We can now survey the ruins of a Babelian tower of discourse about cosmopolitanism. We speak of 'elite travel lounge,' 'Davos,' 'banal' as well as of 'reflexive,' 'really existing,' 'patriotic,' and 'horizontal' cosmopolitanisms. Here, an attempt is made to extract what is normative and ideal in the concept of cosmopolitanism by foregrounding the epistemic and moral dimensions of this attitude toward the world and other cultures. Kant, in a rather unexpected way, is profiled as the exemplification of what is here called 'imperial' cosmopolitanism, which is both blind and dismissive of its own material conditions of possibility. Then, through a discussion of the works of Nussbaum, Appiah, Mignolo, Butler, Benhabib, and Beck, the author elaborates a version of cosmopolitanism that is grounded, enlightened, and reflexive, which corrects and supersedes Kant's own Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. We do not live in an age of cosmopolitanism, but in an age of cosmopolitization. Democratic iterations that are jurisgenerative are matched at the global level by cosmopolitan iterations that are both jurisgenerative and affect generating.

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This article deals with the concepts, processes, and antagonisms that are associated with the notion of postsecularity. In light of this article’s expanded interpretation of José Casanova on the secular and secularization, as well as thoughts on James A. Beckford’s take on public religions, five rubrics on the postsecular derived from critical theory and an understanding of ‘reflexive secularization’ are presented. This term focuses on secularization processes and how these practices unleash complementary as well as antagonistic tendencies, a confrontation of normativities and specific social-empirical challenges. From this basis it is argued that social-empirical analysis should focus on non-naturalistic relations between individuals occupying structurally equivalent positions in narrative networks. A plurality of normativities are seriously considered as ideas circulating through social relations where the critical competence of the participants of such communication processes are provoked to subvert anything – including any normative positionality – as taken for granted. Moves towards the decolonization of the secular/postsecular dyad are emphasized, with ramifications for thinking about the urban, which point to the universal and authentic foundations of the human condition that are brought into play.

El debate sobre el futuro de la especie humana 2 Jürgen Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik?, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2001, pp. 124-125. [«La vida en un vacío moral, como una vida desprovista incluso de cinismo, no merecería la pena ser vivida», N. de la T.].

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