Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social
sciences this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its
impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace
of this idea is its designers' traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition
of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century's cosmopolitan projects
that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century's global democracy. This
hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of
modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent
subjects such as Voltaire Kant and Goethe or Bakhtin Derrida and Deleuze cosmopolitanism
is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of
healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal
reconciliation it risks suppressing other's trauma i.e. turns from politics into a police.
Articulating the author's position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy the
epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.
