Dr. Erik Bormanis

My Dissertation

Belonging in Place: A Critical Account of Cosmopolitanism and its World(s)

Cosmopolitanism is generally understood to be the theory that we all belong to a universal moral community by virtue of our shared humanity and the shared space of the world. As such, it would seem to be uniquely poised to answer the challenges of contemporary politics, which have been increasingly characterized by the ascendent power of xenophobic affects and white nationalism. Given its universal aspirations, however, most theorists of cosmopolitanism understand it to be strictly opposed to forms of local community and belonging. I argue such an understanding is a conceptual and political mistake. Drawing upon a wide range of authors, such as Merleau-Ponty, Franz Fanon, María Lugones, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Iris Marion Young, I aim to give a critical account of cosmopolitanism that sets itself against the grain of mainstream universalist cosmopolitanism by prioritizing localized forms of belonging. To this end, I provide my own phenomenological analyses of social belonging and alienation while at the same time developing a historically grounded understanding of mainstream cosmopolitanism that understands it as the expression of a particular form of belonging. I then present an alternative theory of cosmopolitanism that treats both the “cosmos” understood as the world and the “polis,” understood as the city, the material structures of communal space, as necessarily plural rather than abstractly universal. I argue that a theory of cosmopolitanism responsive to the need to belong will therefore (1) respect the historical and durational nature of human life, (2) respect the spatially extended nature of belonging and the limitations this implies, and (3) engage in an active practice of allowing or making space for the belonging of those on the margins. By integrating a deep concern with belonging with cosmopolitan theory, I argue, cosmopolitanism can become more than an ethics of globalization and instead a radical call for the creation and cultivation of world-wide spaces of belonging against the grain of the homogenizing practices and effects of global capital.

Dissertation Committee: Ed Casey (Advisor), Anne O’Byrne, Megan Craig, Fred Evans (External)

Publications

“Belonging as a Theme of Phenomenology.” Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer: 2022. Eds. Ted Toadvine and Nicolas De Warren. Forthcoming.

“Places of Belonging – and Not Belonging.” The Phenomenology of Belonging. Ed Danielle Petherbridge. SUNY University Press: 2023. Co-authored with Ed Casey.

“Belonging Re-Envisioned in Terms of Habit and Place, Affect and Emotion.” Études Phénomélogiques / Studies in Phenomenology. Volume 6: 2022. pp. 27-47. Co-Authored with Ed Casey.

The Possibility of a Productive Imagination in the Work of Deleuze and Guattari. Imagination and Art, eds. Ananta Sukla and Keith Moser. Brill University Press: 2020. Pp. 425-447.

Spaces of Belonging and the Precariousness of Home. Puncta: Critical Phenomenology Journal. Volume 2, Issue 1: 2019. pp. 19-32

Scholarships, Grants, and Awards

Stony Brook University

Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University)