Can you imagine us taking a vacation on the moon?

Can you see us going not to those ever so fond and familiar places, the ones we keep going to every year, or to one of those terrestrial lands we have long since promised ourselves we’d visit, but to an entirely different elsewhere marked by a weightlessness that, for a few memorable days or weeks, would turn us into veritablecosmopolitans—citizens of the cosmos?

We can dream about this cosmic exoticism. We can do so all the more inconsequentially given that this vacation would last a limited amount of...

The Twilight Zone, the television series that started in 1959 and was cut in 1964, was resuscitated in 1985 in color. And it’s in one of the episodes from the first new season that you will find the incredible story called “A Small Talent for War.” In French, this title was unfaithfully yet interestingly translated as “Risque de paix mondiale,” “the danger of world peace.”

The set for the episode “A Small Talent for War”—a fairly odd set, one must admit—is that of the United Nations in New York. The delegate from the Soviet Union and the delegate...

Kant, like many philosophers before him, believed in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, in a form of life superior to the one known to us as humans on the Earth. Starting with one of his first pieces of writing (Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,written in 1755 when he was twenty-one years old) all the way through one of the last (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,published in 1798, six years before his death), Kant, apparently without making it a major theme of his philosophy, will have regularly summoned inhabitants of other planets, inviting...

Where are we with it all?

Where do we come from and where are we going?

We have covered quite a bit of ground, starting with the discovery of the new earthly world as described by Carl Schmitt, which has led us to Kantian cosmopolitics as seen from the extraterrestrial perspective of the inhabitants of those other new worlds in the still unexplored stars of the cosmos that surrounds [entoure] us. Or rather thatetches us out[détoure], as one can say in the vocabulary of the digital treatment of images as a way of naming the action of delimiting...

“When you look at the stars at night, you get the impression deep down in your gut that you don’t know who you are, that you know more about what is going on out there than what is going on down here,” says Jay to Kay in the second part ofMen in Black(MIIB).¹

Maybe, after all, he’s right.

Or rather, as you suggested to me when you came to meet me one night: Our time and our orientation in space, here, on our Earth, is widely determined by what is weaving its way through the cosmos. You were...

These are the first words of a pamphlet whose original French title can be translated as “Cosmopolitans of All Lands, Yet Another Effort!”¹ For this certainly is a pamphlet, yes, at least in the somewhat archaic sense the term currently has in French, in other words, quite simply a piece of writing consisting of a very small number of pages. And this very little book—maybe the shortest of all those Derrida published—ends by citing “a certain idea of cosmopolitanism,an other,[that] has not yet arrived, perhaps,” or that “has perhaps not yet been recognized” (Derrida,On Cosmopolitanism,...