Video Archives - Lunchtime Talk with Victor Granado Almena (2011)

Thursday, December 1, 2011: Lunchtime Talk on citizenship in a global age

Participants: Victor Granado Almena, a doctorate candidate in Political and contemporary Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Almena was also the Hannah Arendt Center’s Visiting Scholar in Residence for the 2011-12 academic year.

In his lunchtime talk, Victor Granado Almena discusses the main points of his doctoral dissertation, which is based on the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship in the modern world.

“The global age,” says Almena, “is an age of displacement.” People live inside the world, but the world in turn does not offer them asylum, rest, or refuge. They increasingly form part of the machine that moves the world and only inhabit the world itself with difficulty. This dislocation is a product, according to Almena, of three main fictions that are inherent in contemporary thinking about globalization: the unitary fiction, the territorial fiction, and the security fiction.

The unitary fiction is the notion that globalization creates a single global space in which all things now exist, thereby effectively blurring the boundaries separating the center from the periphery. The territorial fiction is the notion of a clearly delimited territory with a specific culture or nation located therein. Lastly, the security fiction is the idea that all politics at all levels coalesces around the security of the political body.

[caption id="attachment_14137" align="alignleft" width="200"] Victor Granado Almena[/caption]

Acknowledging these fictions, Almena seeks to introduce a new way of thinking about how people belong to political communities. Beginning with the idea that all human beings have the right to be a subject of specific laws, a belief that he founds in Arendt’s political thinking, Almena conceptualizes a notion of cosmopolitan citizenship that would guarantee all people the right to live and belong in any political community in any place they chose. This would fundamentally invert the traditional logic of origin and belonging by making citizenship a matter of choice.

In the Q&A portion, Professor Sanjib Baruah notes that Almena is opposing the distinction between legal and illegal persons in a country. Professor Roger Berkowitz suggest that Almena’s cosmopolitan citizenship might make human beings interchangeable, where the flow of human travel across the globe could begin to resemble the flow of money. Almena acknowledges that he is in fact opposing the distinction between legal and illegal status as an ultimately useless method of distinguishing individuals who reside in a given territory. Almena also makes the case that, in fact, people are more instrumental in today’s system than they would be in a world of cosmopolitan citizenship.

This talk broaches the issue of the individual’s relationship to a political community, and it does so in a way that highlights different interpretations of some of Arendt’s writings as applied to our understanding of globalized politics. The extended Q&A is definitely worth watching for anyone interested in how the idea of a right to be subject to laws can be interpreted in starkly different ways.

Analysis by Dan Perlman

You can view Almena's talk in full below:

Lunchtime Talk: Victor Granado Almena from Hannah Arendt Center on Vimeo.