Ronjon Paul Datta, PhD MA, BAHons, BTh

Extending recent developments in the neo-Durkheimian analysis of suicidality as an indicator of social pathology, this paper analyses individual level survey data on suicidal ideation, perceptions of social support, and the sense of belonging from three Canadian provinces. Previous research shows that indicators of objective and subjective integration, including those pertaining to social support and a sense of belonging to the community, are related to suicidality. However, conflations of social support and a sense of belonging obscure whether or not they differently affect suicide ideation. We thus investigate both, analyse whether their subjective and objective indicators interact with each other, and if subjective indicators mediate the effect of objective ones. Measures of a higher level of social support had the largest effect on suicidal ideation. Additionally, the effect of food insecurity was very close to that of social support. Perceived life stress, our variable for controlling psychological as opposed to sociological factors, is an important predictor of suicidal ideation but it only slightly lowered the effect of social support. These findings are consistent with Durkheim's general theory of suicide and approach to social pathology, and previous studies on mental health. This suggests that differences in social integration modalities and their effects on individuals' well-being should be included in analyses of social pathology. The findings highlight the importance of regular, proximate social interaction as a prophylactic against suicidality.

This paper elucidates a range of the potentials and limitations of nominalist sensibilities in social theory through an examination of their presence in Durkheim and Weber. Nominalism, which emerged in early modern western thought, holds that only individual particular cases exists, that there are no universals or generalities beyond mentally or linguistically constructed concepts, and introduced new conceptions of will and voluntarism. Nominalism was variously transposed into classical social theories including those of Durkheim and Weber. In our metatheoretical methodology, we assess tensions between nominalist and realist visualities and modes of reasoning in their works. We conclude by discussing assessments of nominalism, attending to its enduring critical contributions while also explicating a reflexive critique of nominalism as mimetic of chaotic and pathological forms of social organisation.

This book is welcome and needed; I highly recommend it to all those interested in social justice. It offers a sophisticated, exceptionally well-crafted answer to a highly pertinent question: what social scientific criteria are there for making normative judgments about why and how Western civilization should change? To stress “social science ” means a commitment to thinking about what is concretely happening in the world and why as opposed to drawing on pre-given axioms as the basis for social criticism (e.g., human rights as an axiom, greater inclusion as an axiom, etc.). Honneth carefully explicates how the normative dimensions of doing Critical Theory (and hence a normative justification for an explanatory science of social totalities) have themselves been developed by the self-reflexive immanent critique of critical thought since Kant. At the same time, theoretical critique provides an ontology for justifying the normative dimension of a research program, which is then extended to the practical goal of arguing for why, and how we should change the world. This is a book then, in which social scientists, whether they identify as “Critical Theorists ” or not, will find themselves having to think through the old (but not passé) challenges

Purity and Danger, first published in 1966, justly deserves its place as a classic, and the issuing of a new edition, together with a new self-critical preface, solidifies this position. The book is accessible to non-specialists, whilst continually functioning as a stimulus and resource for ...

Explications of concepts in Gilles Deleuze, in particular, "Societies of Control/Control Societies," where he extends and goes beyond Foucault on disciplinary societies (subsequently used by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt); and "Power." Deleuze's conception of power, drawing as it does on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Marx had a significant impact on Foucault, especially in how it deals with corporeality and domination.

What social scientific criteria are there for making normative judgments about why and how Western civilization should change? To stress “social science” means a commitment to thinking about what is concretely happening in the world and why as opposed to drawing on pre-given axioms as the basis for social criticism (e.g., human rights as an axiom, greater inclusion as an axiom, etc.). Attending closely to Axel Honneth's book Pathologies of Reason, Marxist social theory, Critical Realism and Foucault, I puzzle my way through ways of critically and coherently linking social science, ontology, and axiology. (...lots of fond memories of working on this paper a decade ago).

Recognizing the convergence of renewed scholarly interest in the sacred and sacrifice, and debates about fiscal sacrifices in recent economic history, this rethinking of Durkheim develops a symptomatic reading of his theory of sacrifice in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The paper argues that Durkheim's suppression of political economic sensibilities in The Forms leads him to generate a fetishistic account of sacrifice as a moral activity that renews existing bases of rule. His analysis does so because it fails to adequately account for the role of structured inequalities in the production of the rite. A radical Durkheimian political economy of sacrifice is reclaimed by critically synthesizing it with the Foucauldian concept of dispositifs, one better able to account for the contingent combination of knowledge control, inequality, and exclusion on moral life. The critical theoretical work is applied to the axiological implications of neoliberal individualism, highlighting that it depends on and disavows sacrifice, specifically the sacrificing of people's capacity for altruism (or, the sacrifice of sacrifice). Finally, Durkheim's heterological sensibilities about the constitutive potential of the sacred in moments of collective effervescence are used to put the politics back in this political economy of sacrifice.

Accepted Feb. 23, 2018.. The Canadian Journal of Sociology.

Co-author: Dr. M. Reza Nakhaie.

Abstract. Critically reconsidering Durkheim's sociology of suicide, we develop a quantitative analysis of individual level data contained in the Canadian Community Health Survey (2009-2012) to investigate the relationship between perceptions of social support and suicidality in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. We operationalize Durkheim's general sociology to investigate relationships between people's perceptions of the more objective aspects of social life (structural-institutional) and the more subjective dimensions of social life, on suicidal ideation. We find that people's perceptions of the quality of social support available to them significantly affect susceptibility to suicidality, lending credence to key aspects of Durkheim's general sociology of social pathology.

Keywords: suicidality, Durkheim, social support, social pathology

Résumé. À partir d'une reconsidération critique de la sociologie du suicide de Durkheim, nous développons une analyse quantitative des données individuelles de l'Enquête canadienne sur les mesures de la santé/Canadian Community Health Survey (2009-2012) pour étudier la relation entre les perceptions de support social et le taux de suicidalité dans les province canadienne de la Saskatchewan et de la Colombie-Britannique. En posant comme objet les idées suicidaires nous opérationnalisons la sociologie générale de Durkheim pour étudier la relation entre les perceptions qu'ont les gens des aspects objectifs de leur vie sociale (structurels et institutionnels) et les aspects les plus subjectifs de leur vie sociale. Nous en venons à valider la sociologie générale durkheimienne des pathologies sociales en montrant que les perceptions qu'ont les gens quant à la qualité de support social dont ils peuvent bénéficier affecte de manière significative leur susceptibilité à succomber aux idées suicidaires (suicidalité).

Mots-clés: suicidalité, Durkheim, soutien social, pathologie sociale

Abstract

This paper critically synthesizes Pearce’s Crimes of the Powerful and his radical Durkheimianism to analyse the interpellative moral framing of the fiscal sacrifices that have followed the extraordinary bail outs of firms that were key agents in precipitating the Global Financial Crisis. These sacrifices subject people to cuts to public goods, services, and hard-won benefits, while being couched in a contradictory discourse about the moral necessity of sacrificing for the greater good. Doing so secures accumulation conditions for capitalist enterprises grown frail, reflecting the formation of ‘zombie capitalism’ with its legions of ‘living-dead’ firms and households. Drawing on Pearce’s theorem that the reproduction of capital requires ‘continuous effort’, my central contention is that fiscal sacrifices are a moral-political patch on contradictions in zombie capitalism, generating a primitive accumulation of the future, aiding the reproduction of a capitalism unable to survive on its own.

In The Forms, his arguably greatest work, Durkheim explicates the elemental social basis of religion to uncover its ultimate foundation in the “real,” declaring from the outset that “there are no religions that are false” (EFRL:2).1 Religion for Durkheim emerges from the substratum of the social since what the collectivity values “is the source of all religious experience” (cf. EFRL: 274; Milbrandt and Pearce 2011:269, 270). Broadly defined as a system of obligatory beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, religion is no mere epiphenomena; rather, it has been a necessary and constitutive element of all viable collectivities (EFRL:429), from the White Cockatoo clan of pre-modern Australian totemism to contemporary Canadian society. Today, we extend this to the globe, as witnessed by such things as the collective effervescence of World Cup football, communicated by the collective representation of the “buzz” made ubiquitous by vuvuzelas emanating from televisions around the world, transcending and linking societies together in a vibrant cosmopolitanism “from below” (Datta 2012:531; Turner 2006a; Inglis 2011; Inglis and Robertson 2008). We invite the reader to apprehend The Forms as a discursive monument, one that occupies a strikingly nodal place within the discursive networks of the social sciences. As a discursive monument, The Forms has been “left by the past” (Foucault 1972:7) and yet it stands. Its production is a singular “event” (Foucault 1972:8) affecting the human sciences as a monumental work in many major theoretical traditions both positively and negatively. The Forms can also be taken up as part of a symbolic feast of social analysis, nourishing a range of interpretive approaches. This circumstance, we are pleased to say, is evinced by the range of contributors’ work here. Most significantly, they are reminders of the salience of the questions Durkheim posed concerning the very constitution of social life (cf. Milbrandt and Pearce 2011; Ramp 2010; Datta 2008). The analytical and explanatory power of the concepts in The Forms makes it possible to extend Durkheim’s conception of how collective power is symbolised in enduring, existentially meaningful, consecrated, totem-like forms beyond his immediate empirical referent of central Australian tribes. This applies to a wide range of phenomena, from the rather ordinary ritual and meaning of donning one’s “Sunday best,” to extraordinary global social facts such as the revolutionary collective effervescence witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 (Tiryakian 1995). Many recent theoretical developments, notably heterogeneous, build upon The Forms constructively. These include Jeffrey C. Alexander’s sociological conception of justice developed in The Civil Sphere (2006) and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalysis of revolution in Revolt, She Said (2002), among many others. The Forms also functions as an on-going foil for Giorgio Agamben’s influential genealogy of politics, religion and economics (2009).

n this paper I outline the definitive features of Foucault’s way of accounting for the contingent constitution of human existence in Western civilization and how it can be changed. As such my point of departure is whether or not Foucault has a concept of politics at all and if not, why not. I subject Foucault to a symptomatic reading and immanent critique. In reading Foucault symptomatically, I aim to explicate the terrain of his problematic, i.e., his dominant theoretical apparatus for posing questions and producing answers. As an immanent critique, I assess Foucault’s work on its own terms and show the aporetic status of the question of politics produced by it. Doing so allows one to assess why he argues that the practices of the human sciences (and their constituent conditions) far from being liberating, are what subjugate us and constrain our possibilities for becoming otherwise. This diagnosis leads to the Foucauldian conclusion that a social or political science, like Althusser’s concern to develop a science of social formations in the service of democratic transformations of societies, cannot be part of the solution since this will to truth is precisely what dominates us and constrains the possibilities of human existence in modernity (Foucault 1997b/2003: 11; Foucault 1983a/2003: 104; Rabinow and Rose 2003: xv; Rose and Miller 1992: 177). Foucault’s position results in a normative displacement of politics by “ethics” or “arts of existence”. “Ethics” refers to the process by which a subject takes itself as an object to be transformed by is a discursive practice in order to achieve a goal chosen by the subject, the best goal being perpetual creativity and experimentation with living: truth is the problem; art is the answer (Foucault 1983a/2003; 1984b/1996). In opposition to Foucault, I aim to defend social science and politics and show why a materialist understanding of both, drawing on Althusser’s late position of aleatory materialism (hereafter, ‘AM’) is a plausible and necessary alternative that can displace the Foucauldian problematic (Althusser 1986/1994: 596; 1999; 1982/1994; Terray 1997; Negri 1995; Matheron 1998: 27; Elliot 1998; Navarro 1998: 94; cf. Pearce and Dupont 2001: 151). In short, Foucault’s own concept of politics requires him to think in terms of social formations but his nominalism constrains him from doing so.

Zombie capitalism concerns how socio-economic life and death are debated and evaluated, reflecting dynamics in the “collective conscience.” Discussions of zombie capitalism have extended the popular representation of zombies as the “undead/living-dead” to the domain of socio-economic life. Rooted in radical Durkheimian social theory, this paper offers preliminary reflections on the moral framing of “zombie capitalism” by engaging imaginatively with ideas found in Georges Bataille and Giorgio Agamben, two interdisciplinary thinkers that addressed profound issues of life, death, and values. As represented journalistically and in popular economics, “zombie capitalism” is a condition in which socio-economic entities that, from the capitalist perspective about the rationality of healthy markets, would usually be left to die (e.g., declared insolvent, or deprived of further credit). Instead, they are given a “second life” via inventive schemes for keeping them going (e.g., “bailouts”) without completely erasing debt obligations, resulting in “zombies.” Socio-economic zombies are thus the “living-dead” of the political economy. Such zombification arrangements ostensibly deprive “healthy” entities (e.g., households and firms) of the creativity and assets being consumed by such zombies. Bataille contends that non-utilitarian consumption and loss are an integral part of being “sovereign” as a social being, contributing to genuine human dynamism. Popular consumerism facilitated by the uses and abuses of credit can be understood in part along those lines. However, the struggle for sovereignty in this Bataillean sense confronts another “sovereign” of capitalistic morality that can be understood by drawing on Agamben. For Agamben, the “sovereign” decides on what kind of socio-political life is deemed of value or can be killed with impunity. Extending this model to the domain of finance, capital constantly decides on which socio-economic agents are “credit worthy” or should be starved of credit and so exterminated. The central argument is that common representations of zombie capitalism are revealing of significant differences about the moral evaluation of economic activity, differences that in their extremes can be elucidated by drawing on the conceptions of sovereignty found in Bataille and Agamben. Both theorists provide a way to engage in moral debate about a zombie capitalist apocalypse and even why we might wish to embrace it.

 Keywords: zombie capitalism, Bataille, Agamben, sovereignty, debt, biopolitics

We are more than governed through an imagined future, improved, state of affairs. Rather, we are subjugated in the present by a concern for achieving this better future, leaving us blind to the naturalisations of the capricious dominations and violence that comes with security that amount to an open war on the possible. Yet, to render security subjectification itself ‘null and void’ means confronting a different void, namely the void of a political task to be accomplished, even if deemed impossible, requiring a heterodox political metaphysic and existential orientation in which commitment to the goal of development (typically a commitment to the conditions of capital accumulation) is displaced in favour of thinking about unactualised conditions and potentials for differently problematising collective futures and fates.

This article discusses theoretical parallels between Durkheim's concept of the totem and Foucault's concept of `dispositif ' (social apparatus) and draws attention to the respective attempts by these theorists, in which these concepts play a substantial role, to move beyond Kantian conceptions of reality. It is argued that both concepts refer to historically specific structures constitutive of human existence, and to politics as an irreducible feature of such structures. In particular, Durkheim provides an understanding of the truly exceptional potential of politics to constitute meaningful human existence, attaching `words and things'. Hence, his discussion of religion is not simply about reproducing relations of domination. Comparing the concepts of totem and dispositif can aid in developing a richer conception of the contingent manner in which the existential structure of social life is formed by the effects of `politics'. In this light, Durkheim offers a plausible resolution to a lacuna in Foucault by providing an account of the causal force of politics in constituting collective existence. Foucault's attention to contingent causality does similar work to remedy an obscurantist expressivism which subtends Durkheim's account of totem-creation.

This chapter develops a neo-Durkheimian theoretical approach to socially just cosmopolitanism by focusing on the conditions and consequences of movement in global cities, taking seriously the observations above.  In this regard, Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande indicate that the mobilities turn to examining “what sets and keeps people, goods and symbols in motion and how actual and potential movements structure social life,” developed by John Urry, shows promise for making  better social scientific sense of cosmopolitan life. While Durkheim might seem to many an unlikely resource for contributing to contemporary mobilities studies, his attention to cosmopolitanism, migration, infrastructure, knowledge, social justice and how belonging is transformed from below in the conditions of everyday life, suggests that a return to his work is timely and warranted. I contend in particular that a neo-Durkheimian approach to the mobilities dimensions of cosmopolitan life noted by global cities scholars provides a basis for developing viable, sociologically informed proposals for constituting more socially justice cosmopolitan conditions. The provisional formulations below develop as follows. First, I challenge the neglect of movement  in contemporary cosmopolitan theory through a consideration of research on global cities. Next, this is leveraged to show resonances with key thematics in Durkheim’s work. I then develop a provisional analytical framework for redressing idealist impasses in contemporary cosmopolitan theory in no small measure theoretically responsible for the neglect of the mobilities dimensions of cosmopolitanism. A neo-Durkheimian alternative is articulated in which mobilities, knowledge and social justice are theorized as constitutive elements of cosmopolitan belonging. Finally, a framework for realist social justice policy principles pertinent to cosmopolitan mobility is explicated. My hope is to contribute conceptual means for linking empirical studies of mobilities, globalization, and global cities  to contemporary cosmopolitan theory in a sociological way pertinent to realist social justice advocacy.

Published as:
Datta, Ronjon Paul. 2012. ‘Recent Anglo-American Studies on Durkheim’s Sociology’, L’Année Sociologique, 62, No. 2, pp. 527-536.

The works discussed here are indicative of productive and serious tensions in English Durkheimian studies concerning ontology (materialist, realist, idealist) and axiology (liberalism, socialism, conservatism), much of dealing with The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Ramp (2010) well highlights the contours of these recent debates, arguing for a “culturalist realism” (p. 68). Yet, substantive sociological tension is also present. This tension is between focusing on either the routine organisation of social life and its conditions of existence and possibility, together with the elaboration of the means for rendering sociological analyses and evaluations of it; or, on the constitutive intensities of the social.

In this chapter, I approach the problem of theorizing justice by drawing on two different approaches to justice found in the works of the French social analyst Michel Foucault (1926-1984), counted amongst the most significant resources in critical social analysis today.  I highlight a tension in Foucault’s work between what will be called here an “internalist” approach (i.e., his “nominalism”) and an attenuated “externalist” approach, similar to some contemporary forms of realist methodology. I attend especially to a critical inspection of Foucault’s theoretical reasoning and its consequences for theorizing justice. I also aim to demonstrate something about how to engage in critical and creative theoretical reasoning and why paying attention to the fundamental assumptions of a theoretical system is important. Fundamental assumptions substantially affect one’s reasoning through the research process as a whole (methodology), and the more substantive components of theorizing in the social sciences about what kinds of questions one should ask and how we recognize whether or not a concept or a theoretical model is adequate to the issue at hand (Datta, Frauley and Pearce 2010: 244).

hese are fortuitous times for considering zombies. Since Romero’s reinvention of the zombie, they have been represented as mindless consumers, habituated into going to the shopping mall even after they are dead. For him, shopping is our farcical resurrection. It now appears that much of that mindless shopping was fueled by consumer debt facilitated by what is called the “democratization of credit” in deregulated globalized capital markets, made familiar by ubiquitous credit cards and home equity lines of credit (Harman 2009: 288-289; Panitch and Gindin 2009; OCED 2008). We also have the progeny of Japan’s lost economic decade of the 1990s: the “zombie” firms now found globally (Cooley 2009). What is striking is that the image of the zombie as a dead human that has come back to some semblance of life and then heads to the shopping mall, appears to have been the harbinger of the current recession: people borrowed – “buying on time” (as it used to be called) - to consume. This is why the Great Recession is treated as distinct from other modern recessionary periods with the exception of the Great Depression. Like the latter, it is a balance sheet recession in which households, firms and governments seek to deleverage and avoid solvency crises, a real possibility given exceptionally high levels of debt (Callinicos 2010: 85). Our future promise to pay, as indicated underneath the signature line on a credit card slip, was the fuel for zombie-ish shopping and for global economic growth. Consumption accounts for about 70% of GDP in the US and 60% in resource rich Canada. Romero’s lesson: consumption has consumed our lives. Below, we offer our reflections on zombies and the current conjuncture by drawing on Georges Bataille’s work as a sociological “stimulus package” not least because consumption, excess, sacrifice and destruction are his main reference points. We also draw on two of Bataille’s main analytical resources: Marx and Durkheim. We contend that zombies, as represented in film and in the current phenomenon of zombie economic agents, mythologize a central temporal contradiction facing the working class, one that cannot be solved within the structure of capitalist futures. Yet, this temporal contradiction remains suggestive of the power of consumption to consume the “brains” of capital that constrain politics.

The link between politics and religion is more than noticeable today–it may even be definitive of the ideological climate of contemporary North American political culture. In this light, it seems pertinent to reconsider what a theoretical problematic of the sacred, in the ...

This paper develops Foucault’s work on government, security, and art to critically analyze “post-politics.” Contemporary social and political thinkers (e.g., Slavoj Zizek, Wendy Brown, Ernesto Laclau, and Erik Swyngedou) characterize post-politics as the reduction of politics to the ways and means of expert social administration, involving the acceptance of liberal, representative parliamentary democracy and capitalism as the “only game in town.”

This paper (a draft of some teaching related material) offers an explication of Louis Althusser's famous "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [ISA]" essay. It attends to its historical context in relation to May '68, defines key concepts (e.g., ideology, subjectivity, interpellation), provides contemporary examples, and includes some additional reflections on conceptualising class struggle. I hope it helps make Althusser's famous essay more accessible to a broad readership.

Theories are systematically reasoned accounts and arguments, developed using a specialized language of concepts, models and carefully crafted questions, concerning what happens in the world and why. Adequate social theories need to account for both social stability and social change. They do so by analysing what's happening (breaking things down into their component parts to understand their complexity), and offering explanations to answer "why and how" questions by referring to a specific set of social conditions and the interaction of causal social forces found in them (e.g., social actors, classes, symbols, structural inequalities, etc.). Theories are thus quite different from "opinions." Good theorizing is tied to research contexts and is obliged to undertake necessary revisions as new findings and critical insights are developed. So, while people often have ideas about society, and all social scientists rely on theory (implicitly or explicitly) when making arguments, theorists specialize in being intentionally focused on the rational development of systematic and comprehensive accounts of social reality and offering guides for analysing and explaining happenings in the social world. Theories develop ways of picturing the dynamic complexity of the social world differently from those created to deal with the practical concerns of daily life because the social world we see as social scientists is grasped conceptually. For example, in Marxist terms, I'm not merely eating my lunch, I'm really "reproducing my labour power" (working to sustain my capacity to do my job through the consumption of calories). To use another example, one shifts from describing Oktoberfest revellers in legalistic terms as "causing a disturbance," to theorizing the "collective effervescence" (Durkheim might say) that revitalises the community and neighbourliness. Theories thus offer accounts of the social realm that go beyond what we can observe and measure. After all, a social scientist can only experience a portion of social life (there's no "God's-Eye" view to which we have access). Instead, our big-picture thinking relies on a theoretical imagination to make connections between what we ourselves experience and understand, and study others' research to conceptualize the broader social context: we can't see the "big picture" until we've actually drawn/theorized it! Theory serves as our guide in this process of going from the relative simplicity of one's own initial ideas to a rational grasp of the "complex," or from an intuition about "society today" to analysing and understanding the specificity of one's own experiences and challenges. Sociologists read theory and theorize because plausible answers to what is happening in the world and why are not obvious, and we ourselves also need to be clear about the concepts we're using (e.g., law, the state, institution, power, discourse, etc.). If we're not clear about the terms we're using, we won't know how to investigate the reality that a set of concepts is supposed to help us explain. Plus, we're also quite likely to confuse ourselves and our readers. Reading different kinds of theory creatively and critically is also an intellectual stimulus because with each theory, we learn to imagine and think about social reality another way; we learn new concepts and models, ask different questions, find reasons to correct ourselves, learn to avoid errors, and how to defend the sociological enterprise, broadly speaking. Reading critically then, does not mean saying negative things

This project explicated the characteristic of Michel Foucault's " nominalism, " here called " critical nominalism because of how it implicitly is derived from Foucault's critique and reformulation of Kant. The wariness about metaphysics in poststructuralism has resulted in a neglect of what his nominalism means for social analysis and practical politics. I assess the potentials and limitations of Foucauldian nominalism, especially as a critical tool for dispensing with conventional metaphysics. At the same time, the symptomatic tension between realism and nominalism is also highlighted. I identify weak and strong nominalisms in Foucault, the former carrying methodological import, the latter taking us into an anti-humanist ontology of the post-human. I conclude with some remarks about how Foucault's nominalism, in the last couple of years of his work, paves the way for a new kind of vitalism about subjectivity and thought. (More to come).
Published results include: Datta 2007; Datta 2008 (doctoral dissertation: Foucault and the Battle for Politics Itself (Carleton University); Datta and Hanemaayer 2021.

Michel Foucault's concept of " heterotopia, " with its implicit use of Durkheimian concepts (e.g., the sacred, profane, liminality, etc.), here serves as a departure point for revisiting Durkheim's theory of cosmopolitanism. The paper undertakes critical and synthetic theoretical work to conceptualize some broader socio-political effects of the cosmopolitan condition by drawing on Durkheim, Foucault, Bataille, and Agamben. The central argument is that the pragmatic features of cosmopolitan social life " from below " displaces forms of identity central to the biopolitics of the modern state, creating an anti-space for cosmopolitan subjectivity. Giorgio Agamben's conception of the liberatory promise of " profanation " is also used to consider new configurations of social existence, described here as the desacralization of biopolitical forms of identitification. A radical Durkheimian analysis, however, suggests that the dialectical relations surrounding profanation are more complex than are indicated by Agamben since it is exactly the profane qualities of cosmopolitan life that make it " left sacred " (threatening and polluting) to the biopolitical nation-state paradigm. " Cosmotopia " is name for the domain in which this biopolitical identitarian displacement occurs, a domain creating the real social conditions in which a genuine cosmopolitan ethic, as articulated by Durkheim, both emerges and can be sustained.