The European Image of the World as a Cosmos: notes towards an archaeology

Abstract

This chapter argues that the European provenance of International Political Theory shapes the field in ways that go deeper than critical approaches can show. For the European image of the world underlies both affirmations and also critiques of this European world. This is because the concept of ‘the world’ as such is already inseparable from metaphysical ontology and its image of world as an enduring order or cosmos. I provide a brief archaeology of this ‘true world’ before turning to the question of how to overcome it. Quite how difficult it is to be rid of the metaphysical true world is illustrated by way of Nietzsche’s entanglement with the concept of world. I argue that Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return of the same is an attempt to think world as other than a cosmos. But I also show that this thought leads to the implosion of any notion of a knowing subject that can take ‘the world’ as its object.