” modality of exchanges between the parties involved;115
the ebb of the nation-state as “controlling” framework of cultural produc-
tion and reception in postcoloniality under the dissolving action of trans-
national flows of human subjects, symbolic objects, and data generally; and,
following from all this—and to take only the British Empire/Common-
wealth and English as examples—the turning of “postcolonial literature in
English” into “World Englishes literature.”116
If planetarity is, as I think, indeed epochal in the United States and else-
where, then cultural historians will have sooner or later to reconsider their
periodizations. Most basically, I submit that contemporaneity no longer
means what it did forty or even thirty years ago. Up until the 1990s, the
contemporary covered the entire post–World War II era, with postmoder-
nity, chiefly in the West, spanning that period’s last two decades. This is not
the case any more. To resort to another cultural traffic analogy, we are see-
ing that present in the rearview mirror of today’s planetary culture. Thus, I
redefine the contemporary as the time elapsed since the Cold War’s end,
with postmodernism halfheartedly spilling over the 1989 mark and only to
open an early twenty-first-century passageway to a new stage and, possibly,
cultural paradigm: the cosmodern and, more broadly, the planetary.
Planetary Culture and Planetarism. Not, or not yet, a “period” in the classi-
cally literary-
historical sense of a sufficiently discrete and stylistically
marked period, planetary culture gets under way in the Cold War’s after-
math as an incipient, loosely structured moment and scene of aesthetic out-

put. The various discourse-engendering and conceptual functions, frames,
and tools of the nation-state model are now tested out, used up, refurbished,
or discarded, and a more wide-ranging formation—the planet—is arising
as a dominant environment, means, and onto-ethical ground of socioaes-
thetic and critical expressions. Insufficiently—but more and more—world-
systemic, these developments have not given birth to a coherent, well-
defined world culture yet. While our world is neither netospherically satu-
rated nor nethospherically governed at this point, such processes have
already led to a conspicuous and consequential set of planetary themes and
cross-discursive protocols of culture—to planetarism. However, befitting
its epoch, planetarism is not your typical “ism” either. An incrementally
consistent way of picturing the worlded world, planetarism is a planetarily
minded world picture or imaginary that is taking shape before our eyes.
Neither entirely new nor everywhere identical in terms of its meaning,
material embodiment, and effects, planetary geoculture looks to be the hot-
bed of a powerful paradigm leaving, ever more visibly, its daily imprint on
how people imagine themselves and the world in the third millennium.
With rising frequency, the planet is, as argued earlier under §3, the decisive
dimension in which writers and artists perceive themselves, their histories,
and spaces. On this ground, a thorough analysis of the planet as shaping
context of twenty-first-century life, affect, and creativity should be able to
yield a reasonably functional, plausibly laid-out model of planetary poetics.
The issue is not so much that planetarity as a new site, formal operator of
culture, and episteme must be given pride of place by any rigorous, histori-
cally minded effort to come to grips with the twenty-first-century arts. To
me, this is no longer up for debate. The rise of netospherical objectuality,
complete with its expanding, cultural as well as material nethospherical rethe-
matization, is, I offer, the event horizon of the contemporary as defined above.
Both a space and a structure, a relationally structured space, today’s planet
consists—and this is surely a truism by now—in ever-denser relations
among people, cultures, and locales. Therefore, to comprehend the plane-
tary, one must “get” the relationality worked into it.
On the other hand, I cannot emphasize enough that planetary culture
should be taken as heuristic rather than deterministic. The function I assign
it for now is cautiously exploratory. I do not posit the planetary as an abso-
lute and sole context for culture and cultural analysis. In contrast to well-
known theories of globalization, planetarization is not geared toward a one-
world, genetic, homogenous and homogenizing totality. Forging, in some
of the more optimistic and ahead-looking assessments, a culture of sharing,

the planet itself has not yet provided a stable and wholly structured plat-
form for an ecumenically and equitably enjoyed economic or cultural com-
monwealth. A full ethical configuration of planetarity awaits its building in
the “real world,” one reason a thoroughly formed planetary culture is, befit-
tingly enough, still on the horizon. The second part of Reading for the Planet
takes steps to theorize and deepen this critical understanding, with the ad-
dendum that, at least for now, the geoaesthetic commons of planetary cul-
ture is primarily an aspirational construct at once necessary and necessarily
provisional. Yet aspirational does not mean unrealistic or ahistorical. As I
will underscore momentarily, planetarism, as planetary culture’s individual-
izing imaginary mode, is not an idealism, aestheticized or not, but a material-
ism. It is a world imaginary that faces up to the materiality of the world’s
cultures.
In taking globalism in a culturological direction aesthetically and inter-
pretively, planetarism and the geomethodology dealing with it incorporate
some of the earlier resistance, within global studies itself, to the reductive
and undoubtedly self-defeating treatment of the role in which culture has
been cast on the global scene. Some critics have insistently and rightly “cau-
tioned against such frequently used formulations as ‘the impact of global-
ization on culture’ or ‘the cultural consequences of globalization.’” These
“phrases,” they hold, “are, no doubt, often used casually as a reference to the
way in which the connectivity and fluidity of globalization make [them-
selves] felt within the sphere of culture. Yet the trouble with these phrases is
that, taken literally, they imply globalization to be a process which some-
how has its sources and its sphere of operation outside of culture.”117 Insuf-
ficiently acknowledged for what it does to the global world, culture is, to
most globalization commentators, in that world and hopelessly “con-
structed” by it, a (by)product, a “consequence,” and a dire one to boot. Even
when it gets more than a few lines in the global high drama, culture is still
not viewed as a producer, a mover and shaker, but as traded product, and by
the same token “produced” in sites and by agents external to it. At the re-
ceiving end of “true” global actors and the realignments these determine,
culture, it is routinely suggested, does not prompt globalization but bears it,
does “globalize” yet primarily as a “patient” of other forces rather then tran-
sitively—it does not globalize the world. And so where most critics employ
“the culture of globalization” phrase as a subjective/possessive genitive, I
insist—in a planetary, further culturalizing setting—on a more descriptive-
interpretive and ontologically performative usage, with the planet as (a)
context for culture’s planetarizing impetus; (b) object of this process; and (c)
episteme encapsulated by said process as well as guiding its critical recep-
tion. I see planetarization as a property culture shares with capital, data, and
migration, as much as I acknowledge culture as a driving force behind plan-
etarization, a vector sometimes weaker than economics, informatics, and
demographics, sometimes stronger, sometimes on a par with them, and
working across, alongside, or against them, as the case may be. And again,
if this culture “planetarizes,” that means that cultures around the world call
out to each other and interact in the planetary forum faster and more sub-
stantially than ever. It does not mean that these cultures have become or are
becoming one culture, although this risk should not be played down either.
If, as Warnier says bluntly, “speaking of the ‘globalization of culture’ is
abusive,” the abuse is even more egregious in the case of planetary cul-
ture.118 True, one has witnessed the flourishing of certain regional and
cross-regional lifestyles, tastes, hobbies, interests, cultural codes and rites,
some of them now already on the wane, others still expanding. But none of
these has integrated world cultures, and thus the world, into one culture
and world, respectively. Cultures go planetary in that, building on their ge-
netic multiculturalism, they enter in even more complexly multicultural,
that is, cross-cultural discursive alloys. But world cultures have not merged;
they have only been interacting in the post–Berlin Wall era more viva-
ciously than before. What is occurring under planetarity, in other words, is
not cultures’ fusion into one megaculture, but a worlding of cultures, a range
of geopolitical and aesthetic transgressions, delocalizations, migrations,
and other forms of motility and mixing leading to an astounding intensifi-
cation of cultural contacts and amalgamations. Without question, there are
still some privileged cultural hubs, agents, circuits, and styles—there are
Dallas, the never-ending (and increasingly transnational) Die Hard series,
and fast food, as there are, let us not forget, telenovelas, the “slow-food”
movement, Japanese fashion design, and the steady expansion of Bolly-
wood, Iranian, and Romanian cinema outside their historical markets. Still,
critical culturalism of a planetary bent tends to point to an ongoing trans-
culturation of the world, to a new acculturation or, as Jacques Demorgon
words it, “interculturation of the world” into a body of culture, a rewriting
of the world archive into an overall flexible system of cultural relations
where what counts and occurs most is that once-separated cultural produc-
ers and discourses are now able to interrelate instead of simply fading into
one another.119
Thus, cultures do not come together in the planetary theater to plunge
into standardization and uniformity. Neither is planetarization an “Ameri-

canization.” Globalization itself is not either, even though the world con-
solidation and dissemination of U.S. influence, military-economic power,
popular culture, lifestyle, and values overall—including Benjamin Barber’s
notorious “McWorld,” Updike’s “deep-fried homogenization,” and other
forms of “Coca-colonization”120—were and are pretty hard to ignore. Fortu-
nately, scholars no longer hesitate to take to task the paradoxically
“standardizing”/”Americanizing” effects of such one-sided interpretations.
Pierre Rigoulot is just one of the French critics who have disparaged it as a
“pre-thought,” prêt-à-penser doxa or “ready-to-wear,” uncritical “hand-me-
down” itself in urgent need of examination.121 If the “actually existing” glo-
balizing world is not as “flat” as Thomas L. Friedman reports, the planetary
world for whose building we are breaking ground should be even less so. In
either case, extrapolating, unawares or not, from unacknowledged posi-
tions of critical authority can be as problematic a proposition as making
broad claims from privileged centers and headquarters of political and mil-
itary authority. As I see it, planetarization is less an ecumenization or gen-
eralizing of certain national cultural contents and more a widening, thick-
ening, and intertwining of the links among those contents. Danish linguist
Louis Hjelmslev’s distinction between relatum, that which is connected to
something else within a structure, and the connecting relatio, is helpful
here: what planetarizes one’s self, one’s place, others, and the world ulti-
mately is not so much particular relata or elements as the linkages, pro-
cesses, and venues relating these units and thus getting them to “interre-
late.” It is in this sense that cultures planetarize and a planetary culture is in
the making.
Not a monologue but an echo, speaking to us not through a mouthpiece
but as through a sonar, cultural discourse and identity either form or posi-
tion themselves to take shape in the planetary age nethospherically. They
surface more and more relationally and dialogically, according to the logic
of the Ancient Greek dià, that is, always belatedly, by a detour through the
world’s distant or just “different” places, intervals, and styles. So conceived,
both discourse and identity, and the whole culture concept alongside them,
fly in the face of dogmatic and oppressive politics—it wonders about the
political—as it wanders geopolitically. Their anthropological matchless-
ness, that which makes “my” discourse and the identity resting on it so as-
sumingly and exclusively “mine,” supervenes in the strong sense of the
word. It too “comes after.” Characteristically, it ensues from a “wayward”
narrative of oblique addition, filtering, and refracting, thus expanding—
“worlding”—the intertextual poetics of postmodernity rather than com-

pletely discarding it. Identity is thus a “fraud,” if you think about it, insofar
as what makes it (in)authentic is a transcultural chain of deviations, divaga-
tions, borrowings, importations, and interpolations, in short, spatializa-
tions. Adrift in space and meaning, an ongoing uprooting, this route, this
dromo-genesis of culture and subjectivity, is a routine of derivation that
splices together diachronic (“vertical”) filiation and synchronic, lateral af-
filiation or, more likely, maps the former onto the latter, time and again.
Thus, culture or author X, over here, may adopt and follow as its or his/her
“past” tradition culture or author Y, over there, a “there”—a location, aes-
thetic repository, stylistic arsenal, or artistic pattern—that can be either
from the past or from the immediate present. Therefore, planetary culture
seldom overlaps with the nation, ethnos, and their territories, with which
both culture and identity have been associated routinely. However, its pres-
ence, consistency, makeup, and symbolic leverage oscillate across countries.
This is also probably the place to admit, and, as some would be quick to
add, hope, that, like the world itself, no culture is or will probably ever be
wholly worlded. Resistance to cultural planetarization should not be ig-
nored, nor should one be oblivious to the nation-state as the geographical,
administrative, and linguistic venue inside which cultural expression
physically—institutionally, locationally—still comes about and where, by
the same token, it must cope with tremendous territorializing pressures.
But, increasingly faster after 1989, virtually no culture can opt out of the
world’s worlding narrative. And, since a worlding culture’s transactions and
meanings perforce overflow the territorial-historical extension of one pol-
ity, tradition, or language, this narrative, the world epic into which more
and more of the world’s stories feed, should be understood as an inter-or
cross-cultural aggregate.
§14. Politics, Poetics, Epistemology

I prefer “planetary imaginary” over Gilroy’s “planetary mentality”122 be-
cause what I want to highlight in planetarism is an energy and an activity,
an operation in and on the world rather than this world’s effectively or pre-
sumably passive “imaging.” My decision has notable bearings on world-
making, text-making, as well as text-understanding, and so it pertains to
politics, poetics, and epistemology alike. I wrap up this part by going over
the most significant among these consequences.
From a political standpoint, to begin with, planetarism makes for an
ontologically unhappy culturalism. World- transforming, it is a world-

picturing with re-worlding ambitions because it is both forward looking
(forward picturing) and eager to “overshoot” itself, to transcend the
cultural-aesthetic as well as the imaginary and thus plug itself into the
world’s existential nitty-gritty. As an activity of the conscious mind and,
insofar as it sets off imaginative mechanisms, of the unconscious too, plan-
etarism can be viewed as an “activist” and effectively historicized (“always
historicize!”) version of the Jamesonian “geopolitical unconscious.” It is ac-
tivist in that the acts it performs—Jameson’s “(sub)cognitive” mappings—
not only map the “new world system” and “our new being-in-the-world”
but also redraw the existing boundaries, distributions, and Baedekers of
affect, discourse, power, national sovereignty, territory, and capital accord-
ing to a world order still to arrive;123 and it is historicized insofar as, qua
geopolitical cartography of the contemporary, it actually accounts for the
nebulous, tactically unqualified “newness” in Jameson’s “new world-system”
reference, that is, for the eventful 1989 and the ensuing post-Soviet bank-
ruptcy of Wallerstein’s and Jameson’s notoriously schematic three- tier
“worldism.” As is well known, neither the tearing down of the Berlin Wall
nor the breakup of the USSR and its client bloc shows up in any meaningful
way on either critic’s world-system maps, pre-or post-1989. The Geopolitical
Aesthetic came out in 1992, a mere few months after the Soviet Union ceased
to exist, and this world-shattering event remains the elephant in the china
store of Jamesonian teleology, a sort of epistemological dirty secret that ren-
ders said maps, along with the historical and critical narratives behind
them, if not altogether useless to any venture in the territory, then far more
obsolete today than they already were twenty-three years ago.
This world picture falls short epistemologically not only because it has
always been oversimplifying or because it has become geopolitically anti-
quated but also because of its aforementioned “economism.” As with global
analysis in general, the conclusions of this approach predictably and quasi
invariably replay the premise of an all-present, all-defining, uniformly op-
erating and yet somehow Protean Capital with capital “C.” This is, we learn,
the true Network running underneath all networks à la the Wachowskis’
The Matrix and whose “reloading” hiccups spark a real (Real) crisis (Žižek
dixit) the silver lining of which inheres in the opportunity to “get” the Sym-
bolic—to understand, finally, that all world phenomenology camouflages
an ontology of cash. The demonic market is almost always the depressingly
foretold message, the gist of the conspiratorial narrative both uncovered
and reinforced, as I have said, over and over again by critics who, following
in the Wallersteinian line of “nomothetic” inquiry, understandably miss

out, much like their master, on the “idiographic,” namely, on the idiomatic
“social phenomena” and their “uniqueness.”124 Of course, in response to this
doxa, the idea here is not to play back the message but to fight back; not to
rehearse the world’s knee-jerk descriptions but to change the world, to re-
describe or reimagine it into another structure of worldedness; and surely
not to ignore the “corporatist mediation” of literature, culture, and the
world either, but to take conceptually and critically remediative action.125
If, at least in its ordinary accounts, the global is a nomothetic environ-
ment in which the selfsame reinscribes itself according to rewriting laws
(nómoi) passed in advantageously positioned, legislative, administrative,
and managerial hubs, the planetary is primarily an idiography or, better
still, an ideography—world figuration and writing—of the idiomatic as an
“other” badge of the world’s people, emotions, and places. Neither short-
circuiting financial relays and the economic generally nor mimicking their
configuration, planetary culture’s nethospherical imaginary sidesteps the
logic of the selfsame, of the repetitive, and the equivalent by remapping the
world otherwise. Planetarism is not a reaction, a reflex, and a confirmation
of the status quo, but, once more, an action in which the imagining of the
present, fictional as this imagining’s arena may be, has a reworlding and
futural vector to it.126 The ethos planetarism affirms is world-making and
world-remaking in that the mental maps the planetary sanctions connect
the planet’s dots in ways that make visible new configurations, allotments,
and hierarchies of space, discourse, community, and power.
While “globe” implies an “imaginary”— a “one- world”127 master
picture—globalism is surely not just a matter of culture or of the imagina-
tion. Nor does planetarism perform its “act” in a sphere of its own outside
the material world, for it retraces, and traces over, routes, relations, and
onto-political possibilities in that world. As Robbins suggests in critiquing
Wallerstein and agreeing, up to a point, with Arjun Appadurai’s “cultural-
ist” stance, if there is a system in the world in question, “then culture ipso
facto cannot be excluded from what makes [the system] systematic”128 and
hence, I would add immediately, from what makes the world a world. To
reverse the syntax of Cheah’s Weltliteratur considerations, world-imagining
activities are those that enable us to make a world.129 Thus, culturalism, the
cultural approach to our worlding world, for which I am arguing here, is not
an aestheticism but a “worldism.” It is in this sense and in this sense only that
planetarism, pace Wallerstein, is a culturalism, and so will have to be, as we
shall discover before long, the geomethodology applied to it. As an imagi-
native formalization and reformalization of the relational world, planetar-

ism articulates the systematic, is both a mimetic and a visionary model of
the world and thus an axis on which pivots the turnstile between the pres-
ent and the future, the world “as mapped” and the map of the world to
come. A Foucauldian thought-event and an imagination-event at once,
planetarism is more concrete and more engaged in the world than the “cos-
mopolitan imaginary.” Described as “an aesthetic of openness that engen-
ders a global sense of interconnectedness,”130 cosmopolitanism may take up
the form of an “imaginative supplement,” but the “figuration of ethical ter-
ritories” so inaugurated remaps and may well end up supplanting, as Claire
Colebrook posits, “whatever the world is here and now, with all its global
networks, markets, and power structures.”131
Planetarism’s imaginative mobilization in the world carries over into
planetary poetics. As specified in the prologue (§3), planetarism is the “Pre-
vailing Operating System” on which planetary literature and culture’s ne-
thospherical enunciations run thematically and, with less conspicuous ef-
fect, formally. Critics like Pratt were right, about a decade ago, to alert us to
the pell-mell “proliferation” of “global objects” of “all kinds and shapes: vi-
ruses (cybernetic and biologic), evangelical Christianity and Islam, satellite
television and the cellphone, hip-hop and rock, transnational feminism, the
sweatshop, the anti-sweatshop movement, ecology, the T-shirt and rubber
flip-flops, the traffic in human organs and the drug trade, vampires, and
migrant communities.”132 No longer a novelty at this point, the global ba-
zaar of logos, trinkets, commodities, opportunities, and fanaticisms has
come under the discriminating sway of a post-global, meta-objectual plan-
etary ethoscopy that screens, assesses, and classifies them into a critical the-
matics that is both analytic and evaluative. Planetarism’s basic infrastruc-
ture, this thematic poetics deploys certain recurring images, motifs, and,
especially, a sheaf of typical metathemes or nethospherical allegories. These
are clustered around the “worlded world” spatial arch-theme—planetarity’s
“primal scene”—with its various mise-en- scènes: the worldly elsewhere and
the planet itself as that elsewhere’s palpable rather than abstract inscription
into “here,” inside and astride the traditional habitats of indigeneity, au-
tochthony, nativity, homeliness, homeyness, Heimat, and nation-state ter-
ritorialism, an inscription or wording that worlds those locales, emotions,
and sociopolitical entities, opening up their ethno-national narratives, my-
thologies, and epistemologies; remote sites, habits of those habitats, cus-
toms, and their “others,” which the narrative eye perceives, typically, as in-
trinsic or internal to closer (“our”) places, groups, and their ways of seeing
the world and comporting in it; a whole gamut of time-space constriction

games, the nethospherical imaginings they spawn, and the new sense of
proximity, adjacency, with-feeling, and the togetherness the resulting plan-
etary ethoscopy in turn endorses.
Further, while a distinctively planetary stylistics is yet to come about, ho-
mologous to this geothematics is also a certain poetics of form, with the pro-
viso that “form” here is never solely a formalist matter, an issue of mere crafts-
manship and aesthetic ploy, but also a rewording-reworlding algorithm, a
procedure pertaining to the discursive interface of the word and the world.
Planetary poetics features a range of elements and characteristics. Usually
present together, in different constellations and varieties, they all boil down,
in my view, to three sets of textual traits and literary instantiations.
i. Dramatizing the “connectability” of the worlding world, the first is a

wide spectrum of worlded, sometimes Internet-assisted intertextual
formations. Genuinely compatible with Castells’s socioeconomic and
cultural network, on one side, and with the venerable cosmological
trope of the Bibliotheca Universalis, on the other, intertextuality con-
tinues to consolidate its seminal poietic status across literatures in the
twenty-first century.133 “Planetary culture” is not just a matter of
“transculturation,” but this transculturation—a more complex, inter
textual-intercultural process in which spatial and textual crosses and
crossings dovetail—is a core feature and mechanism of planetarization
and, as such, also postmodern intertextuality’s planetary avatar.134 In
fact, more emphatically than under postmodernism, planetarization
affords a cultural ontology qua world anthology.135 Furthermore, and
also more substantially than in the postmodern arts, planetary “quota-
tionalism” is transterritorial, and politically so. “Quotations,” Dimock
reminds us in her search for a “literature for the planet,” “do not have
to be foreign, but they can be. No border patrol can stop them. This
breach of territorial sovereignty is the starting point for a global con-
tinuum of words. It is the point where temporal and spatial distances
break down, where chronological jumbles and jurisdictional jumbles
produce weird offsprings.”136
ii. The second set documents the multiplying of these inscription-cum-
reinscription protocols of discourse across aesthetic and trans-
aesthetic practices. These protocols reach far beyond the literary, the
textual, and the analog. If an older, postmodern-Gérard Genettian
category of intertextuality lives on in its Wikipedian reembodiments,
the latter spread, via such operations, not only across countries and
traditions but also across discourses, representations, and media. In
reality, the “new media” is, with a term hardly new either, “intermedi-
ality,” both a multi-and an inter-media, despite renewed nationalist-
authoritarian attempts to circle the wagons around communities, cul-
tures, customs, and party lines, to limit the circulation of people,
ideas, and even goods, to corral, control, censor, and monitor Internet
users inside statal territories (China and its “Great Firewall,” Iran,
Turkey, Cuba, Russia) or even outside them (the never-ending Na-
tional Security Agency scandals).
iii. The last category consists of certain types of literature and literary
forms ranging from woollier aesthetic categories, morphologies, tech-
niques, and enterprises to somewhat better described literary move-
ments, “genres,” and “species”: “world poetry” (Dimock);137 “World
Bank Literature” (Amitava Kumar, Philip E. Wegner) and “world-
system literature” (Medovoi); littérature mondiale (Jérôme David);138
“‘comparison literature,’ and the emerging genre of world literature for
which global comparison is a formal as well as thematic preoccupa-
tion” (Rebecca L. Walkowitz);139 Susan Stanford Friedman’s all-
embracing “modernism,” which is multicentric rather than West-
centered, and thus planetary, plural in its spatial extension, temporality,
and formal configuration; “planetary postmodernity” (W. Lawrence
Hogue); nomadic, rhizomatic, “archipelago”- like, or “tra
jec
torial”
form—“trajectories have become form” in “altermodernism,” claims
Nicolas Bourriaud;140 “transcultural narrative” (Maurizio Ascari); the
“planetary poem” (Ramazani); “the post-9/11 novel” (Ascari), the “cos-
mopolitan novel” (Berthold Schoene), “the world novel,” and the “geo-
political novel” (Irr) either of the more postmodern kind (DeLillo,
later Pynchon) or of the even more geopolitically, cross-historically,
and narratively networked sort (David Mitchell, Colum McCann, Ro-
berto Bolaño); more radically perhaps, historically speaking, the novel
itself—with Moretti’s title, “the modern epic”—as inherently world-
systemic, a “world genre” successively redefined by Moretti himself, by
Dimock’s critique of Moretti’s “distant” approach, and by Spivak’s “cre-
olization” of Dimock’s planetary model of genre and genre reading;
“fractal” stylistics and “grainy,” exogenous lexicon (Dimock).141 More
and more critics deem these forms, formations, and discourse modali-
ties “planetary” in terms of origin, circulation, and even structural pat-
terns. In essence, such productions document thematically and enact
formally the sharp, post-1989 upswing in worldedness. They soak in,

mark, and critique the contextual clashes, movement, and intermin-
gling of worlds, peoples, and values; they capture the wide world-as-
world textually, “topically” (subject matter-wise), as well as topologi-
cally, namely, within texts highly sensitive to the world’s worlding
and, inside those works’ fictional space, within “little worlds,” com-
munities, and locations less and less immune to the worlding pull of
planetarization.
Largely underpinning planetarism’s poetics, then, is the notion that for-

merly separate, territorially and nationally bound and categorized cultures
can and, in reality, cannot but borrow from each other according to a trans-
actional ethos beyond, or rather across, ethnos: “horizontally,” following a rhi-
zomatic growth scenario, as if they were drawing “organically” from their
own patrimony and in conformity with the standard, one-track, “root” dia-
gram of intra- national, ethno- endogenous historical evolution. Conse-
quently, “digimodernism,” “hypermodernism,” “altermodernism,” “meta
modernism,” and other transvaluating, epoch-making events and trends
capable of couching earnest questions about postmodernism in past tense
and thus lead up to planetarism can be grasped as exercises in a new tradi-
tionalism—as symptoms of a cross-national, world commons posttradition-
alism.142 Part of larger cultural-economic transformations, the shift such
symptoms pinpoint is constructed mainly in the aesthetic-theoretical lexi-
con of a post-postmodern avant-garde. The global’s “over-” and “counter-
writing” into planet signals insistently and programmatically an ethicization
of a cultural—now decidedly cross-cultural—dynamic at the production as
well as the reception end and presents itself as a complex, transcultural-
transtopological phenomenon whose ramifications are economic, political,
and, more notably still, ethical.
For “planetarity” is neither merely cultural nor solely epistemological,
simply an inquisitive forma mentis molding the world, as some contend;143
at once a material (ontological, generative, poietic) and a cognitive-analytic
(epistemic) master framework, the planetary is also an episteme, and part 2
will tackle planetary epistemology at length. Epistemologically speaking,
the planetary is capacious and integrative. It has its ebbs and flows. It trans-
forms and surprises. In keeping with its etymology, the planetary “wan-
ders,” remains shifty, cannot help turning, literally and otherwise, and so it
is neither an ontological nor a hermeneutic given, let alone, as I have said, a
completed project. Therefore, it does not stamp all art objects or all art-
works entirely, nor does it elucidate them completely. To repeat, planetarity

is a relationality, not a totality. While thinking “totality relationally” may
reproject the global planetarily, viewing “relationality in a totalizing fash-
ion,” as some advise, is risky business politically, culturally, and epistemo-
logically.144 The planet is not only a new and fluid cultural landscape
throughout which people and their sustaining fantasies wander, connect,
and reproduce, but, along the same liquid and blurry lines, a clarifying and
interrogative domain simultaneously, a poietic matrix spawning wonders
and ambiguities and, by the same genetic gesture, a germane, “soft” episte-
mology. It wanders and makes us—helps us—wonder. Not so much a dox-
ology, the arrogant cousin of “totality,” but a heuristics, the planetary setup
presents us with a historical occasion and cultural site for travel, explora-
tion, communication, and interaction, as well as for cognitive “wondering,”
for methodical perplexity and principled discussion about a literary-artistic
aesthetics and hermeneutics that, at the end of the day, may remain a rough
critical construct. Loose and loosely invoked, heteroclite, still uncharted,
the planetary nevertheless intrigues. Its presence and bearings on everyday
life as well as its reflections in the life of the arts await comprehensive yet
prudent articulation. In a nutshell, the planetary is more generous, more
permissive with what one can be and mean than the prevailing construc-
tions of globality, which posit— quite positivistically at times—an all-
embracing context of living and meaning indomitably drowned, existen-
tially and semiotically, in liquidities.
To summarize, defining planetarity epistemology are chiefly an em-
blematic mind-set, Weltanschauung, or world picture sponsored by the in-
sight that fewer and fewer separate or presumably discrete places, groups,
and undertakings are sitting out the transnational and transcultural proto-
cols that link up, intertwine, and inflect things, people, and cultural ico-
nologies on a steadily widening scale; a rare sensitivity to the planetary ar-
ticulations and problematics, which supply increasingly central, formal
metaphors and foci to artists and critics alike; national traditionalism’s
posttraditionalist, “worldly” sublation, which fosters something analogous
to Amin Maalouf ’s “horizontal tradition”—the planet’s “other” places and
inhabitants, along with their heritages and fantasies, to which “we” turn and
which we mine as if they were “from around here,” “ours”;145 a new, at-
distance, “endless,” non-patrilineal and cross-patrimonial “planetary feel-
ing” or sense of closeness, kinship, and ties, which designates posttradition-
alism’s utmost affective upshot and supplements textually—and usually
intertextually also—our inherited (“genetic”) familiarity with the kin type
of relations or relatives and with the orthodox (not to say “traditional”) idea
and praxis of relatedness.146
Built into the cultural-aesthetic expressions underwritten by the plane-
tary imaginary, the planetary episteme testifies to a téchne poietiké that does
double duty as téchne hermeneutiké, to a world-making art pregnant with
its own hermeneutics. If “the rational ordering of the global” projects a fig-
ure that dis-figures,147 planetarism refigures the world into an imaginary
ordering that both guides and beckons another mapping, a critical order. In
the livid figures, lifeless numbers, and computational pantomime of the
mercantile universe, the world’s face is, at best, blurred, serialized, and ren-
dered anonymous, a complexion without complexity, without its “idio-
graphic” wrinkles and other signs of history and life underneath its skin; at
worst, this face is here defaced, made unreadable by the very gesture—
decreasingly analog and increasingly digital—that purports to figure and
contour it. With planetarism, however, the world becomes legible again ac-
cording to a reading (de-wording) scenario encoded (worlded), as I say, in
planetary figuration itself.
The first step of reading planetarily is, then, reading for this figure, read-
ing for the planet’s declension—for the worlding world—in planetary writ-
ing, in writing that “writes for the planet.148 Specifically, what this means is
reading for the nethospherical carved into poems, novels, plays, or screen-
plays, scanning discourse for fictional spatializations of ethical relationality.
Even if it was a solely thematic procedure—reading “the world-system as a
theme; the world-system ‘inside’ literature”—this kind of work is still ahead
of us.149
What we do know already—and what Goethe himself knew almost two
hundred years ago—is that a truly worlded literature circulates on a world
scale; we know, too, that the “world republic of letters” across whose terri-
tory this circulation has taken place for centuries is hardly “an enchanted
world, a kingdom of pure creation, the best of all possible worlds where
universality reigns through liberty and equality”;150 and we are certainly
aware that, like everything else, books are not traveling at the beginning of
the twenty-first century how they were when Goethe was talking to Johann
Peter Eckermann about world literature. Therefore, “circulation” is not the
issue, or not the most pressing one, especially since we are getting better
and better at tracking it technologically, financially, and so forth. What we
lack, instead, is an understanding of how circulation, the netospherical (of
which dissemination, distribution, and so on are key components), and
planetarity (of which the netospherical is part and parcel) are engraved in
literature, how literature takes them in. Both thematically and formally, as
an imaginary exercise, literature knows the worlding world of the new mil-
lennium, hence planetarism’s epistemological value; what we do not know is
how we can learn what and how literature knows. There has been no system-
atic attempt thus far to put together a critical apparatus for showing how the
planetary and its condition are actually inscribed into the texts, styles, and
artifacts symptomatic of this epoch-making development, So, to rephrase
the question Colin MacCabe raises apropos of Jameson’s cognitive map-
ping— a question Jameson fails to ask— what do the thematic- formal
“mechanisms” of such an inscription look like?151 More to the point, how
exactly does planetarity translate into planetary literature? How does the
former’s Prevailing Operating System actually operate? And, if the planet is
framing artists’ imagination, how is the critical imagination responding?
With what framework? How are we facing the “face of the earth” in its plan-
etary portrayals? How do we read it, and, when we do, what does that entail
critically, epistemologically, and ethically? How does planetary criticism
work, and what might its workings mean beyond literary-cultural criti-
cism? The book’s second half provides the answers.
Part 2 f Geomethodology
Theory and Practice
Everything begins with Houses, each of which must join up its sections
and hold up compounds—Combray, the Guermantes’ house, the
Verdurins’ salon—and the houses are themselves joined together
according to interfaces, but a planetary Cosmos is already there, visible
through the telescope, which ruins or transforms them and absorbs
them into an infinity of the patch of uniform color.
—gilles deleuze and félix guattari, What Is Philosophy?
I feel that the academy has not yet developed the grid and the grammar
to explore American works that are not quite “American” in a canonical
sense. Such a literature possesses the one essential quality of all great
writing: energy. And energy is released in the mangling and macerating
of fused languages[,] in the reckless violation of outmoded forms, and
in characters pinched and pulled into supernatural shapes.
—bharati mukherjee, “Immigrant Writing: Changing the
Contours of a National Literature”
§15. The Face of the Earth

“The face of the earth”: let us tarry with the venerable idiom a little longer
at this crossroads in the history of the world, the human, and the humani-
ties. For, if thousands of years of use have worn the locution thin, the onset
of the netospherical is prompting the phrase’s semantic reset. One wonders,
in fact, what the old expression might convey at a time when, tying some of
us down to exploit, disenfranchise, and otherwise “expe[l] from the narra-
tives of futurity,”1 the earth’s revved-up morphing into an increasingly inte-
grated biocultural aggregate is also drawing more and more of its denizens—
77
the restless and the ruthless, the enterprising and the dispossessed, the
doers and the knowers—farther and farther afield. It also bears asking, in
this vein: how is our exponentially broadening familiarity with the beyond-
the-familial rekindling the syntagm in casual conversation, popular media,
classrooms, and scholarly analyses? How might we defamiliarize it privately
and publicly, colloquially and academically, as we chat, fantasize, cuddle up
with our favorite books, and write about them?
The point that galloping globalization forces us to take another look at
the worlding world hardly needs any arguing. Nor is this just a matter of
responsibility, although planetary obligation, care, and advocacy trace the
contour lines of the ethical shores where this book will eventually land us.
“Looking the other way” and thus bypassing the urgency of the problem are
simply no longer an option nowadays, when fewer and fewer “other” ways,
directions, and routes circumvent the ever-denser “dromology” of Castells’s
“network society.”2 A modality or, rather, countermodality of looking the
worlding world in the face—a planetary ethoscopy—planetarism refuses to
look the other way. In effect, we might think of it as a profound and multiple
prosopopoeia. Unlike global surveys, mappings, and other similar rational-
izations of the world’s face, planetarism’s prosopopoeial poetics literally as-
cribes, “makes”(see the Ancient Greek poieīn) by making out, by visualizing
and representing a face (prósopon) for and to the world. This face is not a
hocus pocus, an invention, but an invocation and an unveiling. The face
preexists and only makes its appearance (or has its appearance, its “figure,”
made) via the poiēsis— the eloquently tautological “face- makings” or
“facings”—of planetary imaginings. In the face, the world comes alive as if
“personified.” It moves, speaks, and looks at us from afar, over a distance
(prosō, porrō), no matter where we may be hanging out. “Within the percep-
tible world,” writes Georg Simmel in his famous essay “The Aesthetic Sig-
nificance of the Face,” “there is no other structure like the human face which
merges such a great variety of shapes and surfaces into an absolute unity of
meaning.” But, as planet, the “perceptible world” itself flaunts its “whole-
ness.”3 Resonating to planetary displays, planetarism conveys aesthetically
what we are experiencing existentially: the face of the earth is “in our face”
now, and so the real question or questions are what we see and how pre-
pared we are epistemologically to look at all when we do so. Therefore, what
we should also ask ourselves is: While windows are opening wider and
wider onto the world—whether in Microsoft or, no less innovatively, in
Beigbeder’s 2003 9/11 bestseller4—what kind of figure is the world cutting in
our studious frames? How do we look, and what is it that we notice when
geomethodology • 79
we screen planetarism’s figments and images? Do we see the netospherical

in its full, unchecked, often furious swing? Do we see something else, a
world motion of a different order? Do we see a globality, or do we see a
nethospherical reordering of the world, a planetarity? And, if the latter truly
is what we contemplate, how exactly is the planet’s figure revealing us, in
and across the very sites of its figuration, something that the discourse of
globalism often obfuscates and stymies while planetarism forefronts and
nourishes? How does one make sense of this face, of whatever its counte-
nance may express, given, as Levinas teaches, our reflex reaction to ratio-
nalize it, to cover its “nudity” in the self-serving ratiocinations of our
system-beholden gaze?5
Undoubtedly timely, these questions boil down, as the last one hints, to
interpretation, specifically, to a critical act—and to an ethics—that has ev-
erything to do with today’s “actually existing” world and so gets the critic
“down and dirty in the trenches of reading, teaching, conferencing, pub-
lishing” in a very applied, non-“utopian,” and “quotidian” kind of way.6
Generally speaking, all these interrogations demand, in fairly practical
terms, scrutiny of the world’s fast-changing “look” in the aftermath of the
world’s latest, themselves multifaceted reconfigurations. More concretely
yet, and thus more closely to our private homes and disciplinary abodes, the
sheer existence of the netospherical setup, its socioeconomic layout, its sa-
liently interconnective logic, the encounters, synergies, syntheses, and
clashes in which this logic is instrumental, and the courte or longue durée
etiology of the in-progress world-system are not the issue here, or not in the
first place. The ever-more integrated world-as-world, the netospherical’s ut-
most upshot, is a manifest reality both diachronically, as an evolutionary
rationale, and synchronically, as a present world ontology or, more simply,
as the form in which the world exists. Whereas the roots of this form, of this
geocultural framework contextualizing the planetary visions—the primal
scenes of planetarity—adduced in this part of the book, push deep into the
early Renaissance’s transcontinental travels, “discoveries,” and redistribu-
tions of territory, community, affect, and capital, this framework or worldly
armature of the contemporary remains no less unprecedented for that. The
sociohistorical uniqueness of the context within which today’s world physi-
ognomy presents itself to us strikes me as hard to ignore. To repeat: what
literary planetarism illuminates and helps us discern is a physiognomy of
planetarity, a world that is worlding not only netospherically, by following
globalism’s instrumental rationality, but also nethospherically. The face that
arises and shines in the fictional ethoscopies examined below does so ac-
cording to an ethical interface (in the world) while calling for another, be-
tween the “diegetical” face (the face-in-the-text) and its spectator-reader.
§16. The Infinite and the Infinitesimal, Cosmos and Cosmetics

Instead of upholding territorial sovereignty and enforcing a regime
of simultaneity, literature, in my view, unsettles both. It holds out to
its readers dimensions of space and time so far-flung and so deeply
recessional that they can never be made to coincide with the
synchronic plane of the geopolitical map.
—Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”
This physiognomy comes into play in two mutually constitutive and tightly
imbricated dimensions. These are the macro and the micro, the vaster
planet or planetary picture, which connects the world’s dots, and this pic-
ture’s pointillist flipside/inside with its little points and grains of life and
expression, into which the worldly panorama funnels down. I call the ap-
pearance of the world-as-world, of planetarity as non-totalist totality, mac-
roscopic when it breaks forth and appears accessible, not to say obvious,
from above or afar, from technologically enabled, spatial-evaluative posi-
tions and postures, but also when its scope—its spatiality or distance un-
derstood both as horizontal extension (expanse) and vertical scopic
reach—is literally planet-encompassing. The macroscopic or the world qua
“macro” ensemble implies and often is a distant perception and a large-scale
representation, image, or photo. This is the proverbial bird’s-or, more ac-
curately, astronaut’s-eye view; the interval-conditioned approach and what
this technologically or imaginatively assisted prosopopoeia yields from afar
and above (prosō): the planet’s face or the planet as Face, rather; what comes
through, and what one makes out, from the physical and intellectual dis-
tance that presupposes without always bringing into sharp relief the many
little shapes and faces in the planet’s Archimboldian collage, the cross-local,
integrative-interlinking, and world-systemic operations of planetarity.7
I throw my lot with those who wonder less if the macro, reluctantly
“wholistic” picture of the world actually exists and more what the picture
means and how it compares to available, sometimes officially endorsed de-
pictions, images, and maps of territories, regions, and so on. The neto-
sphere’s marks on individuals, places, and artifacts are, to me at least, obvi-
ous. Instead, my concern is how such marks are to be read, and so our
problem falls, I propose, chiefly under the microscopic. This problem is of
the order of the infinitesimal. As I have said, even though it has larger re-
percussions, it is a practical one, and also the real test. This is where the
critical rubber meets the road, although, as I have also made clear, and as
the writers examined in this part’s second half prove, the micro, its focus,
and the reader’s own attention to it do not involve an ontological, topologi-
cal, or epistemological disjuncture with the world-as-world, a complete
shift away from the macro, from the “cosmic” perspective of the NASA
(“Apollonian”) “gaze” and the “infinite” it gestures toward while paradoxi-
cally construing the earth as provisional one, limited “unit.”8 Indeed, the
macro and the micro work—must work, of necessity—as the two arms of
the analytic scissors.
As Robbins reminds us in a commentary on Spivak’s resistance to no-
tions of totality and totalist viewpoints that hark back to suspiciously coher-
ent worlding paradigms,
Cosmos (world) in cosmopolitan originally meant simply “order” or

“adornment”—as in cosmetics—and was only later extended metaphor-
ically to refer to “the world.” Cosmetics preceded totality. Worlding,
then, might be seen as “making up” the face of the planet—something
that can be done in diverse ways. At the same time, the case for this
modest cosmopolitanism is also a case for a certain professionalism—a
professionalism that, without presumption of ultimately totalizing cer-
tainty, believes in its own intellectual powers of generalization, abstrac-
tion synthesis, and representation at a distance, and in the process of
putting them to use—that believes, one might say, in its own work.9
Most critics would probably agree that cosmopolitanism, old and new, has
not completed this work yet, and it may never do so. Under these circum-
stances, planetary criticism might do well to step in. For its approach befits
planetarism’s prosopopoeial poetics, whose “face-making” results in a con-
figuration of form, color, and emotional content that neither implies an ab-
stract scheme nor reinforces the one already supplied by the global cogni-
tive order.
Reordering, remapping, and reworlding the world at the micro level, the
cultural cosmetics of planetary ordering resists, however, not only global
totalization but reading as well. It both founds and confounds the interpre-
tation. Thus, in the era of the “big picture,” of a picture taken by a see-it-all,
and see-it-as-all, eye-in-the-sky, the challenge, the world’s own provocation
to the discerning observer, is not principally the big picture itself, the plan-
et’s “macrophysiognomy” or the Face as such, of which we have been given
more and more detailed and accurate representations. This is not our tough-
est task. Macroscopically discernable thanks to the new technologies of

digital and satellite photography, the Face becomes indiscernible in the mi-
cro, in planetarism’s ever-multiplying facial ornaments and remappings,
which violate recognized maps, boundaries, and distributions of space, cul-
ture, and power. Along all these, the Face gets blurred inside and among the
planet’s faces, and so it becomes the job—the tougher job—of the planetary
critic to deal with the unsettlingly ambiguous encryptions of planetarity in
the local, the tiny, and the humble, to listen for the macro’s murmur in the
vernacular of the micro. For, fraught with distinctions and codifications of
planetarity, the indistinguishable is or looks so only at first glance. To really
pick up the gauntlet, therefore, is to try and ascertain what it entails to work
out cultures’ fine print with this planetary configuration, figure, or face as
master framing device; what it takes to attend geoaesthetically to the endur-
ingly enticing arabesque of “small things” alongside and through their
godly and human handlers, locales, and styles; in brief, what it means to us,
now, to read “with” the planet: to read the planet itself but not as a reduc-
tively “global” totality—a wrongheaded, unethical, and, at the end of the
day, futile undertaking—but, in reading against that ominous oneness, to
read the planet with and ultimately for the myriad of places, archives, and
artifacts of which its fragile, pluricentric, and makeshift whole consists.
§17. “A Single Embrace”: Turn of the Planet, Turn to the Planet

My personal hope for the coming decade is that we will look more
deeply into the presence of the world within the nation, even as we
continue to develop further our exploration of national traditions
within the wider world.
—David Damrosch, “World Literature as Figure and as Ground”
The world does not turn without moments of grace.
—Colum McCann, TransAtlantic
My premise, then, is that, at this point in history, the planet is swimming

into the critic’s ken. On a less Keatsian tone, the earth’s face is coming into
view as planet, in the planetary age and through planetarism’s cultural pro-
jections, in its fully tangible dispensations and cultural-intellectual affor-
dances complete with their sometimes uneven and contradictory offshoots.
This development is controversially complex. Nevertheless, in bringing
about a “discontinuity” in how we understand ourselves and others, it has
all the makings of a major, game-changing “event”10—an event and, with it,
as noted earlier under §13, an event horizon, namely, the planet’s “register-
ing” in our mental pictures but also planetarity as picture within which hu-
man creativity is reframed on the threshold of the twenty-first century.
As such, the event is an occasion not so much for uncritical cheering as
for earnest and sustained inquiry. Does the planet—more accurately, does
the earth—have a face to begin with? Has it ever had one? If so, how visible
was or is that face? To answer, one might start out by specifying that this
visibility need not be anthropomorphic and by the same token vulnerable
to Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of “faciality.”11 Further, one should point
out that our earth does have a surface. It has had one all along, if not a solid
one ab ovo. This is not what I am talking about, though. Primarily a matter
of geometry, geodesy, and, more basically, geology—after all, “earth” sup-
plies here a geological synecdoche for “planet”—the earth qua telluric-
oceanic surface is, so to speak, sur-facial, hence culturally superficial, im-
passive. We have seen, the globe and its rhetoric are post-figurative, an
anti-prosopopoeia that de-faces the earth at its developmentalist end, de-
pleting its material and aesthetic resources and washing off the colorful
“makeup.” Instead, the earth’s face is pre-figurative. Pre-facing the Face, this
blank, faceless face is aesthetically “asleep,” as Michael Ondaatje would put
it.12 Less an expression than sheer expanse, this unmarked flatness—this
“undented” plane, Westphal might gloss—lacks in volume as it does in va-
riety.13 Thus, the mysteries it harbors are either hollow or redundant.
Depthless, smooth, and uniform, this is not a face proper but a geographical
façade, indifferent theater for the drama of cultural difference rather than
the netospherical arena or “semiosphere” in which discourse is engendered
and exchanged.14 And, since this a-or proto-semiotic superficiality does
not feature a topology, it makes no provisions for a typology or principle of
classification either, that is, for a language, a locus-minded logos; the face of
the earth so conceived is scarcely a site of meaning.15
However, it may turn into one, as planet. After all, turning is what the
earth does as a planetary body, in both senses. Terra turns (planā, in An-
cient Greek) to gyrate, concomitantly around other celestial objects and its
own axis. But, by the same movement quite literally, it also turns to change,
turning in order to change and thus into a world-change order itself, the
earth’s revolutions bound up with the twists and turns in anthropocene his-
tory, revolutionary or less so. On one side, then, the earth’s whirling through
space as the planet physically revolves and evolves and as space on earth
itself stretches out, shrinks, is redistributed, and is mapped out in step with
the systoles and diastoles of human civilization; on the other side, our own
pirouettes, swerves, and about-faces, marking how we shuffle around the

world, how we transform it, how we ourselves change in the wake of worldly
changes, and, last but surely not least, how the latter call on us to revisit our
Anschauungen of the spinning Welt and of ourselves in it: all these turns
matter a great deal. What is more, they do so together, for they have been
demonstrably intertwined through the ages. If geography—the earth’s hu-
man writing into cartographic as well as topo-material visibility, the planet’s
life within and without homo sapiens’s scholarly disciplines and material-
aesthetic practices—is subject to becoming, then “the becoming” of such
fields, discourses, and the overall culture they speak to “is geographical”
too, according to Deleuze’s celebrated tribute to the “Superiority of Anglo-
American Literature.”16 On this account, no anthropology or ethnography
without a geophysical chapter is ever complete; no cultural history or para-
digm shift account overlooking the earth’s own motions, cycles, and crises
passes muster; no posthumanism still treating the planetary as inert, an-
thropocene context or backdrop to the human text or figure fulfills its
promise; and, more broadly, no philosophy that does not operate “geophi-
losophically” is worth its salt.17
As Deleuze and Guattari posit, not only is thought’s measure the ability
to “create” its concepts, but this creation also requires an “earth or deterri-
torialization” as its “foundation.”18 Note too that, for them, the earth and its
historical de-, re-, and, we shall discover, under-territorializing dynamics
are mere figures of speech neither ontologically, “out there” in the world,
nor philosophically, inside the reasoning apparatus of the “Geophilosophy”
chapter of What Is Philosophy? Or, they are figures etymologically, as it
were, inasmuch as they designate “aspects” (figurae) in a fairly palpable,
phenomenological fashion, ways in which the planet and thought look and
should be looked at, once again, correlatively, together. Equally significant is
that this togetherness, this mutuality of planetary complexion and thought’s
complications, fluctuates across time. True, Deleuze and Guattari observe
that the illuminating codependence of the earthly as deterritorialization
geoapparatus and of the philosophical has always been in play. In fact, as
Rodolphe Gasché explains in his ample commentary on What Is Philoso-
phy?, Greek democracy and philosophy are, according to the two thinkers,
“both born of an earth and an existence that are self-foundational, autono-
mous, free from all attachment to particular territories, born, in short, of a
fully immanent earth whose internal consistency is not diminished by the
existence of an outside cause or reason.”19 Greek citizens and philosophers,
one might say, are, or rebecame, autochthonous “not because they are of the
land and the earth but because they have all by themselves and of them-
selves grounded themselves, deterritorializing the land and reterritorializ-
ing it into a politically” and philosophically “grounded community.” The
new concept of autochthony, then, Gasché concludes, is
distinct from the one encoded by the official obsession with sameness
and the fascination with the auto-referential, distinct from, in short, the
myth of being born from the earth that dominated the official discourse,
especially in Athens. Wrenched from the earth, the philosopher’s earth
as the deterritorialized par excellence is reterritorialized onto Greece as
an earth that is constituted by the free and autochthonous citizens of the
polis, an earth that, in practice, has also been much more open to for-
eigners than the official discourse would seem to allow, which thus also
made it possible for a miracle to occur in Greece: the miracle of the birth
of philosophy.20
On the other hand, the post–Cold War years have enhanced and fore-
grounded spectacularly the geopolitical, geophilosophical, and geocultural
seesaw of the foundational de-and re-territorializations that promise to
bring, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “all the elements within a single em-
brace” of the planetary earth,21 of an ecumenical indigeneity that forgoes—
when it does not explicitly upend—any appellations d’origine contrôlée by
reaffirming the earth under the post-autochthonous auspices of planetarity.
No other chapter in the world’s history, I contend, has literalized the planet’s
figure so extensively, making it so ineludible in its ubiquitous physical im-
mediacy, so non-figurative in its concrete, geocultural presence, and so pro-
ductive conceptually, so consequential for how one thinks—for how “im-
manent” to thinking thinking with the planet has become across disciplines.
This “immanence,” this philosophical operationality of the planet, de-
rives, as Deleuze and Guattari also comment on Heidegger, from a plane-
tary turn, given that “by virtue of its structure,” Being “continually turns
away when it turns toward,” to the point that “the history of Being or of the
earth is the history of its turning away.”22 For one thing, this movement is to
no negligible degree trans-(and, some might add, post-) statal; arguably,
Henri Lefebvre guessed wrong when, back in 1975, he assured his readers
that planetarity—la mondialité—would be a “planetary extension of the
State.”23 For another thing, this has been a turn away from, and has been
accompanied by the subsequent opening up of, territories, polities, policies,
patrimonies, canons, standards, and paradigms heretofore neatly
circumscribed—“territorialized” in terms of administration, coverage, and
meaning—by national jurisdictions, nationalist mythologies, and attendant

epistemological claims and descriptive models, or just so advertised. These
complex turns trace the ambivalently distancing or “deterritorializing” by
which the planet de facto draws nearer to us, to the little places of our lives
but also to that hub of human reflexivity where it becomes effectively “im-
manent” to thought, or becomes thought, pure and simple, so as to involve
thought itself in the “double becoming” that would make it planet-like—
“earth,” write Deleuze and Guattari—and thereby transform it radically.24
In the multimillennial, interweaving histories of the world and thought,
we stand, as Kostas Axelos would alert us, at the decisive juncture at which
the coextension and co- implication of planetarity and thought— the
devenir-pensée du monde and the devenir-monde de la pensée—render the
worlding world’s fashioning of representation and the latter’s planetary
scope, structure, and content two faces of the same coin.25 For, if the planet
turns away, it does so only to return, turning back toward us ontologically
and analytically, as existential grit and interpretive grid, working itself into
the everyday and its material heterologies at the same time that it turns into
the pivot or “plane” around which thought and comprehension themselves
gravitate. This way, the planet’s turn lays out, still in Deleuze and Guattari’s
lingo, a “plane of immanence.” “Clearly not a program, design, end, or
means,” this plane nonetheless “constitutes,” today more than ever, “the ab-
solute ground of philosophy,” the foundation on which, in accord with the
planet’s cycles, thought warrants re-founding,26 with the sciences and the
arts also responding to these challenges, making similar moves on their
own thinking planes and in their discourse-specific languages.27 Thus, the
planet serves, increasingly and with historically unrivaled force, as a level,
matrix, or condition of possibility for a forma mentis whose purview covers
the conceptual (philosophical), the referential (scientific), as well as the aes-
thetic (imaginative).
This is how the planet is turning to us to concern us all, thinkers and art-
ists, specialists, and laypersons, irrespective of where and what we are, to
sponsor novel forms of world writing and reading, of imagining, figuring,
and figuring out the planetary world-as-world. Otherwise put, this concern
works both ways. We are concerned, “looked at” by the planet as it is turn-
ing to us so we can see the earth’s face. But this turn invites ours; we our-
selves have to turn to the planet. The earth has—finally—entered the pic-
ture qua planet and, in the geocultural dimension of planetarity, shows its
face to us. This face is meaningful, but it will not be readable—it will remain
fairly meaningless to us—unless we too face the earth. Because the turn of
the planet subsumes thought itself, it calls for an intellectual turn to the
planet; the reciprocity of planetarization and thought—of thinking on the
planet and of thinking of the planet as planet—presupposes apposite “con-
cerns,” a certain planetary consideration on our part. This is as much as
saying that, besides the world cast variously identified as multitude (Negri),
Crowd (Badiou), “global soul” (Pico Iyer), cosmopolitan (jet-setting or
not), and, somewhat disconcerting, “nowhere man” (Iyer, Alexandar He-
mon), the planet affords itself a receptive consciousness.28 In turning to the
planetary spectacle of meaning, this consciousness takes in the world ho-
mologically, by availing itself of a methodology germane to its planetary
object, moment, and environment. This methodology is thus a geomethod-
ology. In it, objective and subjective concerns, context and text dovetail. It
features three major constitutive steps and closely interrelated thrusts.
i. The first is principally topological. As such, it latches onto planetar-

ization as spatialization of the world and of aesthetic routines alike. It
does so not at all because temporality is planetarily irrelevant; after
all, Dimock’s “deep time” (other, oftentimes longer histories than U.S.
history) proves as instrumental to the planetary imaginary as “deep
space” (“other continents”). But, in the imaginal economy of planetar-
ism, planetarization and its relational mechanics are withnessed—put
together, recognized, and accounted for—more extensively, more
conspicuously, and more easily in the language of space, of places and
surveys other and of others (from) elsewhere, mapped onto the fiefs of
old-fashioned selfsameness, homogeneity, jurisdiction, ownership,
and autochthony. In brief, if there is a spatial bias or penchant to plan-
etarism, this has to do with its ethoscopic vector, with the unethical
spatializations that make for the target of planetary ethoscopies.
ii. The second is, in the main, structural or relational. It homes in on a
segment, locus, or facet of one or more artworks to tease out—to “de-
compress” analytically—their planetary inscription, namely, the
“here”-“there,” “we”- “they,” “part”-
“whole” relatedness structure
folded into them. This “folding,” I submit, is the strongest common
denominator of emerging planetary culture. Otherwise, as I have ac-
knowledged, “planetary cultures” is far more befitting because there is
no one-size-fits-all folding or compressing mechanism but only fold-
ing or compressing codes, which differ a great deal from one cultural
site, practice, or agent to another. In decoding cultures, in showing
how “here” is co-imagined—pictured inside, alongside, and more
broadly “with” there, and vice versa—geomethodology proceeds as a

reverse engineering of sorts, characteristically activating a reading-
with or a with-reading as it reads these works and their subsequent
topo-cultural “partialities” with the planetary “whole.” Geomethodol-
ogy’s modus operandi can be compared to the famous scene in DeL-
illo’s White Noise where Jack Gladney undoes the work of his garbage
compactor or—surely in the same vein—with Freudian dream inter-
pretation’s dealings with oneiric symbolizing mechanisms, particu-
larly Verdichtung (“condensation”).29 In ways similar to DeLillo’s ar-
cheologist of collective culture or to the analyst of private fantasies,
the geomethodologist is a “de-composer,” one who—incidentally,
against the grain of E. M. Cioran’s Précis de décomposition—de-
compacts or lays out the worlded world the planetary imaginary com-
presses into the nooks and crannies of smaller worlds.30
iii. The third thrust is predominantly ethical. It accentuates even more
powerfully the nethospherical repercussions of relational compres-
sions, condensations, and foldings. Building on the previous two, it
reaches beyond the descriptive by retooling the “with” as a twofold
critical-deontological “for”: geomethodology is not only geared to-
ward tracing symptoms of planetarity “in territory,” in this place, film,
or novel; it also reads for the planet, on its behalf. This is where plan-
etary interpretation and planetary stewardship become one. Below, I
will walk us through these three geomethodological components in
this order.
§18. The Space of Method

This methodology is a geomethodology first and foremost insofar as the
world’s planetary becoming—the turn of the planet—is, in its most notice-
able form, spatial. Planetary spatializations do affect time and its historical
(and historiographical) construction also. More often than not, they touch
off spectacular rehistoricizations, as we shall learn, for example, apropos of
O’Neill’s “Dutch America.” However, by and large, as Lefebvre, Harvey, and
others have suggested, one way or the other planetarization works through,
brings about, and, once more, “appears” most saliently as a transterritoriali
zation—dislocation, reallocation, and novel aggregation—of space and its
meanings on earth. Felt by the world, carved into its body in the form of late
twentieth–early twenty-first-century boundaries, passageways, itineraries,
venues, and geopolitical units of exchange, discourse, communality, and
contestation, this turn cannot be thought of independently from the plan-

et’s geophysical shifts even though its logistics remain largely anthropologi-
cal. Seemingly a natural category, a given (to us, humans), space has been,
in reality, as Lefebvre would also insist, subject to well-defined production
technologies. Occurring in and through human history, the planet’s turn is
thus inseparable from our spatial footprint on earth.
As Westphal maintains in Le monde plausible, the historical scene of this
turn is postmodernity31 or, more likely, whatever postmodernity we got left
after the Cold War. If the “spatial imagination”—across the humanities as
well as in the world “out there”—is older than postmodernism, the “spatial
turn” dramatically picked up speed during the Cold War’s last years to cul-
minate, inside the academy, with a “hyperspatialization” of literary his-
tory,32 theory, and especially postmodern theory through interventions by
topo-theorists, ecocritics, and literary cartographers such as Foucault, Har-
vey, Marc Augé, Edward W. Soja, Brian Jarvis, Buell, Heise, Moretti, and,
outside, with a quasi-worldwide spatialization of the postmodern paradigm
itself.33 Now we know that the globalization of the postmodern was a Pyr-
rhic victory. More noteworthy here is what made it possible, what helped
postmodernism go places in the first place: its “place fixation” itself (if you
indulge the pun) or perhaps the opposite, that is, postmodernism’s insatia-
ble appetite for unfixing, loosening, and setting things adrift, for displace-
ment and deferral, the transgressive, intertextually digressive furor topo-
logicus that bows to neither center nor inside because the marginal and the
outside, along with the “outside the text” (hors-texte), have lost their con-
tours on its maps. In this light, postmodernism’s anti-logocentrism is, apro-
pos of its spatial “fury,” a “lococentrism.”34 But the postmodern’s insistent
re-centering around space rests on a core-periphery dialectic redolent of
Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, where the stable, “rooted” center-circumference di-
chotomy gives way to multiple, ubiquitous, shifty, and rhizomorphe spati-
alities. This plural and fluid topology has been— was, some might
rejoinder—postmodern, terminally postmodern perhaps, before becoming
not only a theoretical-aesthetic but also a geocultural “dominant” of plane-
tarity. It is in response to it that authors from DeLillo, Bolaño, Andrei Co-
drescu, Paul Auster, O’Neill, Iyer, Orhan Pamuk, Mircea Cărtărescu, Michel
Houellebecq, Edwidge Danticat, Mohsin Hamid, and Teju Cole to David
Hollinger, Thomas L. Friedman, Nancy, Jameson, Miyoshi, Hardt, and
Negri—all fiction writers, critics, and philosophers representative for both
paradigms or, more accurately, for the transition from one to another—
extol, bewail, and otherwise dwell on the “disappearance of the outside” and
of those “hiding” places where territory-bounded and culturally “clois-

tered” individuals and groups struggle to opt out of one of our time’s sea
change scenarios.35
Imperfectly accommodated by the spatial-discursive model of post-
modernism, new kinds of painting, moviemaking, writing, reading, and
thinking are made possible, and the world they conjure up becomes intel-
lectually, ethically, and aesthetically “plausible” once the planetary turn has
been completed or, more realistically for now, has reached a point of no
return. As I have expounded at greater length in my book on cosmodern-
ism, and as reiterated earlier under §13, in carrying us past this moment the
contemporary is taking us beyond the postmodern,36 for its nowness weaves
the present and those present in it into a chronotopically novel fabric.
Marking the fast-evolving structure of presentness temporally, this quasi-
ecumenical fuite en avant shrinks the playground of “now” also known as
contemporaneousness down to a more modest interval: the time lapsed
since the end of the Cold War. This geohistorical process renders this now
less generic. While the contemporary is, of course, always mutating, sliding
out of its aging skin into new ones and into a perpetually self-updating
newness, the immediate past bestows uniqueness on this “now,” articulates
it as post–Cold War presentness in very concrete and characteristic ways.
Spatially, one registers, at the same time, a compensatorily amplifying
and juxtaposing “positional” pathos that, within and without the United
States, unpacks the historically discontinuous category of “here” and the
related notion of self so as to forefront the effective presence “in our midst,”
in the immediate proximity, or in the mediate, at-distance propinquity, of
those once upon a time “out there,” not “from around here,” or not like
“us.”37 My point is not simply that Harvey’s chronotopological “compres-
sion” model covers just a slice of a more complex world reality subject to a
range of simultaneous, spatio-temporal contractions and expansions, but
that what sets our epoch apart is a radical geosocialization of places and of
place generally. Even though its intensity and cultural markers shift from
one place to another, this process obtains on a scale as conspicuous as it is
planetary. In this respect, as a “trend,” the cosmodern is, indeed, to the
United States and most Euroatlantic cultures what the planetary is to the
entire world, including the late postcolonial. Put differently, the Western
cosmodernization of the postmodern represents a world-fractal phenome-
non, is part and parcel of a development or transformation of planetary
proportions, and, because of that, the change in question must be addressed
from the “world’s end,” not from America’s.
This shift or turn comes down to an undeniable worlding of world places.

Granted, there are exceptions to a phenomenon that, again, can take up any
number of forms, from the more heartening to the obstreperous and out-
right terrifying. But because what I want to point up is the worldwide, docu-
mentably topocultural dominant, it is worth stressing that this large-scale
spatialization stands out as a defining reality of the third millennium. What
our hyperconnected world has been “specializing” in, and also what distin-
guishes it, is worldly spatialization itself, which bears on how we are in this
world, on what we do in it, and on what we make of it. A perennial attribute
of Heidegger’s Dasein, being-in-the-world, with others, has been heightened
by the accelerated “de-distancing” of the world’s places, sites, and cultural
practices.38 Thus, as previously disconnected or loosely connected regions
have brought closer together modernity’s world en miettes, the spatiality
(Räumlichkeit) tied into Being ab origine has now become worlded spatiality.
Already instituted—presented—by the Heideggerian Welt, presence sets it-
self forth and is legible in spatial co-presence. So characteristic of our age, this
onto-topological condition of vicinity is not a planetary condition a priori
because the management of the self-other, here-there nexus warranting it
still has to become uniformly non-oppressive and non-exploitative. But
planetarism’s world-making, “normative” imaginary opens up, as we shall
see, some interesting possibilities for this equation.
§19. Getting the Picture: Rationality, Relationality, Distance

World literature that emerges from intensive lecture of a certain type,
and remains—despite its global ambitions—compatible with close
reading.
—Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds
Spatialization works by way of an ample repertoire of cultural sites, vectors,

and materials; world spatialization operates via ever broader arenas and so-
cioaesthetic rites and on a world scale. The unprecedented, ever-expanding
contiguity and co-articulation of formerly stand-alone—or so imagined—
agents, discourses, and settings are hallmarks of our worlding world.39 But,
to reemphasize, what “worlds” (weltet, in Heidegger) this world, and what
“welds” its “independent” statements and clauses into a worldly syntax of
subordinating, coordinating, of simply juxtaposing geoontology, is a world
picture (Weltbild) that must be grasped both objectively—empirically, as
what is—and subjectively—cognitively and ethically, as what it must even-
tually become. Reflective of the world’s “worlded” form or “built,” this Welt-
bild facilitates critical reflection on this world, helps us “get the picture” of
the world.40 It is in this multiple sense that the worlding world, and the
planet with it, has entered the picture: topologically, as spatial extension of
the human; historically, as a certain point in time when the world picture
comes about—the Heideggerian “age of the world picture” or, more accu-
rately still, the post–Cold War era, in which late globalization’s netospheri-
cal nomós (in Schmitt’s sense) “ventures” planetary spatiality as much as it
“rules” against it;41 and “spatiologically,” in Lefebvre’s terminology, or, in
mine, geomethodologically, as a planetarily minded approach in the hu-
manities and beyond.42
This approach’s critical algorithm works out readings through strategies
of semiotic spatialization, viz., through telescoping meaning-making asso-
ciations that, besides the unavoidable, if cautious, at-distance ratiocina-
tions, also enact, as we shall see momentarily, semantically microscopic
decompressions— self-
distancing interpretations— of local and proximal
spaces and of their aesthetic renditions. The Heideggerian qualms about the
modern attempts to reterritorialize our purchases on particular places and
occurrences therein by bridging the distances and divides between them
and otherwise transterritorializing their locations and significations are not
completely unwarranted, and yet they do not capture our present historical
circumstances. What Heidegger could not factor in is the crucial mutation
distance as concept and world spatial habitus has undergone over the past
half century: due to the planetary spatialization of places, distance itself has
been so thoroughly displaced and placed, territorialized, inside places, ter-
ritories, and cultural microdomains that dwelling on distance, on this kind
of structural or structure-embedded distance, no longer means automati-
cally subscribing to globalist-totalist ideologies. To the contrary—and on
this ground—“distant” reading can play out as close reading of spatial and
aesthetic distance-laden sites.43 In effect, as we shall notice repeatedly later
on, the distinction between “distant” and “close” all but disappears in the
praxis of planetary interpretation.
In light of this tactical conflation, is bears remembering that, in “The
Age of the World Picture” and elsewhere, the German philosopher is taken
aback by the “wholist,” anthropocentric arrogance behind wide-sweeping,
culturally and politically co-opting, and technologically assisted “calcula-
tions” about remote objects, their positions, meanings, and our physical-
intellectual access to them. No doubt, thinks Heidegger, there is something
to be said about the “gigantism” (“Americanist” or not) of our “distant”
topo-interpretive élans.44 But, as I have observed under §11 and in other

places in this book, Spivak, Neef, and others surmise that the planet—and
implicitly any reading model based on it—may override “globe” and the
globalist rhetoric that assimilates the far-flung and its beyond-reckoning
others into the rational, one-size-fits-all selfsameness makeup of the world’s
political and cultural centers.45 In most accounts, globality and even some
world-systems-based comparative approaches rationalize to shrink the
earth’s topo-epistemological interspaces by a “top-heavy” comparison that
“impos[es] the same system of exchange everywhere.”46 Instead, planetarity
and the criticism built on its conceptual matrix relationalize to link up and
read side by side the world’s worldly insides, its non-interchangeable enti-
ties, thus, and only now, allowing for the Heideggerian “incalculable,” the
aesthetically immeasurable, and the culturally asymmetrical.47 Typically
geomethodological, this (cor)relational move crosses the gap of difference
without annulling difference itself. Much like the planetarity that makes it
both “necessary” and “impossible,”48 the move delineates an analytic back
and forth between either spatially distinct, though connectable, meaning
units (works, genres, authors, movements) or from one meaning level to
another within the same unit or cluster of adjacent, partially overlapping, or
wholly coextensive units. Not infrequently, critics who have taken the for-
mer road have assumed that those units are not only external to each other
but also organized into a self-evident hierarchy of space (“centers” and “pe-
ripheries”), culture (“origins”/“originals”/“sources” and “imitations”/”repli
cas”/“echoes”), and power (“capitals”/“metropolises” and “provinces”/
“colonies”). Rearing its head even in a more democratically run world re-
public of letters such as Casanova’s, this geoaesthetic pecking order ante-
dates the planetary turn.49 With a long disciplinary history behind it, the
methodology underpinning it has yielded notoriously mixed results espe-
cially within the “influence studies” variety of comparative literature.
Driven by a “macro” kind of logic—in fact, excessively “macrological” at
times—it risks shortchanging the micro; wielded from afar or above, and
habitually from unacknowledged hubs and heights of political and cultural
capital, this panoramic view of the faraway and the atypical provides for a
“distant reading” that does remain distant. Here, distance is not only a “con-
dition of knowledge” but, unfortunately, also its stumbling block,50 for, his-
torically, it has produced analogously “distant, abstracted knowledge” in-
dicative of a cognitively suspicious “detachment.”51 If the cavalier dismissal
of “close reading” is damaging and thereby license for playing fast and loose
with the idiomatic richness of the infinitesimal, then whatever planetary
picture the “distant” critical procedure paints may not differ significantly
from the broad, totalizing, and “ideographically” insensitive brushstrokes
of the Wallersteinian and of the globalist model.52
§20. The Telescopic, the Microscopic, and

Planetary “Quilting Points”
More picturesque, from a planetary standpoint, is the latter road. Less trav-
eled and more recently cut, it is better marked not only with the usual road
signs but also with the planet’s lush and variegated ontosemiotics—in short,
with life. What with its high speed, uniformly designed ramps, exits, rest
areas, express tollgates, and lookout points over distant if awe-inspiring
scenery, the other road is an autobahn. The critical traffic it fosters remains
keyed to covering the distance physically rather than uncovering the geo-
cultural minutia of the in-between locales. The highway is just that, a high
road to, and at times even a bypass of, the problematics of the planetary
trivia, the horizontal counterpart of a telescopy exclusively and unambigu-
ously sold on the ideology of tēle (“at distance,” in Ancient Greek). No less
necessary, it must be treaded carefully, as thinkers from Heidegger to De-
leuze and Guattari to Paul Virilio counsel. At the very least, planetary crit-
ics, because they are adepts of a “dialectical” telescopy—a telescopy without
a teleology, an art of looking without a foregone conclusion—must supple-
ment it with the long-winded detour whose critical microscopy may help us
better descry the planet’s Face, the roar of the bigger world, in the faces and
wrinkles of the apparently isolated, in the cultural grimaces, historical
modes, and stylistic mood of unambitious, “cosmically” shy, or politically
disenfranchised topographies.
As we have seen, planetarization works through, brings about, and “ap-
pears” to us phenomenologically as a transterritorialization—dislocation,
reallocation, and novel aggregation—of space and its meanings on earth.
Consequently, discrete places overlap, link up, or reterritorialize each other
inside one another. What I dub the planetary “primal scene” is, in the writ-
ers summoned below from §20 on, a fictional episode typically bringing to
life “little places”—neighborhoods, small towns, sport clubs, theater halls,
family homes, intimate moments—that “telescope” the wider world. Here,
telescoping integrates two spatial-optic and intellectual operations. To my
mind, they do not make for a telescopic dilemma (das Dilemma des Teles-
kops), as Neef calls it after Hans Blumenberg,53 but for a scopic-cognitive
unit in the more Deleuzian and Guattarian sense in which “spatial registers”
can “switch” so as to perform critically revealing microscopic and telescopic

tasks capable of “showing us [both] the molecular and the super-molar,” the
world’s smallness and the world’s bigness.54 One such operation “shrinks
down” to size to compress and comprise something much bigger, quantita-
tively and qualitatively different: the over there, the otherwise, the greater
world. The other “brings closer” so as to “develop” in a quasi-photographic
sense, to render visible, but also to reach through and, in a way, beyond the
visible, to its meaning, and thus to foster a new understanding of place and
world alike. As a method, “reading for the planet” consists in retracing this
telescoping protocol of writing by unfolding and making legible the world’s
picture rolled inside the humble pictures and snapshots of humanity, tele-
scoping out and holding up to view the greater universe in its fragment, the
planetary curled around or hidden inside the omphalós of the indigenous,
the dialectal, and the place-bound. Thus, not only does this critical itinerary
prove analytically safer sometimes—for we risk missing less as we stop by,
look out the window, and take our mental pictures—but it also is more em-
phatically ethical because it encourages us to really “get to know”—to relate
to—those we meet along the way. To continue in the same Frostian vein,
this road can literally make all the difference. Here, the journey pulls the
world together and draws out spatially and intellectually the planet’s togeth-
erness by zooming in on the different, the off-the-beaten path, the small,
and their nuances. The understanding-enabling distance Hannah Arendt
talks about in Reading for the Planet’s opening epigraph is neither absent
nor purely figurative. Its geographical dimension is still in play. But this
expanse has been encoded discursively, as the interstice between the work’s
outer and deeper layers, and then critically, as the scopic-interpretive gap
between a first and second glance, between what we have in sight as we turn
to look and as our gaze caresses the work’s surface, and what comes into
clearer focus as we complete our turn and inspect deeper, that is, the kind
of planetary picture we might be able come away with as we develop the
cultural negative of the novel or painting in question. Distance now is, and
in planetary criticism promises to work, also in Arendt’s words, as an “inner
compass.”
The highway, rooftop, the astronaut, the satellite, the GPS, and their
maps and vistas are elevated both attitudinally and altitudinally. In their
more mechanical applications, they betray a twofold hauteur of standpoint,
a perspectival loftiness of geopositioning and topography as well as of judg-
ment. Quite high on their macro agenda is the barely disguised ambition to
corral the infinite into various distant readings, measurements, and conjec-
tures. Instead, the back road is, less assumingly, a portal to the infinitesimal.
A dromological version of the microscope, this route runs more emphati-
cally—to paraphrase Gregory Bateson—through a geography of the mind,
before trekking across the planet’s terraqueous body. In other words, it is
predicated on a geoaesthetic order, on a homological model of the world
and the artwork, in which the Stoic, macro universe of ever-enlarging cir-
cles of belonging slide into one another and, together, into the particular,
into the “located” work, and into the micro as their generic category.
It is in this sense that the micro telescopes—shrinks down to size to
encapsulate—the macro, which makes the opposition far less cut-and-
dried. For, in this sense too, the microscope is an epistemological telescope,
a meaning-making machine. Harnessing its magnifying capabilities, the mi-
croscopic reading technique of critical planetoscopy subsequently decom-
presses meaning, spreads out the world’s bigger canvas folded inside the
little picture, exposes the whole in the fragment, the planetary curled
around or nestling inside the omphalós of the indigenous, the dialectal, and
the place-bound. The idea behind this compression-cum-decompression
granulary reading optics so crucial to planetary criticism is not to abolish or
transcend distance in order to annex the destination. If, as noted earlier, the
classical telescope skips over places to cover (hoping to cancel out) great
distances, the microscopic view connects vastly separated cultural dots by
affirming and “working through” place after place, beginning with the start-
ing point itself.
In attending to it diligently—in tracking the cultural specimen’s Brown-
ian motion closely—the critical microscope pursues the planetary spatial-
ization of the geocultural sample under scrutiny. In so doing, it sets forth
the “inherently relational” constitution of that place as intersectional com-
munality or trans-communitarian locus communis in which, following in
the footsteps of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, one “inoperative”
community theorist after another locates and gives a chance to the world’s
singularities and to their idioms.55 Instituted through planetarism’s topolu-
dic cartography, inscribed on a mind map still different from the world’s,
this sociocultural haecceity implies a communalist project, a “laboratory of
the common” (Negri) and of a commons to come.56 This is not the locus of
an “illusory” or abstract (Augé) being-with, despite the “distancing” spatial
games inevitably played in and across it.57 On closer reading—the kind of
reading distant interpretation, as remarked earlier, is not incompatible
with—this site turns out instead to be a scene of many-sided cultural-
historical situatedness, one on which, as the planetary readings proposed
later in this part show, people’s dreams and “knowledges” are localized be-
cause, like all locales, they are planetarily positioned. An aesthetic location
where “here” and “ours” are spatialized into “distant kinship” with “there”
and “theirs,” this individual place or aesthetic venue and its this-ness itself
are therefore no longer opposed to planetarity but apposite to it, a scaled-
down with-world.58 Characteristically, this site cites (telescopes) the planet
spatially and intertextually, “sites” (situates) and quotes—with one word,
embodies—worldly relationality in ways that may or may not be right away
noticeable. Watermarked with the planet’s figure, this “sitational” textual-
spatial formation lends itself, accordingly, to a reading with this figure,
across the panoply of local figurations serving as the figure’s cipher and ve-
hicle. This reading is, to invoke Westphal again, a lecture du monde in the
strong sense of the world as worlded or relational mundus, in short, a with-
reading poised to face and shed light on the “withness” makeup of this
world.59 To that effect, planetary reading turns to the latter’s relational
structure—to the planet’s “mondiality”—microscopically, screening the mi-
cro for signs of the macro.
If the close reading handed down to us by the New Critics all-too-often
purports to “resolve” the contradictory by simplifying the complex, plane-
tary close (or micro)reading seeks to complicate the illusorily simple. This
kind of interpretation does the planet’s bidding epistemologically—and
thus instantiates what Axelos pinpointed as the planet’s “thought-
becoming”—by spotting the worldly multiplicity of place, time, and dis-
course in the deceptively monistic, the distant relatives, the exogenous, and
the incoherent genealogies placed under erasure by institutionalized cul-
ture and officially endorsed by the nation-state’s endogenous reveries.
As a product of this endorsement, culture is a cover-up operation. What
does this mean? It means that simulation is hardly the issue here, Jean Bau-
drillard’s variously rehearsed case notwithstanding. To the contrary, dis-
simulation is the problem. “Streamlined,” culture in general and national
culture in particular do not so much simulate as they dissimulate, conceal,
disregard, or short-shrift the many that have gone into the cobbling to-
gether of the one, of the same, of the “we,” and ultimately of the nation,
complete with its collective mythology, solipsist fantasies, and institutional-
ized territorialism. Countercultural because cross-cultural, reading with the
planet is a relational form of analysis that exposes, first, the compilation it-
self, the outsourcing of nativist allegories, and the heteroclite underbelly of
the putatively all-of-a-piece.60 Second, this is a “proximate reading” emi-
nently keen on the worldliness of the bricolage, on the nomadic, peripatetic,
and “distant” archive settled “around here,” as national literatures.61 And,

third, but in the same vein, reading with the planet shines light on the prob-
lematic, historically produced and oftentimes epistemologically counter-
productive “state-centrism.” According to planet-oriented reading, in ag-
gressively territorializing— in limiting to statal territoriality— the
genetic-interpretive play and overall domain of literary-cultural and hu-
manistic discourse, “nation-[state]-based” disciplinarity jars with actual
cross-cultural/cross-territorial scenarios through which this discourse
comes into being, evolves, spreads, and is mapped by scholars.62 As Neil
Brenner maintains, the epistemological impasse one faces here has to do
with a “jealous,” culturally “possessive” institution as much as it does with
political cartography and space. “The epistemology of state- centrism,”
Brenner says, can be understood in terms of a number of several “geograph-
ical assumptions,” including the postulate “that social relations are orga-
nized at a national scale or are undergoing a process of nationalization,”
which, in turn, has “generate[d] a methodical nationalism in which the na-
tional scale is treated as the ontologically primary locus of social relations.”63
Oddly enough, Brenner does not credit, if not Anthony Giddens and Her-
minio Martins, then at least Beck. For the German is the sociologist who
coined, in 2002, and then repeatedly refined the “methodological national-
ism” concept and its critique, “methodological cosmopolitanism.”64 “Meth-
odological nationalism,” Beck expounds,
assumes that the nation, state and society are the “natural” social and
political forms of the modern world. It assumes that humanity is natu-
rally divided into a limited number of nations, which on the inside, or-
ganize themselves as nation-states, and on the outside, set boundaries to
distinguish themselves from other nation-states. It goes even further:
this outer delimitation, as well as the competition between nation-states,
presents the most fundamental category of political organization. In-
deed, the social science stance is rooted in the concept of the nation-
state. It is a nation-state outlook on society and politics, law, justice and
history, that governs the sociological imagination.65
This outlook, Beck concludes, “prevents the social sciences from under-
standing and analysing the dynamics of the human condition in the twenty-
first century.”66 The state may be well and alive rather than a “zombie
categor[y],” but the nation-state as a descriptive unit and, organized around
it, state-backed epistemology have arguably become overbearing, if not out-
right terroristic in their territorialism, and increasingly obsolete, as critics
such as Paul Giles, Fine, Dimock, Spivak, Robbins, and Emery assert on
various occasions.67 Thus, “that a relevant literary history must challenge
the national paradigm is no longer a provocative statement,” points out
Svend Erik Larsen. “Nevertheless,” the Danish critic adds, “this paradigm
still plays a dominant role, if not in the explicit theorising about literary
historiography then at least in the actual writing of local histories.”68 As the
narrator of Hamid’s 2013 novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia com-
ments, the states and their “tireles[s efforts] to determine our orbits” are still
“on the cosmic list of things that unite us.”69 But, also notes the narrator, this
determination “tugs” at us, and its pulls, yanks, and calls to statal order are
getting both overreaching and restrictive epistemologically.70
Gauging this undue pressure, planetary- era writers like Hamid,
Cărtărescu, O’Neill, W. G. Sebald, Nicolas Bouvier, and Antonio Muñoz
Molina discover that “[a]rt cannot be explained”—or comprehensively ex-
plained any more—“as a social activity that fulfills the stated goals of a na-
tional” or “[economic] agenda” and that “[t]he specific place of art is now
increasingly located in networks that are both above and below the reach of
the nation-state.”71 These authors do remain visibly, “thematically” weary of
the persisting “tugs” of statality, sovereignty, national citizenship, and capi-
tal. At the same time, this thematics itself lays open, in their books, shifts
away, on one side, from the national and the postcolonial, and, on the other,
from the global. A novelist as Pakistani as he is American, Hamid would be
here the perfect case study not only for tracking such imaginary reorienta-
tions but also for tracing the moves planetary reading would have to make
in response: across and past the national territory and allegories that, for
many, still designate the foreordained destination of postcolonial analysis;
across and beyond the related, ethnicist-racialist allegory embedded in
most cultural and comparative studies; and across and against the financial
allegory to which mainstream global studies usually comes down one way
or another. These moves across nations and discourse formations are not
only spatial and semiotic. They are, I must stress, also political. Far from
“not reading scale politically,” they flaunt a flexible scalarity that affords po-
litical reading, namely, the pursuit of power, influence, and authority across
their actual, statal and worldly encodings and geographies.72 To be clear, the
point of such simultaneously transterritorial and post-allegorical reading is
not to brush aside the national, the ethnic, the racial, the global, the eco-
nomic, and the injustices and conflicts swirling around them, nor to always
“rea[d] beyond” (“against,” “below,” etc.) the nation, the local, or the ethnic,
nor to search for “scales of belonging” necessarily or exclusively at variance
with these categories’ extension within the perimeter of the nation-state.73

In fact, the point is just the opposite: the point—and my hope in Reading for
the Planet—is to see them for what they are and as they operate in today’s
worlding world, messy as this world is, to rediscover them afresh, in their true,
worldly configurations, outside current hermeneutical teleologies and athwart
the statal injunctions territorializing and making predictable such critical-
theoretical predispositions. If this world of ours is indeed messy, we can be-
gin to sort it out politically, culturally, and so on by acknowledging how
enmeshed in it, how entangled in each other’s lives, turfs, and stories, in one
another’s “terri(s)tories,” we all are.
Critical of the sociocultural aggregation model and “homeland security”-
style of epistemology hawked by methodological nationalism especially in
major moments of crisis (which, of course, is always “national”), epistemo-
logical planetarism cuts, therefore, in the literary and in the critical imagi-
nary alike, across traditionally territorialized— territorially bounded or
pictured—societies and socioformations such as race, ethnicity, class, and so
forth. “[L]iterature” is not just “written as a defense of the dignity of the
strange,” as Julia Kristeva says.74 Literature is strangeness. It “defamiliarizes”
things, as we know too well. But, in order to do so, its making resorts most
fundamentally to a prosopopoeial face-making of planetary mapping, to a
“displacement”—a Verschiebung not very different from Freud’s Verdichtung—
that “moves” the strange, the afar, the “other,” and the cosmic to the throb-
bing heart of culture, rendering the latter’s putative egocentric hearth a para-
doxically yet genetically necessarily allocentric zone.75 In the process,
planetary poiēsis denaturalizes the “national” in “national culture” and
thereby helps cultural understanding, and ultimately culture itself, shed its
national-étatiste epistemological straitjacket. Whistleblowers of sorts, plan-
etary critics leak culturally classified information about the recycled mate-
rial’s planetary provenance or, conversely, about the worldly affiliation of
presumably discrete traditions and autonomous identities by laying bare the
worldly relationality that the fast- expanding planetary imaginary has
threaded into descriptions of allegedly self-subsistent singularities.
What these critics promote, then, is a perusal protocol driven by a post-
traditional, planetary logic of withnessing according to which cultural
space’s nationally legislated (“named”) nomos is remapped heteronomously.
In this space or intersection of spaces, this remapping relies on two inter-
twined critical and geopolitical rearrangements. One concerns classical
statal spatiality; the other, the planetary paradigm and the world’s Face this
model of worldedness helps discern amid the world’s faces.
The first permutation impacts the topocultural and political “centers” of

world spatiality. Typically imagined as (rather than truly instantiating) an
“organic” or “vertical” model of growing, such hubs are not surrounded, at
least to the degree they used to be, by peripheries, semi-peripheries, cir-
cumferences, borders, and other “quilting points” through which centers
link up with other centers of power and administration.76 The center itself
now fully is, as Derrida already theorized it at length in the late 1960s, a col-
lection of quilting points. A “literature for the planet,” Dimock similarly
insists, is an “off-center set of vibrations, chaotic and tangential.”77 The “cri-
sis of territoriality”78 is thus not solely one of national frontiers, of “political
sovereignty” and self-determination understood primarily as “peripheral”
issues (pertaining to boundaries, margins, and so forth), but of centers
themselves and of their very systems of centralization and control, of state
cultural apparatuses and their aggressive overdetermination of culture’s and
cultural identity’s meanings.
In its self-perceived, ethno-linguistically, territorially, and institutionally
homogenous configuration, the state has set itself up as the post-Westphalian
era’s default aggregation unit and “scalar variety” of aesthetic production and
analysis.79 This arrogance, complete with the cultural-epistemological servi-
tudes required of those buying into its premises, was already evident to
Friedrich Nietzsche. In Untimely Meditations, he paints a famously disen-
chanted yet characteristically prescient picture of Western modernity and its
fundamental institutions. “We live,” writes the philosopher,
in the age of atoms, of atomistic chaos. In the Middle Ages the hostile
forces were held together by the church and, through the strong pressure
it exerted, to some extent assimilated with one another. When the bond
broke, the pressure relaxed, [and] they rebelled against one another. The
Reformation declared many things to be adiaphora, domains where re-
ligion was not to hold sway; this was the price at which it purchased its
existence: just as Christianity has already had to pay a similar price in
face of the much more religiously inclined world of antiquity. From
there on the division spread wider and wider. Nowadays the crudest and
most evil forces, the egoism of the money-makers and the military des-
pots, hold sway over almost everything on earth. In the hands of these
despots and money-makers, the state certainly makes an attempt to or-
ganize everything anew out of itself to bind and constrain all those mu-
tually hostile forces: that is to say, it wants men to render it the same
idolatry they formerly rendered the church. With what success? We
have still to learn; we are, in any case, even now still in the ice-filled
stream of the Middle-Ages; it has thawed and is rushing on with devas-

tating power. Ice-floe piles on ice-floe, all the banks have been inun-
dated and are in danger of collapse. The revolution is absolutely un-
avoidable, and it will be the atomistic revolution: but what are the
smallest individualistic basic constituents of human society?80
The picture is not only bleak but also critical in that it critiques a world
picture, a certain cultural, hermeneutic, and geopolitical imaginary. This
critique is as relevant today, after Nietzsche’s “atomistic revolutions” have
broken out and when, in a sense, they are still unfolding, as it was in 1874.
Its main relevance is twofold. On one side, it speaks to the systematic efforts
by various geoinstitutional apparatuses of modernity to aggregate the hu-
man domain into intelligible and manageable structures. The earlier Catho-
lic Church, the Reformed Church after that, what with its partial “with-
drawal” from the social, then capital, and, in the late post-Westphalian
era—after 1848 rather than immediately after 1648—the nation-state have
all scrambled, observes Nietzsche, to “organize” the human. Organize: read
territorialize. Read: shape, contain, define, and rule; be recognized and even
“worshipped.” This territorialization, which some equate with modernity
itself, posits a meaning for something—for human spatiality, sociality, and
ultimately the human itself. This positing bespeaks the rather intellectually
impatient decisional violence of paradigm-setting: this is the model, the
paradigm for the human; this is what human society and the human mean.
On the other side, what humankind, the social, and the cultural signify—
what they are—is a function of where they are. Here, territorialization gets
quite literal. That is to say, ontology becomes topology and interpretation a
geopositioning protocol, in a literal-statal sort of way that, we shall notice
below, planetary criticism sets out to break wide open. Thus, the positing of
meaning goes hand in hand with position, with the human’s place, which is
also paradigmatic; linguistically, ethnically, economically, politically, or cul-
turally, the human is locational, assumed to play out within various “units.”
It is inside them, we are told, that the human makes sense, can be researched
and described—inside them, or, more accurately, inside it, the nation-state
geoapparatus of discourse-making and discourse-processing. For, in mod-
ern history overall and surely in Nietzsche’s time, the latest and by far most
enduring installment in this hegemonic narrative of political, cultural, and
epistemological scalarity has been the nation-state. It is through the statal
that the human, in its cultural expression, and the human world become
intelligible to humanists for almost two hundred years. In fact, one found-
ing assumption of modern Western humanism ever since the nationalist

trahison de clercs exposed by Julien Benda is that one sees culture, and, with
it, humankind and the world, through the nation-state—that the intelligi-
bility model of the world is self-evidently and unassailably statal.81 To go
back to Nietzsche’s liquid metaphor, culture is presumed to flow
“paradigmatically”—and thus to be inevitably streamlined—within the
“banks” of the nation-state, to be contained by it, so much so that it cannot
but “internalize” the container, take it in and also take it up as its content.
Of course, modern culture has greatly overflown its statal-territorialist
riverbanks worldwide. Furthermore, as Adrian Florea notes, new data
shows that “nonstate territorial units” are more numerous than “sovereign
states with often disputed, but fairly stable, borders.” Under these circum-
stances, the “anachronistic view” of political or cultural authority “being
monopolized by clearly demarcated states that exercise full control over
their territory” has become a true “stumbling block” in political science as
well as in cultural analysis and other humanities in which epistemological
mapping of human expression is still dependent on traditional, state-
centered world cartographies.82 As with the post-Reformation Church,
whatever spills over, whatever flows or falls outside statal jurisdiction, risks
being ignored or downgraded culturally, that is, treated as less typical, less
representative, with paradigmatic condescendence, if you will. To be repre-
sentative, and therefore canonical, is to be representative of certain aggrega-
tion units privileged by modernity, of the nation-state first and foremost,
and of classical identity formations such as race, ethnicity, and linguistic
indigeneity, which have been usually associated with and situated within
the master communal framework of the nation-state. What is not “repre-
sentative” along these lines—the less “paradigmatic” phenomena—tends to
register less on our radar screens: in our anthologies, in our sense of history,
tradition, community, group membership, and the like. However, planetar-
ity is forcing us to reconsider the “one-on-one correspondence between the
geographic and ethno-linguistic origins of a text and its evolving radius of
literary action.” “We need,” Dimock further argues, “to stop thinking of na-
tional literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps. . . . [H]
andily outliv[ing] the finite scope of the nation, [literature] brings into play
a different set of temporal and spatial coordinates. It urges on us the entire
planet as a unit of analysis.”83
The second geopolitical and geocultural rearrangement speaks to the
paradigmatic energy of telescoping operations. The “quilting-point,” allo-
centric model of centers and centered cultural spaces does not simply “open
up” the local to the global, thereby “resolving,” in its “glocalizing” fervor, the
local-global (or national-global) aporia, as many critics purport to do by
following Robertson’s lead.84 No “glocal” synthesis gels here. Nor should it,
because it would still be a recipe for globalist homogeneity and for its im-
plicit universalism, which both Robertson’s and Beck’s theoretical blue-
prints feature, another sign that Robertson’s “middle position”—
“methodological glocalism” as a correction of methodological localism or
nationalism—is not entirely different from methodological cosmopolitan-
ism.85 What takes hold instead, with a spatial and material force and con-
creteness neither methodology handles effectively, is a telescopy of the
worlding world curled up inside the local, within which “here” and “there,”
the face and Face, remain distinct and yet intimately co-present, with one
another. Detached from themselves in order to reattach themselves to oth-
ers according to novel, posttraditional and “postethnic” attachments, alle-
giances, and affiliations, they are thus a discontinuity, a self-displaced con-
tinuum that exists in an “interface” mode that neither obscures the other’s
face nor obviates the need, indeed, the duty to look into it.86 Thus reterrito-
rialized as “nested territorial units”87 of space, culture, and subjectivity—all
of them qualified in terms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and
faith and, reciprocally, serving themselves as qualifiers of such identitarian
parameters—cultural territory calls for a new, planetary cultural studies
paradigm attuned to the mutual articulations and imbrications of the
world’s Face and face, of the tiny writ large in the planetary and of the plan-
etary writ small in the tiny. For, as we shall see at great length in this part’s
next half, this is what planetarism’s literary geo-graphy writes out, often-
times against internationally recognized mental and territorial delineations
of statehood, national borders, and statal sovereignty: a Face made up of the
world’s mosaic of many faces. Vice versa, the planet lies “condensed,”
“folded,” “curled up,” or “nested” inside the anonymous and the isolated.
The swelling whole is “compacted,” then taken apart, looked into, and put
back together in its parts, fragments, and subsets; at the same time, each
face’s makeup is a planetary prosopopoeia, makes out the Face, paints and
showcases its interfacial structure. The idiographic, then, does not redra-
matize the global nomos but reveals, under the magnifying glass of plane-
tary critical autopsy—etymologically, “eye-witnessing”—a unique, asym-
metrical, and yet powerful formulation of planetary withness, the worldly
anatomy of elsewheres, multitudes, habits, and ways. The idiomatic here
and there, the “world in a nutshell,” is, in reality, a culturally and historically
trivial site—from the Latin trivium, “intersection of three roads” and more
generally “crossroads”—a “pointillist” point in space and time where the

world’s other ways, routes, places, and histories cross, and so concurrently a
cross-section of everything meeting, touching, classifying, mixing, and
passing in and through it.
So different from the rhetoric of global geometry, all these topological
metaphors have been cropping up in twenty-first-century exchanges in the
humanities, attesting to critics’ growing and akin interests in a fractal no-
tion of discourse, in issues of maps, scale, and aggregation unit, and in a
histoire croisée model of cultural history. The planetary protocol of critical
telescopy employed in part 2, II both incorporates and recalibrates four
components of this fractal-intersectional “outlook” on literature and liter-
ary epistemology as follows:88
i. This analytic procedure retains, first, the post-global, post-Euclidian,

Benoît Mandelbrot–inspired fractal model with a greater emphasis on
the irregularity among fragments and between fragment and whole,
which arrangement or mapping is, as Dimock comments, “what gets
lost in a big picture.”89 In this light, planetarism—a picture of the big-
ger world—is anything but a “big picture” volume-wise. It captures a
sociocultural phenomenology of fractality in which the trivial face or
the fine print of the “minuscule” joins and documents the world’s ma-
juscules of the planetary large-print and thus a world, “endless,” non-
kind type of “kinship” that is, as Dimock allows, neither truly genetic
nor, as I would stress, formally mimetic if by this we mean intention-
ally (and submissively) reproductive of the planetary ensemble. “The
infinite,” the critic explains, “is embedded in the [finite], coiled in the
former, and can be released only when the former is broken down
into fractional units. For it is only when the scale is smaller and the
details get finer that previously hidden dimensions can come swirling
out.” “Scalar opposites,” Dimock concludes, “here generate a dialectic
that makes the global an effect of the grainy.”90 This dialectic, I hasten
to remark, is what no longer makes the “grainy,” the trivial face, and
the micro a docile repository and mimesis of the global but the fine
print in which the inscriptions and prescriptions of globality are un-
written and reinscribed planetarily. Either “over here” or “over there,”
the planet’s own footprint on “local” representations—the flipside of
our ecological marks on the planet itself—becomes visible and thus
lends itself to reading in those representations’ fine print. Usually
crystallizing at a deep level, that fine print is couched in the elusive
language (allusions, connections, references, parallels, borrowings,

puns and cognate playful associations) where the relation with the
geocultural other—other texts, histories, places, and people—turns
out to be so instrumental to the meaning-making process at the writ-
er’s as well as the critic’s end.
ii. The second component of critical telescopy is comparative. If Moret-
ti’s “distant reading” is not quite fit, as Dimock suggests, for the cru-
cial and urgent task of attending to planetary culture’s fine print, frac-
tal analysis is, with the proviso that my concern, also comparative in
nature, is less morphological (a matter of planetary form) and more
thematic-imaginary (a matter of the planetary imagination).91 Other-
wise, planetary reading is a comparative effort. What makes this en-
deavor comparative is, for one thing, the very makeup of the plane-
tary ensemble. If comparison involves, according to the Latin
comparō, “placing” the world’s things “together,” then comparatism is
homologous to the worlding world itself, to the juxtapositions (com-
parationes) the world’s coming together sets off. Planetary critics real-
ize, maybe more than others, that we are living in an increasingly
“comparative” or “(con-)pairing” world that demands an apposite,
comparative reading. For another thing, a “comparative” ontology is
not one in which things run or flow on or within separate tracks or
“riverbeds.” As I insist ever so often, the tracks, the “routes,” are re-
routed across other tracks and itineraries of commerce, exchange, in-
fluence, and derivation. All these weave a world circuitry of cultural
debt. The “comparative,” worlding world is, then, fundamentally sub-
tended and ethically marked by a credit-debit nexus. The world qua
planet is an expanding geodomain of reciprocal indebtedness. It goes
without saying—or perhaps it needs to be said, given the growing tur-
bulence in global finance—I am not talking about debt as a U.S. De-
partment of Commerce official, a CEO, or an accountant might. My
concern is planetary culture and planetarily minded cultural analysis,
which, in this vein, is an account of the indebtedness that goes into
the ecumenical manufacturing of originality. Along these lines, plan-
etary theory and the studies built on it make for a major, quintessen-
tially comparative subset of cultural theory and of the cultural studies
swirling around it. What planetarity criticism attempts or should at-
tempt, against the centuries-old doxa of morally “toxic” debt, is a re-
valuation of indebtedness, a reaccreditation of the discredited notions
of credit and debt. I would contend, in effect, that rethinking these
categories from a cultural standpoint is something of an urgency in

the twenty-first-century world. Paraphrasing, apropos of this ethical,
aesthetic, and epistemological reassessment, Gordon Gekko’s infa-
mous “greed is good” line (Wall Street), the planetary critic entertains
the notion that debt, in an important sense, is hardly a sin. In fact,
debt is good. Debt is better, actually, because, especially in a planetary
context, it is foundational to doing good, designating the premise of
ethics and moral conduct rather than their breach. Moreover, debt,
that thing that we lack and need, that absence (béance in Jacques
Lacan), has constitutive force. What we call “subject formation”—and
certainly what we might some day call planetary subject formation—is
nothing less that going into debt, to others, to the other than “self ”
and “here.” Being is thus being indebted, for we would not be, particu-
larly in our time, if it were not for that originating—and originality-
spawning—deficit. This shortage, the stuff we do not have or are short
of, is ontological. More accurately, it has ontological potential: we can
be or become, make the “most of ourselves” if we live up to it. Other-
wise, as Levinas says, its nature is ethical.85 What that absence carves
out inside ourselves is a space of otherness, and this has crucial impli-
cations: the debt accrues a duty, a responsibility in and to the world.
In this light, it is important to realize—in the planetary age more than
ever before—that this debt is originary rather than supplemental to
being. Planetarily speaking, we do live on borrowed time ab origine.
We do not incur debt after we have somehow made and spent our
fortune or have blown our “inheritance.” It is already there. It (they)
must be in there before we set about being and expressing ourselves.
Our “credentials” are predicated on this credit. In the planetary era,
we “rise up” to our potential from the fertile abyss of alterity. This debt
is a precondition to being human and to all that human beings can be.
Giorgio Agamben says as much in The Coming Community. “The be-
ing most proper to humankind,” he glosses, “is being one’s own pos-
sibility or potentiality.”93 Our full humanity is something we achieve,
something to come and to strive for. Being, at its fullest and “most
proper,” Agamben also notes, implies not being-there, a being “devoid
of foundation.”94 But this missing foundation is, once more, founda-
tional, for we embark on the human adventure, we enact our human-
ness, if you will, without being “in possession” of that ground.95 And
so, the Italian philosopher argues, “humans have and feel a debt,”
leading their lives by taking out an ontological loan without collateral.
“Humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other

words,” he concludes, “always already in debt; they always already
have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy
act.” Agamben’s take on “the doctrine of original sin” pertains to the-
ology as much as to ontology, ethics, and even to literature and its
history.96 In speaking, reading, and writing, in cultural practice gen-
erally, debt brings into play issues as linguistic and textual as ethical
and political, an indebtedness—hence an accountability—beyond ac-
counting, a debt-derived duty larger than words, figures, balances,
and accounts. Granted, it is a different kind of incommensurable debt
that, in his 1996 article “Dette mondiale et univers parallèle” (Global
debt and parallel universe), Baudrillard zeroes in on to pinpoint a ma-
jor challenge of contemporary economics: the financial sublime of the
global age. This is world debt that further globalizes the world, for
better or worse and everything in between. Incrementally shared one
way or the other by the planet’s population—although by some of us
more than others—this debt is practically infinite because impossible
to pay off while still mounting ad infinitum, “beyond counting,” au-
delà de toute comptabilité—beyond measuring and representation
and without correspondence in reality, in “available capital.” This is
why, Baudrillard contends, it is financially meaningless. Its only value
is symbolic because this debt speaks to a “symbolic credit system
whereby people, corporations, nations are attached to one another by
default.”97 But the symbolic value of globalized and globalizing debt, I
would reply, is not immaterial or meaningless. It was not in 1996, and
definitely it is not today, even though the discrediting narrative has
since then somewhat changed. World insolvency points, in an admit-
tedly twisted way, to the very meaning of symbolic values in general
at the dawn of the new millennium, to the concrete “attachments,”
barterings, and exchanges underlying them, in brief, to the global for-
mation and reach of a cultural capital that grows as it finances—funds
and founds, credits and authorizes— rationales, tropes, stances,
trends, and values transnationally, around the world and across tradi-
tional lines of indebtedness, influence, taxation, and jurisdiction.
Non-referential as it may be, unevenly distributed as it certainly is,
global monetary debt nonetheless supplies a serviceable model for
coming to terms with the worldwide circulation of symbolic capital
and the swelling planetary indebtedness derived from it. The indebt-
edness planetary analysis—or comparative analysis with a planetary
bent—dwells on, cultural indebtedness, is neither “sinful” nor virtual.

Setting aside for now the history of financial credit, the banking and
political practices behind debt, how badly it sometimes hurts us, and
how bad we feel about it, one must come to terms with its reality,
namely, with what it does to us all: its “credit lines” tie us together in
real or quasi-real time and space; it “worlds” us, sets us side by side,
“pairs” us up, “com-pares” us as we are credited so that, in turn, we
can also “compare” the world, acquire it (another meaning of comparō),
get a purchase on it aesthetically, as representation. Most notably, in
this material landscape the formation of cultural interconnectedness
expands and becomes more and more visible. Here money, a signifier
of value, is isomorphic to a worthier axiology, and accordingly, here
too debt is the other name of all-pervasive influence and the cultural
métissage coming on its heels. Here, self and other farm their dis-
course out to one another frenetically, so we are all becoming more
indebted to others elsewhere than we have ever been. These others
and their locations hold liens on our times and spaces, on what we do
and say in them, on our discourse. And vice versa: we ourselves are
jump-off points, investments, “seed money” for cultural ventures thus
inevitably joint, coming to fruition somewhere else. This applies to
individual authors as much as to communities and traditions now
more than at any other point in history. In the compressed space and
time of interweaving world cultures, authority is increasingly on loan,
authenticity and originality intertextual affairs, and “individual tal-
ent” and “personal tone” often echoes from afar, ventriloquisms.
This is not an unprecedented paradox. The phenomenon does not
pertain solely to the worlding world of planetarity either. It is in this
world, though, that relatedness and, stemming from it, mix, “impu-
rity,” and the allogeneic have become staples of life around the world.
The planet’s cultural credit/debit arena is giving birth to a new, physi-
cal and non-physical (at-distance) proximity, to a culturally woven
immediacy with “my” culture and “yours” intermingling and foster-
ing new assemblages. It is within this exchange horizon that what I
have called the offshoring of identity takes place, and it is within this
world arena that planetary studies stakes out its territory.98 Whatever
I am or become comes about under the impact of remote, heteroge-
neous sources, places, and styles. The familiar is less and less a func-
tion of the familial. More and more afforded by the alien, it does not
exclude—to the contrary, it entails—a remote sort of kinship. As a
result, the economy of my being is hardly self-sufficient, depending as

it does on others for “loans” and “parts”—myths, fantasies, stories,
symbolic structures, and the like. Leaving behind a separatedness-
based model shaped by the center/margin, “in here”/”out there,” our
culture/theirs, and other similar disjunctions typical of coloniality,
postcoloniality, and the earlier stage of multicultural awareness, this
economy is moving toward a conjunctive or relational model informed
by cross-cultural, cross-geographical, indeed, world-scale contacts,
juxtapositions, borrowings, and barterings. What this new, cross-
territorial, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic scalarity helps visualize
cartographically and appreciate critically is how much culture—any
culture—has borrowed from world cultures and, accordingly, how
much of the nations’ cultural fabric consists, as I have explained, of
“credit lines,” threads, strains, stanzas, quotes, and other similar in-
vestments from elsewhere.99 It is therefore our job as planetary critics
to take comparative literature into the planetary era and read, accord-
ingly, between and across these lines so as to assess both the invest-
ments and their returns.
Thus, far from sounding the death knell of a “discipline” (Spivak’s
comparative studies), planetarity and its paradigm actually mark its
rebirth: of the field and perhaps, around it, of the “ruined” university
itself, which is, or should be, beholden to its statal sponsor and episte-
mological handler no longer.100 For, to unpack a text’s planetarity is to
read that novel or novella as a bundle of relations in the sense previ-
ously defined, and unraveling this entangled relationality comes
down to a comparative undertaking. Further, this comparatism ought
to agree to revisit its own classifications, epistemological habits, and
intellectual maps—to face the incomparable, the immeasurable, the
asymmetrical, the non-repetitive, and other forms of a-serial repre-
sentation, rough discursive conglomerates, and narratives less ac-
commodated by the territorialist metanarrative of the nation-state.
What the “asymmetrical” model of comparison/interpretation allows
is, to recall Clifford Geertz, a “thick description” or critical telescop-
ing of planetarity that, in integrating macro-and microanalysis, en-
ables a reading of the larger world en filigrane (“in filigree”), as the
French might say, that is, in the arabesque-like fabric of “idiomatic”
textuality. Comparatists if not by trade then by necessity, planetary
critics must look for the planetary quasi-totum in parte, contemplate
the fragile, ever-self-reconstituting face of the “all” in filigree, in that
which seems to be facing no one else but itself. Does this mean that,
in reading the “grainy,” they indulge too much in a reading against the
grain, against how local and bounded the local and bounded seem to
be and seem to tell us that they want to be seen? Not quite. In practice,
their reading is also one with the grain. This reading often fleshes out
the insights of worldedness turning up in U.S. and other literatures
with symptomatically increased frequency since the late 1980s.
iii. The third element or maneuver of planetary telescopy highlights the
codependence of the microscopic and the macroscopic. In accom-
modating “multiple scales”101 and interpretive contexts spatially and
temporally102—rather than forcing the comparatist to choose one
over another, on the “internationalist” assumption that “[t]oday . . .
the planetary scale trumps the smaller, national scale”103—fractal
world maps “reorient us towards an axis of scale that runs from the
microcosm to the microcosm.”104 But because the latter is not an inde-
pendent, a priori “totality” socially (nationally) or internationally, as
some think,105 this reorientation also prompts a recursive feedback
loop, a mutually illuminating (“cognitive”) and transformative back
and forth between micro and macro, a successive chain of reciprocal
remappings. What these are likely to uncover is the singular as a cross
of singularities, a particular world as an encoding site and passageway
for other worlds, world channels, paths, and cultural codes.
iv. The fourth and last telescopic procedure is germane to histoire croisée.
While unconvincing in its anti-comparatist bias—which seems so
counterintuitive, given the objectives of “intersectional”
historiography—this historical mode of inquiry is well equipped to
assist the planetary critic. Not unlike “new cosmopolitanism” in soci-
ology,106 this (neo)neo-historicism is a brainchild of the post-1989
cross-disciplinary paradigmatic revisionism. Accordingly, it deploys a
methodological apparatus also self- described as “relational” and
transnational, one functioning by virtue of a cross-historical worlding
mechanics in which the resulting world, society, or time period is en-
twined with other worlds, societies, moments, discourses, and catego-
ries, and therefore pluriscalar, a multiple cross in terms of structure,
location, and genetics. Most importantly, the histoire croisée approach
treats the cultural-engendering “intercrossings” as “intrinsic” to the
object of study, with historical microscopy unearthing, in an “inextri-
cable connectio[n]” with the macro and with its macroscopy, previ-
ously unnoticed, distorted, rationalized, played down, or censored
macrorealities.107 As we shall discover in the last sections of this part,

post–Cold War narratives stage a world so deeply akin to the croisé
sociohistorical model that geomethodology cannot afford to ignore
what this new trend in historiography has to offer. Insistently refocus-
ing the gaze on the planetary “all” and on its histories and places criss-
crossing inside the apparently second-fiddle, cloistral, ingrown, and
otherwise “unworldly,” some of the most emblematic fictions of our
time can be read as geomethodological blueprints.
II
§21. Cosmology and Cosmallogy
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
This nobody contains multitudes.
—Jahan Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization”
Mircea Cărtărescu’s oeuvre is a case in point. If Hungarian author George

Konrád confesses in his 1984 book Antipolitics that “[t]he world is one; and
it is more interesting than Budapest,”109 the Romanian writer feels, around
the same time and a few hundred miles east of Konrád’s Budapest, the pull
of planetarity in situ: not only does the planet exist, but it can be lived out
locally, in and as his hometown. “I truly love my world, the world of Bucha-
rest,” he declares elsewhere, “yet I am fully aware that Bucharest is con-
comitantly all, the Aleph.”109 To get a grip on the Borgesian allusion, it is
important to remember that, at the time, the Communist rulers were seek-
ing to expunge Romania’s capital from the world’s cultural and political
script and turn it, along with the rest of the country, into what the dissidents
were calling “internal exile.” Pushing back against this agenda, the “cultural
resistance” movement (rezistenţa prin cultură) of the Romanian 1980s
marked one of the most cosmopolitan periods in East European history.
In the vanguard of this battle, Cărtărescu fights off the twin incarcera-
tion of his beloved city and of himself in it by opening it out onto what his
1985 poetry volume calls the “All” (Totul).110 Drawing from this and other
earlier works, his 1993 novel Nostalgia sketches an astounding vision of
planetarity.111 Forlorn and dilapidated, plagued by shortages and blackouts,
late Cold War Bucharest is, literally and allegorically, worlded, written by
the book back into the wider world and thereby made “interesting,” into a
site of and argument for worldly belonging. The city may be “airtight” in the
regime’s paranoid delusions of “territorial sovereignty,” as Dimock notes ap-
ropos of Osip Mandelstam’s Soviet Union, but, in Cărtărescu’s worlded
imaginary, it reclaims its seat in the bigger world.112 To turn one of the cyn-
ical ruminations of Jamaica Kincaid’s narrator in A Small Place on its head,
Bucharest and its people, “small” as their city may be, “ca[n]” and do “see
themselves in a larger picture, . . . see that they might be part of a chain of
something.”113 They are, we gather, part and parcel of this world; they live in
its nurturing embrace, although not out in the open, for politics and poli-
cies of cultural lockdown have all but deterritorialized the greater out-
side—or, more exactly, have underterritorialized it. But, from beneath the
defaced surface of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s “golden-age” Bucharest, the writer
summons strange faces and the very face of worldly strangeness: the Face—
the face of the planet—the figure of that hesitant, incoherent and raucous,
totality-shy and yet appealing cosmos further and unduly fractured by the
country’s heavily militarized borders and more generally by the disjunctive
geopolitics of the Cold War. From within the maze of concrete housing
projects, the author conjures up cosmic panoramas by bridging physical
and metaphysical gaps. In dialogue with E. T. A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka,
Gabriel García Márquez, Borges, Pynchon, and other modern and post-
modern masters of the fantastic, the absurd, and magical realism, Cărtărescu
unearths a maimed metropolis whose heart throbs in the world’s wider
body and whose idiosyncratic mix of squalor and “Paris of the Balkans”
charm he flips over to display unsuspected depths and gateways into the
hidden, the elsewhere, and the otherwise—into the world’s larger assem-
blage. Where the Western mind-set relegates his city to an alien geography
overrun by strays and ruled by vampiric dictators razing entire neighbor-
hoods to make room for their sepulchral headquarters, Cărtărescu unfolds
a borderless dreamland.
The oneiric politics of Nostalgia’s urban imaginary was lost on
Cărtărescu’s readers neither when the book first came out in spring 1989,
under the title Visul (The Dream) and butchered by censorship, nor a few
years later, when it was reissued in unabridged form. Its staggeringly world-
relational toposophy went head-on against officially upheld “tradition,” an
exceptionalist-solipsistic notion redolent of early twentieth- century,
agrarian- Orthodox and nationalist- chauvinist doctrines, on which the
Communist Party was falling back in the late 1980s to ward off perestroika.
The novel symbolically liberates the city’s bodies and body politic by linking
them, à la Pynchon, Hamid, and Ian McEwan, with other urban bodies and
bodies of work, with bigger and better-networked places and with geopo-
litical events, with older and vaster topoi, styles, texts, and contexts. An
other to the city and its institutionally sanctioned corporeality thus co-
alesces beyond the closed-off self, community, and place, an other into
whose capaciously agglutinating texture Nostalgia’s main first-person nar-
rator weaves himself and his kin.
The weaving spider is, in fact, Cărtărescu’s signature mise en abyme. A
motif in the story, it also designates, metafictionally, the novel’s multiply
intertextual fabric and, inside it, the web of Kabbalah-like copulas between
stages and layers of existence where the individual brain is plugged into
other brains and their projections of other worlds and the worlds behind
those, ad infinitum. As in one of the novel’s sections, the narrating writer-
in-the-novel plays the spider sliding up and down the threads of various
plot lines. He gets in and out of his dramatis personae’s minds, transform-
ing into his characters while telling us about their own changes into others.
At the same time, he shows how the phylogeny of these metamorphoses
(another Cărtărescu trademark) rehearses cosmic ontogeny by recapitulat-
ing a whole cosmology—an entire cosmallogy. Indeed, what he ultimately
puts up is a spectacle of the planetary All and of those without whom this
provisional, non-totalistic whole’s wholeness would fall short, a perfor-
mance of self and— and as necessarily with—others (álloi in Ancient
Greek).114
People’s bodies; Bucharest’s crumbling body; the nation’s hyperterritori-
alized bulk; and the world’s geocultural corpus: these are Nostalgia’s con-
centric circles, its network-mundus or pre-Internet version of the neto-
spherical. Whatever takes place in this planetary web must take place first
topologically and, we will learn before long, ethically, to wit, must take its
place from another place and place-giver “not here.” For, explains Agam-
ben, no matter where it happens, what ontological seat in the planetary
amphitheater gets assigned to it, this place-taking occurs as one “eases” into
a place, into a residential “easement” that is both one’s own lawfully and
“always-already” an adjacency within the private property in which the pro-
prietorial and the exclusive are consequently premised on an other’s pres-
ence, on the shared, and the right-of-way. Owners and the finite space
where their ownership is exercised are predicated, as Levinas, Derrida, and
other thinkers press home ever so often, on hospitality (hostipitalité, writes
Derrida), its guests (others), and the luminous infinity bathing the face-to-
face of hosting. Innately ek-static, beings thus depend on—they rest on and
have “always-already” internalized—a literally vital exterior. Their realm

and modality are a horizontally as well as vertically spatialized relation. A
priori adjacent, traversed by visible and invisible “easements,” here-ness
only apparently takes hold just “here,” on one level of existence.115 What
occurs on one level unfolds or can unfold Kabbalistically on the rest as a
drama of planetary All-ness, of quasi-mystical partaking of the planet’s All.
Everything—this very All—is a matter of multiple, overlapping scales,
scopes, and perspectives. Matter itself is no exception because what defines
it is extension and “situation” in a space where all locations communicate
and so make up a continuum. How and what things are hinges, as noted
earlier, on where they are, but they can mutate abruptly because their places
are (or are not) theirs insofar as these are spliced together or border on
other places across, near, inside, beneath, or above them.
Ontology is topology, then; position, an inherently relational spatial co-
ordinate, ultimately turns into an ontological category while ontology too
becomes, as Soja would say, spatialized.116 Therefore, one can shuttle back
and forth between different levels of life. One can “overcome” ontological
difference, run the whole gamut of being and thus be in “other” ways and
worlds topologically: here, one changes by simply changing one’s place, sta-
tus, or classification. By the same token, this ontology is political. Nostal-
gia’s planetary imagination marshals beings polemically by reshuffling the
segregationist-autonomist biogeography of Cold War Romania along the
lines of flight of a two-pronged onto-spatial rhetoric. On one side, this rhet-
oric is metonymic. It sets people and objects next to people and objects in
whose vicinity they have neither been nor are supposed to be. On the other
side, it is synecdochic. Treating individuals and locales as headings of
greater units stretching above and athwart the Party-State’s immediate, to-
talitarian totality and ossified taxonomies, this pars pro toto planetary figu-
ration only reformulates, from the vantage point of the part, the totum in
parte of fractal reading. Thus, either way, Cărtărescu’s characters act out a
drama of being—they are—as they are in relation to others, thence de-
termined, at the same time bounded and freed by the proximity to others
and their modes of being in culture and history. Propinquity, the terminus
that both limits and assigns the self a contiguous meaning, also liberates it,
brings it forth and across.
Political through and through, topological and cultural relatedness is
thus Nostalgia’s modus essendi. Bucharest’s “little context”’ reflects the shape
of bigger places and units or feeds into them without warning. The micro
and macro worlds are similarly built but neither repetitious of nor opposed
to each other. In broader bodies, venues, and sequences, the self does not
run into versions of itself but into others. An ontological alloy—made of
álloi—the planetary All’s structure is not a global cosmology but non-
allergic, cosmallogical. This constitution features others and calls upon the
self to acknowledge them both outside and inside itself. Further, if the plan-
etary All is the Alpha and Omega of “little” existential forms, and, further,
if these forms mirror the whole’s own form, then they are its microcosm;
further still, because the levels of this ontology interface and overlap, the
microcosm is not only formally unique, but, in its very uniqueness, it is also
isoform and juxtaposed to the macrocosm, and a portal to it too, an Aleph.
§22. “Mondializing” the City: Blueprints and Constellations

[T]he inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.
—Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
In calling the small, the finite, the shut-in, the incarcerated, the city and its
bodies Alephs, the Romanian writer also calls out to Borges, interpellates
and interpolates his “Aleph.”117 Another homology comes into play here via
the Argentine author’s planetarily holistic (“Allistic”) model of intertextual-
ity: the Babel Library. In it, literature and place are limitless in number, ex-
tent, form, and content, and so they also are coextensive, one. Therefore, the
universal library and the universe overlap. In “The Library of Babel,” “The
Book of Sand,” “The Total Library,” and other Borgesian ficciones, the li-
brary, the book, and the textual show off the universe qualitatively, best il-
lustrate its fabric, its “textile” makeup. Conversely, they also hint that, if the
cosmos is like a book, all books are infinite. That means that every book
holds the rest of the holdings, is an Aleph, “one of the points in space that
contains all points.”118 What de-fines “bookness” is in-finitude as well as
inter-textuality, cosmic boundlessness and/inside boundedness. Underly-
ing the latter is, fundamentally, otherness, the others and their books’ pres-
ence in a particular book. This book, which Nostalgia emulates, does not
only “put up” with a “parasitic” other to it within itself; the book simply
cannot have a self, an identity, cannot be “original,” in short, cannot be what
it is without that “alien” presence inside it, without having its roots, its ori-
gin, somewhere else, in another text. It follows that the Aleph is not just
unlimited and intertextual—and intertextual because unlimited, transgres-
sive, liable to cross over to the other side time and time again—but also
“alterial,” a repository of alterity. It is being that is while also being what it is
not, its other, much like the Aleph includes its “counterpart,” the Zahir, and
everything else between the A (Alpha) and Z (Omega) of existential, cul-
tural, and political “alternatives.”119
Borges’s “Aleph” is not only the novel’s primary intertextual ingredient
but also the Kabbalistic-cosmological trope and cultural stratagem through
which Cărtărescu reveals his cosmology as planetary cosmallogy and Bu-
charest as an Aleph, a site of astonishing otherness and size locked inside
the nation-state’s paranoically policed borders.120 A carceral space, the Ro-
manian capital is also “une ville devenue monde,”121 a city made into world—
“mondialized”—by the writer’s planetary imaginary. Describing Los Ange-
les as the “epitomizing world-city” and utmost sample of postmodern urban
geography, Soja notices that the metropolis is a cosmopolis because it
“reproduc[es] in situ the customary colours and confrontations of a hun-
dred different homelands.” A microcosm of the illimitable and itself with-
out limit, bursting with “fulsome” heterogeneity, Soja’s L.A. is, in his own
formulation, a Borgesian “LA-leph,” at once “everywhere” and “the only
place on earth where all places are.” And they are there because, as the critic
implies apropos, again, of Borges, the Aleph is a “radical[ly] open,” “all-
inclusive simultaneity” sheltering a whole panoply of otherness.122 This
makes the Californian Aleph so mind-bogglingly “global” that it preempts
critical survey.123 Instead, Cărtărescu’s Aleph stimulates and entices, lead-
ing on and out of the all-too-limited. Not the Balkans’ Paris any more, Bu-
charest has yet to become their L.A. The stakes of its planetary projections
are different. If in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas follows real
roads, signs, and maps to famously “project a world,”124 in Cărtărescu the
geoimaginary blueprint of Bucharest is jarringly at odds with the plans
drawn by the city officials. De facto, the latter’s cognitive world maps do not
include the real Bucharest, and, truth be told, there are plenty of reasons to
doubt both the cognitive and the worldly pertinence of those maps, if such
maps exist at all to begin with. Not so in Nostalgia’s camera obscura. Here,
a world picture slowly forms, one in which Bucharest registers.
More memorable still is the other image, which the writer develops “mi-
croscopically” from the city’s negative: the planet’s profile, the Face across
and amid the faces, facets, and petals on Bucharest’s wet, black bough. Make
no mistake: this is not just the by now banal view from above; neither is it
the “view from nowhere,” as critics of “universalist” cosmopolitanism might
quip. A view from within, inside, or underneath a temporally and spatially
anchored locale, this is a “consideration” of place that takes in and honors
this place as “situated” or placed planetarity, an effort to account for the
world relationality intrinsic to place and subsequently to do away with the

pseudo-disjunctions of place and planet, micro and macro, and so forth.
For, as Tariq Jazeel echoes D. Massey, “[p]lace is not opposed to the planet.
It is instead,” the critic underscores, “an ongoing assemblage, constellation,
and agonistic coming together of narratives and trajectories that are in
themselves insufficiently conceptualized as either local or global.” Thus,
“[t]he spatialization of place, in this sense, provides the sphere of the possibil-
ity of existence of multiplicity. . . . The negotiation of difference in place is al-
ways a process of, and invitation to, reconstellate the ‘we,’ and place’s geo-
graphical challenge thought this way is precisely that it is never closeable.”125
To “reconstellate” this “we”—the spatialized communality of the polis—
the planetary critic must look not only around and over the nation-state’s
fences, horizontally, but also over the horizon, up, where the constellations
turn and where the earth itself turns into Earth by trading its topographical
surfaciality for geopolitical voluminosity and its semiotic luminosity. A tri-
angulation of place in the micro mode susceptible to withstanding parochial
and clannish attempts at cordoning off cultural domains, the critical ma-
neuver likely to redraw, à la Hollinger, the Theophrastian circle of “we”126
for the twenty-first century actually depends on macro (“Apollonian”) vis-
tas and their “mondial” mental pictures. To be more exact, this dependence
is an interdependence. For the macro itself collapses, Aleph-like, into the
micro, but, upon geomethodological “decompression,” it becomes readable
in the cultural small print as much as the Stoics’ innermost circles (selfhood
and family) present themselves as ripple or butterfly effect—outer cir-
cles—of far-off and incongruous, themselves eccentric “we”-constellations.
§23. The Origami Face

And if conscience became prescience, reflecting itself in itself, it
would then become omniscience, rising above this telescoping
memory to see the center of the rose with infinite petals, to see the
enchanting spider that weaves illusion, modeling it quickly into
universe, spaces and times, bodies and faces, with its infinite,
articulating legs.
—Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding: The Left Wing
Europe [i]s [s]haped like [m]y [b]rain[.]
—Mircea Cărtărescu, Pururi tînăr, înfășurat în pixeli
The thematization of the dialectic of micro and macro world pictures be-
comes more transparently political in Cărtărescu’s later work, especially in
Orbitor (Blinding), a three-part narrative tour de force. Available in several

languages and pivotal to an extensive oeuvre accumulated over more than
thirty years, Blinding is one reason Cărtărescu has garnered coveted literary
awards and most flattering accolades all over Europe and his name keeps
coming up, year after year, among those with a shot at the Nobel Prize in
literature. The 1,400-page meganovel took him more than a decade to com-
plete. The first installment, The Left Wing (Aripa stîngă), was published in
1996 and was followed by a second volume, The Body (Corpul), in 2002,
with the final one, The Right Wing (Aripa dreaptă), coming out in 2007.
The recently released English translation of The Left Wing has all the
makings of a world literary event.127 As I reminded the reader under §14,
Goethe’s Weltliteratur model sets great store by the original’s broad dissem-
ination and, subsequently, translation, for they test and eventually establish
the work as they attempt to legitimate it elsewhere, for others, in the world
arena and in the exigent embrace of remote idioms and cultural codes. In
that, “great literature” involves and in certain cases ultimately boils down to
an away kind of cultural game, played out in tongues not just foreign but,
ideally, of planetary circulation. It goes without saying, this hardly means
that Blinding does not amount to much in French, German, and Swedish,
let alone in Romanian. Cărtărescu’s strikes me, however, as the type of lit-
erature Sean Cotter’s admirably competent rendition can further and per-
haps decisively energize insofar as it affords Blinding not only a bigger stage
but also a vehicle, an overall form subtly apposite to the novel’s founda-
tional fascination: the planet. Put differently, but in a way that essentially
rehearses Walter Benjamin’s mystic-creative view of translation, English,
our time’s main lingua franca and most “worlded” language, is what this
world-hungry Romanian book has been calling for, as it were, so as to fully
become the world-text, the Borgesian script its narrating protagonist and
authorial alter ego, Mircea, sets out to write.
The planetary critic should resonate to this deeply constitutive, funda-
mentally worldly appetite of the book. For one is undoubtedly struck by
Blinding’s intrinsic and insatiable yearning for the greater world, by its insis-
tently affirmed desire to take this world’s measure and bear witness to it,
painful as it may be, from a place half a century of brutally isolationist poli-
tics purported to cut off from other geographies and their vaster repertoires
of topography, affect, and material culture. Here again designated as “(the)
All,” this larger, geopolitical and cosmic-metaphysical world continues to be
the novel’s ontological provocation, challenging Blinding into existence by
fueling and frustrating its writing at once.128 While the Cold War allows
Mircea to experience, in situ, the All only “in part” (hence the Saint Paul
epigraph to The Left Wing), this non-totalist totality becomes accessible
through the imagination. More precisely, what is activated here is a feverish,
hyperconnective, planetarily (w)holistic imaginary that, over and over
again, telescopes out to plug the forlorn, the isolated, the ostracized, the
incarcerated, and the trivial into the ecumenical and cosmic, and, vice
versa, telescopes the last two into the rest. Thus, the subversively metonym-
ical poetics of a whole cultural-aesthetic movement—Romania’s program-
matically postmodern “Generation of the 1980s”—reaches in Cărtărescu’s
prose a climactic moment as it successively juxtaposes and collapses the
domestic microcosm and the world’s macrocosm, laying them side by side
and inside each other, showing how they intersect, dovetail, and communi-
cate. Prosopopoeia, the art of face-making, and what gets this “facial” poet-
ics going—the “provocation” mentioned earlier—are keynote here, for the
wider beyond is both master theme and impetus, primum movens, which
Blinding echoes by conjuring it up obsessively and mesmerizingly, page af-
ter page. This is how and why these pages come into being and tell their
story, which turns out to be the story of the world’s literal inscription into
the crumbling stucco of Bucharest’s buildings and into the sinewy sheets of
Mircea’s manuscript alike.
Mircea is a postcommunist Marcel of sorts. The paronomasia is both ac-
cidental and illuminating, for it helps place Blinding in the right context.
While this excludes neither José Saramago’s 1995 Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
(translated as Blindness) nor Elias Canetti’s 1935 Die Blendung (“The Blind-
ing,” known to the English-speaking public under the title Auto-da-Fé),
think of Blinding’s non-stop memory spectacle, if you will, as a latter-day
Proustianism, one filtered through Borges—and, not surprisingly, through
Borges’s Kafka as well. And think, in the same vein, of Cărtărescu as a post-
modern Marcel Proust who has survived the Cold War on a diet of Pynchon
novels and now shares with the befuddled world the absurdity and surreal-
ism of things past—very real things albeit not entirely past, mind you.
But Mircea—the empirical and textual one—is also a Job. Atop his heap
of memories in the Eastern bloc’s cul-de-sac, he cries out to God and to his
world as nobody else ever has, in a language that is both strange—the lan-
guage of space wasted and time lost, personally and collectively—and fa-
miliar to that world. It is in this sense that Blinding simultaneously calls out
to the world and calls for it and for an idiom in which the planetary world-
as-world—now post-1989, post-blocs, post-nationalist—gives itself a
greater chance of hearing itself. In this sense also, coming before this world
and its American readers is a homecoming, but one that reaches far beyond
the linguistic and is in turn likely to make English audiences, specifically
the aficionados of American postmoderns from John Barth on, feel at
home. Therefore, I hesitate to call Blinding “exotic.” For it is not, or, if it
looks so, its looks are deceiving. On the one hand, it does paint a starkly
alien urbanscape— Bucharest’s concrete inferno— at Europe’s ever-
convulsive periphery. On the other hand, Communist-era neorealism,
magical realism, and postmodern, textual-political subversion of reality
and realist representation blend in it memorably. Thus, the same readers
will likely recognize shapes and sounds closer to home. These are, once
more, Pynchon—Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the author’s favorite books—
then Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Borges, Kafka (and Bruno Schulz), the Ger-
man Romantics, and the biblical-Judaic tradition, which Cărtărescu inter-
pellates alongside a host of national masters and styles from poet Mihai
Eminescu, whose fantastic prose Blinding occasionally evokes, to play-
wright and short fiction author Ion Luca Caragiale (Ionesco’s foremost pre-
cursor) to Caragiale’s son and flamboyant man-about-town, Mateiu, to
post–World War II Romanian surrealist and “oneirist” poets like Leonid
Dimov. These two threads entwine in Cărtărescu and, more broadly, in his
generation’s postmodernism. This planetary mestizaje is as cultural-
intertextual as it is political. The author dwells on it at length in his 1999
monograph Postmodernismul Românesc (Romanian Postmodernism),
where he explains how the most vibrant direction in his country’s post–
World War II literature came about by turning to outside, principally North
American sources as to its own inheritance and by the same token revisiting
the tradition concept along the lines of the “lateral,” non-territorialist, anti-
nationalist, and worldly model described in §14 as “posttraditional.”
To this model, Blinding gives a fictional body: one of a kind, larger than
life, haunting. The originality of this supremely ambitious and cross-cultural
comedy of literature stems to a notable degree from the dazzling (not to say
“blinding”) scope of Cărtărescu’s talent. The bookishness of his work is con-
spicuous. A polymath who thinks like a poet, he composes his book like a
novelist, though. Granted, what drives the spatio-temporal mobility of the
novel is the unique, all-encompassing vision, which is in turn fueled by a
descriptive fervor quintessentially poetic in nature. The novel’s lavishly ba-
roque surveys of the Communist concentric bolgie—the crummy family
apartment on Ștefan cel Mare Road, the nondescript neighborhood, the
panopticon-like city ravaged by the bulldozers of the Leader’s pharaonic
projects—bespeak the imagination of a poet like Dante trying his hand at
an Allen Ginsberg pastiche. Such tableaux remind one of Cărtărescu’s ear-

lier poems, and so do the several poetry fragments actually inserted into
The Left Wing. Nevertheless, Blinding is and must be read like a novel. It
does have a narrative arc to it. This takes shape across volumes, which vol-
umes, on this account, must be read together. The author tells a story as
personal as Marcel’s and occasionally as close to a memoir as Proust’s, even
though later in The Right Wing Mircea explicitly distinguishes his work in
progress from the diary genre. His author has published, in fact, a multivol-
ume Diary, but, again, although what pushes it forward is memory, Blinding
remains a work of fiction.
Strictly speaking, Mircea’s memory is neither involuntary nor limited to
recollection, or to personal reminiscences for that matter. To remember is
here also to fictionalize, perchance to dream, even to dream other people’s
dreams should Mircea’s own remembrance sputter.129 All Mircea feels left
with in The Left Wing is the past (75), but that slice of time, the only dimen-
sion in which temporality can be said to have (ever had) any “reality” to it,
is both ontologically unavailable and ethically implausible, “absurd and de-
lusional” (319). In fact, it is not so much that Cărtărescu starts writing his
book after the fall of Communism, but, given its forty odd years of docu-
mented horror and absurdity, the Communist past has become quasi un-
representable, an impossibility both unlikely to have been and, to the extent
that it has been, morally disconcerting. In that, le temps perdu of Commu-
nist autocracy mounts a serious challenge to memory, concomitantly set-
ting it off and jamming its works, as well as to expression, to the notion of
narrating and relaying all this. The basic question, then—equally faced by
the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and of the so-called Communist exper-
iment—is not just how you might go about recalling this temporality of
perdition, but also how you might talk about it, furthermore, how you
might convey its monstrosity to somebody who has not lived through it to
understand that which, in hindsight, defies understanding.
A striking phrase Mircea, the fictional writer, uses to relate what he sees
when he climbs on top of the roof of a Bucharest building suggests a possi-
ble answer: “[a] nation of melancholy” (31). A psychoanalyst’s bonanza,
Blinding teems with Freudian moments. This one stands out because it pro-
vides an all-clarifying insight into the protagonist’s psyche and the social
unconscious dramatized by it. With the rise to power of the tyrannical re-
gime in the aftermath of World War II and especially since the 1950s, when
Mircea’s story gets under way, melancholia becomes the nation’s defining
mood. Under a most brutal totalitarian system, this mass psychology be-
comes psychopathological and, as such, usurps the place of politics as civil

society implodes and the “mood” translates, within a decade, into a full-
fledged political mode prohibitive of any freedoms whatsoever—into an
institutionalized “melancholic inhibition,” as Freud calls it. Generalized and
painstakingly enforced by a repressive apparatus that some of Mircea’s ac-
quaintances eagerly join, this disposition cancels out individual initiative
and resistance. The society falls apart inside and outside families like Mir-
cea’s, and this leads to social “loneliness” and its political corollary, “impo-
tence,” which Hannah Arendt deems so typical of totalitarianism. “Melan-
choly” more than ever in their history, Romanians watch passively the silent
movie of their own ruin in a country the Communist Party oligarchy, be-
fore long reduced to the quasi-illiterate Ceaușescu clan, runs virtually un-
checked by implementing aberrant policies that all but turn Romania into
an absurd and desolate land in the late 1980s. Collective self-destruction is
thus the final upshot of Cold War melancholy, but neither the material dev-
astation carried out in the name of pseudo-developmental fantasies nor the
dark humor—the mass wistfulness—that made it possible abates following
the regime’s bloody collapse in December 1989. The past’s protracted agony
makes itself multiply felt in the panorama of urban abjection repeatedly
rolled out by Mircea in the postcommunist present, which cannot part
company with the involuntary surrealism of Communist realities and oc-
currences, such as the church on wheels, relocated to make room for
Ceaușescu’s new residence, The People’s House.
The world-infamous behemoth is a symbolic presence in Cărtărescu’s
Bucharest and narrative. Demolition crews had uprooted urban life on
many square miles to make room for this architectural aberration. Built
against history, The People’s House became, however, the Palace of the Par-
liament and, ironically enough, a historical landmark and major tourist at-
traction after the regime’s downfall. Both a monument and a memento—
the words are etymologically related—“the biggest building in the world”
solidifies a mercilessly resilient time in the language of a Saturnine architec-
ture. In the latter, Romanians contemplate their history and responsibility
for it, their guilt, past and present helplessness, and the overall “worthless-
ness” derived, as Freud would point out, from the gazing subject’s narcis-
sistic identification with the abject object. This identification afflicts the
community as well as the individual, including extraordinary individuals
like Mircea and Herman, our main hero’s alcoholic and visionary friend.
Perfect illustration of what Freud also determines as the melancholic ego’s
“consent to its own destruction,” Herman is Mircea’s master up to a point.
Solitary, dejected, and wistful, the aspiring writer has his double, Victor, the
twin brother, much as the butterfly, Cărtărescu’s arch-symbol and fictional
“mascot,” has its mortal enemy, the spider. Separated from Victor as an in-
fant, Mircea will reunite with him in the monstrous palace on The Right
Wing’s climactic last page, making the infinitesimal and the infinite, good
and evil, inside and outside fuse explosively.
Malefic as he appears, Victor is also the envoy of a much bigger and re-
splendent world. This world, however, has been lying inside Mircea all
along. It is the twin world and face, the world’s otherness as self-
consciousness buried behind Mircea’s face and “telescop[ed]” (77) within
the world of memories and within those memories’ world with which his
brain is pregnant. That face is both an inside and an outside or environs.
“That hyaline cartilage,” Mircea tells us, “there on the shield where the three
heraldic flowers meet—dream, memory, and emotion—that is my domain,
my world, the world. There in the sparkling cylinder that descends through
my mind” (88). The individual mind is a cosmallogical assemblage because
it harbors its other, its double, a cosmic hypostasis and fraction, and, con-
versely, the “neurological”—neurallogical?—template for another, bigger
and wiser brain through which “we will climb, unconscious and happy,
onto a higher level of the fractal of eternal Being” (283). This Being is “made
of cosmoses,” we find out later (417), but these cosmoses are composted and
refracted by the authorial brain into the downtown Bucharest “scenery”
across which Mircea’s parents, Maria and Costel, stroll “drowned in the
whirls and fractals of history,” and yet, nota bene, “without distinguishing
themselves from their world, and without understanding that they lived on
a grain of sand on a beach wider than the universe, spread out and sifted,
melancholically, by a mind that chose the two of them and decided their
destinies” (247). Where Herman only sketches out, rather abstractly, a vi-
sion of symmetries, analogies, antagonisms, coincidentia oppositorum, and
cosmic connections, Mircea lives this vision out by trekking across a fractal
universe in which the story of his family and his childhood meshes with the
history of post–World War II and postcommunist Romania as well as with
other temporalities and spaces of centuries past and faraway landscapes
from Bucharest to Bulgaria and from Louisiana to the Netherlands.
The eventful late December 1989 is the euphoric- liberatory, post-
authoritarian and planetary kairós—“right time” but also “right place” in
Ancient Greek—when the macro and the micro finally fasten onto one an-
other as if “you have pierced” the planet’s “folded map with a needle, uniting
incompatible and disparate places in an incomprehensible trajectory, per-
pendicular to the paper” (309). Now, the Face and the city’s face gaze into
each other because kairotic time, dislodged from its totalist-totalitarian
chronology of repetitiveness, is one of suddenly accelerated, world-making
worlding. At this point and in this point of the new world, Cărtărescu’s tele-
scopy reaches its apex, for, in fact, kairós is best understood as a paroxysm of
planetarization, radical reorientation of mind, body, and place in and toward
the world. At this moment, the planetary maze and Mircea’s whereabouts in
a “revolutionary” Bucharest (his “cobweb map of [his] place in the world”
[309]), the world’s macro cartography and that worldly portrait’s scaled-
down versions in “the filigree design of coffee cups” and snowflakes (309–
310), the cosmic butterfly and the one resting in your palm, the world’s geo-
political intrigues and the patterns of Maria’s handmade rug in The Body130
snap into place, into the same co-incident, synergetic spot of co-presence to
withness—be with and bear witness to—each other alongside all the other,
countless instantiations of the internal- external, small-large, inward/
inworld-outward/outer-world planetary dynamic. At long last, the Face,
with its previously illegible topography, barely visible on a world map either
crumpled and rolled up into an ignominious ball to be discarded by a care-
less author/cartographer or folded up origami-like, becomes once again
“legible.”131 Its “fractals, twisters, non-linear equations, folds . . . , Russian
dolls crammed one inside another . . . Spaces pregnant with spaces pregnant
with spaces” may now come out into the open and play.132
§24. Balzacian Reeducation

[S]pellbound by the mystery of the outside world.
—Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Amplifying exponentially across the post–Cold War novel, the macro-micro

telescopic rites take center stage in DeLillo (Underworld, Cosmopolis, Falling
Man, and Point Omega), Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker, A Gesture Life,
Aloft, The Surrendered, and On Such a Full Sea), Cole (Open City), Gish Jen
(World and Town), Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close), Nicole Krauss (The History of Love), Hemon (Nowhere Man), Gary
Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan), Bharati
Mukherjee (The Holder of the World, Desirable Daughters, and Miss New In-
dia), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), McCann (Let the Great World Spin and
TransAtlantic), O’Neill (Netherland, The Dog), Ondaatje (The English Pa-
tient), Houellebecq (Les particules élémentaires [The Elementary Particles],
Plateforme [Platform], La possibilité d’une île [The Possibility of an Island],

and La carte et le territoire [The Map and the Territory]), Alexandru Muşina
(Nepotul lui Dracula [Dracula’s Nephew]), Zadie Smith (White Teeth, On
Beauty, NW), Ian McEwan (Black Dogs, Saturday, Solar, The Children Act),
Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry of Pain), Christos Tsiolkas (Dead Europe),
Brian Chickwava (Harare North), Michael Parker (The Watery Part of the
World), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Hari Kunzru (Transmission), Orhan
Pamuk (Kar [Snow]), Sorj Chalandon (Le quatrième mur [The Fourth
Wall]), and Dai Sijie (Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise [Balzac and the
Little Chinese Seamstress]), to list only a few of Cărtărescu’s kindred spirits.
Originally published as Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise in 2000 and
translated into English the year after, Chinese-French writer and filmmaker
Dai Sijie’s international bestseller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is,
despite its “minimalism,” historically and politically to Nostalgia what Dai’s
2003 novel, Le complexe du Di, is to Blinding.133 Rendered into English as
Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch in 2005, Le complexe du Di furnishes a critical
glimpse into a global-age China where, as in Blinding, the officially for-
sworn totalitarian past lives on; Balzac, Dai’s most widely acclaimed work
so far, takes us back to the darkest years of pre-Tiananmen China. With a
well-calibrated sense of tragic that dampens neither humor nor compas-
sion, the novels set in train fictional telescopies of arresting literary, cul-
tural, and political insight. Dai’s may be, as some reviewers imply, literature
that pays homage to literature, but this need not be the backhanded compli-
ment it sometimes is. “True book lover’s book[s],”134 his novels are “book-
ish” if this means that he is working his way through other books as he is
writing his own. However, they are not if “bookish” signifies “aestheticist.”
In point of fact, his bookishness, or intertextualism, rather, is not a generic,
effete aestheticism but an astute and pointed geoaestheticism. The literature
inside his is, as in Cărtărescu, of a particular kind, and, as such, it does
something within and without his fictional universe. This literature is twice
more than (“just”) literature—it is world literature that lives up to the dou-
ble condition to which Reading for the Planet attends. That is to say, not only
is this literature of the world, but it also prompts the world’s worlding, com-
ing together across time, space, language barriers, out-of-bounds libraries,
and barbed wire fences; not only is this literature of and in faraway tongues
and languages, but its reading, a characteristic preoccupation of Dai’s char-
acters, works planetarily, “smuggling” those forbidden idioms and land-
scapes into China while reembedding Chinese places, people, and tradi-
tions back into the outside world.
This reembedding is, also like in Cărtărescu, purposeful, provocative,

and overtly political. It wields the power of fiction to retrain the polity’s
geocultural imagination over and against the Cultural Revolution’s brutish
attempts at “reeducating” millions of Chinese in its laojiao (“reeducation
through labor”) detention sites in the early 1970s. Worth keeping in mind
here is that, in spite of its declarations and of the reclassifications of the
country’s incarceration facilities, the Chinese government has never dis-
mantled the laojiao network, as it has not done away with the laogai prison
labor system either. Also known as the Chinese Gulag, the sinister laogai
was geared, especially during Mao’s rule, more deliberately toward torture,
starvation, and other forms of physical extermination en masse. If the dif-
ferences between the two subsets of the Chinese penal apparatus widen
over time, in 1971, however, when seventeen-year-old Dai himself was sent,
like Balzac’s teenagers, to be reeducated in a Sichuan village, the laojiao had
all the makings of a death factory. The book’s narrating protagonist and his
friend Luo realize, in effect, that the odds they face of ever rejoining their
families are indeed “terrible” (“three in a thousand”) due to their putative
social background:135 even though neither has graduated from high school,
they were considered “intellectuals.”
Reflecting Mao’s “hatred of intellectuals,” the “revolutionary” method of
fostering a “new generation”136 and a wholly new human type with it—an
ideal pursued by Nazi and Communist regimes alike—is, as Dai’s storyteller
comments, distinctively anti-intellectual. It seeks actually to weed out the
whole intellectual class, which is too “cosmopolitan” not to be vulnerable to
noxious “outside” influences. Balzac’s author stresses from the outset that
“foreignness” is a priori suspicious (3), and so are intellectuals, who are
more likely than other social categories to catch its disease because, living
mostly in cities, they have presumably more contacts with “aliens.” The in-
tellectual cosmopolite, then, is or is also assumed to be an urbanite. On that
ground, reeducation is not only an anti-cosmopolitan but also an anti-
urban campaign in remote and isolated rural settings, with millions of
“young intellectuals” and high school students like Dai’s heroes cast out into
backcountry exile and its mix of hard labor, interrogation, summary execu-
tions, and deprivation of all sorts, especially cultural deprivation.
The latter is key to reeducation’s cardinal objective, indoctrination. Of
course, one cannot indoctrinate thoroughly if one does not brainwash, and
one cannot brainwash—one cannot wipe the human slate clean—if one
does not keep out external “cultural influences.” In general, culture and its
“contagious” effects are what reeducation pushes against. Culturally speak-
ing, the laojiao “labor farm” is a sanitary cordon around the inmate. To be
sure, as far as indoctrination goes, exile and internment would be toothless
without censorship and the banning of any potential “competition” to the
doctrine and its bible, in this case, Mao’s Little Red Book. Remarkably iso-
morphic, these spatial and cultural deterritorializations work hand in glove.
In the repressive topo-economy of reeducation, confining somebody to a
certain place is pointless unless the site is culturally “decontaminated.” That
site becomes a true reeducation venue once it has been closed off not only
carcerally but also culturally, that is, once its outside has been blocked out
by roping off the culture pregnant with it. Particularly targeted by cultural
censors in the more extreme forms of twentieth-century imagined and ex-
isting dystopias (Orwellian, Stalinist, Maoist, Albanian, North Korean) is
therefore outside culture and, more broadly, the outside world altogether. A
paranoid isolationism—a fallaciously solipsistic ontology—totalitarianism
revels in a perpetual quarantine that scrambles to shut out the world. If it
bans huge swaths of world literature, if it confiscates and burns foreign
books in public, as Dai’s Red Guards do during the Cultural Revolution (51),
this is because these books are cosmoses, brew possibilities, and bear with-
ness, because they comprise or blaze paths to other worlds even in western
China villages like the Phoenix of the Sky, where no European has set foot
since the 1940s and where the main storyteller and Luo undergo reeduca-
tion by hauling buckets of human waste up the mountain.
But reeducation fails. And, if it does, this is largely because reading de-
privation does not work either. As it happens, our heroes come upon a trea-
sure trove: a suitcase full of banned Western classics from Victor Hugo and
Stendhal to Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Romain Rolland, Alexan-
dre Dumas père, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, and Nikolai Gogol. Not
only does the “elegant” valise “g[ive] off a whiff of civilization” (49); it is
civilization itself, vestige of another culture now distant and forbidden yet
capable of playing the role of the carpenter’s case Robinson Crusoe man-
ages to salvage. Cut off from the nurturing presence of others, the incarcer-
ated self still possesses their tools, the blueprints of autopoiesis,137 and with
them self- reconstruction— rather than Maoist reeducation— can begin.
With a nicely aimed irony, Dai’s narrator calls this self-reconstruction “Bal-
zacian re-education” (180). Where Mao’s reeducation fetters and disables
the self, Balzac’s enables it, encouraging its growth, its morphing into the
desired image of itself. This “metamorphosis” is, Luo acknowledges, read-
ing’s “ultimate pay-off ” (180), and reading to his girlfriend from Balzac
does pay off because she is magically “transformed” (100), no longer a “sim-
ple mountain girl” (100). Père Goriot—Old Go, in Chinese translation—

“seduce[s],” “overwhelm[s],” and “spellb[inds]” as it “reveals” to its readers
the “mystery of the outside world, especially the world of women, love and
sex” (109).
But the outside leads inside and, indeed, contaminates, spawns inner
growth. As it reveals itself, the other prompts self-revelation, helps the self
rediscover himself and his world. By no means the most realistic piece of La
Comédie humaine, Ursule Mirouët de-realizes the dire environs. The “truth”
of the 1841 novel gives the lie not only to official rhetoric but also to the hol-
low reality government parlance is trying to couch. “Picture, if you will,”
Luo invites us,
a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having

heard nothing but revolutionary bladder about patriotism, Commu-
nism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story
of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects
that had, until then, been hidden from me.
In spite of my complete ignorance of that distant land called France (I
had heard Napoleon mentioned by my father a few times, that was all),
Ursule’s story rang as true as if it had been about my neighbors. The
messy affair over inheritance and money that befell her made the story
all the more convincing, thereby enhancing the power of the words. By
the end of the day I was feeling quite at home in Nemours, imagining
myself posted by the smoking hearth of her parlour in the company of
doctors and curates. . . . Even the part about magnetism and somnam-
bulism struck me as credible and riveting. (57)
“Wrapped up” like the Little Seamstress in Balzac’s “story of miracles” (57),
the narrator is entranced by this fiction truer than life and cannot help no-
tice that the “credible” fantasy debunks a whole world that claimed to be
“scientific.” Balzac manages to “reeducate” where Mao does not because the
Balzacian text carries its reader in the right direction. Balzac “educates” in
the etymological sense of the Latin edūcere (to “lead forth”). He leads not
away from the self, nor does he take away the self from the learning subject
in the process. Quite the opposite: Balzac is the good teacher who teaches
the ways of the self; the other’s “story of awakening” prompts the narrator’s
awakening into selfhood. This happens because the narrator’s perusal of
Ursule Mirouët “naturalizes” the novel. In other words, the text does remain
“distant” and “different,” but at the same time it throws a bridge across
worlds, instituting a fictional continuum between the reader’s world and his
reading’s worlds. Distinct as these worlds remain, they nonetheless become

compatible and overlap in the reader’s mind, so much so that Dai’s hero
feels that Ursule’s story could have been about his “neighborhood” as much
as he would have felt “at home” in her home and thus his own “story” could
have taken place in the world of hers. Remapping Balzac’s Nemours onto
Szechuan’s Chengdu, telescoping fictional France into Mao’s China, Dai
builds Ursule a home away from home in his hero’s reading, and in turn
Balzac gives his Chinese reader a home away from the one he had to leave
behind. Canceling out the squalor of the narrator’s living quarters, this
imaginary shelter can make the imagining self at home, accommodate and
boost the individual, his desires and dreams.
Translating Balzac’s language into the idiom of specifically Chinese situ-
ations, these projections and “revelations” (110) are “salutary” (110), the nar-
rator understands, precisely because what they unveil is the dignity of the
individual. Similarly, Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, we learn,
with his fierce individualism utterly untainted by malice, was a salutary

revelation. Without him I would have never understood the splendour
of taking free and independent action as an individual. Up until this
stolen encounter with Romain Rolland’s hero, my poor educated and
re-educated brains had been incapable of grasping the notion of one
man standing up against the whole world. The flirtation turned into a
grand passion. Even the excessively emphatic style occasionally in-
dulged in by the author did not detract from the beauty of this astonish-
ing work of art. I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of
words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate
book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived
in would ever look the same. (110–111)
Dai’s protagonist is “naturally drawn” to Jean-Christophe (110). Not only is

he a musician, like Rolland’s hero; they also have the same kind of enemies
and face comparable obstacles. Critics have pointed out that Jean-
Christophe is based on Beethoven, whose biography Rolland wrote too, but
also on Wagner’s and Mozart’s lives—incidentally, Dai’s narrator calls the
Mozart violin piece he plays before the stunned villagers when he arrives at
the Phoenix of the Sky “Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao.” But Rolland
also put a lot of his own life into his character’s, whose trajectory speaks to
the author’s exile of body and mind, to his antinationalist pathos. A self-
declared “internationalist at heart” and “citizen of the world,”138 Rolland
writes the “ultimate book” because, as Dai’s hero reads the novel, the novel
in turn “reads” its reader, its other, as it were, sees through his misfortunes
and helps him see himself and his place with new eyes. This very personal
and very political exchange between people so unlike in so many respects
reeducates Dai’s passionate reader in the very best sense, teaching him the
“notion of standing up against the whole world” and thus for himself. And
so does Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, in whose hero he has even more
reasons to see himself, what with his friend Four-Eyes completing his own
reeducation but leaving behind a treasure of books, with which the narrator
and his friend will indeed change their own lives and others’.
More importantly perhaps, both Jean-Christophe and the Count are Ro-
mantic idealists of a bygone era. Nor is Dai unaware of the marked contrast
between such stories and the world of Chinese labor camps. At first blush,
the disconnect between Dai’s realistically limned China and Dumas’s “pseu-
dohistorical” France, as it has been called, is absolute. But the anachronistic
insertion, the “mistranslation” of Balzac, Flaubert, Herman Melville, let
alone of Rolland and Dumas into the “Cultural Revolution” serves a rhe-
torical as well as a political purpose. The more Romantic, extraordinary,
and “incredible” the heroes of the banned books, the more they behave like
individuals, affirm their freedom, and proclaim a value in painfully short
supply in the reader’s world, and so the more credible they become and
speak to this world, showing what Dai’s heroes are not allowed to be, what
dreams they are not allowed to dream. Somnambulism, dreams, oneiro-
mancy (like in Ursule Mirouët) or psychoanalytically pursued Traumdeu-
tung (like in Dai’s second novel), “cloak- and-dagger” fantasies,
Romanticism—all these are in fact more palpable and make a greater im-
pact than any nitty-gritty realism exactly because of their “excessive,” “ex-
travagant” psychologism, because of a display of individualism that declines
to acknowledge a limit, a system of conventions, be those the conventions
of verisimilitude. In Gogol and Flaubert no less than in Dumas and Rol-
land, Dai is looking for a psychological model—for an encoding of the in-
dividual—as far away as possible from conventionality, in particular from
the psychological conventions ossifying inner life in Stalin’s and Mao’s infa-
mous “soul engineering.”
Two verisimilitude concepts clash here. “Realistic” as it may claim to be,
one covers a narrow range of psychological “types” in turn pegged as either
“progressive” or “reactionary” politically. This scheme renders the fictional
and cinematic varieties of socialist realism Dai’s heroes are treated with—
Chinese, North Korean, and Albanian, with Enver Hoxha’s “complete
works” an amusing stand-in for “Western Literature” (51)—ham-fisted as
far as inner life goes. While not necessarily nonrealistic—after all, Balzac,
Gogol, and Flaubert founded European realism—the other kind of verisi-
militude does not rule out Romantic, sentimental display of feelings, and
derives its credibility from psychological representation unhampered by
ideological predetermination. This does not mean that there is no ideology
in Balzac or Flaubert, but that this ideology does not set out to contain in
advance psychological expression. Further, it means that, given the political
and ideological backdrop over and against which Dai’s heroes peruse Bal-
zac, Dumas, and Rolland, the writers’ unconventional, high-flown, “out-
landish” reports of inner life convey a sense of individuality, freedom, and
openness, of something different and bigger than the here and now, putting
forth exactly what the “Cultural Revolution” purports to quash. This makes
their books “sacred objects” (62) and subversively so in a regime quite re-
luctant, like all apparatuses of this sort, to share its cult status with anybody
and anything else. One more time, Lost Illusions and The Count of Monte
Cristo may not be political a priori, but this kind of reading ends up “politi-
cizing” them.
Undoubtedly, in a different world, Miguel de Cervantes, Dumas, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, and James Joyce would have taught Dai’s characters different
things. But, in the People’s Republic and its iron bubble of cultural and po-
litical “collective” solipsism, what they teach their readers first and foremost
is the ways of the self, more exactly, the way of the world as a way to the self
and its unique life. Most remarkably, Dai’s individualism is not autarchic
but worldly. Stepping into other worlds and, vice versa, telescoping those
worlds into self-isolating China by reading the other’s forbidden writing
become, together, a compensatory exercise in selfhood, a stage where the
self can go on by performing the vital routines of soul and mind, empathiz-
ing and sympathizing, suffering, rejoicing, and ultimately growing an iden-
tity in response to the passions, crises, and similar displays of inner life in
the other’s mesmerizing fiction. After reading to the Little Seamstress from
Ursule Mirouët’s “scene of private life,” an awestruck Luo tells his friend that
“[t]his fellow Balzac is a wizard. . . . He touched the head of this mountain
girl with an invisible finger, and she was transformed, carried away in a
dream. It took a while for her to come down to earth. She ended up putting
your wretched coat on. . . . She said having Balzac’s words next to her skin
made her feel good, and also more intelligent.”139
The girl wears Balzac, literally. She wraps herself up symbolically in the
text of Ursule Mirouët, or at least in the fragments Luo’s friend was able to
reproduce on the inside of a sheepskin coat. “I copied out,” the friend re-
veals, “the chapter where Ursule somnambulates. I longed to be like her: to

be able, while I lay asleep in my bed, to see what my mother was doing in
our apartment five hundred kilometers away, to watch my parents having
supper, to observe their gestures, the dishes on the table, the color of the
crockery, to sniff the aroma of their food, to hear their conversation. . . .
Better still, like Ursule, I would visit, in my dreams, places I had never set
eyes on before” (58–59).
“Longing” here unfolds as cross-cultural identity mimesis at equal dis-
tance, on one side, from René Girard’s “I covet what the other covets” para-
digm of confrontational desire first sketched out in Mensonge romantique et
vérité romanesque and, on the other side, from Lacan’s “I desire as the
Other” substitutive scenario. In the former, the other is what the self aspires
to become, but also a competitor. In the latter, the self is a detour “in the
trajectory of the desire of the Other.”140 Therefore, neither model fully ap-
plies. In Dai, the scintillating “out there” and the dreary “in here” do not
compete but cooperate at a distance on the self ’s project, with the elsewhere
and the other a necessary sponsor and cultural creditor, an other route and
an aesthetic apprenticeship the self must complete to come into its own.
This apprenticeship is also an education of desire; in Dai, one craves the
world’s literature and for the world in this literature so as to grasp and live
out craving, yearning, and other forms of desire. Notably, Dai’s narrator
does not want what the other does. Instead, he learns, or relearns to want as
the other wants, to long, dream, and imagine as Ursule does in Balzac’s
short story. Make no mistake: he does not want to be Ursule; not unlike the
Little Seamstress, he does not wish to give up his self. Quite the contrary: it
is in order to be himself that he wants to be like Ursule, to have a self as she
does and to go through the same calisthenics of selfhood transaction:
dreaming, daydreaming, imagining, in brief, desire. Via Balzacian desire,
Dai’s nameless narrator desires; across an other’s images, he imagines him-
self elsewhere, neither in Ursule’s town nor in the shabby room he shares
with Luo above the pigsty, but back with his family (57).
A profound and complex transformation occurs, no doubt, and it refash-
ions selves and places, bodies and cultural practices, habits and maps. Predi-
cated as it may be on the rekindling of desire and on the reeducation of the
imagination, this transformation and the worlding of the laojiao, and of
mainland China with it, are nevertheless more than a figure of speech. If
Balzac changes how Luo and his buddy feel about women (151), Balzac also
“transforms” (100) the Little Seamstress, who decides to become a “city girl”
(178) and lead the urbanite life denied to her friends. As for Flaubert, he is
not only a great writer but apparently also an underrated haute couture de-
signer, for Madame Bovary inspires her to make herself a brassiere and, more
brazenly still, to turn a Mao jacket into the kind of “smart” garb that “would
only be worn by a woman in the city” (179). Along the same lines, Dumas’s
Marseille may be “on the other side of the world” (124), as the narrator tells
her father, but the Count’s adventures cast such a spell on the village tailor—a
transparent reincarnation of Cibot from Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons—that
“some of the details he picked up from the French story started to have a
discreet influence on the clothes he was making for the villagers. Dumas
would have been most surprised to see the mountain men sporting sailor
tops with square collars that flapped in the breeze. You could almost smell the
briny Mediterranean air” (127; emphasis added). Thus, the fictional world of
Balzac, Dumas, and Rolland begins to bleed into the peasants’ everyday. Dis-
crepant ontologies, cultures, and politics collapse into each other. And this is
precisely what the bonfire in Balzac’s last pages suggests: if the Red Guards
would set books on fire to destroy them, to make them disappear, Luo and
the storyteller burn them so as to hint that, since they have read the texts,
learned them by heart, and can retell them so creatively—so self-creatively—
they have been reeducated, and the books have done their job. They are now
worlds of this world, embodied visions, lifestyles, ways of seeing and doing
things, of dreaming, and of hoping against hope.
§25. Freudian Reeducation: Mao, Muo, and

“Geopsychoanalysis”
[T]his foreign tongue to unite us . . .
—Dai Sijie, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch
Set in twenty-first-century China, Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch speaks to an-

other context. The difference is by no means dramatic, though. A Chinese
expatriate living in Paris since the early 1990s, Dai’s Muo returns to his na-
tive country only to discover that censorship of readings and persecution of
readers are still alive and well. Alongside other forms of authority, they have
become both sloppier and more focused. Recycling Balzac’s Dumasian
treasure chest theme, the city of Kunming’s “Department of Clandestine
Anti-publications” has amassed a whole “treasure house” of “forbidden
books.” This features two main categories of texts (196). The first includes
the memoirs of Mao’s personal physician, books on the 1989 Tiananmen
Square student uprising, the power struggle within the Chinese Commu-
nist Party, the “reeducation camps” of the “Cultural Revolution,” and the
bizarre “cases of revolutionary cannibalism” (197). These dwell on China’s
recent past and tell stories the current regime does not want told because
they are incriminating chapters in its own biography. In sum, they expose
the authoritarian heritage—one might say the political unconscious—of
“free-market” China. This explains the Department’s interest in a second
class of publications, which comprise “erotic novels,” “licentious writings by
libertine monks,” the Marquis de Sade, ancient pornography, the Chinese
Kama Sutra, “Taoist treatises on ejaculation,” Freud, and psychoanalysis
generally.
What we are dealing with, then, is, on the one hand, unorthodox ac-
counts of the Chinese collective self and its troubled history; on the other, a
no less provocative understanding—a disturbing reading—of the private
self, Freudianism. Both worry a regime that has historically shaped the for-
mer by systematically repressing the latter. In Balzac, Dai throws light on the
“reeducation” version of this repression. A psychoanalyst apprentice of
Freudian and Lacanian persuasion, Muo reads Mao and Maoist legacy, the
“new” China, through his masters’ lenses, and what he discerns from the
vantage point of radical otherness provided by Freud and Lacan is the “rev-
enant” past, the uncanny survival of the world limned in Balzac. Through
the analysis he does, in the “observations” he cannot help making, Muo’s
return—a psychoanalyst’s—bears out yet another, of the repressed, of old
pains and wrongs whose public acknowledgment the Department is dead set
to preempt. As it becomes clear, Freudianism and authoritarianism are at
loggerheads, as much as Balzacianism and Maoism were in the Little Seam-
stress’s village. Not only do their distinct ontologies collide, though. In Dai’s
worlded imaginary, they also communicate and dovetail. Moreover, one also
seeps into the other to query it and erode its setup. The former’s “truth,” Muo
warns, “no one can escape, . . . not even an official representative of law and
order” (123). Etched in dreams, fantasies, slips of tongue, and the like, the
psychoanalytic truth invariably unsettles the official truths, either compli-
cates or renders them partial, more or less than whatever they claim.
Tearing down this pseudo-rational discourse, psychoanalysis had been
banished or treated with suspicion throughout the Communist world. After
1989, this status has changed radically in Central and Eastern Europe; in
China, less so. While otherwise advertising itself as globalization-friendly,
the regime keeps the country outside what Derrida describes as psycho-
analysis’ “becoming-a-world,” its “ongoing worldification.”141 In “liberal-
ized,” “cosmopolitan” China, Freud’s teaching remains an “ostracized for-
eign body” because it promotes a definition of the self other than

abovementioned discourse’s crude determinism, because it acknowledges
this self, its uniqueness, and needs, and thus, most significantly, situates its
genesis and welfare in the world while bringing the world into its universe.
Muo’s self model is indeed “worldified,” as Derrida might say; as both a ge-
nealogy and recourse of the self, psychoanalysis is, with another Derridean
term, “geopsychoanalysis.”142
It is noteworthy, in this light, that recent Freudians have not hesitated to
look into Chinese politics and especially Mao’s legacy and scan the system’s
self-
styled progressive rationalism for symbolic, phallocratic- autocratic
drives carrying on under new codes, languages, and institutions (210). Not
unlike Balzac and Flaubert, Freud and Lacan warrant in Dai feelings and
emotions—algorithms of private life and ultimately of privacy, of an indi-
vidual’s most intimate rights. Their psychoanalysis thus provides a psycho-
logical and political—no less than cultural—other to the regime, an other
whose texts Muo inscribes between himself and this regime’s rhetoric to
institute a “methodological” distance, a discerning interval. Via Freud, Muo
sees how much of the “Cultural Revolution” still lingers in the public or
private unconscious. As in Balzac, the other helps the self make out his self-
alienation, the asymmetry between self-representation and the actuality of
the self ’s circumstances. Balzac and Freud afford this revelation by insert-
ing themselves between Dai’s characters and the context in which they read
Ursule Mirouët and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Self-awareness arises in
the resulting fertile rift as an effect of a reading that distances the readers
from an evening-up, serializing environment. But as they secure this pro-
tective and clarifying distance, Luo, his friend, the Little Seamstress, and
even her father come to share a passion, learn a secret language, and bind
together.
Notably, “Western literature” opens a gap at the same time that it closes
those keeping apart the readers drawn to taboo texts, as well as the vaster
gap between these texts’ authors and their Chinese audience. The other
brings them together as they pull him into their midst, a dynamic the 2003
novel spells out perceptively. In a letter to his beloved Volcano of the Old
Moon, now in a Chinese prison, Muo ponders his reasons for writing to her
in French, a language “of which the dearly addressed understands scarcely
a word” (215):
It is a small enigma, resonant with the sweet sound of happiness. . . .

From now on, my dear Old Moon, my splendid Volcano, we can look to
this foreign tongue to unite us, reunite us, bind us together in a magical
knot that blossoms into the wings of an exotic butterfly—an alphabetic
language from the other side of the world, whose orthography, complete
with apostrophes and diacriticals, lends it the heady, impenetrable air of
esotericism. Your fellow prisoners, I can well imagine, will envy you
your passing the time poring over love letters, to extract even the slight-
est triumphant particle of meaning from them. Do you remember those
wonderful times we sat together listening to our favorite poets: Eliot,
Frost, Pound, Borges? Their voices, each with its own personality and
sonorous beauty, enveloped us, uplifted us, and made us dream, even
though neither of us understood much English, much less Spanish.
Those accents, those incomprehensible phrases, remain for me, even to-
day, the loveliest music in the world. Music for the elect few, filled with
the spirit of romance and melancholy. Our music. (215–216)
If he could, Muo confesses, he would learn not only English and Spanish
but also Vietnamese, Catalan, Tibetan, Mongolian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
and Sanskrit, then the language of Egyptian hieroglyphs—the less “com-
mon” the tongue, the more “recherché” (216) and unyielding, the better.
These are highly “complicated” idioms of prayer and scholarly pursuit, not
unlike “the Tumchooq language” in which, with a self-referential wink at
Balzac, a “sacred Buddhist text [was] copied word for word onto the inside
of the sheepskin jerkin [Paul d’Ampère] wore day in and day out, summer
and winter” in a laogai camp in the late 1950s in Dai’s third novel, Par une
nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée (Once on a Moonless Night [2007]).143
Like Ampère’s friend Hu Feng, himself imprisoned for a “thought crime,”
like Four-Eyes, Luo, and Balzac’s storyteller, Muo too yearns for all these
languages and venerates their scripts. As we saw, in Balzac this fascination
is neither abstract nor artificial. It is palpable. The worlds it projects are real,
material, almost plushy in their texture. In Once on a Moonless Night, Hu
Feng “touche[s] those words written on sheepskin with [his] hands[,] and
they [are] warm as living things.”144 What they are and do has ontological
density to it, and so the window they open for Muo onto sacred and secular
truths while shielding those truths by creating a sodality of study and wor-
ship and protecting this circle from intruders is real. Muo suspects that
these languages’ “inner sanctum” can be “penetrated,” moreover, that he can
“pray” for his beloved and himself in those languages on the altars of their
unyielding grammars. Thus, in Muo’s imagination the alien and exotic id-
iom suddenly becomes exoteric. One more time, the outside moves inside,
gives birth to an inside, to a private world. It opens up to embrace the studi-
ous linguist-lover and his beloved, to become a tenor and vehicle of with-
ness, available to them yet still impenetrable to this other language’s others.
Remarkably, it is the very “esotericism” and foreignness of French or any
other language for that matter that “unite” and “bind,” which means that the
otherness ensconced in the other’s “incomprehensible” tongue is never ab-
solutely exclusive. This linguistic and cultural restrictiveness cannot be
done away with completely either. But Muo draws exactly from the other
tongue’s reserve of secrecy to develop a language of privacy, an idiolect in
which he and his former girlfriend can be together as long as the likes of
Judge Di cannot “translate” it. The words of the other draw their own world
maps, mark off a space, “translate” or take the lovers to a place where they
can “talk” to each other, can “communicate” and understand each other in
a language ultimately “incomprehensible” because only this language al-
lows for both self-expression and privacy. As Muo relives a Dantesque,
Francesca da Rimini-like episode, the music of T. S. Eliot’s poetry—the
other’s music—becomes their music, again. In appropriating it once more,
they appropriate themselves, and, in so doing, they take, as Luo’s friend
would insist, the ultimate “action” an individual can take. The “mesmeriz-
ing, voluptuous overtones” of the “foreign word” (157) from “the other side
of the world” (215) conjure up an intimate “here and now” in which Muo
and his girlfriend, separated by time and space as they are, can nonetheless
be “reunited” and bask in each other’s company.
The unknown, the unheard, and the unfamiliar bewitch. Little Sister
Wang, another female acquaintance, finds Muo’s impenetrable rote recita-
tions from Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine entrancing,
mysteriously erotic (213). Not even the wild Lolos can resist the magic of the
“foreign word.” The tribesmen are so intrigued by Muo’s francophone skills
(239) and overall show of “Frenchness” that they feel prompted to show off
their own “chivalrous” ways (240). Muo discovers with surprise that the
Lolos are not so uncouth as they seem, for they appear capable of sensing in
his deportment a defining French value: the “spirit of chivalry” (193). Ironi-
cally enough, the “savages” prove sophisticated—and “empathic,” one could
say—in recognizing the “essence” of Muo’s French virtues and accepting it
as a part of who he is, as well as a part of themselves, whereas the local au-
thorities take a similar cultural display (peppered with quotes from Freud,
Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida) as symptoms of mental illness and commit
him to the Chengdu Psychiatric Institute (66–67). Not too far away from
Balzac’s laojiao both in space and method, they diagnose Muo’s French
“foreignness” as pathological. To the supposedly uncultured, isolated
mountain villages, however, Muo’s strangeness is a matter of course. Iden-

tity, they suspect, presupposes it, and so does communication between dif-
ferent identities. Muo and his attackers understand each other, come closer
as soon as he starts performing the foreignness setting him apart from the
Lolos, that is, as soon as he acts out his Frenchness by speaking French,
producing his Carte Orange, and lecturing (in Chinese) his audience on the
unlikely topic of the Parisian metro. His linguistic and cultural “out-of-
placeness” bridges a seemingly unbridgeable gap between separate places,
worlds, and norms by helping the psychoanalyst and the Lolos see each
other as culturally structured entities, not as “aberrations” or “anomalies.”
In Dai’s translational imaginary, the strange—the other as strange—
does not estrange. On the contrary, it works as an intercessor. It mediates a
mutual recognition, a rapprochement between Muo and the natives, who
acknowledge and accept his French and Chinese identity simultaneously.
Or, we saw above, it “reunites” Muo and his former and current women
acquaintances, brings the Volcano of the Old Moon magically into being
despite—or perhaps precisely due to—its “foreign tongue.” In turn, this
presence is best seized as planetary co-presence, intimate aggregate of
selves—Muo’s and the Volcano’s—both alike and unlike at same time,
brought together by what they know and are no less than by what they do
not know and are not yet prove able to imagine. Imagining other worlds,
fantasizing about the meanings of the other’s language and books, the self
both leaps into a markedly different world and links up to other selves in-
side its own.
Notably, the former world is a prerequisite to the latter. We connect to
our kin and kind, Dai implies, and we relate “authentically” to our relatives
and our familiar universe insofar as the unfamiliar and the offbeat are al-
ready written into the formula of our being and as such shape our world-
view. Our proximal, direct bonds abbreviate and dissimulate intervals, dis-
tances, and zigzags. Unlikely as it may seem, our cultural identity and, with
it, our community belonging rest on these discontinuities and “impurities,”
and this debt must be owned up to—by planetary critics in the first place
given that, as I have said, planetarity is a world structure of mutual indebt-
edness. It does not matter that this recognition is imperfect, that we cannot
always “recognize” French or Tibetan. Nor is the self required to be an ex-
pert on otherness, to be fully conversant with its strange language, for ex-
ample, or to “figure out” its culture through and through, provided such an
expertise exists in the first place. In fact, the other’s idiom, style, or text need
not be completely “comprehensible,” or, more exactly, this comprehension
or proficiency does not have to be philological. Dai does not argue for this
sort of competency and for the comprehension derived from it but for a
more elementary recognition, for an intuition of, or “feel” for, what the
other means in the petri dish of selfhood. To feel this way—to honor the
original debt—all the self must do is reach the level of a certain empathy, of
a certain propinquity or rapport between itself and other, a relation on
which it can then build its own fantasies and play its own games. Stemming
from these games, Dai suggests one more time, the individual is always a
worldly composite: interlocutional and interlocational, intertextual and in-
tercultural. Ever “derived” and “second-order,” profoundly unoriginal at its
very origin, it springs from a matrix of otherness.
§26. Taking Shelter

We know this is our house, because it feels ours.
—E. M. Forster, Howards End
“There is such shelter in each other,” Carlene tells her friend Kiki in Zadie
Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty.145 The sentence, critics have been quick to
point out, can be traced to Howards End’s famous epigraph and chapter 22
passage: “Only connect! . . . Only connect the prose and the passion, and
both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in frag-
ments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the
isolation that is life to either, will die.”146 Smith herself has acknowledged
that, “from the first line, . . . [On Beauty] is a novel inspired by a love for E.
M. Forster, to whom my all fiction is indebted, one way or the other.” “This
time,” she goes on, “I wanted to repay the debt with hommage.”147
On Beauty can be read as a tribute to Forster on several levels. An exqui-
site response to Howards End, the novel repays Smith’s debt with cultural
interest by retelling Forster’s story for the new millennium’s globalizing
world, with the politically conservative, religious- minded Caribbean-
British Kippses and the racially mixed, more liberal American Belseys play-
ing in today’s Boston the parts the British writer assigns the Wilcoxes and
the Schlegels, respectively, in Howards End’s early twentieth-century Lon-
don. What is more, Smith’s intertextual tour-de-force has a precise focus.
Her novel’s “Forster connection” vividly foregrounds connectedness itself.
It is this very concept and the whole array of cosmopolitan cultural-
emotional experiences associated with it that, through Forster, On Beauty
carries into our time and retrofits planetarily.148
For Smith’s world is world-saturated, markedly nethospherical. This is

true at the macro level, and, as her 2012 novel NW assures us, at the micro
level as well, for instance in Northwest London, a sort of urban strainer of
the modern world’s biocultural nutrients, with the symbolic “fat worm” in
the “lump of London clay . . . passing the world through itself.”149 To live, we
metabolize the world. We live fully, Smith suggests, to the extent that we
take the world in, make connections, and relate to one another, because to
be is to be in the world, and to be in the world is to be with others. In her
2000 debut novel, this defining togetherness is profoundly engrained in
minds and bodies alike, in people’s notions and complexions, in their
thoughts and words, in their digestive systems and teeth, in linguistic roots
and tooth roots. Deep as these roots may be, in White Teeth they are inter-
twined with other roots and thus make selfhood impossible to isolate as an
ontologically and culturally discrete unit. The harder one digs—the deeper
Smith’s narrative “root canals”—the more the vertical cut through a self ’s
biography proves to be a cross-section through other individual and collec-
tive destinies, and the political and ethical bearings of this netospherical
revelation cannot be underestimated. White Teeth explicitly cautions us
that, considering the heteroclite architecture of who we are, literal self-
engendering—“autogamy,” Smith calls it—is philosophically dubious, a re-
pression of or cover for a process the author seizes as “cross-pollinating.”150
Of course, White Teeth itself is a fictional cross-pollination in its own right,
what with its Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi textual implants; so is
Smith’s next novel too, The Autograph Man, where one of the main heroes,
Alex, is a “philograph,” a collector and trader of autographs—others’ quint-
essential writings, as it were—but also a writer, of late at work on a book of
sorts listing in two separate (yet inevitably overlapping) columns all things
“typically” Jewish and gentile;151 and no less cross-pollinating is, we shall
see in detail, On Beauty.
What draws Smith to Forster, in particular to the 1910 classic, is her pre-
cursor’s relational imagination and, behind it, his uniquely cosmopolitan
mind-set. The connection passage is just one among many setting forth the
strong emphasis Forster lays on disinterested ties, friendship and affective
bonds, human affiliations, and generally on the other and his or her world’s
nurturing proximity to the self no matter how far apart the two may be by
location, ethno-racial background, or politics. Significantly, in Forster the
modernist esthete of the Edwardian age, the closeted homosexual and
sometimes critic of the British Empire, and the lover of Italian and Indian
culture, the Jamaican-British writer finds a generous model of worldedness,
of world sociality that she extends critically yet optimistically to a place and
time where such values seem in short supply. We shall observe, the dearth
of connectedness and of those others without whom neither connection
nor self can develop is in Smith a matter of ethics as much as aesthetics.
Also typical of her planetarily upgraded cosmopolitanism is a quintessen-
tially and multiply connective— existential, historical, intertextual—
approach to connectedness. For she tackles the latter with help from others
and the books in which they broach it: Elaine Scarry’s 1999 On Beauty and
Being Just—from which Smith’s On Beauty borrows more than just the
title—and, first and foremost, Howards End.152
While Smith does not use Forster’s title too, one of her lead characters is
Howard Belsey, and the novel does end with him lecturing, assisted by
“Smith,” his graduate student, on Rembrandt before colleagues at Welling-
ton College. Although On Beauty has Howard admit that he “can’t stand
Forster” (298), the ending is just another Forsterian clue, one more time
decoding Smith’s text as a narrative digestion of Howards End. This “me-
tabolization” of the precursor gets under way from the outset, with the e-
mail Howard receives from his son, Jerome. Critics like Gérard Genette
would probably advise against ignoring the real “threshold”—and code
breaker—of Smith’s fictional world, namely, the H. J. Blackham motto to the
novel, “We refuse to be each other.” No doubt, the line can be read in more
than one way, but, like Dai, Smith prompts us, via Forster, to take it as an
invitation not to be like each other, interchangeable, but to imagine our-
selves in the other’s place so as to be there for one another and so, at last, be
ourselves to the fullest.
Place, more exactly residential place, holds in Howards End a truly piv-
otal role, which in turn is part and parcel of a gender drama. Unquestion-
ably more than an address, the place identified in the title of Forster’s novel
is a withness stage. It unfolds a bonding space, a domain of female “com-
radeship” (Forster’s own word) and cradle of an evolving, worldly, cross-
cultural, and cross-topological women’s tradition. Serving to Ruth Wilcox
as the one-time companion and “spiritual heir” Kiki Belsey is to Carlene
Kipps, Margaret Schlegel is hardly committed to feminism yet vows that “if
men came into Howards End it should be over her body” (98, 248). She
does not dislike all men—including men like Henry Wilcox, whom she
marries following Ruth’s death—but the narrow-minded authoritarians
Henry and his son Charles prove they can be. Their authority expresses it-
self in a blend of male chauvinism, jingoism, and self-centered, materialist,
and individualist parochialism whose explicit target is, time and over again,
early twentieth-century philosophies and practices of cosmopolitanism.
If Margaret’s slogan is “connect,” “My motto,” Henry promptly replies,
“is Concentrate.” He makes no apologies either: “I’ve no intention of fritter-
ing away my strength with that sort of thing” (168). “It’s no frittering away
the strength,” Margaret protests his dismissal of “connections,” but “enlarg-
ing the space in which you may be strong” (168). Yet strength, Henry im-
plies, comes from inside. It issues from within the individual and his cul-
ture, from the only concentrated space in which people can apply themselves,
concentrate, and succeed even though they eventually wind up taking over
other spaces for political and economic benefit, like Henry himself. They
act with a markedly masculine authority and assert it topologically as they
monopolize space, excluding from it undesirable presences such as women
and aliens. In this regard (theirs), Howards End makes for a political synec-
doche of the United Kingdom, an autarchically authoritarian and patriar-
chal mise-en-abyme of British society. Like the latter, the place is not to be
opened or “left” to an “outsider, who’d never appreciate” it anyway, accord-
ing to Henry and his son—on this account, in “conveying” Howards End to
Margaret, they decide, “Mrs. Wilcox had been treacherous to the family, to
the laws of property, to her own written word” (99). In Henry’s view, a self
coalesces as it fills out and lays exclusive claim to a determinate place. Intel-
lectual and cultural self-possession and ownership of the place are co-
extensive; both are absolute and absolutely “allergic”—we noted apropos of
Cărtărescu, and it is worth remembering here, that “allergy,” as its etymon
teaches us, is adverse reaction to “others,” álloi. This is not Margaret’s reac-
tion, though. Instead, she believes we truly come into our own provided we
open up ourselves and our homes to others or seek them out at their places.
There are surely dangers we need to be aware of such as conquest, subjuga-
tion of others and their lands, and the like. After all, Margaret is weary of
what cosmopolitanism itself might become, and oftentimes did become, at
the hands of empire—a source, like the latter, of worldly “grayness” (276), a
“caricature of infinity” not unlike the modern metropolis of London (242).
In this London, in Edwardian England generally, and in Forster’s novel
alike, socialism, equitable distribution of wealth, women’s rights, and cos-
mopolitanism are hotly debated topics. Tibby, Margaret’s brother, proclaims
himself a cosmopolitan (146), and Helen, his sister, acts like one pointedly.
Margaret, however, suspects that the cosmopolites of the time live cut off
from “earth” (227)—the place par excellence—and, all “dust, and a stink, and
cosmopolitan chatter” (190), they could not care less about other people.
The “English,” she thinks, is a “better vein than the cosmopolitan” (145),
which, however, does not prevent Charles from pegging her as a “cosmo-
politan,” and a “German cosmopolitan” to boot, exactly the kind of type he
“cannot stand” (100).
Charles’s apprehension is worth pondering. In a sense, he is right. The
Schlegels, Margaret included, represent an interesting “type” of cosmopo-
lite. To Mrs. Munt, they are “English to the backbone” (25) and thereby
distinct from the Germans, whom Margaret herself deems “too thorough.”
The “thorough” is the cosmopolitan’s flipside in that it tends to leave little
room for ambiguity, experiment, and adventure, for the alternatives and the
outsiders who usually try them out first. Thoroughness evokes completion
of an itinerary, a spatial voluntarism that implies carrying through a certain
project as well as projection into and over space, henceforth adjudicated
(mine) through and through, completely and for that reason exclusively,
and marked as such geopolitically and culturally. The thorough kind invari-
ably completes its actions, follows and is eventually “through” because it
concentrates in Henry’s sense, that is, because it acts with limited purview
and within limited space and is if not hostile at least indifferent to others
and their worlds. Thoroughness and self-centeredness are thus equivalent
and, also in this context, provincialism’s other names.
They are also what Margaret’s father had sought to leave behind when he
moved from Germany to England, but, oddly enough, imperial and acquis-
itive England is now turning into the Germany he had fled. This goes to
show that neither country embodies “true” cosmopolitanism, nor is either
its antithesis. In Forster, the cosmopolitan can be, in principle at least, no-
where and everywhere but not in an “uprooted,” disembodied, and free-
floating way. It lies in-between, much like the Schlegel sisters’ type, which
falls somewhere between the “English to the backbone” and the “Germans
of the dreadful sort” (41). Indeed, cosmopolitanism is not confined to a
place as long as it eludes the logic of thoroughness and imperial (German
or British) adjudication. It goes without saying, it cannot be of a place, can-
not be one place’s monopoly no matter how “concentrated” human presence
and its culture may be in that point in space. For, its own logic, its other
logic, does not develop discretely or punctually, in or at unconnected points
but in aggregate structures that world the separate dots together. At odds
with self-absorbed “concentration” and its “fragmentary” Weltanschauung,
cosmopolitan culture largely comes “after” fragments. It is exactly this no-
tion of worlded culture that Margaret has in mind when she urges Henry
not to live “in fragments” any more. On the other hand, whether spatial or
cultural, imperial cosmopolitanism is not one of those loose world aggre-
gates. As I have shown in part I (§10) and elsewhere, both private and col-
lective, colonial-era and even classical models of cosmopolitanism often
postulate, condone, and overall participate in ominous geocultural totali-
ties insofar as such cosmopolitan philosophies, aesthetics, and lifestyles
threaten to concentrate, centralize, level out, and equalize, thus marking the
global onset of “gray” at the expense of the offbeat, the atypical, the incom-
plete, the less-than-thorough, and the well-composed emotionally and oth-
erwise.153 Smith’s cosmopolitan parable, to which Forsterian intertextuality
is so instrumental, reacts subtly against this threat. She is looking to Forster
and, more specifically, to Forster’s own “homage” to the great Romantics
August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel in an attempt to reimagine German
Romanticism’s cosmopolitanism and its relational philosophy for the plan-
etary moment.
§27. “Greetings from Other Worlds”

Is, then, planetarism a neoromanticism? Given the growing number of Ro-
mantic references in Reading for the Planet, the question is not ill-placed.
Admittedly, Romanticism and planetarism do share a sense of worldedness.
They are both fascinated with those worldly convergences that will become
“correspondences” in Baudelaire and in symbolism generally. With the Ro-
mantics, this supremely integrative drive of the imagination leads or at least
aspires, very broadly, to absolute oneness, to the aesthetic of the absolute,
and to the transcendental sublime. A postromanticism rather than a neoro-
manticism, planetarism is the immanent and shifty underbelly of such
metaphysical-spiritualist categories. The rise of the netosphere has only
sped up the piecing together of our multicentric, disjointed, and conflicted
world. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, planetarism is not a new Ro-
manticism. I would point, however, to Romanticism and, in it, especially to
some less metaphysically leaning and less synthesis-tempted definitions of
cosmopolitanism and world letters as important harbingers of twentieth-
century ontologies of worldedness and, of late, planetarity.
So does Smith, actually, in Margaret’s exhortation. Cosmopolitan de-
spite its anti-cosmopolitan rhetoric, this is an indirect paean to her father
and, through him, a salute to the other Schlegels often mentioned apropos
of Margaret, Helen, and Tibby. However, few have noticed that not only
does Forster “borro[w] Margaret and Helen’s patronymic from the Roman-
tic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel,” but that the German thinker’s “early
thought [also] becomes the (unelaborated) touchstone for their beliefs” as
the novel “elevates his value for personal relationships and love to such
heights that they just might overcome world-historical problems such as
the fate of [the British] Empire” at the dawn of the last century.154 The Eng-
lish Schlegels’ pater refers the reader quite transparently to his German pa-
trons. He was a “distant relation of the great critic [Friedrich] Schlegel,” as
we learn from an earlier version of the novel,155 and also a cultural relay in
a cross-national tradition of relatedness, living proof of a more generous,
“worlded” model of kinship, of the notion of a family of spirits and ideals in
which intellectual and emotional ties may outreach those grounded, and
oftentimes locked, in a common birthplace, mother tongue, or ethnicity.
“He was not,” Howards End assures us, “the aggressive German, so dear to
the English journalist, nor the domestic German, so dear to the English wit.
If one classed him at all it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant,
as the idealist, inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperial-
ism of the air” (41). Dismayed by “bigness,” “Pan-Germanism,” and the
utilitarian “thoroughness” of the “vulgar mind” deprived of the “imagina-
tion” (42), the quasi-“unclassifiable” German is of a sort “that was more
prominent in Germany fifty years ago than now” (41).
August Wilhelm died in 1845 and Friedrich sixteen year before, but in
mid-nineteenth-century German culture this category was undeniably in-
fluential. Alongside Friedrich Hölderlin, Jean Paul, Novalis, Friedrich
Schelling, and others, the Schlegels themselves illustrated the so-called
Herder effect in the Germany and Europe of the time.156 Accordingly, they
formulated after Johann Gottfried Herder a two-pronged Romantic aes-
thetics that sought, on the one hand, to identify an independent, distinct
profile for German literature and rising national literatures across Europe,
to “nationalize” and define in specific terms the continent’s “young” cul-
tures, and on the other, to deal with modern literature comparatively—
weltliterarisch, after Goethe—in international and historical contexts of co-
dependence by “connecting” recent and ancient, European and Asian
traditions philologically. The duality of the project lived on beyond Herder’s
time and got increasingly troublesome as German nationalism escalated
and the imperialism abhorred by Margaret’s father took off. But, overall,
Forster is quite right to stress the supranational, “synthetic” element. Fried-
rich Schlegel theorized Romanticism itself as a new if incomplete and fluc-
tuant synthesis, a rhetoric of worldedness capable of taking on but not nec-
essarily of “overcoming” the fragmentation of modern life. On this topic he
composed his own Fragmente, among other works published in the jour-
nals Lyceum and Athenäeum in the late 1790s and the first years of the next
century.
In an essay on the Schlegelian aesthetic of the fragment, J. Hillis Miller
offers that “[i]f [Schlegel’s] fragments are really fragments, they cannot be
joined together in a chain, garland, or system. However they are assembled,
they still remain a contiguous set of incompatibles. It would be a dangerous
mistake, for example, to try to use a chain of fragments to anchor a boat.
They just cannot be connected to one another in a way that will hold. A
chain of fragments is a chain that does not enchain or concatenate.” Neither
part of a whole nor a whole unto itself, a “true fragment” is in Schlegel,
Miller proposes, a “catachresic allegory,” a figure of the “wholly other,” or
what the German idealist calls “chaos.”157 The point is, of course, to “sub-
late,” to abolish while also somewhat preserving this chaos so as to convert
it into a positive value, a structure likely to capture some of its swarming
heterogeneity and irreducible meaning.
Following his conversion to Catholicism later in life, Schlegel himself
tried to rewrite his own fragmentary thoughts into a clarifying synthesis.
But the attempt met with scant success. More consequential for Forster and
his characters was Schlegel’s early wrestling with a chaotic concept that
presents itself as an ontological given as well as a moral and aesthetic di-
lemma. The fragment dares us to acknowledge the incomplete, uncon-
nected, isolated, and “sheltered” mode of existence as a reality of life and at
the same time to aim beyond fragmentariness, isolation, and parochialism
by opening our own selves and places to others. Margaret’s “Live in frag-
ments no longer” injunction recognizes the fragment with all that it implies
and thus gestures toward a form of sociality—rather than a firm social to-
tality—in which fragments, individuals, and cultural models link up and
shore up one another mindful of each other’s incompleteness and distinctive-
ness. For, sheltering an other, if authentic, entails sheltering the other’s oth-
erness itself and thereby stops short of taking the other in “thoroughly,” as-
similating it into the host. The metabolization of the world obtains ethically
if, as in Dai, both the self and the world are still distinct at the end of the
autopoietic process. Assimilation, the fall into non-distinction, and the re-
duction of the world to the structure of selfsameness are high on the agenda
of the imperial cosmopolitanism Margaret casts aside. Uniformity-
inducing, this is a cosmopolitanism of economic, cultural, and interper-
sonal ties that takes us into a “gray” world and, insists Howards End, eventu-
ally “outside humanity altogether” (287) because humanness quintessentially
inheres in variety, nuances, and dissimilarities. Without them, it loses its

aura, its “glow.” Still, “[a] place, as well as a person, may catch the glow,” she
tells Helen, and “this all leads to comfort in the end.” “It is,” she discloses,
“part of the battle against sameness. Differences— eternal differences
planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sor-
row perhaps, but colour in the daily gray” (287). Following her father and
his philosophical mentors, Margaret recommends nurturing those connec-
tions that lead up to a chromatic, mosaic-like world where people connect
because they rescue their differences, where they feel for each other because
they “feel” these very distinctions. Difference, they suspect, provides a com-
mon language, is the bond, the ethical as well as the aesthetical glue of a
world of “beauty and adventure” (281); we talk to one another and are with
each other not over but through or across our differences.
While acknowledging in the Howards End chapter of Others that Forster
names his characters after the illustrious Romantics, Miller opines that
readers will have to figure out for themselves what to make of this, for “the
book will not clearly decide.”158 The critic does make his decision, however,
when he contends that in Howards End “the otherness of race, nationality,
class, and gender can in one way or another, by tolerance and sympathy, be
reduced to the same.” “This is true,” he explains, “in spite of Forster’s cele-
bration of difference. The nation-, class-, and gender-grounded other can
be comprehended and so incorporated, at least in principle, into an ideal
society such as Margaret and Helen Schlegel imagine as their utopian
goal.”159 But it seems to me that the Howards End passages reproduced
above, which Miller also discusses, lend themselves to an “other” sort of
reading, and let me point out too that they are hardly isolated in the novel’s
Friedrich Schlegel–derived economy of otherness. Further, it is this econ-
omy itself that tips the balance in favor of en ethical “decision” that the
novel, I would also maintain, does make. This decision, Miller himself rec-
ognizes, gives pride of place to the “unseen” and the “obscure,” the “un-
known” and the “invisible,” in brief to a “wholly other” whose features fit
almost perfectly the description of Schlegel’s “chaos” and thus of the frag-
mentary.160 Margaret contradicts herself more than once much as her phil-
osophical ancestor did (to Hegel’s despair), but she does not advocate same-
ness, nor does the novel overall push “assimilation.” What they both
promote, by and large, is the world and its places and human associations—
homes, families, communities—as domains and regimens of connections
among entities who are held together emotionally by their fundamental
humanness, to wit, by that which in each of us affords our individuality,
makes us different from one another, and thus ultimately if paradoxically

sets us apart.
It is this visionary, “differential” cosmopolitanism that draws Forster to
the Schlegels and Smith to Forster, the culture of linkages that boost life’s
colorfulness and make the world concurrently more hospitable and more
beautiful. Worlding as world-shrinking, as netospherical becoming, but, by
the same token, worlding as sheltering, hosting, beckoning, and taking in:
Carlene, Kiki, and at last Howard himself are not immune to this geoaes-
thetic of planetarity. They respond to the inviting radiance of this worlding
world, to the heartwarming aura that renders the different, the un-
assimilated, the un-conceptualized, and the mysterious out of the reach of
the instinctively rationalizing self yet no less approachable for that matter,
worth caring for and sheltering. As in Forster, the moral and the beautiful
are the two faces of the same coin, share the same space, and ultimately
make space itself a space of sharing. In a larger sense, the world itself be-
comes a geography of sharing where the topological, the ethical, and the
aesthetical coincide. Smith’s planetarism no longer treats world space as a
conquest zone or as surface, “acreage,” or real estate, but as an affective com-
mons, a cultural-affective field of feelings and circuitry of bonds. The world
is worlding but it does not induce identicalness; in the highly complex spa-
tial, ethical, and aesthetic dynamic of planetary sheltering, the nethospher-
ical provides the necessary correction of the netospherical: sheltering’s
price—not that there should be one—is not the co-optation of the guest
into the host. Blackham’s “We refuse to be each other” ventriloquizes Mar-
garet’s apprehension of sameness—this refusal is, after all, a rejection of
equivalence quite literally—while deploring separation, “discreteness,” and
disinterest in the other’s welfare. For, indeed, “[t]here is such a shelter in
each other,” or there should be, regardless of what Monty Kipps, Smith’s ver-
sion of Henry Wilcox, means when he quotes Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis clos
infamous “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (“Hell is others”).161
These seem to be the two ethical poles of Smith’s novel. I say “seem” be-
cause the contrast is far from absolute, based as it is on a misreading of the
famous dictum, which, as the French writer himself complained, had been
“misunderstood.” What he meant was not that our “relations with others are
tainted,” troublesome, and “infernal” by definition but that if these relations
are “twisted, vitiated, then the other can be to us nothing else than hell.”
That is “because in reality the others are the most important thing within
ourselves that we can draw from to know who we are.” “When we think
about ourselves, when we try to find out who we are,” Sartre clarifies his
paradox, “we actually use the knowledge others already have of us. We form
an opinion of ourselves by means of tools others have given us. Whatever I
say about myself, an other’s judgment is always contained in it. This means
that if my relations with an other are bad, I am completely dependent on
this other. And then I am truly in hell.”162 Forster and Smith after him refute
this sort of subjection of the self to the other and of the other to the self. It
is not hierarchical “dependence” they argue but co-dependence, ethical re-
lation, which is precisely what Sartre intended to underscore. In this light,
we do not have a choice: our selves have always absorbed others and their
views, which we have used to view and represent ourselves, to stake claims
to our identities. We develop a proprietary sense of our being and place as
we borrow from others, as we let them into our lives and thoughts. We give
them sanctuary, for a night or forever, but they also lend us the shelter of
their minds so we can make up our own and thus come to grips with the
secret of our beings. This is a process of inclusion intellectually and affec-
tively, pertaining as it does to politics, psychology, morals, as well as aes-
thetics. Throughout his career, Howard has endeavored, as Smith writes in
On Beauty, to “recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion” (155),
with beauty as elusive and forbidding as the unfathomable shadows of a
Rembrandt painting. Opposed to this understanding of art is Carlene and
Kiki’s passion for the Hyppolite painting, which the older woman leaves the
younger one with a transparent nod to the testamentary nexus between
Ruth and Margaret in Howards End.
This intertextual ploy is among many others suggesting that Smith’s
reading of Forster’s own reading of the Schlegels reworks Howards End’s
cosmopolitan discourse of connectedness into a more ethically worlded vi-
sion. Anticipating Smith’s planetary remapping of the circumatlantic world
so as to collocate London and Boston and the Caribbean and New England,
Margaret’s struggle to associate disparate and often conflicting values such
as practicality and aesthetic sensibility, “prose” and “poetry,” “England” and
“Germany,” and thus expand the latticework of people, ideas, and feelings
across the barriers of class, ethnicity, geography, and culture, is undercut by
the webs of exploitation, inequality, and pain into which the British and
German Empires themselves were turning at the time. Margaret’s endeavor
testifies to the “good,” difference-and distinction-grounded cosmopolitan-
ism; the imperial networks, to the “bad” sort, which is, as far as Margaret is
concerned, the one that unfortunately carries the day. If, generally speak-
ing, her attempts fall short, in her family and outside it, that is not only be-
cause her project and its historical context are at odds but also because this
project remains too “Schlegelian,” too idealistic. As a result, the sodalities

and solidarities she aims at across and against both absolute distinctiveness
and complete sameness do not strike roots as she has hoped. Responding to
this failure, or quasi failure, of Forster’s cosmopolitan designs, Smith em-
ploys the Haitian painting—an actual artwork, she specifies163—as a more
productive “bonding” device.
Paul Gilroy has warned about the shortcomings of those bonds and alli-
ances predicated on, and thus limited by, a “raciological” understanding of
communal interaction and political effectiveness. “The spaces in which
‘races’ come to life,” he maintains, “are a field from which political interac-
tion has been banished. It is usually replaced by enthusiasm for the cheapest
pseudo-solidarities: forms of connection that are imagined to arise effort-
lessly from shared phenotypes, culture, and bio-nationalities.” The “glam-
our of sameness” stemming from the latter is certainly deceiving.164 Con-
troversial as this position has been, it helps us come to grips with what
happens between Carlene, a Caribbean-British woman, and Kiki, her Afri-
can American friend, and more broadly with what occurs intertextually
“between” Howards End and On Beauty. Simply put, what the Haitian can-
vas offers the two black women is a more tangible, affective-aesthetic space
in which, and in response to which, they connect across their all-too-
conspicuous differences. Nor does this connectedness arena annul race. But
this bond lends race an emotional substance that proves more palpable,
more immediate than anything else two women of African background
might have in common. That is to say, what Smith is after is a more nuanced
form of sharing. This form does not preexist. It is not a priori rooted in
putative racialist-genomic sameness but implies a project, a state of being
with an other that self and other work toward rather than take for granted.
Carlene has developed her own relation to the painting while Kiki has
hardly one at the beginning of their relationship, but, following her son’s
“liberating” the painting from Monty’s Wellington office, she begins to re-
spond to the art object and through it to its previous owner, which response
in turn interpellates her estranged husband’s own aesthetic dealings and
thus might just mark a fresh start in their own relationship.
As Milan Kundera notes in a commentary on Kafka, beauty is “perpet-
ual astonishment”; it shocks us because it is essentially the “beauty of
strangeness.”165 In this sense, on which Smith, Cărtărescu, Dai, McEwan,
and other planetary writers are so keen, Howard Belsey is not off the mark:
in beautiful paintings and books, we are intrigued by the unfamiliar and the
non-familial, by what differs from us and our kin, from what we normally
do, know, and surround ourselves with. We tend to like that which surprises
us. And so even though one should not charge the sheltered for shelter, he
or she offers something in exchange anyway: beauty itself. Lying, one more
time, where the ethical and the aesthetic intersect, the beautiful is intrinsic
to an other’s strangeness and to otherness generally, thus reinforcing the
affective-aesthetic thrust of geoaesthetics. No doubt, this other, this differ-
ent, may be forbidding, hard to figure out, to put together conceptually.
That is, it may be, like the Schlegelian chaos and fragment, wholly different
from what we expect and are used to. As such, it may keep us off. But the
different qua different in the object we gaze at, daunting as its difference
may be, is also that which draws us. In that, any aesthetics, or, as Kundera
calls it, any “poetics,” is or can become cosmopolitan.
What I find truly remarkable, though, is that, as Elaine Scarry contends
in the book that made such a powerful impact on Smith, we react to this
object mimetically regardless of how bizarre and strange it appears to us.
“[B]eautiful things,” Scarry contends, “always carry greetings from other
worlds with them.”166 However, our impulse is often to try and replicate
their beauty, to “follow” them no matter how otherworldly their call. This is
a befitting reaction aesthetically as well as ethically. For, the internal equi-
librium, the formal achievement we appreciate in the beautiful and the fair
outshine “loveliness of aspect.” They spill over the boundaries of the ad-
mired object, flood the extra-aesthetical, the social, and the interpersonal,
and hint at ways of making sociality itself beautiful by suggesting that art’s
“fairness” and balance of proportions must convert into a “symmetry of
everyone’s relation to one another” outside it. Art’s inside and outside be-
come then hard to delimitate, and with them, one more time, the ethical
and the aesthetical too, which overlap once art has issued its unique “invita-
tion to ethical fairness.”167 Beauty is thus poised to hold sway both within
and without beautiful things, with ethics and politics “field-specific” appli-
cations of aesthetic criteria. The latter’s jurisdiction stretches out beyond
museums and libraries into the sociocultural sphere, which can now be
judged on its “sheltering” effectiveness, in terms of how “symmetrically”—
how “aesthetically”—it is occupied by “me” and “you,” “my” kind and
“yours.” Thus underpinned by an aesthetic, “differential” cosmopolitanism,
space—social, national, planetary—at long last becomes, suggests Smith, a
domain where self and other come together by virtue rather than at the
expense of their individualizing traits.
To reiterate: planetarism does not merely “aestheticize” the world. Writ-
ers like Cărtărescu, Dai, and Smith do not cut artworks off from the “real
world,” nor do they make the world into an aesthetic object showcased out-
side the purview of the ethical and the political. If any aestheticism is in
play here at all, its Prevailing Operating System is, indeed, geoaesthetic.
And, to reemphasize this aspect of planetarism, geoaesthetics does not limit
itself to taking the measure of the world’s beautiful things. As a branch of
geoculture, it also positions things in the world; it “finds” them present in
the world rather then “putting” them in there. At the same time, as I have
argued throughout, being present in the world, being present tout court, is
an offshoot of worldly co-presence because being-with comes before—and
comes to afford and sustain—being to the point that it renders ontological
and aesthetic well-being a function of ethical with-being. This is, in fact, a
planetary principle, a (or perhaps the) planetary nomos. Planetarily speak-
ing, things and places—whatever pleases, expresses, and locates us—are
because they are worlded, located in the world themselves, and so, from the
standpoint of the planetary artist and, by the same token, of the planetary
critic, to fancy all these things, to weigh them, and otherwise to imagine
them require first and foremost imagining them in the world, enabling the
imagination to world its object. In that, planetarism works as a geolocating
system; planetary criticism’s job—the reverse engineering described earlier
under §17—is to take the system apart, to show how it works, and evaluate
what its workings yield.
Ethical, ontological, topological, political, and economic simultane-
ously, the planetary nomos regulates a number of interrelated world-
positioning operations: it renders the insular vicinal; it sets up location as
collocation, putting “me” (up) at “your place” and putting me and “my
place” in “yours,” and the other way around; and it affords the hosting apti-
tude of the guest and the other reciprocities and amphibologies of hosting/
guesting, in the great line of thought linking Ancient Greek xeniā and Ro-
man hospitium with the French hôte (both “guest” and “host”), Levinas,
Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and other recent philosophers and theorists.168
These protocols trace a certain progression of planetarization—of planetar-
ization viewed as contiguous or shared space, location, and dwelling—
depending on the intensities and extensities with which the writers’ imagi-
nation translates the planet’s collocational principle into fictional space.
This gradation of planetarity runs the whole gamut of co-spatiality from
vicinity (adjacency of habitation) to contractual (a posteriori) mutuality of
hosting to ethical (postulated) sheltering that makes hosting both a duty
and free of charge because one has already been hosted and sheltered in the
planetary commons before one hosts and gives shelter or sanctuary to an
other. What we have in this withness spectrum is, at one pole, “softer” forms
of planetary situatedness clustered around topological juxtapositions in
which self and other may border on one another while remaining territori-
ally separate, and, at the opposite pole, “stronger” varieties of shared space
in which self and other crisscross each other’s zones or, also to varying de-
grees, coincide geographically. Accordingly, one can adjoin an other’s space
or home, living side by side with it; one can cohabitate, that is, share the
same territory or abode; one can live in it, alongside or among others; or
your space or home can overlap with his or hers.
§28. Snowflakes: The Imagination as

Geopositioning Technology
Planetary co-spatiality and the geopositioning system behind it are signa-
ture themes of post–Cold War fiction. Roughly put, they originate with
postcolonial literature. However, authors like Kureishi, Smith, Lahiri, Foer,
Krauss, Houellebecq, Muşina, Hemon, Shteyngart, Ugrešić, Iva Pekárkova
(Gimme the Money), Olga Tokarczuk (House of Day, House of Night), Saša
Stanišić (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone), Yelena Akhtiorskaya
(Panic in a Suitcase), and Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to
Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia) rewire the system’s spatial capabilities. The
new, planetary Prevailing Operating System functions as a literary GPS that
registers preponderantly those geolocational or, more exactly, geocolloca-
tional phenomena that I have called “telescopies.” “Strong” as these co-
spatial arrangements and apportionments of polity, language, religion, race,
and ethnicity may be, they rarely result in utopias of harmoniously multi-
cultural cohabitation.
Take, for example, Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow. In the book, contemporary
Istanbul, a mere three hundred miles south of Cărtărescu’s Bucharest, then,
farther away, the eastern Anatolia town of Kars, and with them Turkey
claim “accessions” to wider geopolitical aggregates such as the European
Union and are concurrently reclaimed by multiple forces of religious, re-
gional, and separatist entrenchment dead set on rescinding Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk’s secularist legacy. Historically between a rock and a hard place,
Pamuk’s country finds itself trapped between ill-assorted geopolitical mod-
els and choices. One is the greater world of NATO (since 1951) and Europe
(an increasingly contradictory aspiration), for which the Young Turks’
modernity-bent reformism had paved the way. Pulling in the opposite di-
rection are Iran-backed Islamists and, yet in another, radical Kurdish au-
tonomists (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK), of late also fighting ISIS
(Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). Turkey’s predicament, Pamuk hints, lies in
what might be called the extraneous fallacy: the assumption that, first, such
options, positions, affiliations, and the cultural-religious models derived
from or attributed to them are indomitably unworlded, external to each
other, following as they allegedly do separate—rather than intersecting—
trajectories in space and time; and second, that they are mutually, and self-
evidently, exclusive.
Nowhere is this antinomic worldview more ingeniously refuted than in
the telescoping episode where Ka, the protagonist, talks about “All Human-
ity and the Stars,” the “constellating” poem he composes in reaction to his
companion’s comment that “the history of the small city [of Kars] has be-
come as one with the history of the world.”169 “In the notes he made after-
ward,” Ka “described [the poem’s] subject”
as the sadness of a city forgotten by the outside world and banished

from history; the first lines followed a sequence recalling the opening
scenes of the Hollywood films he had so loved as a child. As the titles
rolled past, there was a faraway image of the earth turning slowly; as
the camera came in closer and closer, the sphere grew and grew, until
suddenly all you could see was one country, and of course—just as in
the imaginary films Ka had been watching in his head since
childhood—this country was Turkey; now the blue waters of the Sea of
Marmara and the Bosphorus and the Black Sea and the Nişantaş of
Ka’s childhood, with the traffic policeman on Teşvikiye Avenue, the
street of Niğar [sic] the Poetess, and trees and rooftops (how lovely
they looked from above!); then came a slow pan across the laundry
hanging on the line, the billboard advertising Tamek canned goods,
the rusty gutters and the pitch-covered sidewalks, before the pause at
Ka’s bedroom window. Then a long tracking shot through the window
of rooms packed with books, dusty furniture, and carpets, to Ka at a
desk facing the other window; panning over his shoulder, the camera
revealed a piece of paper on the desk and, following the fountain pen,
came finally to rest on the last letters of the message he was writing,
thus inviting us to read:
ADDRESS ON THE DAY OF MY ENTRANCE

INTO THE HISTORY OF POETRY: POET KA,
16/8 NIGÂR THE POETESS STREET,
NI[Ș]ANTA[Ș,] ISTANBUL, TURKEY
As the narrator adds in a reference to the snowflake-shaped cosmic dia-

gram he comes across in one of Ka’s notebooks, “discerning readers will al-
ready have guessed” that Ka’s address “is located on the Reason axis but
positioned to suggest the power of the imagination.”170 Intersecting Reason
and Memory,171 the Imagination re-or geo(-)positions Ka(r)—the artist,
the place, and Turkey with them—planetarily, as it does, we have noticed,
with Cărtărescu’s Bucharest, with Dai’s Szechuan village, and with Smith’s
London neighborhood and buildings. An intercontinental quilting point,
Turkey is remapped by Pamuk’s planetarism interstitially, “between conti-
nents,” as we say forgetting that this is geographically impossible and that
the interstice is as much a cleft or crevice as it is a contact zone, a test and a
provision for a continuum. Turkey thus lies across worlds, religions, ratio-
nalities, and individual-collective memories; it brings them all together, as
it has since the fifteenth century, and probes their togetherness, their capac-
ity and willingness to be together as much as its own. The most “Caribbean”
among Eurasian political entities, its making is a historical dramatization of
the poétique de la relation Edouard Glissant formulated in Le Discours antil-
lais and Spivak, Ramazani, and others lean on in their treatment of plane-
tary poetics. By a mix of zoom-in and zoom-out scenes, Pamuk and his
authorial alter ego both locate their places in the outside worlds and make
out these worlds in the Turkish quotidian, lying inside one another like so
many Chinese boxes, overlapping, or traversing each other to weave the
Alephic fractality—the “snowflake”—of planetarity.
Like Cărtărescu’s Mircea, who, we have seen, also screens snowflakes for
cosmic geometries and elaborated, translucent worlds, Ka does not have to
invent the “little things” his compatriots live and die for. These things are
already there, in the Universal Studios picture of the turning planet. But he
needs to turn to the picture a director’s eye trained for this kind of planetary
“detail.” The magnifying-glass workings of the microanalysis also enable the
macroanalytic flipside, which helps him detect the world’s multitudinous
footprints in snowy Kars. It is, arguably, all a matter of scale, of a revisionary
scalarity no longer keyed to national-linguistic territoriality but willing to
take the risk of another direction performatively and geoculturally, of other
understandings, dramatizations, and mappings. Both imaginary and real,
so vivid in Kars’s Turkish-Kurdish-Iranian-Armenian-Russian-West Euro-
pean urban potpourri and so subtly reinforced by Pamuk’s Brechtian-
Pirandellian theatrical and intertextual games, this is a complex cartogra-
phy in which place, affect, faith, gender, ethnicity, and governance crystallize
snowflake-like into aggregates of culture inside, outside, and astride statal

and sectarian turfs.
Staged in Kars’s back alleys and teahouses as well as in the local theater
during the botched anti-Islamist military takeover is a world drama at once
thespian and geopolitical, imagined and unfictitious, literal and metaphori-
cal, private and collective, Turkish and transnational, historical and con-
temporary, Ottoman and post-Atatürk, past and unfolding. The copula, the
“and” linking up such assumed antinomies, sets up too the reciprocities,
mutual inclusions, co-spatialities, and co-temporalities fostered by “as,”
“in,” “or,” “alongside,” “with,” “while,” and “at the same time.” We can think
of these connectors as narrative-imaginary and geosyntactic operators that
reposition Kars in the world at the same time that they co-position Kars
and the world by variously enforcing and qualifying their conjunctive pa-
thos. Such qualifications do not simply bring out the multifarious and self-
conflicted worldliness lying inside or astride Kars; they also point to the
reciprocal encroaching of these worlds and of their ontologies.
This is where the Brechtian play produced, directed, and watched by
Kars’s residents at the aptly named “National Theater” comes in (155). Only,
the jarring Verfremdungseffekt of the lethal shots fired by the soldier actors
into the auditorium does not “distance” the audience from the world on
stage properly speaking. Or, if it does, it does so insofar as it de-fictionalizes
what goes on behind the imaginary “fourth wall” through which modern
drama theory and, after it, common parlance ordinarily separate the stage
and its fictional realm from the first rows and the “real people” in them. Ob-
viously, Snow’s spectators recognize themselves (how could they not?) in the
dramatis personae. True, in a way, the play’s world is a dramatic production,
and, further, according to Bertolt Brecht’s epische Theater, in order for the
spectators to remain detached from the plot and maintain contact with their
own world so as to rediscover it anew, perhaps critically, the theatrical arti-
fact has to be flaunted as such, as an illusion-spawning mechanism. In an-
other way, though, that world is no make-believe but a clip of the everyday
footage, complete with Kars’s urban grimness, religious strife, power grabs,
women’s plight, the Kurds’ struggle for autonomy, and, again, recognizable
figures. To that extent, that world is ontologically on stage in the National
Theater, where the Turkish drama plays out as a world show and, on another
level, as a show of worldedness, as well as a show-and-tell of sorts, a display
of experience. The “distancing” effect thus does not inhere so much in an
intervening distance as in one that has more complex intellectual properties,
a distance that “estranges” and defamiliarizes (fremd means “strange,” “for-

eign,” and “alien” in German) while pulling the public into the play’s fictional
fold. For the estrangement and defamiliarization are not achieved as the gap
between the world-as-play and the attendees’ world widens but, to the con-
trary, as it closes, as the aesthetic violence of community theater and the
political violence scripting the theater of Kars’s communality ooze into one
another and ultimately suspend the ontological interval—the “fourth wall”—
between illusion and war, metareality and reality.
§29. The Beirut Wall

Returning to Lebanon was taking me on a world tour.
—Sorj Chalandon, Le quatrième mur
The fourth wall is both the central theme and the title of French journalist
and fiction author Sorj Chalandon’s internationally acclaimed 2013 novel Le
quatrième mur. The parallels between Chalandon’s work and Pamuk’s are
geoculturally, politically, religiously, narratively, and aesthetically unmis-
takable, so much so that Le quatrième mur reads at times as a replay of
Snow’s situations, issues, and tensions on a larger scale and in a more acutely
tragic tonality. Thus, in Chalandon, Beirut and Lebanon overall provide a
similarly convulsive and geopolitically “intersectional” backdrop to a civil
war and an ethno-religious factionalism that greatly escalate the social un-
rest and Turkish-Kurdish skirmishes of Kars and its surroundings; the Pal-
estinian tragedy reprises the Kurds’ ordeal with a vengeance; Ka, whose
liberal leanings got him in trouble earlier in his career and had to leave his
native Turkey, has been living in exile in Frankfurt, Germany, while Cha-
landon’s narrating protagonist, far-left activist Georges, hails from Paris,
but they travel to same area, the Near-Middle East (the Levant), where they
are both treated as Westerners; in Beirut—the “Paris of the Middle East”—
Georges too involves himself in a turmoil whose roots are entwined with
various episodes of Turkish, French, British, and Russian imperialism, and,
of late, with the American presence in the region.
Both heroes act as intermediaries also. They go back and forth between
various feuding parties and even attempt to bring them together. Drawn to
Kars by a flurry of female suicides, on which he has been commissioned to
do an article for a European newspaper, Ka meets and interviews the local
political players, including Islamic militants who have taken up armed re-
sistance. The poet is wearing a reporter’s hat surely not his size. He insists
on giving everybody a fair hearing, even though his own convictions are a
matter of public record and, as we gather, will eventually cost him his life
back in Germany. His goal is to bear witness rather than to take sides.
Equally out of his depth, Georges does, one might say, just the opposite. An
outsider too, he eventually chooses the path of action, of violent retribution,
and survives. Unlike Ka, the Frenchman is not a foreign correspondent
bound by the laws of objectivity. But, in principle at least, he cannot be an
actor politically either because he is supposed to be a director, namely, to
direct a play whose cast is representative, as in Snow, of virtually all politi-
cal, ethnic, and religious factions. While his pro-Palestinian position is a
secret neither to the reader nor to most people he comes across in war-
ravaged Lebanon, it must take a back seat to his impossible task and to the
quasi neutrality this task presumably calls for.
Not a stage director by training, Georges becomes one reluctantly, at the
bequest of his friend Samuel. A Jewish-Greek theater director well known
for mounting his plays in war zones and sites of social conflict, Sam lies
terminally ill in a Paris hospital bed, and Georges agrees to complete Sam’s
project and fly to Beirut to see through the production of Jean Anouilh’s
Antigone forty years after its writing and thirty-eight years after its 1944
premiere in Nazi-occupied Paris. The Beirut performance is set for October
1, 1982, with a string of rehearsals during the previous months. But Kataeb
leader and president-elect of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel is assassinated on
September 14, and the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra
and Shatila follow suit on the sixteenth and eighteenth. Imane, the Palestin-
ian woman playing Antigone, is raped and murdered in Shatila. Charbel,
the Maronite Christian picked for Creon’s part although, unlike his brother,
he is not a Phalangist (an important distinction, as we shall see), and the
rest of the cast—Nakad, a Druze assigned Haemon’s role, Yevkinée, the Ar-
menian Ismene, the Shia Euridice, and the others—are either dead, back to
the daily business of killing and being killed, or have fled. Sam’s dream is
shattered.
Or so it seems. On a closer look, things prove more complicated. One
could argue, in fact, that Chalandon pulls it off as a novelist—as the director
of the novel, if you will—where the director-in-the-novel fails, or, more ac-
curately, that the former builds on the latter’s work, picking up where
Georges, his alter ego, left off. That is, if Georges does not actually keep the
promise he made Sam, Chalandon, who, like his hero, also witnessed Sha-
tila’s atrocities, does, through the novel itself. As a whole, Le quatrième mur
performs the Antigone whose performance Georges rehearsed, practices
what the rehearsals practiced for. For, indeed, the book can be read as
Snow’s National Theater episode writ large, with Pamuk’s Brechtian play-in-
the-novel episode scaled up to become Chalandon’s novel-as-play and by
the same movement taking over the entire book. This is how the multiple
walls between the aborted tragedy and the play’s tragic staging as Le
quatrième mur tumble down; this is how the divide separating, on one side,
the protagonist and his own universe and ideals and, on the other side, the
author, his commitments, and his world disappears but only to echo and
reinforce the wiping away of cognate fault lines inside and outside the novel,
as well as of the very inside-outside distinction: between the (fictional)
tragedy, the Antigone that never happened (was never produced), and the
(actual) tragedy of Sabra and Shatila (and Damour and Karantina before
them), even though the war’s horrors are recorded fictionally, in and by
Chalandon’s novel; more broadly, between imagined tragedy and historical
tragedy; further, between tragedy as performance, as enactment, and trag-
edy as pure act, as factual occurrence; between the actors’ and actresses’
own private existence and the imaginary destinies they conjure up as actors
and actresses; finally, and perhaps more starkly, between the raw ontology
of eventfulness sanctioning the “real lives” of the spectators in their seats
and the aesthetic ontology framing the cast’s imaginary exploits on stage.
Summing up the rest, the last divide is encapsulated by the novel’s title.
As Chalandon tells an interviewer, “[t]he fourth wall is, of course, a fairly
well-known drama term referring to the ‘wall’ that demarcates the universe
of the play from the real universe, and an actor shatters this wall to pieces
when, during a representation, he addresses the public directly.” But, he
adds, the title is also a pun. Accordingly,
this fourth wall is the one imprisoning Georges, the wall closing up his
prison and making his return impossible. It is the wall dividing the liv-
ing from the dead. Georges is the one who builds this wall; he walls
himself alive into his madness and into the war. The choice for this title
was also a way of designating the impossibility of producing the play
amidst Lebanon’s raging war and with actors from all camps involved.
As a writer, I wanted this to work out, that is, I wanted the representa-
tion to take place, but I realized that this was not possible. The novelist
himself had to face up to the unfeasibility of this foolish project.172
This recognition notwithstanding, the novel is not all doom and gloom. It
does not give up all hope that the war will end. “Let us say,” the author al-
lows, “that a war is over when the monuments honoring the dead have been
built. There is a monument for the dead in each French village. But where
are the monuments for those killed in the Lebanese war, for the Druze, for
the Christians, for the Palestinians? Where will one go to collect one’s
thoughts and pay one’s respects? We need to make sure,” Chalandon insists,
“that the memory of the dead stays alive, that we preserve it, that the war’s
traces remain visible. The monuments erected for the dead are war’s collec-
tive graves.” “War,” he goes on, “is an infernal machine that blows to pieces
everything within its reach. And, when we are not talking about a war in
which two countries face off but about battles moving from one street to the
next, battles in which neighbors, friends, or even members of the families
fight each other, what we are talking about is a war that cannot be won,
which is something I find very unsettling.” If this is not the kind of “mes-
sage” some might expect a novel such as Le quatrième mur to convey, that is
because, Chalandon declares, his literature has no message to deliver. In-
stead, what he wants his fiction to accomplish is to “confront [his] charac-
ters with huge problems, which they must handle the best they can, whether
these problems involve a betrayal, a promise, or a sham. . . . Here, Sam and
Georges have run into something too big for them, something that will
crush them. I feel for them, but I also do for Creon, as much as I do for
Antigone.”173
The novel may not carry a straightforward “message,” or a single mes-
sage for that matter, but this makes it neither meaningless nor defeatist.
What bears underscoring, rather, is the remarkable complexity of a message
striving to capture the “bigness” of the world scenario into which the two
directors set out to work Antigone’s representation: the mutually contested,
parallel, dovetailing, or overlapping geohistorical narratives, the co-
territorialities and reciprocal land claims following from them, the entan-
gled jurisdictions, rights, and responsibilities, the shiftiness of Lebanon’s
victim-victimizer dialectic, and, more broadly, the sheer quagmire of Leba-
nese politics itself, all of which are only magnified by the post–Cold War,
regional and international angle from which Le quatrième mur surveys the
war theater of the Lebanese early 1980s.
But the reality on the ground, whose intricacies the writer understand-
ably declines to explain away, is only one source of this almost disconcert-
ing richness of meaning. The other two are largely performative. They have
to do with tragedy and its aesthetic and civic attributes across the ages. The
first is primarily space, viz., tragedy as aesthetic and communal spatiality
produced literally, materially, alongside dramatic production itself, specifi-
cally through stagecraft and theater design solutions to the “fourth wall”
problem; I might add, I write “solutions” advisedly, for, as we have noticed

in the interview excerpt, the plural is warranted given that the book features
not one but several approaches to this multifaceted issue. The second source
is tragedy as text, specifically, the intertextual liberties Chalandon takes
with Antigone in its various forms as he reads, revisits, and “localizes” not
only Anouilh but also Sophocles and Brecht.
Of course, the French playwright remains the novelist’s self-
acknowledged, main inspiration. But Chalandon also went back to the orig-
inal Antigone, as he must have turned to Brecht as well. The Brechtian ver-
sion is particularly relevant because, before intersecting in Le quatrième
mur, the two filiations described here already met in Brecht’s “Antigone” des
Sophokles. Indeed, four years after Anouilh, Brecht retrofitted Sophocles’s
masterpiece (“adapted” from Friedrich Hölderlin’s German translation)
with a prologue that broke down the imaginary wall to insert, also like in
the French playwright’s work, Antigone into the greater tragedy of World
War II and the Nazi nightmare. Most interestingly, the twin tracks of textual
tragedy and of tragedy as event connecting with and impacting on world
events over classical aesthetics’ gulf between representation and reality
cross again in the Antigone put on “by young Palestinians at the Jenin Refu-
gee Camp in the northern West Bank, years after the Israeli invasion of 2002
and around the time when the Museum of Tolerance was being con-
structed.”174
In all likelihood, Chalandon was not aware of the Palestinian produc-
tion. And, as his personal politics, journalism, and interviews given follow-
ing Le quatrième mur’s appearance go to show, Anouilh appealed to him
more than Sophocles and Brecht. In his reading, the Greek Antigone’s op-
position to Creon and to the law he symbolizes evinces, more than political
commitment to people and ideals in the world of the living, transcendent
duty—to the dead, their underworld, and the laws set by the gods, includ-
ing the customs and obligations of burial, mourning, piety, “recollection,”
and related “cleansing” rites Creon’s decree denies to Polynices. “In Anouilh,”
the novelist points out, Antigone “rises up against the King, against modern
authority.”175 Besides, unlike the pacifism advocated upfront by Brecht’s An-
tigone in response to Creon’s warmongering, peace obtains in Anouilh
through secular political practice, representing as it does the bonus of con-
crete resistance to a no less palpable “order”—Creon’s state and/as Nazi
power—and this stance requires getting your hands dirty in what Anouilh’s
Theban ruler calls the “kitchen of politics.”176 The same Creon claims that
he was forced to step in and become the chef-in-chief, but, whether we buy
it or not, Antigone accepts the metaphor herself.177 This corroborates Judith

Butler’s rebuttal of famous Sophoclean commentaries by Hegel (Phenome-
nology of Spirit) and Lacan (Seminar VII), a critique revolving around the
point that Antigone and her uncle are alike, a similarity neither Brecht nor
Anouilh seem unaware of. Brecht, for example, has Creon lecture Antigone
on the state’s “divine order,”178 a speech that collapses the oppositions be-
tween the world of the dead and the world of mortals and between the laws
of gods and human laws, respectively, while, in Anouilh, Creon tells his son
Haemon that “[he, Creon, is] master [of Thebes, but] under the law. Not
above the law,”179 which, in turn, makes the case against Creon’s “tyranny”
more difficult (and probably placated Anouilh’s German censors as well).
Furthermore, as Butler maintains, a careful reading of Sophocles himself
suggests that
[o]pposing Antigone to Creon as the encounter between the forces of

kinship and those of state power fails to take into account the ways in
which Antigone has already departed from kinship, herself the daughter
of an incestuous bond, herself devoted to an impossible and death-bent
incestuous love for her brother, how her actions compel others to regard
her as “manly” and thus cast doubt on the way that kinship might un-
derwrite gender, how her language, paradoxically, most closely approxi-
mates Creon’s, the language of sovereign authority and action, and how
Creon himself assumes his sovereignty only by virtue of the kinship line
that enables that succession, how he becomes, as it were, unmanned by
Antigone’s defiance, and finally by his own actions, at once abrogating
the norms that secure his place in kinship and in sovereignty.180
In short, the critic concludes, “Sophocles’ text makes clear that the two are
metaphorically implicated in one another in ways that suggest that there is,
in fact, no simple opposition between the two.” In essence, says Butler, An-
tigone and Creon are “chiasmically related.”181
§30. Chiasmic Spatiality, Planetarity,

and the “Monumental” Novel
The observation is pertinent but incomplete and also potentially misleading
insofar as it restricts the chiasmus of relatedness to the territory controlled
by the sovereign, namely, to the state or, with a word used by Sophocles’s
Creon, to the “fatherland.”182 In Butler, as well as in previous interpretations
of Sophocles, be they more traditional, such as George Steiner’s, or psycho-
analytic, such as Žižek’s, the polis circumscribes the space of relation and of
the law derived from it.183 State-saturated, its play reined in by the Theban
walls, relation becomes synonymous with consanguinity and its crisis an-
other episode in the Labdacids’ family saga.
But this not what Chalandon takes away from Sophocles and, more sig-
nificantly still, from Anouilh’s rereading of Sophocles. In an important way,
Le quatrième mur throws Thebes’s seven gates open to let in not the Argive
army but the world. Or, with a metaphor more apposite to this discussion,
he knocks down the city walls to widen the dynamic of relation beyond
relatives, polis, and the living. Thus, in a polyethnic and plurireligious Bei-
rut that, “cut off from the world”184 as it may be at times, also brings to-
gether Georges’s Paris and Sam’s Thessaloniki,185 the chiasmus-like kinship
Chalandon sets up bridges distances that are geographic as they are ethno-
cultural, political, and ontological, shrinking down to the Lebanese capital’s
size and moment histories, traditions, differences, and antagonisms stretch-
ing across whole continents, ethnicities, and faiths. As Anouilh puts it, the
“civil war” makes everybody “dirty” no matter who and where they are,
with equalizing guilt—for nobody can in the end claim innocence any
more—a prelude to the equivalence, to the bond of indistinctiveness and
tragic likeness death bestows, notes Creon himself, on Eteocles and Poly-
nices, on former adversaries, and on natives and strangers.186 As Chalandon
too implies, in literary tragedy and in the tragedies of history alike people
bond not only in life but also in death. In fact, the latter’s bond may be
stronger because it is irreversible, binding us together “chiasmically,” over
the chasm of our ethno-religious asymmetries, rivalries, and violence. Oe-
dipus’s sons ford the tragic gulf of fratricide to rebecome brothers in death.
And, when Brecht’s Creon proclaims that “[t]he enemy, even when dead,
does not become a friend,” Antigone retorts promptly: “Of course he does.
I don’t live to hate, but to love.”187
Since this kind of love is possible, as Creon replies, only “down there,” in
the kingdom of death, this is where Antigone is headed by taking her own
life: not to “hell” as such, where Creon curtly and literally dispatches her,188
but to the netherworld. The distinction is important. In Sophocles, Anouilh,
and Chalandon, the world below is quite worldly because this is where An-
tigone reunites with her brothers and where foes and friends, aliens and
citizens, Polynices’s allies (the “seven foreign princes”)189 and Eteocles’s
comrades, and the ecumene and the polis embrace each other. Neither en-
tirely intra muros, inside the walls of the city-state and of the ethnocentri-
cally relational model enforced by it, nor completely “out there,” “in the
middle of nowhere,” Antigone’s sepulcher lies just outside the walls, inside
the city’s outside: not fully separated from Thebes but not wholly Theban,
totally territorialized, spatially, legally, culturally, and politically contained
by the city either. So, neither is her “act . . . territorially circumscribed to a
singular polity,” as in Butler and other critics,190 nor does this act make her
a total “stranger,” a word preferred in some translations and insistently at-
tended to by some critics;191 although her parents’ hubris and all the tragic
events flowing from it deny her the home more law-abiding Thebans enjoy,
Thebes remains the “city of / [her] fathers and her land.”192 A tragic co-
spatialization of the fatherland, Antigone’s standing up to Creon makes her
own wall, her resolution to be walled in, and her suicide ultimately both an
enclosure, an enclave within the polis and its reach, and an opening, a “No!”
and a “Yes!” at the same time, a contestation of the ingrown world of patri-
archal rule’s parochial-territorialist politics but also a reaffirmation, a re-or,
better yet, trans-territorialization of politics. These permutations of terri-
tory, kin, and polity world or reorient ethically ethnically oriented political
activity, bring the world into it by extending funereal rights—and thus a
post-mortem citizenship of sorts—to all war casualties. A withnessing
monument, one that honors the dead regardless of their polis and politics,
Antigone’s grave is a place where the former combatants finally take a break
from hostilities to rest in a peace beyond the shaky ontology of any confla-
gration and negotiated truce and where, by the same token, war itself may
rest or, as the novelist hints, perhaps even end.
To this effect, to jam the war machine in the war’s own commemoration,
in a monument understood and erected as war and world testimonial, the
novel must perform—must imagine—the monumentality both forfeited
and rehearsed by the aborted performance of Anouilh’s Antigone. That is, Le
quatrième mur must enact narratively the co-spatial remapping of Beirut
Georges did not see premiered in the ruins of a former cinema in the Chris-
tian zone of the Lebanese capital; the Antigonean, world-communal rei-
magination of the city by the novel has to succeed where the theater of com-
munality in the novel—Antigone as stage production as well as staging of a
certain Lebanese community and shared space—remained an unfinished
project. To achieve all this, Chalandon also confesses, he must assume his
own “luminous contradictions,”193 which largely coincide with those em-
bedded in Antigone’s double bind as someone bound at once by the laws of
the state and the world, by the customs of the living and of the underworld.
In other words, much as Antigone’s “No!” does not place her entirely out-
side the polis, politics, and war, neither the author nor Georges—who both
identify with Antigone and act on her behalf194—can bypass war and death.
Writing for Libération is to Chalandon what directing Antigone is for
Georges: politics, fighting, taking sides by other means.195
Not so much an incongruity in either Sophocles or Anouilh, Chaland-
on’s “luminous” inconsistency is surely consistent with the Brechtian
performative-political tactic of pulling down the walls between acting and
action, between directing scenes and directing (affecting) events, between
the fiction and reality of “neutrality,” between life and death, and so forth.
This is another way of looking, of course, at Georges’s wall quandary: Does
the author build a wall around Georges, dragging him too into the war as
the character kills the “real” Creon, the Phalangist Joseph-Boutros, brother
of the actor playing Anouilh’s Creon, or, more likely, does Chalandon, by
the same movement, do away with the pretense of an impartiality that has
never been there to begin with? Does he demolish the wall of a hollow con-
vention? Either way, and more notably still, it is not just the director who
ends up taking sides, but also the imaginary Creon: in fact, not only does
Charbel take sides, but he also crosses over to the other side by turning his
brother in for his involvement in the Shatila atrocities. Georges may be
forced to shoot somebody presumably sharing his Christian faith and thus
commit another killing in the family to save his own life—after all, like Oe-
dipus, the director has been literally, if temporarily, blinded—but Charbel
acquiesces to the putting to death of his brother. A radical departure from
all versions of the tragedy, the punishment of the Greek/Phalangist Creon
by its Lebanese twin—or Creon’s turning into an avenging, parricidal Hae-
mon and thus against himself—paints a mirror image of Antigone’s broth-
erly piety: where she steps outside her polis, into the cosmopolitical, inter-
stitial space in which she can honor Polynices and bring him back into the
fold of the community and thus transform, “world,” and bring peace to The-
bes itself, Charbel takes on the same task as Antigone and de facto revenges
her murder by aiding in Joseph-Boutros’s ambush.
With this specular chiasmus, we have reached a crucial point in Le
quatrième mur. A new type of communal space can now be envisaged. With
it, a new kind of community and another form of monumentality, them-
selves chiasmic, differential in nature, cobbling together contrasts and dis-
continuities instead of similitudes and continuities, can now arise. They are
forward looking rather than merely commemorative. They have been made
possible by the executioner’s execution by Georges, which presupposed
Charbel’s assent, which had been “rehearsed” through Antigone’s actual re-
hearsals in the bombed-out Beirut theater building with a fourth wall alle-
gorically missing196 but also all over the city, as the actors, actresses, and the
director himself had been trekking back and forth across all sorts of front
lines, ethnic neighborhoods, and “zones” controlled by various militias. The
boundaries and frontiers drawn by the civil war are annulled or challenged
by this brave and resilient movement, whose “communitarian symbolism”
(Georges’s phrase) is as striking as Anouilh’s play itself.197 On-and offstage,
the cast produce and reproduce Lebanese space planetarily, if in situ, like
Cărtărescu, by following a mental map at odds with the ever-contested de-
marcations of territory, belonging, allegiance, and community in war-torn
Lebanon. Not only does Georges seek out his artists all over the country,
scouting camp after camp and neighborhood after neighborhood for his
performers and managing to extricate them from the theater of war to cast
them in another performance and another time, a time out or répit (“re-
spite”) from fighting, but this performance, along with its preparations,
drills, reading, and logistics, also makes up a topo-political dramatization of
Lebanese community in its fundamental plurality.198 As Dr. Cohen tells
Georges, the representation project “associate[s the country’s] communities
in an identical dream of peace.”199 The dream does not come true in the
opening night, in the representation proper, but is represented, if in another
medium, in the premiere’s poster that Georges had printed in Paris. The af-
fiche features all the actors and actresses’ names, Sam’s, Georges’s, and “the
official insignia of the Beirut consular services and of the cultural associa-
tions [that have sponsored the project. The flyer is] white, red, green, and
beautiful, with a cedar as a genealogical tree grouping together [all these
war] enemies [represented here on the poster], branch after branch, all of the
limbs leading toward a tree trunk springing from the same, common soil.”200
Charbel’s “ethical” betrayal, then, does not come out of the blue but in-
dexes an emerging, Antigonean worlding of consciousness, the rising
awareness of a relatedness and attendant obligations transgressing the turfs
of faith, ethnos, kin, and family, and their “closed-circuit” reproductions.201
Such breaches of demeanor, language, custom, dress, and even gender
codes soften and query identities, make people rethink who they are. Obvi-
ously, Antigone’s transgression provides the role model here, but, broadly
speaking, all the roles in Anouilh, insofar as they have to be prepared, train
the Lebanese cast for identity roles insufficiently, marginally, or inade-
quately represented in available community scripts. Antigone’s collective
rehearsal itself, the actors and actresses’ inevitable, dramatically fostered
being-together and teamwork on and around the stage transform, quasi im-
perceptibly, the play, its répétitions, and the interactions around them into a
theater of planetary communality. They perform—“repeat” into being—a

new sociality. They sow the seeds for a togetherness that, in turn, lays the
groundwork for hope-giving, less orthodox, and less partisan kinds of iden-
tity performance. As Georges points out to his cast, “We are wearing the
masks of tragedy. They allow us to be together. As soon as we drop them, we
are putting our military armbands back on, and this is war.”202
§31. “Where the Print Is Finest”

Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with the
theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.
—C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary
Thinking small is not enough; agency is not to be had so predictably.
The unit of coherence where transformative energies have the best
chance of seizing hold is not predictable in advance; it might well be
larger, not smaller.
—Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms”
In O’Neill’s 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award- winning Netherland, sports—

cricket, more exactly—hold the communal role Chalandon assigns to the-
ater.203 For cricket, the Turkish-Irish-American author teaches us through
his Dutch protagonist Hans van der Broeck and especially Hans’s West In-
dian friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, is more than a pastime. It is not in the past
either. Its time has not passed. Or, if it has, so has the exceptionalist-
autonomist temporality in which American communality has traditionally
pictured itself. As a community, Chuck believes, the United States still has to
pass the geopolitical and cultural-demographic test of the planetary present.
Popular with Americans since the early eighteenth century but gradually
elbowed aside by baseball’s modern “hegemony,” the game of cricket is thus
more than a trope or fictional ploy. It is a concrete, athletically embodied
modality of presentifying or updating an America that, in the September 11,
2001 aftermath, must reconstellate itself qua community so as to work
through the meanings of not only the World Trade Center tragedy but also
of the planetarization without which the traumatic event would remain
meaningless. A community driven to the limit by the violently worlding
world, the United States cannot afford not to use its new, liminal position in
the world to think through its communal cultural-ethical limits and spatio-
political limitations. As Faruk Patel, one of the rumored financial backers of
Chuck’s New York Cricket Club project and adept of a “one with the cosmos”
life philosophy, implies, cricket uniquely brings together liminality, Ameri-

canness, and understanding, or, less redundantly, simply brings together.204
Beck is right to lay bare the global economics behind the “cosmopoli-
tanization” of big-city sports clubs (soccer is his example). These clubs,
along with their “cosmopolitan” players and fans, attest to world cosmo-
politan culture as much as they do to the “global cities” our metropolitan
centers have become.205 Chuck’s idea is different, however, even though he
needs some serious financing to get it off the ground. His cricket club pur-
ports to be not only a platform for global business, Internet broadcast
rights, and so forth, but also for a planetary community project. He wants
to build a team, a field and its facilities, and socialize with teammates, op-
ponents, fans, and the cricketers’ families, in a nutshell, to deploy cricket as
a twenty-first-century ritual of American togetherness. There may be, as
Faruk opines, “a limit to what Americans understand,” and that “limit” may
well be, as he goes on, “cricket” itself. But if that is true, then the game ceases
to be trivial in an axiological sense (“rubbish,” “insignificant”), and becomes
trivial, and thus highly significant, in an etymological-dromological sense
that articulates the communal the way theater does in Chalandon.
Indeed, playing Anouilh and playing cricket entail the same planetary
orchestration of identity, space, and belonging. That is not just because, as
O’Neill glosses on C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary only months before
Netherland came out, the sport constitutes “an art on a par with theater, bal-
let, opera, and dance”;206 James demonstrates in his 1963 extraordinary
“cricket memoir” that this indeed is the case.207 Like performance, cricket
also takes, both in James and in O’Neill’s 2007 novel, on a spectacularly
sociological and political “consequentiality” beyond the putatively inconse-
quential ludic. There is a sociologically spectacular “practical” part to it,
James argues.208 More exactly, cricket is a sociality practice. What Gilroy
determines as cricket’s “imperial logics” and what James himself pinpoints
as “the clash of race, caste[,] class,” and more largely “the injustice in the
sphere of sport” testify to the broader inequalities, rifts, and conflicts of
society.209 But, like Greek drama, the Trinidadian critic suggests—and this
suggestion is crucial for an adequate reading of Netherland—that cricket
provides an exercise in democracy210 to the extent that, as James also notes
repeatedly, athletics, what occurs in the field and around it, puts, like in
Chalandon, all kinds of pressure on the ways players and those near them
interact ordinarily in a world of “racial partisanships,”211 isolationist-
chauvinist predispositions, and so on. As O’Neill comments on Mariners,
Renegades, and Castaways, James’s 1953 Melville book is a “pioneering effort
to reject the insular, exceptionalist narratives by which America explains

itself,” and, most notably, this early “postnationalist”212 critique’s anti-
autonomist tenets further underpin the symbolically named memoir-cum-
scholarly study. “Using cricket to blur the boundaries between white and
black, colonized and colonizer, ancient and modern, political and social,”213
Beyond a Boundary supplies, not unlike Le quatrième mur, the agonal venue
where people might recontest the meanings of being in the world. It is in
this sense that, to quote the title of Beyond the Boundary’s first chapter,
cricket is a “window to the world.” Rephrasing James’s question, “What do
they know of cricket who only cricket know?”214 as “What do they know of
America who only America know?”215 Netherland cracks America’s win-
dow with planetary impatience. Americans, O’Neill echoes James, cannot
afford “insular” self-perceptions and narrow identity classifications any
more, nor can they limit themselves to purely theoretical de-and re-
limitations of territory, society, culture, ethnicity, race, and subjectivity
overall inside somewhat less rigid boundaries and categories, to mere re-
conceptualizations of what it means to be in the world. They must also, and
fully, “experiment” with worldliness, that is, with being-in-the world as a
community-fostering modality of being.
Hans and others are aware of the “laboratory experiment” under way.216
But the laboratory, Chuck maintains, is not restricted to the grassy ground
because the latter’s liminal condition necessarily marks and unmarks this
terrain as an enclosure, limit, or terminus. Thus, the pitch and its surround-
ings set themselves up as an American microcosm. Or, with another meta-
phor activated by my geomethodological model of reading, the laboratory
is also a photo lab—better yet, a socio-photo lab. In it, not only “developers”
like Chuck but also Americans at large, players, crowds, and the whole body
of socii give themselves another chance to learn or relearn how to develop,
from the ludic negative of the cricket community, a new picture of the
United States and of the world inside and outside the country.
“The bigger you think, the crappier it looks,” Theo avers in McEwan’s
2005 novel Saturday. As in The Children Act (2014), where the British au-
thor’s Fiona cannot go through her workday without feeling the weight of
the “planet’s lot” on her shoulders,217 the world’s “big things” are bearing
down on Theo’s private world and concerns, and “So,” he announces, “this
is going to be my motto—think small.”218 “My motto is, Think fantastic,”
Chuck lets Hans know instead, with one of the novel’s frequent nods at The
Great Gatsby.219 As logicians might jump in, this is a one-way contradiction
because Chuck’s plan is not to import, from the outside, worldly “bigness”
into cricket-reconstellated American smallness. He just does not envision

worldliness as an outside, or solely as such; no optional, flavor-enhancing
additive to the American melting pot, the world is neither external nor sup-
plemental to the United States. His goals are, first, to flesh out the big tightly
already packed within the small, the history burrowed inside our seemingly
ahistorical contemporaneity, the potential future with which the flat present
is thus interleaved, the macro within the micro; and second, to help Ameri-
cans visualize this multilayered structure, picture their home as, with, and
of the world and the world as and deep inside it, in brief, turn to the planet
by turning meaningfully, self-analytically and ethically, to each other, their
country, and its renewed hospitality to the world inside and outside the
national territory. As he tells Hans, if “[y]ou ask people to agree to compli-
cated rules and regulations,” the sport might just be the answer because, in
spite of its colonial dissemination, it has served and can serve again as a
“crash course in democracy. Plus—and this is key—the game forced [play-
ers from the warring tribes of Papua New Guinea] to share a field for days
with their enemies, forced them to provide hospitality and places to sleep.”
“Hans,” he carries on, “that kind of closeness changes the way you think
about somebody. No other sport makes this happen.”220 When Hans won-
ders if his friend thinks of Americans as “savages,” Chuck rejects the impli-
cation by bolstering not only his “fantastic” vision’s import as a world-
communal picture but also the planetary relationality over whose filigree,
specifically and deliberately, the world picture is laid palimpsest-like. “‘I’m
saying,’” he elaborates, “that people, all people, Americans, whoever, are at
their most civilized when they’re playing cricket. What’s the first thing that
happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match.
Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this. Every-
body who plays the game benefits from it. So I say, why not Americans?”
The question is timely because the 9/11 attacks triggered a crisis of the plan-
etary optics on whose prosopopoeial working condition a community’s
welfare depends. Chuck’s diagnosis is right on target: “Americans cannot
really see the world. They think they can, but they can’t. I don’t need to tell
you that. Look at the problems we’re having. It’s a mess, and it’s going to get
worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Mus-
lims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York
Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?
Why not say so if it’s true? Why hold back? I’m going to open our eyes.”221
Critics who have wondered if Chuck has read his fellow Trinidadian
James have here an answer.222 Both James’s and Chuck’s project, “opening
our American eyes” in order to see and “get” the world picture, is to “fulfill
[our true] destiny,”223 in other words, to rebecome the hospitable commu-
nity for which cricket can offer a model morally urgent, plausible (still in
Westphal’s sense), and, once again, practical. The only “white man [he] saw
on the cricket fields of New York,” Hans is surrounded by “teammates” who
“variously originated from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and
Sri Lanka,” with “Hindus, Christians, a Sikh, and four Muslims” drawing
together “into a circle for prayer” before the match.224 In the finite circle of
“we,” a new communality becomes readable at long last. “I’ve heard,” Hans
confesses,
that social scientists like to explain such a scene—a patch of America

sprinkled with the foreign-born strangely in play—in terms of the im-
migrant quest for subcommunities. How true this is: we’re all far away
from Tipperary, and clubbing together mitigates this unfair fact. But
surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of
homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be lo-
cated in spaces of geography or history, and accordingly it’s my belief
that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New York cricket is un-
derwritten, there where the print is finest, by the same agglomeration of
unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played
anywhere—longings concerned with horizons and potentials sighted or
hallucinated and in any event lost long ago, tantalisms that touch on the
undoing of losses too private and reprehensible to be acknowledged to
oneself, let alone to others. I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see,
when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an
environment of justice. (italics added)225
The passage draws the fine distinction between immigrant “subcommuni-

ties” and communities that could be called planetary or in which planetar-
ization can be “experienced” and witnessed socially, but also experienced
with, observed as if under a microscope. Let me clarify.
Typical of earlier, postcolonial diasporas, “subcommunities” cohere
around ethnos, more specifically, around effectively or imaginarily separate
and competing ēthne. Here, “competition” tends to be disjunctive and topo-
culturally exclusionary, further prying the competing bodies apart and
spacing them out literally or figuratively across intervals of territory, affect,
faith, belonging, and cultural practice. What matters is ethnos- as-
gamesmanship. The communality game is played on a field athletically and
socially finite, limited as to what the players might do and mean together.
Gathering around one trans-ethnic ethos—the ethos of cricket—the second

group category, “community,” is de facto cross-or supra-communal, inte-
grative. In its finitude of time, space, skill, and membership, an infinite,
because infinitely definable, communality awaits.226 Its ludus is multiply
ethical, in fact: it relies on cricket’s civic behavior injunction and play-by-
the-rules principle; it works as a language conveying “others,” playfully,
quasi-ineffable emotional states (“tantalisms”) that, by the same movement,
can be either sublated or “mined” for bonding purposes; and, since it is in-
clusive of winners and losers, hosts and guests, Americans and “foreigners,”
main actors and family extras alike, it is also, if not already just, then a tem-
plate for justice. At premium in this playful zone is an agonally ethicized
ethnos, ethics-as-sportsmanship; the contest is not primarily a face-off but a
face-to-face preamble to a planetary prosopopoeia, to a glance at the Face.
While the tiny relational community of cricket is not and cannot substitute
itself for the world, this world’s face is legible in Chuck’s contractual vision,
where the contract’s “print is finest”—where, in making sense of the Van
Cortland Park cricket photo Hans and his wife look at (“it looks like a
Brueghel,” exclaims Rachel), one makes sense of the planet.227
Epilogue f
Criticism as
Planetary Stewardship
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the
inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or
black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a
relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings
become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, then
inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their
supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s
refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the
plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of
strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time
more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves
and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the
ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last,
without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of
intricate relationships seeking a form.
—italo calvino, Invisible Cities (75)
§32. Strings of Life

Face the worlding world’s face: if not in so many words, this is what O’Neill
and other planetary writers urge on us. Popping up among the cricket play-
ers’ faces, the Face shows itself in all its confoundingly Archimboldian
hodgepodge, unflagging shiftiness, and self- contradictory mien in
Cărtărescu’s Bucharest, Ugrešić’s Amsterdam, Foer’s and Beigbeder’s New
York, Houellebecq’s Paris, and McEwan’s London, as well as in Muşina’s
Braşov, Pamuk’s Kars, Chalandon’s Beirut, Hamid’s Lahore, and Mukher-
jee’s Gauripur—in the world, its cities, its less glamorous towns, and every-
where else in between them; indeed, this face has become a “world and
174
epilogue • 175
town” staple, as Jen suggests in her 2010 Chinese-Cambodian-New Eng-

lander Riverlake saga.
Ubiquitous as this enigmatic profile may be, it is a fragile one, though:
anguished, unstable, unfinished, ever precariously in balance. O’Neill
makes no illusions about it. His take on things, American and otherwise, is
hardly Pollyannish. As we seek and perhaps recognize this face, we should
remember that, with another extreme twist on the Gatsby story, Chuck’s
handcuffed body gets dumped in the Gowanus Canal. The inevitable ques-
tion, then, is whether his vision ends up in the same place. My answer is
that, although Hans leaves New York to join his family in the United King-
dom, the reunion with his son Jake, his estranged British wife, her parents
and his former colleagues, Londoners, strangers, and even with his own
past and long-passed mother, farther and farther away spatially, temporally,
and empathically from the inner circle of “we,” enacts what Chuck describes
as cricket’s “lesson in civility.”1
This lesson is important. But no less important is this: as in Cărtărescu,
whose characters keep climbing up on the roofs of their destitute apart-
ment complexes to hug the world, or in Jen, whose small town has its own
observation (“twin”) towers, or in Lee’s vol d’oiseau surveys from Aloft, the
lesson is not learned, or is only half-learned, from afar. The at-distance,
macro pedagogy of aerial-theoretical planetary togetherness and empathy
can only do so much. But what it does do, the ontoscopic opening that it
marks, matters a great deal. Planetary optics is, to stress it again, an ethos-
copy whose distant self-positioning sows dialectically the perspectival
“micro” seeds of nearness, closeness, intimacy, and being-with: we shoot
up and above in space to draw near and see our place anew as a place of
places and the face of the earth as a Face of faces; we pull back to come
back, enlightened; we extend our life-sustaining “strings” and ties so we
can strengthen them; with Cole, McCann, and the later Pynchon (Against
the Day), we uncover the world, rise to bask in the planet’s aura above cit-
ies, above the horizon, so we can recover our humanness on the ground
and in ways that may also reground us; with DeLillo’s earlier “Human Mo-
ments in World War III” story, we ascend to our “orbital” stations to recon-
ceptualize the big things, to un-and re-think them so we can “talk about
small things, routine things”2; with Lee’s Hector (The Surrendered), we
screen, from such intellectual altitudes, “tumultuous world history” for
also small but intensely private moments;3 we temporarily, tactically de-
couple so we can recouple, rejoin, regroup and “reunite,” relate and endure
in our relations. True, with McCann, we get reports that the “ontological
glue” is thin up there. But this is why that is where we must walk first, alone
on our individual tightropes as DeLillo’s and McCann’s acrobats, in our
Skylabs, in our space suits, or, with Joseph McElroy’s cyborg hero Imp Plus
(Plus), in our high-tech space bodies: so we can fight the gravity-like pull
of inherited notions and navel-gazing whims and walk the earth with oth-
ers again, “feel” what it truly takes to be a couple, with the loved ones and
family, but also with those who are not relatives, not from “around here”
and yet related to us.4 Hans’s residential limbo, New York City’s Chelsea
Hotel, and his bizarre affaire with Danielle in it measure spatially, commu-
nally, and affectively an “interlude of togetherness,” a “time-out” from, but
also a retraining for, being together with family and the world, again.5 Like
Chuck’s Cadillac, through which “[a]n intercontinental cast of characters
pas[s],”6 the hotel is a world transit, a halfway house for an incredibly di-
verse population that, “furtive” and “ornamental” as it may be, nonetheless
feels the hotel is the place where it can be itself even it that means—or be-
cause it means—wearing angel wings.7
As Houellebecq jokes in The Map and the Territory, the “satellite im-
age” may not be God’s viewpoint. To be sure, the reasons to doubt the
picture’s divine provenance are legion.8 Think only about how the world’s
spatial technology-enhanced visual availability has led to increased vul-
nerability to surveillance, control, space weaponization, and military “tar-
geting.”9 Authors like O’Neill, DeLillo, Kunzru, Hamid, Pynchon, and
Richard Powers do want us to think about the world panopticon. But, at
the same time, these writers push us to envisage a world demotikón. They
prompt us to follow the dialectical ontology of the macro and micro all
the way to its ethical end, where the planet’s face turns—and turns us as
well—to the faces of those around us and to the problematic of care “in”
or, better still, across “territory,” to a responsibility idea and practice no-
tionally and nationally reterritorialized, extended conceptually and phys-
ically to other spaces and people. This is where the geomethodology dra-
matized by planetary fiction should take us: to the point at which reading
with the planet turns itself into reading for the planet and criticism into a
“moral” enterprise, into planetary stewardship. “Decompressed” along
these generous lines, Netherland’s final chapter declines to work like De-
leuze and Guattari’s uniformity- inducing, picture- “ruining,” “bad”-
infinity-keyed telescopy.10 If they telescope the world, those pages do so in
the term’s opulent, fundamental amphibology: they simultaneously con-
dense and enlarge a world, bring it closer and spread it out so we can
contemplate the planet’s dazzling gallery of faces.
epilogue • 177
§33. Mastering the Mystery

Let us remain masters of the mystery that the earth breathes.
—Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom
The Romantic sublime of at-distance contemplation bounced the aloof gaze

back to itself. This is what happens to Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary hero
in the 1818 canvas Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, and this is what Nietzsche fancies
we see as we stare into the famous abyss of Beyond Good and Evil: the depths
reflecting our look straight back to ourselves.11 Instead, the planetary sub-
lime is refractive rather than sterilely reflective. If the planetary gaze—the
one that has “the physical planet in [Hans’s] sight12—comes back to its ori-
gin, it does so ethically, not by reinforcing the selfsame’s epistemological
cocoon through a scopically self-centered, repetitive pantomime, but by a
withnessing detour. The “alternative” route is just that: an alternate trajec-
tory optically and ethically, an itinerary across alterity that acknowledges
others and their faces. It may start out in a telescopically distancing mode,
as does one of the several “Google scenes” in O’Neill’s book, with the “satel-
lite image” of the earth’s a-semiotic crust, on which “a human movement is
a barely intelligible thing . . . no signs of nations, no sense of the work of
man.”13 Or it may begin, also in a classically telescopic fashion, up in a gon-
dola of the aptly named London Eye, where Hans, Jake, Rachel, and their
German and Lithuanian companions—the world’s bona fide ambassadors
to Hans’s private moment—climb higher and higher to the zenith so that
once again the city and the world of humans with it “becom[e] . . . less rec-
ognizable.” But the episode belongs to an act that comprises a second scene,
which the novel’s ending both directs (shapes theatrically) and directs us to
it, “denudes” and places under the microscope for us.
Thematically and structurally, the stage for this scene is laid by another
“telescopy,” that of the human dramas stratified in the season’s geo-
meteorological texture. “The English summer,” writes O’Neill on the previ-
ous page, “is actually a Russian dolls of summers, the largest of which is the
summer of unambiguous disaster in Iraq, which immediately contains the
destruction of Lebanon, which itself holds a series of ever-smaller summers
that led to the summer of Monty Panesar and, smallest perhaps, the sum-
mer of Wayne Rooney’s foot.”14 And so, inside the Ferris wheel ride lies, in
other time and space, another (Staten Island) ferry ride, which Hans took
with his mother one September evening years before. On the deck, after
admiring the “world lighting up” in front of them as the Manhattan sunset
was “concentrating” that “world” in the “lilac acres of two amazing high
towers going up above all others,” Hans and his mother instinctively turned
their smiling faces to each other. Back on the Ferris wheel following this
quick flashback and after his capsule “reach[es] the very top of our celestial
circuit . . . to a point where [we] can see horizons previously unseen, and the
old earth reveals itself newly,” Hans “come[s] to face his family with the
same smile” while “Lithuanian ladies” ask about London landmarks and
Jake “befriends a six-year-old boy who speaks not a word of English.”15 “You
only had to look at our faces,” Hans comments on a scene that otherwise
can do without any commentary.16
This instant is, as Deleuze and Guattari would probably call it, aesthetic
in that it ultimately “create[s] the finite,” the little situation, the tiniest “Rus-
sian doll” of human life, or the infinitesimal that “rediscovers,” “restores,”
and shows off the “infinite.”17 Within this aesthetic dynamic, neither the
infinite nor the infinitesimal is anterior/posterior or superior/inferior to the
other. “The town,” the philosophers stress, “does not come after the house,
nor does the cosmos after the territory. The universe does not come after
the figure, and the figure is an aptitude of the universe.”18 They are tele-
scoped inside each other, available—reluctantly perhaps—to our geometh-
odological microscopy. The figure figures a universe because there is a uni-
verse—a planetary universe, the one in Hans’s “sight”—to be figured and
figured out, and that universe, the planet itself, is a figure, a representation
and a face of many faces, all alongside one another and oftentimes all in one
or in one place.
Let us be mindful of this, because it sums up geomethodology’s basic
tenet, from which the decompressing technology of reading follows. It is
the kind of distancing-cum-de-distancing technique some critics have
hinted at. “Whereas the localist poem,” Ramazani argues in echoing Glis-
sant, “requires one kind of critical attention to tease out its cross-culturalism
in borrowed verse forms, sea-traversing allusions, or subterranean influ-
ences that establish unexpected lines of cross-cultural relationality . . . , the
planetary poem, viewing the Earth from the extraterrestrial perspective of
Heaney’s astronaut, Auden’s orbiting dog, or Walcott’s traveler, requires an-
other kind of critical pressure, to specify its local, regional, and national
bearings.” The labor of his “transnational and translocal poetics” takes
places “[i]n-between these poles.” Attending to this genetic space, the plan-
etary reader may learn that “even Heaney’s brief imaginative glimpse of his
planetary origins from a spaceship window quickly pivots to a recognition
of his more immediate, if unhomely origins.”19 But this also means, one
epilogue • 179
more time, that the issue, or the solution, here is not vague in-betweenness,
and the dubious compromise it might underwrite, but another, telescoped
topology of culture in which a particular place and event are already creased
and cleft, fraught with, and in all actuality afforded by, the in-between. By
virtue of this topology, “our gardens,” in Candide’s sense, and the world
garden are set up, somewhat like Semiramis’s “hanging” gardens, in an
overlaid structure, one on top and inside another, as it were, with one gar-
den’s flowers, trees, and the trees’ branches, roots, and seeds reaching over,
deep into other gardens, growing, grafting themselves onto other plants,
and bearing fruit there. It is only now, as they subscribe to this fully hori-
zontal (horti)cultural model—a model of culture as rhizomatically luxuri-
ant, wild rather than “disciplined,” geometrically organized, and conceptu-
ally “pruned” cultura—that the “figure of the astronaut” and of the “air-borne
traveller,” the van der Broeks up in the London Eye, and all the “distant
eyes” with them no longer renew the universalist-distant claims made, as
Ramazani aptly notes, by an “older model of cosmopolitanism.”20
Levinas is even more explicit, and more optimistic also, about the geo-
methodological resourcefulness of such a figure, which he welcomed in his
“Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” essay against Heidegger’s apprehensions about
the fast-growing human capabilities of “measuring and executing, for the
purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole.”21 As Michael Lang
explains in a 2003 essay on Heidegger’s “planetary discourse,” for the Ger-
man thinker the new, de-distancing technologies wind up supplanting hu-
man relationships. The only relationships left are technological or, in the
more extreme, Pynchonian formulation from Gravity’s Rainbow, téchne’s
relation to itself. In the Heidegger–David Harvey line of thought, Lang dem-
onstrates, this de-distantiaton is tantamount to circumventing the human
and its undergirding relatedness. Eventually, this leads to a “compression,”
congealing, and preordaining of everything in this world, including the ma-
terial texture and the meanings of the post-Enlightenment West and of the
whole globe with it, now seized mechanically and “totalistically” as a passive
reflection (“globalization”) of the Western model.22 Not only does Heideg-
gerian technology de-spatialize, but its topological intervention is unethi-
cal.23 The resulting Weltbild globalizes the planet and its understandings.
What Levinas admires in the astronaut’s “feat” is a completely different
technology. This technology is not a technocracy or a disempowering ratio-
nality any more because it spatializes—more precisely, spaces out—ethically.
Distance is here retained. In fact, it is reinvented and valued because, in
spreading things and people out, it opens up the world to responsibility and
care for others and hence to a new place ethos. Thus, distance and its tech-
nology hold out the promise of an ethicization of terraqueous space. The
feat’s basic gist or feature inheres in the features themselves, in the face whose
gaze the technological feat brings to bear on us all and on our planet and
which helps us rediscover the latter as commons, “hospitality” that “precedes
private property,” as Derrida puts it in his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.24 But,
most notably, for the astronaut and then for those below on whom his eyes
fell, this commonality arises as a site of multiple and multiply positive dis-
placement, subject to certain transactions imposed on place and life concur-
rently in the name of an ethic beyond the ethnic: an ethic that neither erases
nor dismisses ethnic background and all backgrounds, grounds, and Gründe,
but, to the contrary, one that acknowledges and honors them by working
with, through, and over their contested geography, their territorially and
ethno-culturally demarcated spaces, turfs, and discourses.
Going squarely against “nationalist place-based ideologies of dwell-
ing”25 and other exclusionary- autochthonist and chauvinist topo-
monopolies, Levinasian ethic “redistricts” place planet-wide to help both
the comfortably placed and the displaced to relate and come together. Less
“dangerous than the spirits [génies] of the Place” that, throughout history,
have placed to include, shelter, and nourish, but also to exclude, control,
and enslave by “splitting . . . humanity into native and strangers,” this is a
distancing technology liable to make stronger the “strings” between us, be-
tween our places, and between mankind and place overall, to renew the
earth as common home. In this vein, Yuri Gagarin’s is a technologically
discriminating perception of place that, in a way than reminds this reader
of Michael Parker’s The Watery Part of the World and its drifting Yaupon
Island, sets the place in motion and unlocks its gates so that the world may
flood it and soak it in its lifeblood. For Levinas, Gagarin, the first human in
outer space, comes to instigate a certain positive mind and body restless-
ness technologically. He can do so because he arrives from a distance at
once distancing and de-distancing: distancing insofar as it separates us
from the place and thus does away with the distinction native-stranger; and
de-distancing because a new togetherness, a world structure of withness-
ing, and a “kindship” above any kinship become possible once said distinc-
tion no longer operates. “[W]hat counts most of all, Levinas says, is that
[Gagarin] left the Place,” the Earth as Place. In Levinas’s assessment, the
Soviet cosmonaut rose “beyond any horizon” but only to open up new
places, horizons and understandings, within which the planet’s mystery, its
many facets, faces, and the relations in which they are all necessarily en-
epilogue • 181
meshed in the world at large and in this world’s Karses and Riverlakes are
reaffirmed and cared for rather than fatuously mastered.26
Or, perhaps a mastery of sorts is in play here, after all. In its ethical fac-
ing of the world’s otherness, this mystery mastery would be, deep down,
rather modest and unassuming, an understood duty actually. For here, fac-
ing the world and its others would not efface their faces. So what we are
talking about is not control over other people, their worlds, and the world
as a whole, but responsibility and care. We must commit to these not only
as citizens but also as critics and humanists, through a reading that does not
disfigure the figures in which mystery is offered to our descriptions. To the
contrary, this reading should honor and enhance the secrets our planet ex-
hales. Thus, reading with the planet would reveal itself as a reading for the
planet, a critic’s plea on behalf of the earth. By the same token, criticism
would become a form of planetary stewardship.27
It is, indeed, a more subdued mastery of the mystery that fleetingly
brushes our faces when we turn to the planet’s face and to the countless
faces glued together, mosaic-like, in neighborhoods, cantinas, and play-
grounds, at Bar Mitzvahs, in Ferris wheel cabins, and in other little places.
Going down the trail blazed by this technological breakthrough, a really
viable geomethodology is going to be a balancing act between, on one side,
the understandable euphoria (perhaps cockiness too) of leaning on such a
deparochializing “world picture” and, with it, as Appadurai says, on such a
critically enriching “research imagination,” and, on the other side, the ex-
ploratory attitude, healthy skepticism, caution, resistance to the grandiose,
and, most importantly, undissimulated humility before what may well
evade inquiry.28 The planetary critic must allow that this mystery, the
enigma of the planet’s others, may—and in effect must—persists as such, in
plain sight and undefaced, protected by the very “nudity” of the face in
which it comes forth. As Levinas never tires of reminding us, we are with
those others in the world so that we ourselves can be. This is the core pre-
cept of his ethics-before-ontology argument and also the reason reading
with the planet is or ought to be not only an analytic scenario but also a
model of exemplary sociality. For, if we turn to the planet’s face right, if we
see it, as Levinas recommends, in its “nudity,” as “is by itself and not by ref-
erence to a system” that precludes seeing and understanding, “with” will
also turn into “for.”29
Notes
Prologue
1. This is an excerpt from the Salon blurb reproduced on the 2004 Hyperion
edition of Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World.
2. Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World, trans. Frank Wayne (New York:
Hyperion, 2004), 255.
3. Beigbeder, Windows on the World, trans. Frank Wayne, 255.
4. Beigbeder, Windows on the World, trans. Frank Wayne, 252.
5. Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 312.
6. See Mary Ann Caws, “The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness,”
in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws, xix–xxxi (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2000).
7. The “essay-manifesto” is only one of the many subcategories of a genre that
keeps expanding and renewing itself throughout its history. See Caws, “Poetics of
the Manifesto,” xxix.
8. David Damrosch refers to “planiterati” as “literary globalists” in “World Lit-
erature as Figure and as Ground,” American Comparative Literature Association,
the 2014–2015 Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature
website—Paradigms. http://stateofthediscipline.acla.-org/entry/world-literature-
figure-and-ground-0.
9. David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 259.
10. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, esp. 177–182.
11. Christian Moraru, Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Post-
modernism (Madison. NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 224–234.
12. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Cen-
tury, ed. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 2015).
13. Here, I refer the reader only to my article “Thirteen Ways of Passing Post-
modernism: Introduction to Focus,” American Book Review 34, no. 4 (May–June
2013): 3–4, and to the chapter “Postmodernism, Cosmodernism, Planetarism” that
I have contributed to The Cambridge History of Postmodernism, edited by Brian
McHale and Len Platt and forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
14. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Cen-
tury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 136, 141–142.
15. Don DeLillo, White Noise, Text and Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen (New York:
Penguin, 1998), 24.
16. Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Vintage, 2009), 15.
17. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across
Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 143.
183
184 • notes to pages 8–21
18. In Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cul-
tural Imaginary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), I offer similar
specifications on the “radically distinct cultural other” (23).
19. On Henry Sussman’s “Prevailing Operating System” and its place in the au-
thor’s larger project, see my review-essay, “Invisible, Ink.: Classics, Programmers,
and the Reprogramming of Cultural History in the Aftermath of the ‘Book Crisis,’”
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 39, no. 4 (December 2012): 415–426.
20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “World Systems and the Creole,” Narrative 14,
no. 1 (January 2006): 108.
21. Henry Sussman, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2011), 12.
22. Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis Preceded by Dust Breeding, trans. Drew S.
Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2011), 48.
23. On globalization’s production though critical discourse, see, among other
places, Sarika Chandra’s Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobiliz-
ing of Americanism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 3.
24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003); Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford, 2012),
mainly 23–102; Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslat-
ability (London: Verso, 2013), 217. Apter is one of the editors of the English transla-
tion of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, ed.
Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
25. On “emotional maps” and their geopolitics, see Dominique Moïsi, The Geo-
politics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the
World (New York: Doubleday, 2009). On “mental maps” and spatial aesthetics, see
Nikos Papastergiadis, “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary,” in An-
tinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry
Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, 363–381, esp. 370 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008).
26. Bharati Mukherjee, The Tree Bride (New York: Hyperion, 2004), 236, 10.
27. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven
Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 189.
28. On the digital world’s mise ensemble logic and on the new “social contract”
and “socia(bi)lity” overall derived from this logic, see Milad Doueihi’s lucid book
Pour un humanisme numérique (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 119, 65, 39.
29. On planetary “conviviality,” see Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), iv and the entire final chapter, 121–151. I
have proposed a similar concept, “collegiality,” in Cosmodernism, esp. 57–59.
Part 1
1. John Crowe Ransom, “The Planetary Poet,” Kenyon Review 26, no. 1 (Winter
1964): 264.
2. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage,
1990), 532.
3. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), 69.
notes to pages 22–28 • 185
4. Philip Roth, Letting Go (New York: Random House, 1961), 429.

5. See Moïsi, Geopolitics of Emotion, 4.
6. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth (New York: Random House, 2012), 191.
7. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002), 165.
8. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
9. For a “one-world” argument on globalization and its ethics, see Peter Sing-
er’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2002), 11–13.
10. See, more recently, Derek C. Maus, Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian
and American Cold War Satire (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2011), and Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold
War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
11. “Hombre Planetario,” in Jorge Carrera Andrade, Selected Poems of Jorge Car-
rera Andrade, trans. and introduction H. R. Hays (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1972), 139–161.
12. Jahan Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 300. An older version of the Ramazani essay
came out as chapter 1 in his book A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009).
13. David Held advances the “strong globalization thesis” in the “Afterword” to
his anthology A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Politics, 171 (London: Rout-
ledge in association with The Open University, 2000). Christopher J. Kollmeyer
takes up Held’s weak/strong globalization distinction in “Globalization, Class Com-
promise, and American Exceptionalism: Political Change in 16 Advanced Capitalist
Countries,” Critical Sociology 29, no. 3 (October 2003): 369–391. On “late globaliza-
tion” and its cultural relevance in the world and the United States, see, among other
places, my book Cosmodernism, 33–37.
14. Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” in Wollaeger with
Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 301.
15. Timothy Brennan, “From Development to Globalization: Postcolonial Stud-
ies and Globalization Theory,” in Global Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Richard
J. Lane (London: Routledge, 2013), 880.
16. See, for example, Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” in Wol-
laeger with Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 292–297.
17. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1992). Zygmunt Bauman refers to Jowitt’s book in Globaliza-
tion: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 59.
For Tzvetan Todorov, see Le Nouveau Désordre Mondial: Réflexions d’un Européen,
preface by Stanley Hoffmann (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003). On the “chaos” of the
contemporary world, also see Amin Maalouf ’s recent book Le dérèglement du
monde (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009) and Immanuel Wallerstein’s article “New
Revolts against the System,” New Left Review, 2nd ser., 18 (November–December
2002): 37.
18. Christian Moraru, “The Global Turn in Critical Theory,” symploke 9, nos. 1–2
(2001): 80–92.
19. One such instrument is Andrew Jones’s Dictionary of Globalization (Lon-

don: Polity, 2006).
20. In Dislocalism (4), Chandra talks about the lexical perfection of “the ‘global,’”
but, logically, her conclusion applies to “globe” before it does to any of the relatives
of “globe.”
21. Apter, Against World Literature, 78.
22. On the “abstract geometry of the global” as opposed, in Spivak, to “the lived
history of the planetary,” see Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” in
Wollaeger with Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 301.
23. See Chandra’s definition of the term in the introduction to Dislocalism (6).
24. Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization?, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2000), 9–10.
25. Marshall Brown, “Globalism or Globalization?” in Modern Language Quar-
terly 68, no. 2 (June 2007): 143.
26. Brown, “Globalism or Globalization?” 137.
27. Roland Robertson, “Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and the Problem of
Globality,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Condi-
tions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King, 73 (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2000).
28. Allan Cochrane and Kathy Pain refer to Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thomp-
son’s 1996 book Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Pos-
sibility of Governance (2nd ed., Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
29. Allan Cochrane and Kathy Pain, “A Globalizing Society?,” in Held, A Global-
izing World?
30. Bo Stråth, “World History and Cosmopolitanism,” in Routledge Handbook of
Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 73–75.
31. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing
World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des Sciences
de l’Homme, 1991), 140.
32. David Held, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 429. On Martin Albrow’s “global age,”
see his book The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997).
33. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 178.
34. Jean-Pierre Warnier, La mondialisation de la culture, 3rd ed. (Paris: La Dé-
couverte, 2004), 32.
35. On Pierre Chaunu’s univers cloisonné, see his book, Histoire, science sociale:
La durée, l’espace et l’homme à l’époque moderne (Paris: Société d’édition
d’enseignement supérieur, 1974). On the contemporary world as network and the
“network society,” see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and
Culture, vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
36. Slavoj Žižek, “20 Years of Collapse,” New York Times, November 9, 2009,
http: //www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?pagewanted=all&r=o.
37. Jameson, Singular Modernity, 215.
38. On Heideggerian Miteinandersein, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A
Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1996), 111–112.
39. Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational sphere,” which also involves the notion of
“proximity,” is an aesthetic concept that emphasizes artist-public interaction. See
his Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les Presses du réel; New York: Idea Books,
2002), 43.
40. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phénomène humain (Paris: Seuil, 1955),
translated into English as The Human Phenomenon, a new ed. and trans. of Le phé-
nomène humain by Sarah Appleton-Weber, with a foreword by Brian Swimme
(Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1999).
41. On Teilhard de Chardin and planetarization/globalization, see Bernard Se-
sé’s article “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, prophète de la mondialisation?” in Etudes
3964 (April 2002): 483–494.
42. On “the emergence of a global public sphere,” see the chapter by the same
title in Robert J. Holton’s Global Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
152–161.
43. Mukherjee, The Tree Bride, 231.
44. Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far-
East (New York: Knopf, 1988); “The Nowhere Man,” Prospect 30, no. 3 (February
1997): 30–33; The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (New
York: Random House, 2000); Sun after Dark: Flights into the Foreign (New York:
Random House, 2004). For Thomas L. Friedman, see especially his highly popular
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999; New York: Pica-
dor, 2012); Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11 (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); and The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of
the Twentieth-First Century, further updated and expanded (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006).
45. See, for example, Moraru, Cosmodernism, 35–44, 235–237.
46. For the concept of potenza, see Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude: Nine Let-
ters on Art, Followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labor, trans. Ed Emery
(London: Polity, 2011), 30.
47. Basarab Nicolescu, La transdisciplinarité: Manifeste (Paris: Éditions du
Rocher, 1996). The American reader can consult Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity,
trans. Karen-Claire Voss (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Also
see Nicolescu, Théorèmes poétiques, preface by Michel Camus (Paris: Rocher,
1994); Nicolescu, “The Challenge of Transdisciplinarity: From Postmodernity to
Cosmodernity,” paper abstract, Centre of Transdisciplinarity, Cognitive and
State-System Sciences—Indexicals. http://indexicals.ac.at/abstractvienna05bni-
colescu.html (accessed December 31, 2006); Basarab Nicolescu, Corin Braga,
Ruxandra Cesereanu, Sanda Cordoş, Anca Haţiegan, Marius Jucan, Doru Pop,
Vlad Roman, Nicolae Ţurcan, and Mihaela Ursa, “Ce este cosmodernitatea?”
(What Is Cosmodernity?), Center for the Research of the Imaginary, Cluj, Roma-
nia, http://phantasma.ro/dezbateri/masa-/masa14.html (accessed September 23,
2007). On the “new vision of the world,” the reader can turn to the Manifesto’s
seventh chapter, 39–47.
48. See Jean D’Argoun, La mutation planétaire (Paris: Véga, 2005).
49. On planetary futurology and “terrapolitanism,” see Bron Taylor, Dark Green
Religion: Nature, Spirituality, and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 8 and 9, 180–222.
50. Wallerstein refers to “globalization” in World-Systems Analysis: An Introduc-
tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) only in passing (86) and dismis-
sively rather than engaging with the “rhetoric” the term is part of. The treatment of
the global vocabulary and the overall “rhetoric of globalization” is typically per-
functory in world-systems theory. See, in this regard, Richard E. Lee, “The Modern
World-System: Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and Transformation,” in Im-
manuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture, ed. David
Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2011), 35.
51. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (New York: Aca-
demic Press, 1974), 7–8.
52. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture, 198–199. See too Waller-
stein’s Utopistics, or Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century (New York: New
Press, 1998).
53. Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth: A Cosmopolite’s Viewpoint (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 187–188; Gérard Raulet, Critical Cosmology:
On Nations and Globalization—A Philosophical Essay (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2005), esp. 65–80; Félix Guattari, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée, 1992); Anne
Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 42–72. For an unsubstantiated reference to the “end of cosmology,” see
Fredric Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: BFI Publishing, 1995), 10.
54. On “cosmos” and cosmopolitanism versus “globe” and globalization, see the
excellent essay by David Inglis and Roland Robertson, “From Cosmos to Globe:
Relating Cosmopolitanism, Globalization and Globality,” in The Ashgate Research
Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farn-
ham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 295–311. On the cosmological and scalarity in Nicolescu’s
work, see his book From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture, and Spiritu-
ality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 111.
55. Amy J. Elias, “The Dialogical Avant-Garde: Relational Aesthetics and Time
Ecologies in Only Revolutions and TOC,” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (Winter
2012): 749–750.
56. The distinction is indeed a rough one. If done competently, the history of
cosmopolitanism is likely to reveal forms and moments of a school of thought that,
argue David Inglis and Roland Robertson, has been more “rooted in emerging
world-conditions” and less metaphysically “speculative” than many anti-(and even
pro-)cosmopolitan voices today might lead one to believe (“From Cosmos to Globe:
Relating Cosmopolitanism, Globalization and Globality,” in Rovisco and Nowicka,
Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, 299).
57. Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 21. Fine’s is also
one of the best overviews of “new cosmopolitanism” in sociology, political science,
and international law.
58. For a post-cosmological “world[-]system,” see Jameson’s Geopolitical Aes-
thetic, 10.
59. Neil Turnbull, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global Being
in the Planetary World,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 1 (2006): 133.
60. Turnbull, “Ontological Consequences of Copernicus,” 137.

61. Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,”
Comparative Literature 53, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 295.
62. Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet,” 295–296.
63. Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet,” 296.
64. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Imperative to Re-imagine the Planet,” chap. 16
in her book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 348.
65. Spivak, “Imperative to Re-imagine the Planet,” 349.
66. Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet,” 296.
67. Bruce Clarke, “Autopoiesis and the Planet,” in Impasses of the Post-Global:
Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 2, ed. Henry Sussman (Ann Arbor: Open
Humanities Press/Michigan Publishing, 2012). http://quod.lib.umich.edu-/o/
ohp/10803281.0001.-001/1:4/—impasses-of-the-post-global-theory-in-the-era-of-
climate?rgn=div1;view-=fulltext.
68. Sonja A. J. Neef, Der babylonische Planet: Kultur, Übersetzung, Dekonstruk-
tion under den Bedingungen der Globalisierung (Heidelberg, Germany: Univer-
sitätsverlag Winter, 2013), 25–27, esp. 26. Also see 153–155.
69. See also Joni Adamson, “American Literature and Film from a Planetary
Perspective: Teaching Space, Time, and Scale,” Transformations 21, no. 1 (Spring–
Summer 2010): 23–41; Wai Chee Dimock’s series of articles: “Literature for the
Planet,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 173–188; “Scales of Aggregation: Prena-
tional, Subnational, Transnational,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (Summer
2006): 219–228; and “Planetary Time and Global Translation: ‘Context’ in Liter-
ary Studies,” Common Knowledge 9, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 488–507. The reader might
want to consult too her groundbreaking book, Through Other Continents: Ameri-
can Literature across Deep Time. Also see Amy J. Elias, “Interactive Cosmopoli-
tanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary
History,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 705–725; Frances Fergu-
son, “Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text,” New Literary History 39,
no. 3 (Summer 2008): 657–684; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Planetarity: Musing
Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 3 (September 2010): 471–499;
Ursula K. Heise’s by now classic title, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Envi-
ronmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
to be followed by another pioneering work in new ecological studies, her Nach
der Natur: Das Artensterben und die Moderne Kultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010);
Moraru, Cosmodernism; Caren Irr, “Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in
Twentieth-First-Century Expatriate Fiction,” American Literary History 23, no. 3
(Fall 2011): 660–679; Leerom Medovoi, “‘Terminal Crisis?’ From the Worlding of
American Literature to World-System Literature,” American Literary History 23,
no. 3 (Fall 2011): 643–659; Mark Poster, “Global Media and Culture,” New Literary
History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 685–703; Mary Louise Pratt, “Planetary Long-
ings: Sitting in the Light of the Great Solar TV,” in World Writing: Poetics, Ethics,
Globalization, edited by Mary Gallagher, 207–223 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2008); Min Hyoung Song, “Becoming Planetary,” American Literary His-
tory 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 555–573; Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Rout-
ledge, 2013), Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the
World System (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and his edited collection
Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Stud-
ies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
70. See Elias and Moraru, Planetary Turn.
71. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72–73.
72. Moraru, Cosmodernism, 48–49.
73. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 73.
74. Already upon us, the planetary (Das Planetarische) has inaugurated, some
critics aver, a “postglobal age.” See, in this regard, Ulrike Bergermann, Isabell Otto,
and Gabriele Schabacher, eds., Das Planetarische: Kultur-Technik-Medien in postglo-
balen Zeitalter (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010).
75. Mary Lou Emery, “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary,” in Wol-
laeger with Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 49.
76. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, xv.
77. Song, “Becoming Planetary,” 568.
78. Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” in Wollaeger with
Eatough, Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, 297.
81. Elias, “Dialogical Avant-Garde,” 741; Moraru, Cosmodernism, 57.
82. Apter, Against World Literature, 189.
83. I have attended in more detail to the monde/mundus paradigm in Cosmod-
ernism, 51–54, 60, 255, 257.
84. Herman Rapaport, The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts
and Methods (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 221.
85. Rapaport, Literary Theory Toolkit, 221–222.
86. Emery, “Caribbean Modernism,” in Wollaeger with Eatough, Oxford Hand-
book of Global Modernisms, 49.
87. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013), 44.
89. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 16–17.
90. On Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the “world,” see, among others, J. E. Mal-
pas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 7–9. On Deleuze and Guattari and their “and” and “with”
“operators,” see, among many other possible sources, Eugene Holland, “Global Cos-
mopolitanism and Nomad Citizenship,” in After Cosmopolitanism, ed. Rosi Braid-
otti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 153.
91. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 17.
92. Garret Wallace Brown and David Held remind us of this basic tenet of Sto-
icism with reference to Seneca in the “Editors’ Introduction” to The Cosmopolitan-
ism Reader, ed. Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (Cambridge: Polity, 2010),
5, 11. Also see, in the same collection, David Held’s essay “Principles or Cosmopoli-
tan Order,” 229.
93. On postmodern cartography, see, as part of an ever-larger body of work,
Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contem-
porary American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), and Peta Mitchell,
Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary
Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2008).
94. Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World? On World Literature as World-Making

Activity,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 30. Also see, in the same vein, Cheah’s
more recent article, “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of
World literature,” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 303–329.
95. On “world” as transitive verb in relation to the “worlding” work of com-
paratists, see Djelal Kadir’s articles “To World, to Globalize: Comparative Litera-
ture’s Crossroads,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004): 1–9, and “To
Compare, to World: Two Verbs, One Discipline,” Comparatist 34 (May 2010): 4–11.
96. On “postcosmopolitanism” and the terminological conflations affecting
“planet” and “relation,” see Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagaard’s
“Introduction” to their essay collection After Cosmopolitanism, 4.
97. In her discussion of “becoming-world,” Rosi Braidotti uses “planetary” in a
globalist sense and replaces “planet,” which she considers a relational datum, with
“world.” See her essay ‘Becoming-World’ in Braidotti, Hanafin, and Blaagaard, After
Cosmopolitanism, 8–27.
98. Song, “Becoming Planetary,” 572.
99. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, “The Most Im-
portant Thing Happening,” in Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, Immanuel
Wallerstein and the Problem of the World, 17.
100. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 7, 10–15.
101. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 21. On 1989 as a “continuation” of 1968,
see, among other places, Almantas Samalavicius’s interview with Immanuel Waller-
stein, “New World-System? A Conversation with Immanuel Wallerstein,” Eurozine,
February 8, 2013, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/-2013–02–08-wallerstein-en.
html.
102. Bruce Robbins, “Blaming the System,” in Palumbo- Liu, Robbins, and
Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World, 55.
103. On the paradox of (geo)culture—always invoked, never attended to—inside
the Wallersteinian school, see Richard E. Lee, “The Modern World-System,” in
Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the
World.
104. Also see an excellent discussion of Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and
its bearings on world/comparative literature in Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 30–41.
105. Apter, Against World Literature, 71–72.
106. Spivak, Susan Stanford Friedman, Dimock, Braidotti, and Emery are only a
few of the critics who have insistently linked planetarity and relation. On the “global
condition” of “interconnectedness” and its potentially pernicious effects on plane-
tarity itself, see Braidotti’s “Becoming-World,” in Braidotti, Hanafin, and Blaagaard,
After Cosmopolitanism, 19.
107. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin, 2013), 379.
108. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourn-
ing, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, with an introduction by Bernd
Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 173–176.
109. On Heidegger and eventfulness, see especially Martin Heidegger, The Event,
trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
110. On September 11, 2011, as “event-world” and the “world-culture” the event
attests to, see Jean-François Sirinelli’s article “L’événement-monde” in Vingtième
Siècle. Revue d’histoire 4, no. 74 (2002): 35–38. On the worldwide impact of seem-
ingly local or regional events modeled on Badiou’s “universal singular,” see Tani E.
Barlow, “What Is a Poem? The Event of Women and the Modern Girl as Problems
in Global or World History,” in Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, Immanuel
Wallerstein and the Problem of the World, mainly 159–160.
111. It is very tempting, confesses Maurizio Ascari, to settle on September 11,
2001, as the official date of postmodernism’s demise. See his book, Literature of the
Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2011), 21. In Cosmodernism, I explained why 9/11 should be viewed as an upshot of
1989.
112. This is a reference to Philip Leonard’s Literature after Globalization: Textual-
ity, Technology and the Nation-State (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Like mine, the
critic’s focus is on recent literature’s “movement away from narratives of global cul-
ture.” However, he understands the trend as a testimony to the “reassert[ion] of
national sovereignty against technology’s transnational effects” (2). In my view,
while the ethicization of the netospherical does go against transnational technolo-
gy’s leveling effects, this planetary revaluation of technorelatedness does not neces-
sarily reinforce, nor does it relegitimize, the nation-state.
113. Ascari is one of the critics pointing to a planetary transition out of the post-
modern paradigm as a paradoxical effect of the postmodern’s “going global.” See his
Literature of the Global Age, 17–40.
114. Simon Gikandi, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” South At-
lantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 631.
115. On networked communication and postcolonial theory, see Mark Poster,
“Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Planetary Communications,” Quarterly Review
of Film and Video 24 (2007): 379–393.
116. On “world Englishes literature,” see E. Dawson Varughese, Beyond the Post-
colonial: World Englishes Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. 1–
23, where the book’s main concept—the “postcolonial’s beyond”—is theorized.
117. John Tomlinson, “Globalization and Cultural Analysis,” in Globalization
Theory: Approaches and Controversies, edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 150.
118. Warnier, La mondialisation de la culture, 107.
119. See Jacques Demorgon’s books L’interculturation du monde (Paris: Anthro-
pos, 2000) and Critique de l’interculturel: L’horizon de la sociologie (Paris: Anthro-
pos, 2005).
120. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Re-
shaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996); John Updike, Bech at Bay
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 238–239.
121. On “Americanization” theory and the “ready-to-wear” anti-américanisme
often coloring it, see Jean-François Revel, L’obsession anti-américaine: Son fonctione-
ment, ses causes, ses inconséquences (Paris: Plon, 2002), and Pierre Rigoulot,
L’Antiaméricanisme: Critique d’un prêt-à-penser rétrograde (Paris: Robert Laffont,
2004).
122. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 69–7 1.
123. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 3.
124. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 6.
125. Oana Strugaru, “Globalization and Literature: What Is Left of Literary His-
tory?” Euresis (2013): 144.
126. On fiction and its “worlding” function, see Medovoi, “‘Terminal Crisis?’”
657.
127. Inglis and Robertson, “From Cosmos to Globe,” in Rovisco and Nowicka,
Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, 298.
128. Robbins, “Blaming the System,” in Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi,
Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World, 48.
129. Cheah, “What Is a World?” 26, 34.
130. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,” in Delanty, Routledge
Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 229. On the thought-event concept, see Fou-
cault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 179.
131. Claire Colebrook, “Destroying Cosmopolitanism for the Sake of the Cos-
mos,” in Braidotti, Hanafin, and Blaagaard, After Cosmopolitanism, 167.
132. Pratt, “Planetary Longings,” in Gallagher, World Writing: Poetics, Ethics, Glo-
balization, 219–220.
133. “Connectedness” and “networkedness” are cardinal aspect of literature’s
“worldedness” according to Hayot. These systemic features of discourse reach be-
yond intertextuality (On Literary Worlds, 73–78).
134. Ascari, Literature of the Global Age, 11–17.
135. On the “anthological” and the “ontological,” see Doueihi, Pour un human-
isme numérique, 111.
136. Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” 181.
138. Jérôme David, Spectres de Goethe: Les métamorphoses de la “littérature mon-
diale” (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2011).
139. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book
and the Migrant Writer,” in Lane, Global Literary Theory, 924.
140. Nicolas Bourriaud, ed., Altermodern: Tate Triennial (London: Tate Publish-
ing, 2009), 13, 14.
141. See Medovoi, “‘Terminal Crisis?’”; Ascari, Literature of the Global Age, 11–14,
24; Irr, “Toward the World Novel,” and Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in
the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Berthold
Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010;
Amitava Kumar, ed., World Bank Literature, foreword by John Berger, afterword by
Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Philip E. Weg-
ner, “Soldierboys for Peace: Cognitive Mapping, Space, and Science Fiction as
World Bank Literature,” in Kumar, World Bank Literature, 280–296; Friedman,
“Planetarity”; W. Lawrence Hogue, Postmodern American Literature and Its Other
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 143–188. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures
on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000), 56–58; Distant
Reading (New York: Verso, 2013); and Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe
to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996); Spivak, “World
Systems and the Creole”; and Wai Chee Dimock, “Genre as World System: Epic and
Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (January 2006): 85–101.
142. Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time
Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) is only the latest,
Jameson-derived, installment in a series of inquiries revolving around the “what
comes after postmodernism?” question. On the intensifying disputes around post-
modernism’s simultaneous obsolescence and endurance, see John Frow’s “What
Was Postmodernism?” section of his 1997 Time and Commodity Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 13–63, initially published, in 1990, in Ian Adams and
Helen Tiffin, eds., Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post- Colonialism and Post-
Modernism (Calgary: University of Calgary Press; Hertfordshire: Harvester-
Wheatsheaf), 139–152 (Frow’s chapter title is, of course, an allusion to Harry Levin’s
1960 classical essay, “What Was Modernism?”); Brian McHale’s own article with the
same title in Electronic Book Review, December 20, 2007, http://www.electronic-
bookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent-/tense?mode-print (accessed March 8,
2013); Andrew Hoberek, John Burt, David Kadlec, Jamie Owen Daniel, Shelly Ever-
sley, Catherine Jurca, Aparajita Sagar, and Michael Berube, “Twentieth-Century-
Literature in the New Century: A Symposium,” College English 64, no. 1 (September
2001): 9–33; Moraru, “Global Turn in Critical Theory” and Cosmodernism; Timothy
S. Murphy, “To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Glo-
balization Studies,” symploke 12, nos. 1–2 (2004): 20–34; in the same symploke issue
(53–68), Robert L. McLaughlin’s “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fic-
tion and the Social World”; Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, eds., The Mourning After:
Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Alan Kirby,
“The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” Philosophy Now 71 (January–February
2009), http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm (accessed February 26,
2009); and other works by Mary Holland, Amy J. Elias, Timotheus Vermeulen and
Robin van den Akker (proponents of “metamodernism”), Alison Gibbons, Caren
Irr, Leerom Medovoi, Rachel Adams, Min Hyoung Song, Bharati Mukherjee, and
the list could go on.
143. Susan Stanford Friedman writes in her 2010 article “Planetarity: Musing
Modernist Studies”: “As I use the term, . . . planetarity . . . is an epistemology, not an
ontology” (494).
144. Wegner, “Soldierboys for Peace,” in Kumar, World Bank Literature, 218.
145. Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong,
trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin, 2000), 102.
146. On post-biological, “endless kinship,” see Dimock, “Genre as World System,”
89.
148. Paul Giles uses the phrase “writing for the planet” in chap. 8 of Elias and
Moraru, Planetary Turn, “Writing for the Planet: Contemporary Australian Fic-
tion.”
149. Franco Moretti, “World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltlitera-
tur,” in Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Prob-
lem of the World, 68.
150. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 11–12.
151. Colin MacCabe, “Preface” to Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, xi–xii.
Part 2
1. Pratt, “Planetary Longings,” in Gallagher, World Writing: Poetics, Ethics, Glo-

balization, 211.
2. In Ancient Greek, drómos means “race,” “running (place),” “track,” or “sta-

dium.” Recently revivified, primarily by Paul Virilio in his 1977 book Vitesse et poli-
tique: Essai de dromologie (Paris: Galilée, 1977), “dromology” is the “science of
speed” or systematic inquiry into “speed culture.” More generally, drómos signifies
“road” (in Greek and other languages that have borrowed the word) and thus inter-
sects, so to speak, with hodós—“way,” “street,” “road,” “path,” “journey” (when it is
used as a masculine noun), and “threshold” (when one employs its feminine form).
3. Georg Simmel, Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H.
Wolff (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 276–277.
4. Before providing the title of Beigbeder’s 2003 novel, Windows on the World
was a restaurant on the top floor of the North World Trade Center Tower.
5. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Interiority, trans. Al-
phonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1961), 74–75.
6. Friedman, “Planetarity,” 494.
7. See Friedman’s “Planetarity” (493) for “modernisms” and collage as a “plan-
etary epistemology” within which to read them.
8. In his article “Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking
Planetary Futures” (Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 5 [2011]), Tariq Jazeel relies on
Denis Cosgrove’s 2001 book Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in
the Western Imagination to claim that photos of the Earth such as those taken by
Apollo 17 in 1972 attest to an “Apollonian gaze” (81), which, Jazeel further contends,
betrays an imperial, culturocentric, and totalizing “reverie” redolent of cosmopoli-
tanism’s “one-worldist” thrust (87). As it turned out, NASA pictures are no different
from those taken since the 1970s by hundreds of other space missions, shuttles, or-
biting stations, and satellites belonging to a steadily growing number of countries,
Western and non-Western. While the meaning of these images has shifted some-
what in the post–Cold War era, it would be safe to say that even back in the 1970s
they meant and suggested much more than what Cosgrove and others think they
did. Equally reductive is Jazeel’s grasp of cosmopolitanism. Finally, the scalar syn-
ergy of the macro and micro categories also plays out in the argument Dimock
makes in her essay in The Planetary Turn.
9. Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitics: Think-
ing and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 253.
10. On the “event” as discontinuous and ambiguously “suspect” occurrence, see,
among many others, Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge,
62 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000), and Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics,
trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 118, 132.
11. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 167–191. On “faciality” in Deleuze and Guattari, see, among others, Burcu
Canar, “Deleuze and the Face,” Lingua ac Communitas 21 (2011): 33–52.
12. Where “there is no expression,” the face is “asleep,” writes Michael Ondaatje
in The English Patient (New York: Vintage, 1993), 28.
13. Bertrand Westphal, “The White Globe and the Paradoxical Cartography of
Berger & Berger: A Meditation on Deceptive Evidence,” another essay from Elias
and Moraru, Planetary Turn.
14. Youri Lotman, La sémiosphère, trans. Anka Ledenko (Limoges, France:

Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 1999), 9–20.
15. In On Literary Worlds (91), Hayot assigns “planet” a cosmographic meaning
close to how I understand “earth” here but also to how I define the “spherical” na-
ture of “globe” in part 1, §7.
16. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 37.
17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlin-
son and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 95.
18. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 41.
19. Rodolphe Gasché, Geophilosophy: On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
What Is Philosophy? (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 21.
20. Gasché, Geophilosophy, 35.
23. Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and
Stuart Elden, trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 96.
25. Kostas Axelos, Vers la pensée planétaire: Le devenir-pensée du monde et le
devenir-monde de la pensée (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 29–31.
27. In their essay on Deleuze and Guattari’s “plan d’immanence” from Le Vo-
cabulaire de Gilles Deleuze edited by Robert Sasso and Arnaud Villani (Nice, France:
Les Cahiers de Noesis, 2003), Maurice Élie and Arnaud Villani observe that “distinct
from the plane of reference, which characterizes science, consists of ‘actuals’ [ac-
tuels], and gives up on the infinite, and also distinct from the plane of consistence,
which characterizes art, consists of affects and percepts, and brings about the finite
so as to regain the infinite, the plane of immanence consists of concepts and recovers
the infinite [directly]” (272).
28. On “multitude,” see Negri, Art and Multitude, 7, 75; on “crowd,” Badiou’s
Handbook of Inaesthetics, 31–32. Also see Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shop-
ping Malls, and the Search for Home (New York: Random House, 2000) and “The
Nowhere Man,” in Prospect 30, no. 3 (February 1997): 30–33; and Alexandar He-
mon’s novel Nowhere Man (New York: Random House, 2002). Also, Masao Miyoshi
was among the first to draw attention to, but also to argue for, a turn to the planet in
a sense that he determined as enabling culturally, politically, and otherwise. On this
topic, see his “Turn to the Planet” article discussed in part 1, §10.
29. DeLillo, White Noise, 258–259.
30. This is a reference to E. M. Cioran’s Précis de décomposition (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1977), originally published in 1949.
31. Bertrand Westphal, Le monde plausible: Espace, lieu, carte (Paris: Minuit,
2011), 12–15.
32. On a perceptive discussion of “the spatial turn in contemporary literary his-
toriography,” see Andrei Terian, Critica de export: Teorii, contexte, ideologii (Bucha-
rest: Editura Muzeului Literaturii Române, 2013), 75–88.
33. For postmodernism’s “spatial imagination,” also see Julian Murphet, “Post-
modernism and Space,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven

Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 116–135.
34. On “lococentrism,” see the “Place” chapter in Lawrence Buell’s The Environ-
mental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Cul-
ture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 252–279.
The section has been anthologized in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd
ed., edited by David Lodge and Nigel Wood (New York: Longman, 2008), 667–691.
35. “Out is over,” variously proclaims, among others, Thomas L. Friedman in
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11 (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2002), 22, and elsewhere in his books. On the disappearance of
the planet’s traditional “hiding places,” see also Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 66,
and David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Re-
ligious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 2006), xxii.
36. Moraru, Cosmodernism, 2.
37. Moraru, Cosmodernism, 307–316.
38. Heidegger, Being and Time, 97.
39. For the evolving meaning of “world” as verb (welten) in Heidegger, with
particular emphasis on the philosopher’s early work, see Françoise Dastur, “Hei-
degger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger toward the
Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s, ed. James Risser, 129, 140 (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1999).
40. On Heidegger’s world concept and its relation to the world of the arts and
literature with special application to comparative literature, see Hayot, On Literary
Worlds, 23–29.
41. Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays,
trans. and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 129.
On Schmitt’s nomós, see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International
Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. and annotated by G. L. Ulmen (New
York: Telos, 2006).
42. Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 196.
43. On a possible synthesis of the two reading modes, see N. Katherine Hayles,
“Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and
the Aesthetic of Bookishness,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (January 2013): 226–231.
44. Heidegger, Question concerning Technology, 135.
46. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 30, 72.
47. Heidegger, Question concerning Technology, 135.
48. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 82, 92.
49. See Casanova, World Republic of Letters.
50. On “distant reading” and its problematic procedure in Moretti, see his “Con-
jectures on World Literature,” 56–58.
51. See Emery, “Caribbean Modernism” (49), on the cognitive risks of “distance”
and spatial-epistemological “detachment.” On the latter and its planetary remedies,
see Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” 301. On this subject, Rama-
zani leans on Robbins’s essay “Introduction[,] Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopoli-
tanism” (in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 1–19), which in turn revisits the
community-making dynamic of attachment-detachment discussed by Benedict

Anderson in his classic 1983 work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991) and Amanda Anderson
in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
52. Moretti also makes a rather unpersuasive and, to my mind, unnecessary case
against close reading in “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57.
53. Neef, Der babylonische Planet, 151–152.
54. Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art beyond Repre-
sentation,” Angelaki 6, no. 3 (December 2001): 127.
55. On the relationality of place and the need to “work through” the latter, see
Jazeel, “Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism,” 92. For an “inoperative”
concept of community, see, of course, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community,
ed. Peter Conor, trans. Peter Conor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona
Sawhney, foreword by Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991). Critics who move in the same direction overall, also in the context of
twenty-first-century geosocial developments, include: Negri, with Inventer le com-
mun des hommes, pref. Judith Revel (Paris: Bayard, 2010), Todorov, with La vie com-
mune: Essai d’anthropologie générale (Paris: Seuil, 1995), and Roberto Esposito, with
Communitas: The Origins and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
56. Negri talks about the community “laboratory” in Inventer le commun des
hommes.
57. On community as an “illusion” in the global age, see Marc Augé, La Com-
munauté illusoire (Paris: Payot, 2010).
58. On distant kinship, see Dimock, Through Other Continents, 144–145.
59. Westphal uses the phrase “world reading” (lecture du monde) in Le monde
plausible, 15.
60. Regarding “relational reading,” the wider world, and the world library, see
Bernadette Brennan’s “Worlds Without and Within: Reading Through Patrick
White’s Library in The Solid Mandala,” in Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature
a World Literature?, ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney, 115–126 (Melbourne: Aus-
tralian Scholarly Publishing, 2014).
61. Dixon and Rooney mention Ken Gelder’s “proximate reading” in their in-
troduction to Scenes of Reading, xxxi, xxxv.
62. On literary study as a “nation-based discipline” and the field’s changes after
the “national period,” see, among many others, Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney,
“Introduction: Australian Literature, Globalisation and the Literary Province,” in
Dixon and Rooney, Scenes of Reading, x, xi, xv. On this issue, the critics reference in
particular Giles’s recent books on American Literature.
63. Neil Brenner, “The Space of the World: Beyond State- Centrism?” in
Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the
World, 109.
64. As Fine shows in Cosmopolitanism (7), Beck formulated his famous critique
of “methodological nationalism” probably for the first time in a 2002 article, then he
reformulated it in “Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent,”
Constellations 10, no. 4 (2003), 453–468. After several more elaborations on the
same subject, he takes it up again in “Cosmopolitan Sociology: Outline of a Para-

digm Shift,” a piece included in Rovisco and Nowicka, Ashgate Research Companion
to Cosmopolitanism, 17–32. On Giddens, Beck, Martins, “methodological cosmo-
politanism,” and its “equivocations” (including Beck’s “post-universalism”), see
Fine’s excellent discussion in Cosmopolitanism, 1–14.
65. Beck, “Cosmopolitan Sociology, 18.
66. Beck, “Cosmopolitan Sociology, 29.
67. On Beck and the state as a “zombie category,” see Fine, Cosmopolitanism,
6–7. Paul Giles has commented on territorialism, terrorism, and the “homeland
security” approach to literature in his essay “The Deterritorialization of American
Literature,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai
Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 39–61 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007).
68. Svend Erik Larsen, “Literary History as a Cultural Challenge: Rewriting Lo-
cal Literary History in the Age of Globalisation,” in Dixon and Rooney, Scenes of
Reading, 62.
69. Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (New York: Riverhead,
2013), 139.
70. Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 139.
71. Papastergiadis, “Spatial Aesthetics,” 373.
72. In the phrase and, presumably, the practice of “world literature,” “world” can
and does serve as an “alibi for not reading scale politically,” claims Peter Hitchcock
in his article “The Function of Agon at the Present Time,” Comparatist 37 (2013): 18.
73. Walkowitz, “Location of Literature,” 926, 927. Regarding the distinction be-
tween the postcolonial and the global, Rapaport argues that “[w]hereas global stud-
ies is quite concerned with transit across the globe—that is to say, with mobility and
its expression as power—post-colonial studies has been concerned with inter-
cultural relations and their expression in terms of domination and subjection” (Lit-
erary Theory Kit, 61).
74. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 51.
75. Regarding a dynamic of “hearth” and “cosmos” close to the planetary inter-
play of “here” and “there,” see Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth, 187–188. On “ego-
centric” versus “allocentric space,” see Malpas, Place and Experience, 44–55.
76. On borders as “quilting points,” see Anthony Cooper and Chris Rumford,
“Cosmopolitan Borders: Bordering as Connectivity,” in Rovisco and Nowicka, Ash-
gate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, 273.
78. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Cosmopolitan Memory and Human
Rights,” in Rovisco and Nowicka, Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism,
197.
79. Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation,” 219, 226.
80. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149–150.
81. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, with a new introduction by
Roger Kinball, trans. Richard Aldington (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007).
82. Adrian Florea, “De Facto States in International Politics (1945–2011): A New
Data Set,” International Interactions: Empirical and Theoretical Research in Interna-

tional Relations (October 2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050629.-2014.915543.
84. Among the critics for whom “novel assemblages of territory, authority[,]
and rights” would deal successfully with the local (national)-global conundrum, I
list here only Saskia Sassen, with her article “Neither Global nor National: Novel
Assemblages of Territory, Authority and Rights” (Ethics & Global Politics 1, nos. 1–2
[2008]: 61–79), Ramazani, with “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization” (301), and
Beck, with “Cosmopolitan Sociology” (28–29).
85. On methodological “glocalism,” see Holton, Global Networks, 47.
86. Quoting Robbins in “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” Ramazani
points to the “multiple attachments” following “detachments” from local bonds.
Under planetarity, such detachments are not a prerequisite of with-being. On post-
ethnic affiliation, voluntary rather than inherited by background, see David A. Hol-
linger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books/Harp-
erCollins, 1995), and Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity. Delanty discusses the
cosmopolitan local-global and self-other interface in “The Idea of Critical Cosmo-
politanism,” in Delanty, Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, 41.
87. On “nested territorial units,” see Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and
Sovereignty,” in Brown and Held, Cosmopolitanism Reader, 114.
88. Dumitru Tiutiuca, “Fractology—a Possible Outlook on Literature,” Euresis
1–4 (2012): 102–108.
89. Dimock, “Genre as World System,” 88.
92. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Basic
Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Ber-
nasconi, 168 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
93. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 44.
94. Agamben, Coming Community, 43.
95. Agamben, Coming Community, 43.
96. Agamben, Coming Community, 43–44.
97. Jean Baudrillard, “Global Debt and Parallel Universe,” in Digital Delirium,
ed. and introduction by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, 38–40 (New York: St. Mar-
tin’s, 1997).
98. I talk about the “outsourcing of identity” in Cosmodernism, 16–17, also in the
context of world indebtedness (21, 26). On the latter, see too my recent article
“‘World,’ ‘Globe,’ ‘Planet’: Comparative Literature, Planetary Studies, and Cultural
Debt after the Global Turn,” American Comparative Literature Association, the
2014–2015 Report on the State of the Discipline of Comparative Literature website
-Paradigms. http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org.
99. See the previous note. Also see the epilogue of my book Memorious Dis-
course, 224–234.
100. For the “university in ruins” argument, see, of course, Bill Readings’s book
The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
101. Holton, Global Networks, 45.
102. Dimock, “Planetary Time and Global Translation.”

103. Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Vio-
lence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 4.
104. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 77.
105. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 77–78.
106. “New cosmopolitanism,” Fine argues in Cosmopolitanism (1), is a post-1989
phenomenon.
107. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: His-
toire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (February
2006): 30, 31, 39, 42, 44.
108. George Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. from the Hungarian by Rich-
ard E. Allen (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 179.
109. Mircea Cărtărescu, “Realismul poeziei tinere” (Young Poets’ Realism), in
Competiţia continuă: Generaţia 80 in texte teoretice (The Race Goes On: Theoretical
Texts on the 1980s Generation), ed. Gheorghe Crăciun, 183 (Piteşti, Romania: Edi-
tura Vlasie, 1994).
110. Mircea Cărtărescu, Totul (All) (Bucharest, Romania: Cartea Românească,
1985).
111. Visul (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1989) was republished in complete
form in 1993 (Bucharest: Humanitas) and has been translated into a number of
languages. For the English version, see Nostalgia, trans., with an afterword, from the
Romanian by Julian Semilian, introduction by Andrei Codrescu (New York: New
Directions, 2005). Later prose works such as novels like Travesti (Disguise) (Bucha-
rest: Humanitas, 1994), the Orbitor (Blinding) three-volume series (Bucharest: Hu-
manitas, 1996–2007), and the short pieces gathered in the bestseller De ce iubim
femeile (Why We Love Women) (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2005) detail Nostalgia’s
description of Bucharest.
113. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Penguin, 1981), 52.
114. Állos (masculine plural álloi) is “another” in Greek. It may designate either
another like the self (by and large an other of the same sort) or an other to this self,
in which case its meaning is closer to héteros. “The other of two,” the latter marks
the other’s otherness more emphatically. In Latin, alius and alter enact roughly the
same distinction. While unquestionably significant, the difference between állos
and héteros is not instrumental to my argument.
115. On the spatial ethics of “taking place” and the ek-static “outside,” see Agam-
ben, Coming Community, 13–15, 23–25, and 67–68.
116. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Criti-
cal Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 131–137.
117. On the Aleph symbol in writing and inscription systems generally, see Sonja
Neef, Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the Age of Technology, trans. Anthony
Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), esp. 7–13.
118. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley
(New York: Penguin, 1999), 280.
119. On the Zahir as “an unbearable symbol of the infinite, painful circularity,
an[d] obsessive counterpart of the elusive Aleph,” see Matei Calinescu’s Rereading
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 12, 11–16.
120. On Borges, the Aleph, the Kabbalah, and Judaic tradition in general, see
Jaime Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah and Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Edna Aizenberg, The Aleph Weaver:
Biblical, Kabbalistic and Judaic Elements in Borges (Potomac, MD: Scripta Human-
istica, 1984). In Edna Aizenberg, ed., Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Im-
pact on Literature and the Arts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), see
esp. its fifth section, “Hebraism and Poetic Influence,” 249–284, which features two
lectures by Borges on the Book of Job and Baruch Spinoza, respectively. Worth
mentioning is also Evelyn Fishburn’s article “Reflections on the Jewish Imaginary in
the Fictions of Borges,” in Variaciones Borges: Journal of the Jorge Luis Borges Center
for Studies and Documentation, no. 5 (1998): 145–156. On Borges’s own thoughts on
the Kabbalah, see “The Kabbalah,” in Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger, intro-
duction by Alasdair Reid (New York: New Directions, 1984), 99.
121. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 223.
122. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-
Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 54–57.
123. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 222–23.
124. “Shall I project a world?” famously asks Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas in The Cry-
ing of Lot 49 (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 64.
125. Jazeel, “Spatializing Difference beyond Cosmopolitanism,” 92.
126. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, 73, 36.
127. Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding, trans. Sean Cotter (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago
Books, 2013).
128. Cărtărescu, Blinding, 75.
129. Cărtărescu, Blinding, 48.
130. Mircea Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Corpul (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2002), 135, 152.
131. Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Corpul, 249.
132. Cărtărescu, Orbitor. Corpul, 248–249.
133. Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, trans. from the French by
Ina Rilke (New York: Random House, 2001); Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch, trans.
from the French by Ina Rilke (New York: Knopf, 2005).
134. Excerpt from a Boston Herald review of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seam-
stress, fragment reproduced on the front inside cover of the American translation.
135. Dai, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 45.
136. Dai, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 49.
137. Bernadette Delamarre, Autrui (Paris: Ellipses, 1996), 4–5.
138. Romain Rolland on himself, quoted in “Romain Rolland,” World Authors,
1900–1950, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens, vol. 3 (New York:
H. W. Wilson, 1996), 2222.
139. Dai, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, 58–59. Critics who have fo-
cused on Balzac’s presence in Dai’s novel include, among others, Dorothée Fritz-
Ababneh, in “L’Intertextualité dans Balzac et La petite tailleuse chinoise de Dai Sijie,”
in French Studies 77 (Winter 2006): 97–113, and Ian McCall, who zeroes in on the
role Balzac plays in the little seamstress’s education sentimentale in “French Litera-
ture and Film in the USSR and Mao’s China,” in Romance Studies 24, no. 2 (July
2006): 159–170. Michelle E. Bloom deals with similar issues apropos of the movie
Dai himself made of his novel in 2002. See her article “Contemporary Franco-
Chinese Cinema: Translation, Citation, and Imitation in Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the
Little Chinese Seamstress and Tsai Ming-Liang’s What Time Is It There?,” in Quar-
terly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 4 (October–December 2005): 311–325.
140. Peter Fenves, “Alterity and Identity, Postmodern Theories Of,” in Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Craig, general editor (New York: Routledge,
1998), 188.
141. Jacques Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘and . . . the rest of the world,’” in
Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998), 66, 68.
142. Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis,” 65.
143. Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night, trans. Adriana Hunter (New York:
Knopf, 2009), 158.
144. Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night, 158.
145. Zadie Smith, On Beauty (New York: Penguin, 2005), 93.
146. E. M. Forster, Howards End. Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical
and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Crit-
ical Perspectives, ed. Alistair M. Duckworth (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997),
168.
147. Smith, On Beauty, “Acknowledgements.” On Smith and Forster’s “Only con-
nect . . . ,” see, among others, Georgia Garett’s book note in Publishers Weekly, http://
www.powells.com/-biblio/1594200637, and Gail Caldwell’s review “Come Together”
in the Boston Globe, September 11, 2005, http://www.boston.com/ae/books/-
articles/2005/09/11/-come_together/.
148. Caldwell, “Come Together.”
149. Zadie Smith, NW (New York: Penguin, 2012), 85.
150. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Random House, 2000), 257.
151. Zadie Smith, Autograph Man (New York: Vintage, 2003), 77.
152. Smith, On Beauty, “Acknowledgements.”
153. For an extensive version of this historical critique of cosmopolitanism, see
my book Cosmodernism, esp. 67–73.
154. Seth Jacobowitz, “Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Eugenics of Culture in E.
M. Forster’s Howards End,” CLWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6, no. 4
(December 2004), http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04–4/jacobowitz04.
html. In a footnote to his Howards End edition, Alistair M. Duckworth also ob-
serves that “[t]he Name Schlegel recalls the Schlegel brothers” (25).
155. J. Hillis Miller, Others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 195.
The critic quotes from The Manuscripts of Howards End edited by Oliver Stally-
brass. He also proposes “there is no way to tell whether Forster had in mind Fried-
rich Schlegel or August Wilhelm Schlegel as the ‘great critic’” (205). My reading
suggests that, in all likelihood, Friedrich is the one Forster refers to even though
“August Wilhelm may have had greater importance in Forster’s day” (205).
156. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 77–81.
157. Miller, Others, 8.
161. Smith, On Beauty, 94.
162. My translation of the following French original: “Mais ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’
a toujours été mal compris. On a cru que je voulais dire par là que nos rapports avec
les autres étaient toujours empoisonnés, que c’étaient toujours des rapports infer-
naux. Or, c’est autre chose que je veux dire. Je veux dire que si les rapports avec au-
trui sont tordus, viciés, alors l’autre ne peut être que l’enfer. Pourquoi? Parce que les
autres sont au fond ce qu’il y a de plus important en nous-même pour notre propre
connaissance de nous-même. Quand nous pensons sur nous, quand nous essayons
de nous connaître, au fond nous usons ces connaissances que les autres ont déja sur
nous. Nous jugeons aves les moyens que les autres ont, nous ont donné de nous
juger. Quoique je dise sur moi, toujours le jugement d’autrui entre dedans. Ce qui
veut dire que, si mes rapports sont mauvaises, je me mets dans la totale dépendance
d’autrui. Et alors en effet je suis en enfer.” See Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three
Other Plays (New York: Random House, 1973); “Huis clos de Jean-Paul Sartre,”
http://www.alalettre.com/sartre-huisclos.htm.
163. Smith, On Beauty, “Author’s Note,” 445. However, the painter is not Jean
Hyppolite (the French philosopher), but Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite.
164. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 41.
165. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda
Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 50–51.
166. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 47.
167. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 95.
168. On Levinas, Derrida, and hospitality, see Derrida’s Adieu to Emmanuel Levi-
nas, Of Hospitality, and esp. the “Hostipitality” chapter of Acts of Religion, ed. and
with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 358–420. Also
see J. Hillis Miller’s classical essay “The Critic as Host,” in Theory Now and Then
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 143–170.
169. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely (New York:
Vintage, 2005), 306.
170. Pamuk, Snow, 306–307.
171. See Ka’s cosmic “snowflake” in Pamuk, Snow, 283.
172. Sorj Chalandon, “Entretien. Sorj Chalandon dans le vertige de la guerre,”
L’Orient Littéraire 97 (July 2014), http://www.lorientlitteraire.com/article-_details.
php?cid=6&nid=4293.
173. Chalandon, “Entretien. Sorj Chalandon dans le vertige de la guerre.”
174. Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, “Antigone Claimed: ‘I Am a Stranger!’ Politi-
cal Theory and the Figure of the Stranger,” Hypathia 28, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 317.
175. Sorj Chalandon, “‘Je vis avec la mort et la trahison en essayant de me garder
de l’une et de l’autre,’” interview by Nicolas Norrito, illustrations by Yann Levy,
CQFD 115 (October 2013), http://cqfd-journal.org/Je-vis-avec-la-mort-et-la-trahi-
son.
176. Jean Anouilh, The Collected Plays, Volume 2: Time Remembered, Point of De-
parture, Antigone, Romeo and Jeanette, Medea (London: Methuen, 1967), 218.
177. Anouilh, Collected Plays, Volume 2, 222.
178. Bertolt Brecht, Sophocles’ Antigone, adapted by Bertolt Brecht, based on the
German translation by Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Judith Malina (New York: Ap-
plause, 1990), 34.

180. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), 6.
181. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 6.
182. Sophocles, The Complete Sophocles, Volume I: The Theban Plays, ed. Peter
Burian and Alan Shapiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64.
183. George Steiner, Antigones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Slavoj
Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992), 46, 77, 91–92.
184. Sorj Chalandon, Le quatrième mur (Paris: Grasset, 2013), 241.
185. Chalandon, Le quatrième mur, 181.
186. Anouilh, Collected Plays, Volume 2, 218–219.
187. Brecht, Sophocles’ Antigone, 35.
188. Brecht, Sophocles’ Antigone, 35.
190. Castro, “Antigone Claimed: ‘I Am a Stranger!’” 307.
191. Castro, “Antigone Claimed: ‘I Am a Stranger!’”
192. Sophocles, Complete Sophocles, Volume I, 99.
193. Chalandon, “Je vis avec la mort et la trahison en essayant de me garder de
l’une et de l’autre.”
201. In Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2014), Jean-Michel Rabaté reminds us that “Antigone’s very name sug-
gests a movement ‘against’ generation,” that is, against the “procreation . . . per-
verted after Oedipus’s transgression” (227).
203. I thank Jeffrey J. Williams and John McGowan for pointing out to me some
of the divergent readings to which O’Neill’s Netherland lends itself. Williams
touches on this issue briefly in his article “The Plutocratic Imagination,” Dissent
(Winter 2013), http://www.-dissentmagazine.org/article/the-plutocratic-imagina-
tion.
204. Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Vintage, 2009), 161.
205. Ulrich Beck, “Global Inequality and Human Rights: A Cosmopolitan Per-
spective,” in Delanty, Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 306. On
“global cities,” see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
206. Joseph O’Neill, “Bowling Alone,” Atlantic Monthly, September 11, 2007,
http://www.powells.com/review/2007_09_11. I thank John Protevi for mentioning
O’Neill’s review to me.
207. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary, with an introduction by Robert Lipsyte
and a new foreword by Paget Henry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013),
195–211.
208. “The Art and Practice Part” is the title of part 6 of James, Beyond a Boundary
(193).
209. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 111; James, Beyond a Boundary, 67, 65.
210. James, Beyond a Boundary, 210.
211. O’Neill, “Bowling Alone.”
214. James, Beyond a Boundary, 233.
216. O’Neill, Netherland, 12.
217. Ian McEwan, The Children Act (New York: Random House, 2014), 46.
218. Ian McEwan, Saturday (New York: Random House, 2005), 35.
222. James Wood, “Beyond a Boundary,” New Yorker, May 26, 2008. http://www.
newyorker.-com/magazine/2008/05/26/beyond-a-boundary.
224. O’Neill, Netherland, 10–11.
225. O’Neill, Netherland, 120-121.
226. Jean-Luc Nancy, Verité de la démocratie (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 30–32.
227. O’Neill, Netherland, 10. My comments on this place in Netherland also al-
lude to Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.
Epilogue

2. Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 2011)
25, 29.
3. Chang-rae Lee, The Surrendered (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 102.
4. Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House,
2009), 325.
8. Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory (New York: Knopf, 2012),
46–47.
9. Rey Chow, The Age of World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and
Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 31, 41.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy, trans. R.
J. Hollingdale, with an introduction by Michael Tanner (London: Penguin, 1990),
102.

19. Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” 301.
20. Ramazani, “Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization,” 301.
21. Heidegger, Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, 132.
22. Michael Lang, “Mapping Globalization or Globalizing the Map? Heidegger
and Planetary Discourse,” Genre 36 (Fall–Winter 2003): 239–244.
23. On Heidegger and his “essentialist theory of place,” also see Harvey, Cosmo-
politanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 180.
24. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Haas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45.
25. Mimi Scheller, “Cosmopolitanism and Mobilities,” in Rovisco and Nowicka,
Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, 349
26. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 233–234.
27. Somewhat similar proposals have advanced: Jameson, who talks about the
critic as “curator” of the world museum in “New Literary History after the End of
the New,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008), 385; Spivak, who refers to
the “custodial” energies we must spend on behalf of our planet, in “World Systems
and the Creole,” 108; and Martha Nussbaum, who, in “Toward a Globally Sensitive
Patriotism,” from Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 78–93, modifies the position
previously formulated in her several interventions from For Love of Country (ed.
Joshua Cohen [Boston: Beacon Press, 2002]). See also Kennedy Graham, ed., The
Planetary Interest: A New Concept for the Global Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1999). Some of these suggestions and recommendations are more
or less in line with global studies’ “ethical turn,” for which see Mervyn Frost, Global
Ethics: Anarchy, Freedom and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2009),
esp. 18–41.
28. Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,”
Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 8, 12.
29. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 74–75.
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Index
Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 7 Appadurai, Arjun, 69, 181

Absurd, 113 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 46
Absurdistan (Shteyngart), 125 Apter, Emily, 12, 45, 46, 52, 58
Adamson, Joni, 46 Arendt, Hannah, 95, 122
Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida), 180 Ascari, Maurizio, 72
Aesthetics, 21 A Small Place (Kincaid), 113
and ontology. See Ontology: and aes- Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 154, 157
thetics Auden, W. H., 24
neo-Romantic, 21 “Prologue at Sixty,” 24
and planetarism. See Geoaesthetic(s); Augé, Marc, 89, 96
Other: and beauty/aesthetics; Auster, Paul, 89
Planetarism: and aesthetics Autochthony/autochthonous, 84–85, 87
Affect/emotion topomonopoly, 180
affective turn, 22 Autograph Man, The (Smith), 141
affectsphere, 21 Axelos, Kostas, 86, 97
geopolitics of, 21–22
map/mapping of. See Map/mapping Badiou, Alain, 52, 61, 87
and planet(arity), 63 Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Dai),
Africa, 7 126–138
Against the Day (Pynchon), 175 Balzac, Honoré de, 128–137 passim
Agamben, Giorgio, 107–108, 114 Comédie humaine, La, 129
Akhtiorskaya, Yelena, 154 Cousin Pons, Le, 134
Panic in a Suitcase, 154 Lost Illusions, 132
Albrow, Martin, 35 Père Goriot, 129
Aleph(ic), 112, 114, 117, 118, 156 Ursule Mirouët, 129, 131, 132, 136
and fractals, 156 Barber, Benjamin, 66
and otherness, 116 Barth, John, 121
Aloft (Lee), 125, 175 Bateson, Gregory, 96
“Alphabets” (Heaney), 24 Bataille, Georges, 96
Altermodernism, 73 Baudelaire, Charles, 138, 145
Amsterdam, 174 Baudrillard, Jean, 97, 108
Anatolia, 3, 154 Bauman, Zygmunt, 27
Andrade, Jorge Carrera, 24 Beck, Ulrich, 31, 45, 98, 104, 169
“Hombre Planetario,” 24 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 130
Anouilh, Jean, 159–169 Beigbeder, Frédéric, 1, 78, 174
Antigone, 159–169 Being-with/being-in-relation, 15, 50, 96,
Anthropology, 84 104, 175 (see also Miteinandersein;
Antigone (Anouilh), 159–169 Togetherness; World: with-world:
Antigone (Sophocles), 162 withness[ing])
“Antigone” des Sophokles (Brecht), 162 being-in-the-world, 91, 170
225
226 • index
Being-with/being-in-relation (continued ) Brenner, Neil, 98

as community-fostering, 170 (see British Empire/Commonwealth, 62, 141,
also Planetarity: community/ 150, 158
communality) Brontë, Emily, 128
with-being/being-together, 153, 167–168 Brown, Marshall, 32
(see also Nomos: planetary: as Bucharest, 112–126 passim, 154, 174
with-being) Budapest, 112
Beirut, 158–168 passim, 174 Buell, Lawrence, 7, 46, 89
Belonging, 3 Bulgaria, 124
Benda, Julien, 103 Bush, George H. W., 27
Benjamin, Walter, 119 Butler, Judith, 163, 165
Berlant, Lauren, 21
Berlin Wall, 6, 26, 38 Calinescu, Matei, 58
fall of/1989, 27, 36, 68 Calvino, Italo, 54
and Derrida, 60 Canetti, Elias, 120
and relation, 36 Blendung, Die, 120
and worlding, 67 Capital, 26, 29, 52, 65, 68, 79, 99, 102, 108–
world-systemic/transforming event, 109
36, 60–61 cash, ontology of, 108
post-Berlin Wall, 65 cultural, 93, 108–109
Best, Steven, 58 financial sublime, the, 108
Beyond a Boundary (James), 168–171 symbolic, 108
Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 177 Caragiale, Ion Luca, 121
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 136 Caragiale, Mateiu, 121
Black Dogs (McEwan), 126 Cărtărescu, Mircea, 89, 99, 112–126, 127,
Blackham, H. J., 142, 149 143, 151, 152, 154, 156, 167, 174, 175
Blanchot, Maurice, 96 Blinding, 119–126
Blendung, Die (Canetti), 120 Diary, 122
Blinding (Cărtărescu), 119–125, 126 Nostalgia, 112–118
Blumenberg, Hans, 94 Caribbean, 140, 150, 156
Body, 114 Carte et le territoire, La (Houellebecq),
and planetarity, 114 126
Bolaño, Roberto, 72, 89 Cartography. See Map/mapping
“Book of Sand, The” (Borges), 116 Casanova, Pascale, 45, 93
Borders, 7 Castells, Manuel, 45, 71, 78
Borges, Jorge Luis, 54, 113, 116 Catholic Church, 102
“Book of Sand, The,” 116 Catholicism, 147
“Library of Babel, The,” 116 Caws, Mary Ann, 2
“Total Library, The,” 116 Ceaușescu, Nicolae, 113, 123
Boston, 140, 150 Central Europe, 135
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 72 Cervantes, Miguel de, 132
Bouvier, Nicolas, 99 Chabon, Michael, 54
Braşov, 174 Chalandon, Sorj, 126, 158–168, 169, 174
Braudel, Fernand, 34 Quatrième mur, Le, 126, 158–168
Brecht, Bertolt/Brechtian, 156, 157, 160, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (Friedrich), 177
162–166 Chandra, Sarika, 31
“Antigone” des Sophokles, 162 Chaunu, Pierre, 36
index • 227
Cheah, Pheng, 54, 69 Commons. See World: commons

Chengdu, 130 Communism, 41, 127
Chickwava, Brian, 126 fall of, 122
Harare North, 126 and Holocaust, 122
Children Act, The (McEwan), 126 postcommunism, 123–124
China, 3, 57, 72, 126–140 passim and psychoanalysis. See Psychoanalysis:
Great Firewall of, 72 and Communism
Christianity, 70 Community, 3
Cioran, E. M., 88 American, 168–173
Précis de décomposition, 88 communal(ity), 14, 59, 88, 96, 103, 118,
Clarke, Bruce, 45 151, 158, 161, 165
Class, 8, 104 American, 168
and other. See Other: and class planetary. See Planetary: commu-
Clingman, Stephen, 46 nity/communality
Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 126 world-communal, 165–166
Cochrane, Allan, 33 intersectional, 96
Codrescu, Andrei, 89 Lebanese, 167
Cold War, 3, 57, 112–126 passim and location, 6
geopolitics of, 21–22 and nation-state, 103
Manichean/disconnective/disjunc- and relationality, 96
tive, 26, 36, 113 spatialized, 118 (see also Space; Spatial-
and melancholia, 123 ity; Spatialization)
and modernism, 22 theory of, 96
post-cold War era, 10 Comparative approach/comparatism/
as contemporary/contemporaneity, comparative studies, 44–46, 110
90 See also Reading
as cosmodern, 62 Complexe du Di, Le (Dai), 126, 134–140
and geomethodology. See Geo- Connectedness. See Interconnectedness;
methodology: and post-Cold Relation; Togetherness
War era Contemporary/contemporaneity, 62.
and geopolitics, 85 See also Cold War: post-Cold
as late globalization, 92 War era
and netospherical/nethospherical, geopolitical cartography of, 68 (see also
92 Geopolitics/geopolitical: mapping)
as new world-systemic age, 26 and netosphere/nethosphere, 63
novel, 125 ontology of, 79
as planetary, 62, 111, 120 and post-postmodernism, 90
and postmodernity, 89 Coover, Robert, 22
and togetherness. See Togetherness: Co-presence, 6, 91
post-Cold War and ethics/aesthetics, 153–154
and world picture, 92 and space. See Spatial: co-presence
See also World: world-as-world and withness(ing), 125
and relationality. See Relationality Cortázar, Julio, 121
Cole, Teju, 89, 125, 175 Cosmodernism, 5
Open City, 125 cosmodernization, 90
Colebrook, Claire, 70 of the postmodern, 90
Comédie humaine, La (Balzac), 129 defined, 5
228 • index
Cosmodernism (continued) Culture, 8

period of, 61–62 (see also Cold War: and contamination/infection/influence,
post-Cold War) 127–129
and the planetary/planetarism. See and debt. See Debt/indebtedness
Planetarism: and cosmodernism de-/re-territorialization of, 104, 128
and postcolonial, 90 as ecosystem, 8
as post-postmodernism, 90 planetary, 8, 67
Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 125 and bricolage/heterogeneity, 97
Cosmopolitan, 7, 40, 87 conjunctive/horizontal/relational
(neo)cosmopolitan studies/neocosmo- model of, 110, 179
politanism, 41–42, 45, 55 and distance/distant archive. See
and global/planetary terminology/ Distance: and cultural forma-
problematics, 55 tion
post-Cold War, 42 and ethnos/ethnicity. See Ethnos/
self-fashioning, 7 ethnicity/ethnic
world culture, 169 intertextually-interculturally super-
Cosmopolitanism, 40, 41 saturated, 13
and anti-cosmopolitanism, 42, 55 and nation-state. See Nation:
differential, 152 nation-state: and planetary
and Eastern Europe, 112 culture
imperial, 145, 147 and ontology. See Ontology
and Maoism, 127 and territory, 67, 97
methodological, 98 and tradition, 67
versus methodological nationalism, role of, 64–65
104
old/new, 82 Dai, Sijie, 126–140, 142, 147, 151, 156
and place, 144 Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, 126–
planetarized in Smith, 140–151 passim 138
and polis, 166 Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée,
and politics, 70 137
postcosmopolitanism, 55 Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch, 126, 134–140
Romantic. See Romantic/Romanticism: Dalby, Simon, 46
and cosmopolitan/cosmopolitan- Dallas, 65
ism Damrosch, David, 45
transatlantic, 46 Dante Aligheri, 121
Cosmopolitical, 166 Danticat, Edwidge, 12
Cotter, Sean, 119 D’Argoun, Jean, 40
Count of Monte Cristo, The (Dumas, Dasein, 90
père), 131, 132 Davenport, Guy, 54
Cousin Pons, Le (Balzac), 134 David, Jérôme, 72
Cricket, 168–77 passim Dead Europe (Tsiolkas), 126
Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 117 Debt/indebtedness, 57
Cuba, 72 cultural, 108–109
Cultural origination, 7 and comparative analysis, 109
horizontal, 67, 179 and map/mapping. See Map/map-
new model of, 7 ping: planetary: and cultural
Cultural Revolution (Chinese), 127, 128, debt
131, 132, 135, 136 and ethics, 106–108
index • 229
and global/globalization, 108 See also Spatiality: chiasmic/and

and human. See Human (the): and debt chiasmus
and interconnectedness, 109 distant reading. See Reading: distant
and Lacan, 107 ethno-cultural, 164
and originality, manufacturing of, 106, intellectual/critical value of, 80, 92, 93
109 in Arendt, 95
and other/otherness. See Other: and in drama/performance, 157–158
debt and psychoanalysis, 136
and planetary criticism. See Planetary: management of, 37
criticism: and debt ontological, 164
and subject formation, 107 physical, 71, 78, 80, 94, 164
and world as planet, 106, 139 self-distancing, 92
and worlding, 106, 109 See also Relationality: and/as kin/kind/
Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 83–86, 94, 176, 178 kinship: distant
DeLillo, Don, 7, 22, 72, 88, 89, 125, 175, Dog, The (O’Neill), 125
176 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 132
Cosmopolis, 125 Doyle, Laura, 46
Falling Man, 125 Dumas, père, Alexandre, 128, 131, 132, 134
“Human Moments in World War III,” Count of Monte Cristo, The, 131, 132
175 dystopia, 128
Point Omega, 125
Underworld, 125 Earth, 77–85
White Noise, 7, 88 and face/surface of. See Face/figure: of
Demorgon, Jacques, 65 the earth
Derrida, Jacques, 22, 52, 60, 101, 114, 135– and geopolitics/geopolitical, 118
136, 138, 153, 180 and globe, 83
Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 180 as place, 180
Desirable Daughters (Mukherjee), 125 and planet, 41, 83–84
Deterritorialization. See Territorialization and planetarization, 56
D’Haen, Theo, 58 and world, 53
Diary (Cărtărescu), 122 Eastern bloc, 27, 120
Dickens, Charles, 128 Eastern Europe, 60, 135
Die Hard, 65 Eco-cosmopolitanism, 45
Digimodernism, 73 Ecocriticism, 45
Dimock, Wai Chee, 45, 46, 58, 71, 72, 87, Ecology, 8
99, 100, 103, 105, 106, 113 cultural, 8
Dimov, Leonid, 121 environmentalism, 56
Discours antillais, Le (Glissant), 156 geocultural, 8
Distance, 80, 93, 95–96 and planetarization, 56
at-distance interaction, 62, 74, 90, Economics, 99, 108
175–181 passim (see also Ro- and reading. See reading: and econom-
mantic/Romanticism: sublime: ics
and distance) Eckermann, Johann Peter, 75
critical risks posed by, 94 Elias, Amy J., 41, 46, 52
and cultural formation, 97–98 Eliot, T. S., 138
de-distancing, 91, 178–180, 175–181 pas- Emery, Mary Lou, 46, 47, 99
sim Eminescu, Mihai, 121
and de-/familiarization, 157–158 English Patient, The (Ondaatje), 125
230 • index
Enlightenment, 41 and language, 103

post-, 179 and map/mapping, 156
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Saramago), 120 and nation-state, 103
Epistemology, 4 and planetary culture, 67
challenges to, 4, 7 and postcolonial (sub)community, 172–
and ethics, 12 173
of global/globalization, 45 (post)ethnicity, 45, 104
and map. See Map/mapping: epistemol- and reading, 99
ogy trans-ethnic. See Ethics/ethical: trans-
and modernity. See Modernity: episte- ethnic
mology of transgressed, 167
and nation-state/epistemological na- Ethnography, 84
tionalism, 13, 30, 56, 61, 86, 98–103 Ethoscopy, 20, 70
and planetary reading, 98–104 and ethical/unethical, 87
planetary, 5, 63, 73–74, 76, 100 and ontoscopy, 175
rebuilding of, 51 planetary, 70, 87, 177–181
and scale. See Scale: and epistemology Europe, 6, 154
and telescope/telescopy, 96 European Union (EU), 27, 154
Ethics/ethical, 4, 5, 13, 106 Event. See Berlin Wall: fall of/1989; Plane-
and aesthetics, 142 tarism: as event
and fragment, 140–152 (see also Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Other: and beauty/aesthetics) (Foer), 125
in Smith, 142–154 passim
and co-articulation of the ontological Face/figure, 5, 104
and the political, 58 of the earth, 77–78, 83
and debt. See Debt/indebtedness: and face-to-face, 173
ethics versus face-off, 173
and ethnic, permutations of, 165, 167, facing the planet, 5, 78–79, 174–181 pas-
172–173, 180 sim
and geomethodology, 14–15, 88, 176–181 as ethoscopy, 20, 78, 175 (see also
interface, 79 Ethics/ethical)
and place. See Place: and ethics/planeta- as poiēsis, 20
rized; Planetarization: and place and netospherical/nethospherical. See
of planetarism, 69, 73 Netosphere: netospherical
transactional, 73 of the other, 181
and planetarity, 44, 54, 58 and responsibility, 181
of planetary interpretation, 10, 12, 76, of the planet, 5, 12, 15, 20, 50, 77–83, 117,
176–181 125, 174–181
of reading, 76, 95 reading of, 12, 76, 181
and relationality, 39, 55 and telescopy, 94, 104 (see also Tele-
and reworlding, 48 scope/telescopy)
and space, 114–115 and totality, 113 (see also Totality:
and technology, 179–180 and planetarity)
trans-ethnic, 173 and space, 100
Ethnic/ethnicity/ethnos, 8, 30, 104, 146, of the worlding world, 174
154 Faith, 8, 104
ethicized. See Ethics/ethical: and ethnic, and map/mapping, 156
permutations of transgressed, 167
index • 231
Falling Man (DeLillo), 125 and planetarism, 149–154

Fantastic (the), 113 of planetarity, 149
Ferguson, Frances, 45 Geocriticism, 46
Fine, Robert, 42, 99 Geoculture/geocultural, 5, 58, 79, 85
Flaubert, Gustave, 128, 131, 132, 133–134, changes, 103
136 dominant, 89
Madame Bovary, 134 imagination, 127
Florea, Adrian, 103 interpretation, 10
Foer, Jonathan Safran, 125, 154, 174 logic, 6
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 125 methodology, 5 (see also Geomethodol-
Forster, E. M., 140–151 passim ogy)
Howards End, 140–151 passim planetary, 63, 86
“Fortunate Traveller, The” (Walcott), 24 and planetarity, 89
Foucault, Michel, 60, 89, 138 and spatialization, 96
Fractal(s), 6, 72, 90, 105, 106, 111, 156 Geodesy, 83
See also Map/mapping: fractal Geoeconomics, 13
France, 130, 131 Geography/geographical, 83, 84, 95
Frankfurt, 158 as geo-graphy. See Planetarism
French Empire, 158 of the mind, 96
French Revolution, 36 postmodern, 117
Freud, Sigmund, 123, 135–140 passim urban, 117
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 136 Geohistory/geohistorical, 90
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 46, 72 Geoinstitutional, 102
Friedman, Thomas L., 38, 39, 66, 89 Geolocation. See Geopositioning
Friedrich, Caspar David, 177 Geology, 83
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 177 Geometry, 83
Geomethodology, 5, 10, 170, 179, 181
Gagarin, Yuri, 180 culturalist, 69–70
Gaia, 40 and/of planetarism, 69–70, 87–112
Gasché, Rodolphe, 84 and epistemology, 14
Gauripur, 174 and ethics. See Ethics
Gaza, 3 and Levinas, 179
Geertz, Clifford, 110 and planetarism versus globalism,
Gender, 8, 104 64
and map/mapping, 156 and post-Cold War era, 112
and other. See Other: and gender and relationality, 87–88
and place, 142–143 as reverse engineering, 88 (see also
Generation of the 1980s, 120 Reading: of cultures’ “fine print”/of
Genette, Gérard, 142 planetary encryptions/of relation-
Genre, 12 ality)
planetary/and planetary poetics, 13, 72 and space/spatialization/territory/to-
and world-systems, 45 pology, 87–93
Geoaesthetic(s), 13, 126, 153 See also Reading
commons, 64 Geoontology/geoontological, 15, 91
and geoethics, 13 Geophilosophy/geophilosophical, 84–
order, 93, 96 85
and other, 149 (see also Other: and Geophysics/geophysical, 84
beauty/aesthetics) shifts, 89
232 • index
Geopolitics/geopolitical, 3, 13, 113, 157 studies, 49 (see also Planetary: studies:

adversarial/disjunctive, 21 versus global studies)
of affect/emotion. See Affect/emotion: turn in humanities, 28
geopolitics of Globalism, 6, 11, 28, 32
and center(ed), 61 as cosa mentale, 32
crisis, 3 and homogenization/homogeneity, 104
criticism, 46 instrumental rationality of, 79
and Earth. See Earth: and geopolitics/ and modernism, postmodernism, 32
geopolitical Globalist theory/global studies, 11
imaginary. See Imaginary: geopolitical critique of, 10
intersectional, 158 and planetary terminology, 40
and mapping, 68 and planetary reworlding, 11
and planetary, 65 Globality, 31
and identity, 66 and totality/totalist rhetoric, 31
shifts, 7, 85, 100, 103 versus planetary topological meta-
See also Cold War phors, 105
Geopositioning, 95 and (totalist) ideology, 92
and planetary imagination/planetarism, See also Totalism
154–158 passim Globalization, 11, 32–35, 41
and post-Cold War fiction, 154 as complete/incomplete project, 31–32
and reading/interpretation/criticism, and debt. See Debt/indebtedness
102, 118, 153 discourse of/discursive-rhetorical, 28,
Geoscopy, 20 49
Geosocialization, 90 epistemology of. See Epistemology: and
and place, 90 global/globalization
Geothematics. See Planetarism: themes of as historical development, 32–33
German Empire, 150 and modernity, 34
Germany, 144, 158, 159 and/of post-Cold War era/late global-
Gesture Life, A (Lee), 125 ization, 11, 24, 60
Giddens, Anthony, 31 of postmodern/postmodernism. See
Gikandi, Simon, 62 Postmodern/postmodernism: glo-
Giles, Paul, 46, 99 balization of, 89
Gilroy, Paul, 45, 46, 48, 49, 151, 169 rhetorical, of the world, 24–26, 34, 83
Gimme the Money (Pekárkova), 154 strong/thick/late, 35
Ginsberg, Allen, 122 totalist, 33, 51
Girard, René, 133 Globalized, 31–32
Glissant, Edouard, 156 as fait accompli, 31
Discours antillais, Le, 156 Globalizing, 31–32
Global versus planetarizing, 31
age, 28, 35–36, 43 Globe, 11, 28
post-1989, 35–36 and Earth, 29 (see also Earth: and globe)
and United States, 36 lexical family/terminology, 28
and local, dynamic of, 30–31, 104 critique of, 28–36
and multiplicity, 30 in Wallerstein, 40
ontology, 50 rhetoric of. See Globalization: rhetori-
and the planetary project, 50 cal, of the world
paradigm, 31–36 as rationalization of relationality, 30, 50
and reading. See Reading: and global and totalization, 29–30
index • 233
and world, 29–30 History of Love, The (Krauss), 125

Glocalization, 31, 104 Hjelmslev, Louis, 66
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 15, 54, Hoffmann, E. T. A., 113
75, 119, 146 Hogue, W. Lawrence, 72
Gogol, Nikolai, 128, 131, 132 Holder of the World, The (Mukherjee), 125
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 27 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 162
Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 121, 179 Hollinger, David, 45, 89, 118
Great Gatsby, The (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Holocaust, 122
170 and Communism, 122
Guattari, Félix, 40, 53, 83, 85–86, 94, 176, “Hombre Planetario” (Andrade), 24
178 Houellebecq, Michel, 89, 125, 154, 174, 176
Guest/host. See Self: and other: and Carte et le territoire, La, 126, 176
guest/host Particules élémentaires, Les, 125
Gulag, 41 Plateforme, 126
Chinese, 127, 131. See also laogai Possibilité d’une île, La, 126
House of Day, House of Night (Tokarc-
Haiti, 7 zuk), 154
Hamid, Mohsin, 89, 99, 114, 154, 174, 176 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Ha-
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising mid), 99
Asia, 99, 154 How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Reluctant Fundamentalist, The, 154 (Stanišić), 154
Harare North (Chickwava), 126 Howards End (Forster), 140–151 passim
Hardt, Michael, 45, 48, 89 Hoxha, Enver, 131
Harvey, David, 4, 58, 89, 90, 179 Huang, Yunte, 46
Hassan, Ihab, 58 Hugo, Victor, 128, 138
Hayot, Eric, 12, 45, 46 Huis clos (Sartre), 149–150
Heaney, Seamus, 24 Human (the), 36
“Alphabets,” 24 and debt, 107–108
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 163 and nation-state/national paradigm, 102
“Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” (Levinas), and relationality, 36–37, 179 (see also Re-
179 lationality: and human)
Heidegger, Martin, 14, 53, 92, 94, 179 Humanism/humanists, 44, 181
and Being, 85 Humanities, 3, 15, 22, 28, 33, 44, 47, 56, 59,
and turn of. See Turn: and Being 77, 89
Bestand, 51 and nation-state, 103
distance, 92 and topological metaphors, 105
and Levinas, 179 “Human Moments in World War III”
Sein und Zeit, 36 (DeLillo), 175
and technology, 14 Hutcheon, Linda, 58
and worlding, 22 Hypermodernism, 73
See also Dasein
Heise, Ursula K., 8, 45, 46, 56, 58, 89 Identity, 3, 6
Held, David, 24 de/-re-territorialization of, 104
Hemon, Alexandar, 87, 125, 154 and geopolitics, 66
Nowhere Man, 125 (in)authenticity of, 67
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 146 and derivation, 67
Hirst, Paul Q., 33 and space/spatialization, 67
histoire croisée, 13, 105, 111 and nation-state, 103
234 • index
Identity (continued) Jameson, Fredric, 22, 36, 46, 58, 68, 76, 89
offshoring of, 109–110 Japan, 7
and relationality, 66 Jarvis, Brian, 89
Imaginary, 24 Jay, Paul, 46
cultural, 102 Jazeel, Tariq, 46, 118
geopolitical, 102 Jean-Christophe (Rolland), 130–131
in Cărtărescu, 113–114 Jen, Gish, 125, 175
hermeneutic, 102 World and Town, 125
planetary, 24, 67, 75, 115, 117, 120 (see also Jowitt, Ken, 27
Planetarism) Joyce, James, 132
after 1989, 24, 27 Jurisdiction. See Sovereignty
netospherical, 69
(w)holistic, 120 Kabbalah/Kabbalistic, 114, 115, 117
and worldly relationality, 100 Kafka, Franz, 113, 120, 121, 151
translational, 139 Kairós, 125
Indigenous/indigeneity, 94 See also World: worlding: and time/kai-
and planetary reading, 95 (see also rós; Planetarization: and time/kai-
Reading: indigenous/indigeneity) rós
Interconnectedness, 3, 7 Kars, 154–158, 174, 181
after 1989, 27 Kellner, Douglass, 58
and culture, 64 Kilcup, Karen L., 8
and debt. See Debt/indebtedness: and Kincaid, Jamaica, 113
interconnectedness A Small Place, 113
and fragment. See Ethics/ethical: and Konrád, George, 112
aesthetics: and fragment Krauss, Nicole, 125, 154
and globalization, 24, 43 History of Love, The, 125
and hyperconnected, 91 Kumar, Amitava, 72
logic of, 36, 79 Kundera, Milan, 149, 151, 152
and planetarity, 24 Kunzru, Hari, 126, 176
and race/racial. See Race/racial: and Transmission, 126
communal/interconnectedness Kurd/Kurdish, 154–158 passim
in Smith, 140 Kureishi, Hanif, 141, 154
See also Planetary: poetics: intertex-
tual Lacan, Jacques, 107, 133, 135, 136, 138, 163
Interconnectivity. See Interconnectedness Laclau, Ernesto, 61
Internationalism, 44 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 125, 154
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 27 Namesake, The, 125
Internet, 27, 71–72, 169 Lahore, 174
Iran, 72, 154 Lang, Michael, 179
Irr, Caren, 46, 72 Language, 30, 37, 50, 67, 106, 137–141, 154
Islam, 70, 158 indigenous, 103
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 155 and other, 137–140
Islamism, 154, 157 Laogai, 41, 126, 137
Istanbul, 154 Laojiao, 126, 128, 138
Iyer, Pico, 38, 39, 87, 89 worlding of, 133
Larsen, Svend Erik, 99
James, C. L. R., 168–171 Lebanon, 158–168 passim, 177
Beyond a Boundary, 168–171 Lee, Chang-rae, 125, 175
index • 235
Aloft, 125, 175 See Reading: of cultures’ “fine

Gesture Life, A, 125 print”/of planetary encryptions/of
Native Speaker, 125 relationality/as cultural decom-
On Such a Full Sea, 125 pression
Surrendered, The, 125, 175 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 134
Lefebvre, Henri, 85, 89, 92 Magical realism, 113, 121
Letting Go (Roth), 21 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 105
Let the Great World Spin (McCann), 125 Mandelstam, Osip, 113
Levander, Caroline Field, 46 Manifesto, 2, 4
Levant, 158 Manning, Susan, 46
Levinas, Emmanuel, 14, 15, 79, 107, 114, Mao, Zedong/Maoism, 127–140 passim
153, 179 Little Red Book, The, 128
“Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” 179 Map/mapping, 13, 84, 105
Levine, Robert S., 46 of affect/affective, 68, 156
Libération, 166 cognitive, 68, 76, 117, 167
“Library of Babel, The” (Borges), 116 of planetarism, 69, 117
Limit, 3 epistemology of, 68
Little Red Book, The (Mao Zedong), 128 and ethnicity. See Ethnic/ethnicity/eth-
Local, 104 nos: and map/mapping
and global. See Global: and local, dy- and faith. See Faith: and maps/mapping
namic of fractal, 111, 156
Location, 3 and gender. See Gender: and map/map-
London, 150, 174 ping
Los Angeles, 117 global, 78
Lost Illusions (Balzac), 132 and nation(al)/nation-state, 103, 156–157
Louisiana, 124 and Nomos, 100
Lyotard, Jean-François, 58 official versus intellectual-affective, 13,
156
Maalouf, Amin, 27, 74 planetary, 54, 96, 100
MacCabe, Colin, 76 and cultural debt, 110
Macro/micro, 30, 93, 115, 120, 124–125, 141, and postmodern, 54, 89
171, 175–177 and rationality, 78
dialectical ontology of, 176 remapping, 82
and global, 30 and world-system, 68
and geomethodology, 45, 118 Márquez, Gabriel García, 113, 121
infinite/infinitesimal, 80–82, 178 Marseille, 134
and place, 118 Marxism, 57, 60
and planetary/planetarity, 80 Massey, D., 118
politics of. See Politics: and macro/mi- Matrix, The, 68
cro McCann, Colum, 72, 125, 175, 176
and reading, 97, 156 Let the Great World Spin, 125
and territory. See Territory: and macro/ TransAtlantic, 125
micro McElroy, Joseph, 176
See also Macroscopic/microscopic; Tele- Plus, 176
scope/telescopy McEwan, Ian, 22, 114, 126, 151, 170, 174,
Macroscopic/microscopic, 80, 82, 93–112 126, 151, 170, 174
passim, 175–177 Black Dogs, 126
and (critical/cultural decompression). Children Act, The, 126, 170
236 • index
McEwan, Ian (continued) Mr. Muo’s Travelling Couch, 126, 134–

Saturday, 126, 170 140
Solar, 126 Mukherjee, Bharati, 13, 38, 125, 174
Sweet Tooth, 22 Desirable Daughters, 125
McHale, Brian, 58 Holder of the World, The, 125
Medovoi, Leerom, 46 Miss New India, 125
Melville, Herman, 131 Tree Bride, The, 13, 38
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 53 Multiculturalism, 40
Mestizaje, 121 Multitude(s), 87
Metamodernism, 73 Muşina, Alexandru, 126, 154, 174
“Metamorphosen des Heidenrösleins” Nepotul lui Dracula, 126
(Tawada), 7
Methodology, 3 Namesake, The (Lahiri), 125
nationalist-territorialist, 3, 100 (see also Nancy, Jean-Luc, 52, 89
Nationalism: methodological) Nation
planetarized, 3 (see also Geomethodol- national culture, 100
ogy) and planetary poetics. See Plane-
Miller, J. Hillis, 147, 148, 153 tary: poetics: and national
Ministry of Pain, The (Ugrešić), 126 (culture)
Miss New India (Mukherjee), 125 nation-state, 3, 30, 61
Mitchell, David, 72, 126 as aggregation/analysis unit, 101,
Cloud Atlas, 126 103
Miteinandersein, 36 and Cold War, 26
Miyoshi, Masao, 42–45, 89 and community. See Community:
Modern, 61 and nation-state
Modernism, 21 as (geo)cultural apparatus, 101, 102
and Cold War. See Cold War and epistemology. See Epistemol-
global, 45 ogy: epistemological national-
late, 21 ism
period of, 61 and globalization, 43
planetarized, 21 and (the) human. See Human (the):
and relationality. See Relationality: and and nation-state/national par-
modernism adigm
Modernity, 41 and identity formation. See Iden-
disassociative logic of, 36 tity: and nation-state
en miettes, 91 law of, 165
epistemology of, 102 and map/mapping. See Map/map-
institutions of, 102 ping: and nation(al)/nation-
and space. See Space: and modernity state
and (national) territorialization, 102– and planet, 63
103 and planetary culture, 67
Western, 101 and planetary reading. See Reading:
Molina, Antonio Muñoz, 99 planetary: and nation-state
Mondialization/mondialisation, 36, 52, 117 and space/territory. See Spatiality:
Mondialité, 52, 85, 97 and nation-state/national/
Moretti, Franco, 45, 46, 72, 89, 106 statal
Moya, Paula M. L., 46 and territorialization. See Relation-
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 130 ality: and nation-state
index • 237
and tradition. See Tradition: and and distance, 37–38

nation-state ethical resetting of, 51, 141 (see also Ne-
and other. See Other: and nation thosphere)
and postcolonial, 62 and Face/figure, 77, 79
and scale. See Scale: and nation-state and globalization/planetarization, 37
weakening of, 3, 62 netospherical, 37, 50
National literature, 98 and earth, 83
and distance, 97–98 and planetary, 50, 56, 79
National Security Agency (NSA), 72 post-Cold War, 60, 92
Nationalism, 13 and worlding. See World: worlding:
anti-neoliberal, 24, 25, 49 netospherical
epistemological. See Epistemology: and relationality, 37
epistemological nationalism rise of, 145
German, 146 Network, 13
methodological, 98–102 imperial, 150
versus methodological cosmopoli- world culture of, 13
tanism. See Cosmopolitanism: New comparatism, 45
methodological: versus meth- New Critics, 97
odological nationalism New England, 150
and methodological glocalism, New York City, 174, 175, 176
104 Nicolescu, Basarab, 40
Native Speaker (Lee), 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101–103, 177
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Beyond Good and Evil, 177
(NATO), 154 Untimely Meditations, 101–102
Nazism, 41, 127, 162 Nomos, 100
Near-Middle East, 158 global, 104
Neef, Sonja A. J., 45, 93, 94 and nation, 100
Negri, Antonio, 45, 48, 61, 89, 96 planetary, 153
Nemours, 130 as with-being, 153
Neoliberalism, 27, 45 remapped. See Map/mapping: and No-
post-, 120 mos
in Wallerstein, 40 and space, 100
Neorealism, 121 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
Nepotul lui Dracula (Muşina), 126 27
Netherland (O’Neill), 7, 125, 168–179 North America, 6
Netherlands, 124 North American Free Trade Agreement
Nethosphere (NAFTA), 27
as ethicized netosphere, 51 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
nethospherical, 51 (NATO), 27
and geomethodology, 88, 92 Nostalgia (Cărtărescu), 112–118
imaginings, 71 Novalis (Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von
versus netospherical, 55, 58, 60, 63, Hardenberg), 146
79, 92, 149 Nowhere Man (Hemon), 125
and literature, 75 NW (Smith), 126, 141
post-Cold War, 92
and world relationality, 51 On Beauty (Smith), 126, 140–151
See also Netosphere Ondaatje, Michael, 83, 125
Netosphere, 21, 37 English Patient, The, 125
238 • index
O’Neill, Joseph, 7, 59, 89, 99, 125, 168–177 and world, 181
Dog, The, 125 Ottoman (Empire), 157, 158
Netherland, 7, 125, 168–177 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid, 46
On Such a Full Sea (Lee), 125
Ontology Pain, Kathy, 33
and aesthetics, 160, 162 Palestinian, 158–162 passim
comparative, 106, 115–116 Pamuk, Orhan, 89, 126, 154–158
contemporary. See Contemporary: on- Snow, 126, 154–158, 159
tology of Panic in a Suitcase (Akhtiorskaya), 154
cultural, 71 Paris, 134, 158, 159, 174
and planetarization, 71 Parker, Michael, 126, 180
and debt, 107–108 (see also Debt/indebt- Watery Part of the World, The, 126, 180
edness) Particules élémentaires, Les (Houelle-
ontosemiotics, 94 becq), 125
planetary/worlded or ontosyntax, 22, Par une nuit où la lune ne s’est pas levée
44, 53, 90, 91 (Dai), 137
and politics. See Politics: and ontology Pascal, Blaise, 89
and relation, 36, 44, 115 Pensées, 89
after 1989, 36 Paul, Jean (Johann Paul Friedrich Rich-
and space/onto-topological/territory/ ter), 146
territorialization. See Space: and Paul of Tarsus, Saint, 120
ontology: onto-topological Pavić, Milorad, 54
of world, 79 Pekárkova, Iva, 154
Ontoscopy. See Ethoscopy Gimme the Money, 154
Open City (Cole), 125 Pensées (Pascal), 89
Ortega, Julio, 46 Perec, Georges, 54
Other, 8, 114 Père Goriot (Balzac), 129
and beauty/aesthetics, 149–154 Periodization, 62
and care, 149–154 of modernity/postmodernity/cosmo-
and class, 148 dernity/planetarity, 61–62
and cultural allergy, 116, 143 Perloff, Marjorie, 7
and culture, 100 Phillips, Anne, 40
and debt, 107–110 Pizer, John, 45
and Face/figure. See Face/figure: and Place, 3
other and cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism.
and gender, 148 See Cosmopolitanism: and place
geocultural, 8, 106 and culture, 6–7, 9
and language. See Language: and other and Earth. See Earth: as place
and nation, 148 and ethics/planetarized, 180–181
self-other nexus, management of, 91 and gender. See Gender: and place
in Sartre. See Self: and other: in Sar- and geosocialization. See Geosocializa-
tre tion: and place
and shelter, 149–154 and humanity, 3
See also Self and in-betweenness, 179
Otherness, 44 or location, reterritorialized as plane-
and Aleph. See Aleph(ic): and otherness tary site, 56
and planetarity, 44–45, 52, 181 and macro/micro. See Macro/micro:
and relationality, 45, 91 and place
index • 239
place-bound, 95–96 and face/facing. See Face/figure: facing

and planetarity, 114, 117–118 the planet
and reading. See Reading: and place/ and geoaesthetics. See Geoaesthetic(s):
and place-bound and planetarism
and relationality, 96, 118 (see also Com- as geo-graphy, 104
munity) and globalism, 69
and withness(ing), 142 and planet’s face/figure, 79
See also Space; Spatiality; Spatialization as imaginary/imagining protocol, 9, 64
Planet, 5, 11, 119 (see also Imaginary)
collocational principle of, 153 as counter-imagination, 15
and cosmos, 41 as materialism, 64
as cosmo-theological and mystic- and netospherical/nethospherical. See
esoteric concept, 40 Nethosphere: nethospherical: ver-
defined, 8 sus netospherical
as context/object/episteme, 65 and ontology, 68
as geocultural matrix, 8, 9, 59, 85 and planetarity, 9
as opposed to globe, 51 as alternatives to globalization, 25,
and debt. See Debt/indebtedness 28, 47
and Earth. See Earth: and planet and planetary age. See Planetary: age
and environment/environmentalism, and poetics. See Planetary: poetics
8 and politics, 67–69, 115, 153
and globe, 40, 53 as post-postmodernism, 73
and local, 12 (see also Place: and plane- primal scene of, 70, 79, 94
tarity; Planetarity: in situ/pars pro as reworlding, 11, 25, 48, 69–70, 91
toto/synecdoche) (see also World: reworlded/re-
versus nation-state. See Nation: nation- worlding)
state: and planet rise of, 10
as non-totalist totality. See Totality and Romanticism. See Romantic/Ro-
ontology of, 9 manticism: and planetarism
and ethical infrastructure of, 51 in Smith, 149
as relational space, 63 themes of, 70–7 1
as unit of world-writing and world- and tradition. See Tradition
reading, 8 and worlding, 25
and world, 53 Planetarity, 6, 58–60, 79, 110
as world-system, 52–53, 80 cognitive, 73
See also Face/figure; Turn community/communality of, 167–173,
Planetarism, 2, 11, 63–70, 82 180–181
and aesthetics, 149–154 as cultural production/interpretation/
and cosmodernism, 6, 90 (master) framework, 60, 73
and cultural imperialism, 6 cultural symptoms of, 48
and culture, 15, 62–70 descriptive versus normative, 59, 91
descriptive versus normative/prescrip- and episteme/epistemology. See Episte-
tive, 9 mology: planetary
and Earth, 41 geoaesthetic(s) of. See: Geoaesthetic(s)
epistemological. See Epistemology: of planetarity
planetary geocultural. See Geoculture
ethos of. See Ethics: of planetarism as incomplete project. See Planetariza-
as event, 70, 73, 82–83 tion: incomplete
240 • index
Planetarity (continued) in United States, 62

in situ/pars pro toto/synecdoche 112, 114, and center, 61, 104
115, 120 circulation/dissemination, 119
material, 73 commons. See World: commons
and modernism, 22 community/communality. See Planetar-
as netospherical formation, 50 (see ity: community/communality of
also Netosphere: netospherical: consciousness/awareness/mind-set/
and planetary) forma mentis, 20, 53, 86, 167
ontological/ontology of/world condi- condition, 58–60
tion of, 8, 50, 60, 73, 145 (see also and (post)postcolonialism, 61–62
Ontology) and (post)postmodernism, 61–62
optics of. See Face/figure; Telescope/ and space, 91
telescopy counter-images/counterdiscourse, 4
and postcolonialism, 61–62 as relationalization of rationality,
and postmodernism, 61–62 51–52
and relationality, 47, 50, 54, 66, 74 critic/criticism, 39, 46, 65, 76, 178–181
and State, 85 and cosmopolitanism, 82
and totality. See Totality: and planetarity as culturalism, 65–66, 68, 69–70
as world theory, 34 (see also Planetarism)
Planetarization, 6, 56–63, 65–66 and debt, 106–107, 139
and Americanization, 66 versus economism, 68–69
and cosmodernization, 6 and ethics. See Ethics: of reading
cultural, 67 as geopositioning. See Geoposition-
of critical terminology, 12 ing: and reading/interpreta-
and culture, 65 tion/criticism
and transculturation, 71, 74 as neo-historicism, 111
as ethical (re)worlding, 56, 60 (see also and new cosmopolitanism, 111
World: reworlded/reworlding; and place, 118
worlded; worlding) and post-1989/post-Cold War, 111
incomplete, 57, 74 (see also Cold War: post-Cold
and ontology. See Ontology War era: planetary)
and place, 180–181 as worlding imagination, 153
and de-/re-/trans-/territorialization. See and worldliness, 119 (see also
Territorialization Worldliness)
and time/kairós, 125 cultural dominant, 59
and withness(ing). See World: with- cultural symptomatology, 9
world: withness(ing) culture, 62–67
Planetary, 2 netospherical imaginary of. See
aesthetics/mimesis, 20–21, 149–154 pas- Imaginary
sim double bind/association with
age, 12, 13, 47, 57, 60–63, 83 global(ization), 47–48
and alterity/other/otherness, 107 ethoscopy. See Ethoscopy
and culture, 62–67 genre/literary form. See Genre
and discourse, 66 idiography/ideography, 69
and identity, 66 (see also Identity) imaginary. See Imaginary; Planetarism
periodization of, 61–63 model/dimension of culture, 2, 9
and planetarism, 60 and netosphere/nethosphere. See Neto-
as postglobal, 47 sphere; Nethosphere
index • 241
nomos. See Nomos: planetary and ethics, 14

and other(ness). See Other; Otherness of macro/micro, 118–119
paradigm, 5, 10, 38, 48, 55–67, 110 and ontology, 115
emancipated from global(ization), re-/trans-territorialized, 165
47 Possibilité d’une île, La (Houellebecq),
as global subcategory, 28 126
shift/turn to, 42–43, 46–47 Postcolonialism/postcolonial studies,
poetics, 63, 70–73, 75 45
and intermedia(lity), 71–72 and center/decentering, 61
intertextual, 71, 74–75, 126 and coloniality, 110
and national (culture), 100 and cultural-epistemological paradigm
and originality, 109 of, 62
and postmodernism ,71 and disjunctive logic, 110
prosopopoeial, 78 (see also Proso- and literature, 154
popoeia) and nation-state. See Nation: nation-
and transculturation, 71 state: and postcolonial
in statu nascendi, 59 and planetary-era authors, 99
and postcolonial, 10 Poster, Mark, 46, 62
reading model, 10, 12 (see also Reading) Posthumanism, 84
and shelter, 149 Postmodern/postmodernism, 5, 60, 113,
spatialization. See Spatialization: plane- 121
tary American, 121
stewardship. See Reading: for: as critical and Cold War, 60, 89
stewardship post-Cold War, after 1989, 89
studies, 24, 38, 42, 45 and globalization of, 89
cultural, 106 overhauled, 61
versus global studies, 24, 44–45, 50 period of, 61
stylistics, 71 and planetary poetics. See Planetary:
(supra-)unit of writing/analysis, 20 poetics
terminology, 11–12, 40 postmodern condition, 58
versus globalization terminology, post-postmodernism, 62, 90 (See also
24 Contemporary/contemporaneity;
theory, 106 Planetarism)
and cultural theory, 106 and relationality. See Relationality: and
thinking/thought: 45, 47, 48, 49, 84, 86, postmodernism
87, 97 and space. See Space: and postmodern/
vision/worldview, 13, 22 postmodernism
and worlding. See World: reworlded/re- Postmodernity, 60, 89
worlding: and planetarity and Cold War, 60
writer, 151, 174 Postnational(ism), 61
See also Face/figure Powers, Richard, 176
“Planet on the Table, The” (Stevens), 19, Pratt, Mary Louise, 46, 70
24 “Prologue at Sixty” (Auden), 24
Plateforme (Houellebecq), 126 Prosopopoeia, 78, 80, 81,100, 104, 120, 171,
Plus (McElroy), 176 173
Point Omega (DeLillo), 125 anti-prosopopoeia, 83
Politics, 4 See also Face/face
and aesthetics, 149–154 passim Proust, Marcel, 120, 122
242 • index
Psychoanalysis, 135–140 passim and responsibility, 181

and Communism, 135–136 fractal, 115
and geopsychoanalysis, 136 and global, 99
Pynchon, Thomas, 2, 22, 54, 60, 72, 113, and indigenous/indigeneity, 95
114, 117, 120, 121, 175, 176 (for the) nethospherical, 75
Against the Day, 175 and place/and place-bound, 95
Crying of Lot 49, The, 117 planetary, 11, 48, 75, 82, 87–88, 99
Gravity’s Rainbow, 121, 179 and globe/globalist rhetoric, 93
homologous to worlding world,
Quatrième mur, Le (Chalandon), 126, 106
158–168 inherently comparative, 106
and nation-state, 99–100
Race/Racial, 8, 30, 99, 104, 154 and politics, 15
and communal/interconnectedness, 151 and rationalization/relationaliza-
and nation-state, 103 tion, 93
and reading, 99 and world, 13, 171
Ramazani, Jahan, 24, 49, 72, 178, 179 and race/racial. See: Race/racial: and
Rancière, Jacques, 14, 15 reading
Ransom, John Crowe, 19 and scale. See Scale: and reading
Rapaport, Herman, 52 and spatialization, 75, 95
Raulet, Gérard, 40 and territory/de-/re-territorialization,
Reading, 5 98–104
allegorical versus post-allegorical, 99 and togetherness, 95
close, 93, 96–97 with (the planet), 5, 10, 14, 88
comparative/and comparative literature, antitotalist, 82
12, 93, 106, 111 versus for (the planet),181
and asymmetric/different/immea- and nation-state (territory)/nation-
surable/incalculable, 93, 110 alism/state-centrism, 98–104
and planetary. See Reading: plane- as planetary interpretation, 10
tary and world-system, 75
rebirth of, 110 See also Face/figure: of the planet: read-
as (critical) telescopy. See Macro/micro; ing of
Telescope/telescopy: and reading Real (the), 68
of cultures’ “fine print”/of planetary en- Realism, 131
cryptions/of relationality/as de- Reformed Church, 102, 103
compression, 12, 15, 82, 87–88, 92, Relatedness. See Relationality
94–97, 104–105, 110, 118, 170, 171, Relation. See Relationality
173, 177 (see also Totality: and plan- Relational, 11. See also World: worlded;
etarity: and totum/all; Aleph[ic]) World: worlding
distant: 93, 94, 96 Relationality, 11, 66
and economics, 99 authentic, 139
en filigrane, 110, 171 awareness of, 167
ethics of. See Ethics and Cold War, 23
and ethnic(icity). See Ethnic/ethnicity/ and community. See Community: and
ethnos: and reading relationality
for, 5, 10, 14, 88 and dialogical/dialogism, 52
as critical stewardship, 10, 14, 88, and ethics. See Ethics: and relationality
176–181 and ethnocentrism, 164
index • 243
and geomethodology. See Geomethod- German, 145

ology neo-Romantic, 21
geophenomenological, 15 and planetarism, 145–146
and human, 36–37 sublime, 177
and identity. See Identity and distance, 177
and/as kin/kind/kinship, 74 and worldedness, 146
afforded by the alien, 109, 139 Roots, 7, 179
chiasmic/and chiasmus. See Spatial- and cross-pollination, 141, 179
ity: chiasmic/and chiasmus and routes, 7
and consanguinity, 164 Roth, Philip, 21–22
and death, 164 Letting Go, 21
distant/remote, 97, 109 Routledge, Paul, 46
and familiar/familial, 109, 139 Rushdie, Salman, 141
in planetarity, 74 Russia, 3, 72
and territory/de-/re- Russian Empire, 158
territorialization, 165 Russian Debutante’s Handbook, The
transgressed, 167 (Shteyngart), 125
worlded model of, 146
management of, 11, 50 Sade, Marquis de, 135
and modernism, 23 Saldivar, Ramón, 46
and nation-state, 164–165 Saramango, José, 120
and place. See Place: and relationality Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, 120
and planet/planetarity/planetary. See Sartre, Jean-Paul, 149–150
Planetarity: and relationality Huis clos, 149–150
post-Cold War, 23, 36 Saturday (McEwan), 126
and postmodernism, 23 Scale, 3, 29, 56, 74, 80, 91, 105, 110
spatialization of. See Spatialization: of and epistemology, 102
relation global, 48
technical-economic approach to, 38 and nation-state, 99–100, 102, 111
territorialized. See Territorialization: of planetary, 20, 156
relation and reading, 99
tradition of, 146 and planetary 111
and worlding, 23–24 and politics, 99
worldly, 97 world, 24, 27, 40, 57, 61, 75, 91
and world-system. See World-system See also Spatialization
See also Netosphere; Nethosphere Scarry, Elaine, 142, 152
Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid), Schedler, Christopher, 46
154 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
Renaissance, 79 146
Rigoulot, Pierre, 66 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 145–152
Robbins, Bruce, 57, 69, 82, 99 passim
Robertson, Roland, 31, 32, 104 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 145–152
Rolland, Romain, 128, 130–131, 132, 134 passim
Jean-Christophe, 130–131 Schmitt, Carl, 48, 92
Romania, 7, 112, 115 Schoene, Berthold, 72
Romantic/Romanticism, 131, 132 Schulz, Bruno, 121
and cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism, Sebald, W. G., 99
145 Sein und Zeit (Heidegger), 36
244 • index
Self, 90, 132 and planet, 44 (see also Spatiality)

as discrete unit, 141 and planetarism/planetary imaginary,
and other, 107–108 87
and debt, 107–110, 139–140 and relation, 63, 87–90
and guest/host, 153–154 and postmodern/postmodernism, 89–
in Lacan, 133 90
in Sartre, 149–150 and self. See Self
and space, 154 and tragedy, 161–162
and psychoanalysis, 136 Spatial, 15
and space, 90 co-presence, 91
unoriginal/derived/second-order, 140 imagination, 89
September 11, 2001, 168–173 passim planetarity, 56, 154
post-September 11, 2001, 5 poetics versus politics, 15
and fiction/novels, 13 Spatiality, 3
Sexuality, 104 chiasmic/and chiasmus, 163–166
Shteyngart, Gary, 125, 154 and relatedness, 163, 164
Absurdistan, 125 co-spatiality, 153–154, 157
Russian Debutante’s Handbook, The, 125 planetary, 154
Singer, Peter, 46 and nation-state/national/statal, 100,
Sloterdijk, Peter, 46 154 (see also Territorialization; Ter-
Smith, Zadie, 126, 140–154, 156 ritory)
Autograph Man, The, 141 territorialist metanarrative of, 110
NW, 126, 141 world, 100
On Beauty, 126, 140–151 topocultural centers/decentering of,
White Teeth, 126, 141 101, 103–104
Snow (Pamuk), 126, 154–158, 159 worlded, 91
Socialist realism, 131 and toposophy, 113
Soja, Edward. W., 89, 117 Spatialization, 53, 67
Solar (McEwan), 126 of (ethical) relationality, 75
Song, Min Hyoung, 46, 48, 49, 56 and geocultural. See Geoculture/geocul-
Sophocles, 162 tural: and spatialization
Antigone, 162 large-scale, 91
South China Sea, 3 planetary, 92, 96, 154
Sovereignty, 3, 68, 87, 99 of relation, 115
and nation-state, 7 semiotic, 92
territorial, 71 and technology, 179–180
and relatedness, 163 of world, 91
Space, 44, 152 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 9, 12, 44–45,
and culture/topocultural, 91 47, 49, 58, 72, 93, 99, 110
deep, 56–57 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, 131
and ethics. See Ethics/ethical: and space Stanišić, Saša, 154
and geomethodology. See Geomethod- How the Soldier Repairs the Gramo-
ology: and space/spatialization/ phone, 154
territory/topology Steiner, George, 163
and modernity, 91 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 128
and ontology, 91 Stevens, Wallace, 19–24, 60
(and) onto-topological, 91, 102, 105 “Planet on the Table, The,” 19, 24
and topology, 114, 115 Stråth, Bo, 34
index • 245
Subjectivity, 10 of relation, 164–165

Surrendered, The (Lee), 125, 175 reterritorialization, 10, 56, 84–85,
Sussman, Henry, 8, 9 92
Sweet Tooth (McEwan), 22 of care/responsibility, 176
Symbolic (the), 68 of culture. See Culture: de-/re-
territorialization of
Tabbi, Joseph, 8 of identity. See Identity: de-/re-
Tally, Robert T. Jr., 46 territorialization of
Tawada, Yoko, 7 transterritorialization, 71, 88, 92, 94, 99,
“Metamorphosen des Heidenrösleins,” 165
7 underterritorialization, 84, 113
Taylor, Andrew, 46 See also Politics: re-/trans-territorialized
Technology, 179–181 Territory, 6
and ethics. See Ethics/ethical: and tech- and discourse, 6
nology and community, 6
and space/spatialization. See Spatializa- and identity, 6
tion: and technology and jurisdiction, 7
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 37, 40 linguistic/and language, 156
Telescope/telescopy, 15, 94–112 passim, and macro/micro, 176
132, 154–156, 175–181 passim and map, 68
critical, 106 and nation/nation-state/national, 156
and comparative. See Reading: and reading. See Reading: and territory/
comparative/and comparative de-/re-territorialization
literature redistribution of, 79
as thick description, 110 See also Nation: nation-state; Place;
and epistemology. See Telescope/teles- Space; Spatialization
copy: and epistemology Thebes, 164, 165, 166
and meaning-making, 92, 96 Thessaloniki, 164
and reading, 96 Thompson, Grahame, 33
scene, 15 Tiananmen, Square, 126, 134
and teleology, 94 Time/temporal, 3, 8, 10, 53, 56, 57, 60, 71,
See also Macro/micro; Macroscopic/mi- 72, 87, 90, 97, 103, 111, 117, 121, 122,
croscopic 124, 125, 138,155, 157
Territorial, 7 co-temporality, 157
and nation/nation-state. See Spatiality: respite, 167
and nation-state/national/statal Todorov, Tzvetan, 27
sovereignty. See Sovereignty: territorial Togetherness, 14, 167–169
and Communism/paranoia of, 113 and ethics, 15
territorialist, 110 new, 180
transterritorial, 71 planetary, 175–181 passim
and quotational, 71 (see also Plane- post-Cold War, 26
tary: poetics: intertextual) and reading. See Reading: and together-
Territorialization, 3, 92, 154 ness
deterritorialization, 10, 84–85, 113 in Smith, 141
as modernity, 102 and togethering. See World: worlding
and planetarization, 94 See also Being-with/being-in-relation
and reading. See Reading: and territory/ Tokarczuk, Olga, 154
de-/re-territorialization House of Day, House of Night, 154
246 • index
Totalism, 6 and new writing/reading, 86

and (globalist) ideology, 92 and postmodernity, 89
and planetarity, 54, 120 planetary/to the planet, 82, 85–86, 90
totalitarian, 115 See also Face/figure
and time, 125 Turnbull, Neil, 43
See also Globalization
Totalitarianism, 122 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 126, 154
Totality, 43–45, 49 Ministry of Pain, The, 126
and planetarity: 74, 80 Ukraine, 3
and totum/All, 112–126 passim (see Underworld (DeLillo), 125
also Aleph[ic]) United Kingdom, 143
“Total Library, The” (Borges), 116 United Nations, 27
Tradition, 7 United States, 3, 6, 9, 168–177 passim
biblical-Judaic, 121 and community/communality. See
horizontal (lateral)/vertical, 67, 74 Community
and nation-state, 103 exceptionalism, 170
anti-nationalist, 121 and global age/late globalization, 36
non-territorialist, 121 insularism, 170
and Romanian Communism, 113 literature of, 13
and planetarism, 73 and imperialism/influence ,13, 66
and intertextuality, 74–75 and planetary/world-relational
and posttraditionalism, 73–74 imagination, 23
posttraditional, 100, 104, 121 and planetarity, in, 62
Tragedy, 160–168 and world syntax, 90
and space/spatiality. See: Space: and Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche), 101–
tragedy 102
TransAtlantic (McCann), 125 Updike, John, 22, 66
Translation, 119 Ursule Mirouët (Balzac), 129, 131, 132, 136
and imaginary. See Imaginary: transla- USSR, 27, 36, 68, 113
tional
Translation studies, 45 Verdichtung, 88, 100
Transmission (Kunzru), 126 Verfremdungseffekt, 157
Transnational(ism), 3, 157 Verlaine, Paul, 138
after Cold War, 61 Verschiebung, 100
age, 3 Virilio, Paul, 94
and planetary epistemology. See Episte-
mology: planetary Wagner, Richard, 130
Traumdeutung, 131 Wakowski, Andy, 68
Tree Bride, The (Mukherjee), 13, 38 Wakowski, Lana, 68
Tsiolkas, Christos, 126 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 72
Dead Europe, 126 Walcott, Derek, 24
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 40 “Fortunate Traveller, The,” 24
Turkey, 72, 154–158 Wallace, David Foster, 54
See also Ottoman (Empire) Wallerstein, Immanuel, 27, 34–35, 40, 53,
Turn 57, 68, 69
and Being, 85 Wall Street, 107
planetary/of the planet, 5, 85–87, 89–90, Warnier, Jean-Pierre, 36, 65
176 Warsaw Pact, 27
index • 247
Watery Part of the World, The (Parker), withness(ing), 87

126, 180 and place. See Place: and
Wegner, Philip E., 72 withness(ing)
Weltliteratur, 54, 69, 75, 119 (see also and war, 165–166
World literature) world structure of, 180
West/Western, 6, 26, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 61, with-world, 15, 97
62, 90, 101, 103, 113, 128, 131, 136, 158, world-as-world, 11
179 and Cold War, 22
West Africa, 3 and post-Cold War, 120
Westphal, Bertrand, 46, 83, 89, 97, 171 and modernist aesthetics, 21–23
White Noise (DeLillo), 7 and planetary turn. See Turn: plan-
White Teeth (Smith), 126, 141 etary/of the planet
Wilson, Woodrow, 27 worlded, 14, 22, 23, 24
Windows on the World (Beigbeder), 1 as grand narrative, 14
Winkiel, Laura, 46 literature/culture of the planet, 14,
World, 3, 11 67, 144–145
commons, 56, 64, 153, 180 picture of/world picture, 92, 171
and co-presence, 125 as relational, 23
planetary (logic of), 100, 104 and space. See Spatiality: worlded
culture, 65 worlding, 14, 126
decentered, 3, 103–104 comparative, 106
demotikón versus panopticon, 176 of consciousness. See Planetary:
and earth. See Earth: world consciousness/awareness/
and globe, 11 mind-set/forma mentis
haptical, 22 and credit-debit nexus/indebted-
mapping of, 4 ness. See Debt/indebtedness:
versus one-world, 22, 56, 58 and worlding
and planet/planetarity/planetariza- and cricket/sports, 168–177 passim
tion, 63–64 of diaspora, 62
and planet. See Planet: world and face. See Face/figure
post-1989, 3 global versus planetary, 23, 60
pre-planetary, 54 hallmarks of, 91
and relationality, 11 in Heidegger, 91
as relational space, 24 of laojiao. See laojiao: worlding of
and/into/reset as planet, 6, 11, 50, 51 in modernism, 22
reworlded/reworlding, 11, 50 narrative, 25
and Berlin Wall, fall of/1989. See netospherical, 149
Berlin Wall: fall of/1989 and other(ness). See Otherness
nethospherical, 60, 141 picture of, 92, 102
ontology and intertextuality of, 50 and (planetary) imaginary, 24
and planetarism/planetarity, 60, 65, and planetary poetics/genre/form.
68, 71 See Planetary: poetics
unworlded, 26 and (planetary) thinking/thought.
in Wallerstein, 40 See Planetary: thinking/
webbed, 3 thought
Welt, 84, 91 and planetary turn. See Turn: plan-
Weltbild, 91, 179 etary/of the planet; planetary/
welten, 91 to the planet
248 • index
World (continued) Worldliness, 10

of polis, 166 and inside/outside, 171
of postmodern intertextuality, 67 of national literatures, 13
and relationality. See Relationality: partial, 57
and worlding and planetary critic/criticism. See Plan-
and telescopy. See Telescope/teles- etary: critic/criticism: and worldli-
copy ness
and time/kairós, 125 of underworld, 164–166
as togethering, 23 World literature, 13–14, 45
in Wallace Stevens, 21–23 circulation of, 75
and Wallerstein, 57–58 as worlded literature, 14
and wording/aesthetics, 22–24 World-system, 15
See also Heidegger, Martin: and and culture, 15
worlding and genre, 45
worldly, 14 and globalization, 34
otherness, 25 as grand narrative, 57
World and Town (Jen), 125 obsoleteness of, 57
World Bank, 27 and planet. See Planet: as world-system
Worldedness, 14, 24, 100 reading of. See Reading: and world-
and Cold War, 57 (see also Cold War) system
Forster, a model of, in Smith, 141–142 and relationality, 23
and/in literature, 111 World Trade Organization (WTO), 27
multi-worldedness versus one-world. Wutz, Michael, 8
See World: versus one-world
and post-Cold War, 72–73 (see also Cold xenia, 153
War: post-Cold War)
reimagined, 69 (see also World: re- Yugoslavia, 27
worlded/reworlding; Planetarism;
Planetarization) Zapf, Hubert, 8
rush toward, 22 Žižek, Slavoj, 37, 38, 39, 61, 68, 164

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What is the book about based on the passages?

What is the book about based on the passages?

What philosophical concepts are discussed in the passages?

What philosophical concepts are discussed in the passages?

Reading for the Planet

Reading for the Planet f

university of michigan press • ann arbor

Published in the United States of America by the

ISBN 978-­0-­472-­07279-­8 (cloth : alk. paper)

Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective,

Planetarity is not a threat[. I]t is an opportunity. It means leaving the

Prologue • A Well-­Tempered Manifesto 1

Part 1 • World, Globe, Planet 19

Part 2 • Geomethodology: Theory and Practice 77

Epilogue • Criticism as Planetary Stewardship 174

Both theoretically and historically-­culturally, literature furnishes the

§1. A Book with an Edge

‘Internationalism.’ Except that sounds too commie. . . . ‘Multilateralism’?

things, but also because extensive historical and theoretical expatiations, if

§2. Cosmodernism and the Planet

Building on these meanings, Reading for the Planet adds a fifth: as an

cal, economic, and epistemological sovereignty has been enforced by the

§3. Planetarism: History, the Cultural Imaginary,

tain figuring or imagining protocol: planetarism. The cultural imaginary of

under §13, in search of the postcolonial’s “beyond”; from extreme forms of

§4. Steps toward a Geomethodology: Brief Outline

globalization, global studies, and the latter’s “global” family vocabulary. By

strategically coalitional by buying into a single, clearly identified, and vastly

guished Americanist, widely recognized authority in postmodern and digi-

the University of Konstanz, and the University of Freiburg (Germany), the

The globe is not the world.

§5. Wording the World, Worlding the Word

It was not important that they survive.

Some affluence, if only half-­perceived,

rably to a modernist extreme, the rhetorical longitudes and latitudes of this

ple. A kind of moral isolationism.”4 This feeling of “feelinglessness” flies in

routine of the everyday.8 Compared to this worlded setup, Stevens’s world—­

§6. Post–­Cold War Globalization

and of modernity overall took a back seat to a worldly connectedness that

§7. “World” into “Globe”

the word’s etymology, geometry was already multiply symbolic. As most

as journey, complexity, and meaning, to where the world can be spatially,

globalization-­as-­homogenization) and its variety, dis-­localization (which,

§8. The Global Paradigm

To do so, however, globalization must be either de-­completed or, more

Globalism. In response to the “terminological quandary” evident in the in-

Globalization. If “globe” is a systemic, world totality and “globalism” the “vi-

darkly ambiguous and self-­contradictory, globalization is both structurally

“Global Age”: “Thick” or “Late” Globalization. Our worldly makeup is not

§9. The Rise of the Netosphere

spectacle of orchestrated intervals and charting vectors across and by which

§10. Planetary Studies

Responding to this provocation, planetary criticism brings us to a cross-

mic” rather than “discrete-­cultures” scheme (Multiculturalism without Cul-

sequently, what distinguishes overall post–­Cold War cosmopolitan criti-

As one can notice, the global is concurrently ascertained (as “environment”)

§11. “World” Reloaded

instantiations, did manage to speak against the dominant languages it had

§12. “Globe” into “Planet”

ISBN 978-0-472-07279-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

Prologue • A Well-Tempered Manifesto 1

Part 1 • World, Globe, Planet 19

Part 2 • Geomethodology: Theory and Practice 77

Epilogue • Criticism as Planetary Stewardship 174

Both theoretically and historically-culturally, literature furnishes the

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,

routine of the everyday.8 Compared to this worlded setup, Stevens’s world—

§6. Post–Cold War Globalization

globalization-as-homogenization) and its variety, dis-localization (which,

To do so, however, globalization must be either de-completed or, more

darkly ambiguous and self-contradictory, globalization is both structurally

mic” rather than “discrete-cultures” scheme (Multiculturalism without Cul-

sequently, what distinguishes overall post–Cold War cosmopolitan criti-

expressions—then another relational concept, and approach thereto, is re-

Planetary-Becoming, Planetarization, Planetarized. Spurred by such prac-

Planetarity and the “Planetary Condition.” What reaches quasi-planetary

planetarity, in a process that entailed not only the post-postmodernizing

of the more optimistic and ahead-looking assessments, a culture of sharing,

“worlding”—the intertextual poetics of postmodernity rather than com-

ontologically unhappy culturalism. World- transforming, it is a world-

the world and comporting in it; a whole gamut of time-space constriction

formally the sharp, post-1989 upswing in worldedness. They soak in,

pirouettes, swerves, and about-faces, marking how we shuffle around the

meaning—by national jurisdictions, nationalist mythologies, and attendant

broadly “with” there, and vice versa—geomethodology proceeds as a

of those “hiding” places where territory-bounded and culturally “clois-

topo-interpretive élans.44 But, as I have observed under §11 and in other

with these categories’ extension within the perimeter of the nation-state.73

stream of the Middle-Ages; it has thawed and is rushing on with devas-

generally “crossroads”—a “pointillist” point in space and time where the

i. This analytic procedure retains, first, the post-global, post-Euclidian,

“Humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other

bent—dwells on, cultural indebtedness, is neither “sinful” nor virtual.

result, the economy of my being is hardly self-sufficient, depending as

have “always-already” internalized—a literally vital exterior. Their realm

Orbitor (Blinding), a three-part narrative tour de force. Available in several

Amplifying exponentially across the post–Cold War novel, the macro-micro