ConcateNations. Globalization in a Spinozist Context 

Yves Citton (1)

1 LIRE - Littérature, idéologies, représentations, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles

Two common assumptions tend to blur our understanding of "globalization". First, it is generally perceived as a rather recent phenomenon, dating back a few years, or at most a few decades. Best-selling books like Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree frame it within an opposition between the bi-polar, military-led, ideologicallystructured world of the Cold War and the multi-centered, economically-driven and valuefree process of globalization, with a turning point occurring around the 1980s. The second assumption presents globalization as being first and foremost a matter of economics, dealing with flows of goods and investments which have more or less remote cultural consequences. The word and the notion of concatenation provide, as I hope to show in this paper, a remarkable vantage point to reverse these two assumptions1. By shifting the focus to the archeology and the imaginary of globalization, one is led to consider "globalization" under the Lyotardian category of a masternarrative -- a legitimizing myth centered on a universal protagonist and whose power of legitimization comes from a promise for the future. Right after Lyotard had made our age "postmodern" in view of our incredulity towards any metanarrative, we fell prey to the (not so) new grand récit of "globalization". Exploring the imaginary dimension of this masternarrative can thus bring a much needed critical distance towards a constellation of signifiers, clichés, assumptions, confusions, beliefs, values, which currently thwart the public debate about the meaning, threats and promises of the transformations currently in process.

Domaines: Littératures

Yves Citton. ConcateNations. Globalization in a Spinozist Context . Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.91-117, 2007. ⟨hal-00847110⟩