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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLIII | Number 3 | 2022 | 93–107 | cc by-nc-nd 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/FV.43.3.04
* ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6457-3815 | 
 rok.bencin@zrc-sazu.si
Rok Benčin*
World at the Border: The Cosmopolitan Ideal 
between Loss and Multiplication1
Introduction1
Throughout the history of political thought, cosmopolitanism has been insep-
arable from the problem of the border. In principle, the subjectivity cosmopoli-
tanism gives rise to is based on an indifference towards – if not the effacement 
of – borders. A closer look, however, reveals some complications. The border 
returns both as a condition of possibility and a condition of impossibility of the 
cosmopolitan ideal. In his writings on cosmopolitanism, Immanuel Kant warned 
against the establishment of a global political power and claimed that a peace-
ful cosmopolitan condition can only be attained by an agreement between sep-
arated independent states.2 Due to the dangerous concentration of power within 
a potential universal monarchy, he considered the existence of borders between 
states (despite being the cause of endless wars) to be a condition of possibility 
for any kind of peaceful coexistence between peoples in the future (when rea-
son finally prevails). For Kant, the persistence of borders is compensated for by 
universal hospitality, i.e. the right to not be treated with hostility upon arrival 
across a border. A century and a half later, Hannah Arendt declared that the 
unification of the world, which for Kant was still an ideal, had become an “ines-
capable fact.”3 But as humanity comes together in the “One World”, the figure of 
the stateless migrant or refugee puts the cosmopolitan ideal to a test that it does 
not pass.4 Outside of state protection, people are denied their rights and face the 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6-3139 “Reconfiguring Borders in 
Philosophy, Politics, and Psychoanalysis”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2 Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, trans. D. L. Colclasure, 
in P. Kleingeld (ed.), Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and 
History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 91–92.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1979, 
p. 298.
4 Ibid., p. 297.
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ultimate exclusion of being “deprived of expression within and action upon a 
common world.”5 The world as a political ideal is held up at the border.
Another reversal followed in the last couple of decades when cosmopolitanism 
re-emerged in political theory not as an ideal of peaceful unification, but as an 
actual condition of marginal subjectivities. After the universal values of the En-
lightenment, which constituted the core of modern cosmopolitanism, were sub-
jected to postcolonial critique, new kinds of “cosmopolitics” emerged, based 
precisely on the struggles of the peoples that modern universalisms have ex-
cluded. In the introduction to their volume Cosmopolitanism, Sheldon Pollock, 
Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty write that the 
“cosmopolitanism of our times does not spring from the capitalized ‘virtues’ of 
Rationality, Universality, and Progress,” but resides in the experience of refu-
gees, migrants, and peoples of diasporas, who now “represent the spirit of the 
cosmopolitical community.”6 In a similar vein, Michel Agier has developed an 
anthropology of “ordinary cosmopolitanism”, which sees the world no longer as 
a political ideal but as a problematic non-place inhabited by displaced people:
Persons in displacement may well be in the process of living an experience more 
universal than it might appear, beyond the categories, classes and nationalities 
that are involved today. Even if they find themselves “on the margin”, they enable 
us to anticipate a way of being-in-the-world that globalization is tending to gener-
alize. In this conception, cosmopolitism is not the monopoly of a globalized elite. 
On the contrary, it is the experience of the roughness of the world by all those 
who, by taste, necessity or compulsion, by desire or by habit, are led to live in 
several places almost simultaneously and, in the absence of ubiquity, to live in-
creasingly in mobility, even in an in-between.7
5 Ibid., p. 302.
6 Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 
“Cosmopolitanisms”, in C. A. Breckenridge, S. Pollock, H. K. Bhabha, and D. Chakrabarty 
(eds.), Cosmopolitanism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2002, p. 6.
7 Michel Agier, Borderland: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, trans. 
D. Fernbach, Cambridge, Polity, 2016, pp. xiii–ix.
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world at the border: the cosmopolitan ideal between loss and multiplication
In this article, I propose an examination of the concept of world at stake in these 
transformations of cosmopolitanism.8 What happens to the concept of world at 
the core of cosmopolitanism when it collides with the phenomenon of the bor-
der as its immanent limit? How to think of the world as a political ideal when it 
is no longer defined by totality but by marginality? In what sense can the dis-
placed experience at the margins still constitute a being-in-the-world, i.e. a Hei-
deggerian concept describing the authentic horizon of existence used by Agier 
and (more implicitly but no less crucially, as we will see) by Arendt? I argue that 
in order to think the cosmopolitics of borders, a different concept of world is 
needed. I conclude by suggesting that Jacques Rancière’s understanding of pol-
itics as a conflict of worlds can take us beyond the traps of both cosmopolitan 
universalism and the phenomenological singularity of being-in-the-world.
The World Between Loss and Multiplication
In the famous discussion of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 
Arendt addresses the unwelcome effects of the realisation of Kant’s regulative 
idea, describing how stateless people are deprived of participation, expression, 
and action within a common world. Arendt claims that the realised unifica-
tion of the world of humanity pushes stateless people into a position of radical 
worldlessness. As Roland Végső recently put it, Arendt presents a historical ac-
count of how “two opposing tendencies coincide: the absolute unification of 
the world and the absolute loss of the world.”9 The formation of the world as 
a global socio-economic totality is equated with the loss of what turns human 
coexistence into a world. Arendt sees the modern process of globalisation not 
as a condition of possibility of cosmopolitanism, but as a direct threat to any 
worldly experience.
Arendt’s concern over the loss of the world stems from the fact that genuine pol-
itics is only possible within the framework of a common world. The problemat-
ic totalisation of the world does not result in the need to abandon the notion of 
8 The concept of world in contemporary (political and general) philosophy was a topic of a 
recent special issue of Filozofski vestnik. See Rok Benčin (ed.), “The Concept of World in 
Contemporary Philosophy”, Filozofski vestnik, 42 (2/2021), special issue, https://ojs.zrc-
sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik/issue/view/849.
9 Roland Végső, Worldlessness After Heidegger, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 
2020, p. 89.
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world in political thought, but necessitates its reconceptualisation. Arendt thus 
rehabilitates the ideal of worldliness beyond global unification. Turning away 
from cosmopolitan totalisation due to the disastrous consequences of actual glo-
balisation, the world as a political ideal is transformed into a framework of com-
mon existential experience that conditions political action. If the world is to re-
main a political ideal, it must be divorced from any notion of a global totality. 
This does not, however, necessarily imply a regression to the closed worlds of 
national communities. It is neither the totality nor the particularity of human co-
existence that makes a world, but its singularity: the common world exists as a 
singular common world, based on specific common experience and joint action.
What in the Origins of Totalitarianism might still be understood as a condition 
of the radically deprived turns out to be a disturbing form of a much more gen-
eral state of affairs in The Human Condition, where Arendt positions the concept 
of world at the centre of her political thought, which identifies modernity with 
world alienation. The interconnectedness of humanity across the globe in terms 
of economy, travel, and communication unites humanity on a global scale but 
deprives it of a world.10
Before returning to the reasons for this loss, we should understand better what 
makes world a political concept for Arendt, for it is not at first introduced as 
such. Arendt presents the world as a product of human work, the artificial en-
vironment of things humanity surrounds itself with: “The man-made world of 
things, the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal 
men, whose stability will endure and outlast the ever-changing movement of 
their lives and actions.”11 To the natural cycles of mortal life and its needs, as 
well as to the perishable character of words and deeds, the world opposes a 
realm of durability, objectivity, and stability. As the correlate of work, the world 
is thus opposed to the two other forms of vita activa Arendt explores in The Hu-
man Condition: labour, whose correlate is (the preservation and reproduction 
of) life, and action, whose correlate is the plurality of human beings as political 
animals capable of deeds and speech. Even though the fabrication of the world 
10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 
248–257.
11 Ibid., p. 173.
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world at the border: the cosmopolitan ideal between loss and multiplication
of things as such is not political per se (only action can be political),12 it soon be-
comes clear that it is not only the material environment of action, as it also has 
a much more intimate relation to the political realm. It turns out that work and 
action condition each other: “Without being talked about by men and without 
housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated 
things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; 
without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, 
as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes.”13
The meaning of the common world for human affairs only becomes fully ap-
parent with its loss. But how can it be lost, considering that humanity obvious-
ly still (and increasingly so) lives in an artificial world of things? For Arendt, 
modern world alienation results from the fact that the principles of both labour 
and action invade the world-making principles of homo faber. On the one hand, 
things are no longer produced to be durable but become themselves objects of 
consumption, just like the goods necessary for the daily reproduction of life.14 
This erodes the durability of the world and pulls the public sphere of political 
action down into the field of social issues and reproduction. No longer a free ac-
tivity of equal men, politics becomes subordinated to the necessities dictated by 
the mass society of labouring animals and those who exploit them. On the oth-
er hand, modern science and advanced technology infect work with character-
istics of action, namely unpredictability and irreversibility. Some of the things 
that homo faber now produces no longer offer worldly stability but threaten the 
very existence of the world. What started with the Scientific Revolution in the 
17th century, Arendt claims, came to a conclusion with the atom bomb.15 Without 
the stabilising force of worldliness provided by work, the natural cycles of life 
and the unpredictability of action reveal their worldless character.
In Arendt, world thus appears as a political concept not in the sense of a politi-
cal project or a regulative idea, but in the phenomenological sense as a horizon 
of authentic existential experience, which is transformed into the existential ho-
rizon of political action. Without entering into Arendt’s complicated position 
12 Ibid., p. 208.
13 Ibid., p. 204.
14 Ibid., p. 124.
15 Ibid., p. 6.
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towards Martin Heidegger, it is clear – as Végső argues – that “she shares Hei-
degger’s phenomenological investment in the idea (and the experience) of the 
world.”16 The Kantian notion of the world as a totality is replaced by a Heideg-
gerian phenomenological concept of world.
In his study on the notion of worldlessness, Végső claims that the phenome-
nological concept of world is haunted by worldlessness, not only historically, 
through the onset of a supposedly worldless modernity, but also structurally, 
as a precondition for the very emergence of worldliness as the fundamental ho-
rizon of existence.17 In a similar manner, Étienne Tassin notes that for Arendt, 
even though the existence of a common world is a condition of politics, political 
action proper “can rise against being-in-the-world.”18 Even though the world is 
both the condition (the stability of the man-made world of things) and the ob-
ject (the public realm of coexistence) of politics, every free political act detaches 
itself from its conditions and therefore the world, redefining the field of possi-
bilities with unpredictable consequences. Due to its power to separate from the 
world in which it takes place, action should be understood as existentially (Tas-
sin) or structurally (Végső) worldless – it is a worldless power that precedes any 
historical epoch of world alienation.19
It should not be forgotten, however, that Arendtian action disturbs the world 
not only with its inherent worldlessness, but also with its power to bifurcate 
and multiply worlds. Action, for Arendt, is not only the bearer of worldlessness, 
but also what turns the heap of things humans produce into a world in the first 
place. Political action “not only has the most intimate relationship to the pub-
lic part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes 
it.”20 While it is true that the constitutive capacity for action is also what has 
the power to dismantle the stability of the world, this is not because of its struc-
tural worldlessness, but because every act constitutes the world anew. Rather 
than being committed within the world, an act has the character of opening up 
a new world, a new field of possibilities. The multiplicity of acts and therefore 
16 Végső, Worldlessness After Heidegger, p. 81.
17 Ibid., pp. 25, 81–82.
18 Étienne Tassin, Un monde commun: Pour une cosmo-politique des conflits, Paris, Seuil, 
2003, p. 147.
19 Ibid., p. 146; Végső, Worldlessness after Heidegger, p. 86.
20 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198.
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world at the border: the cosmopolitan ideal between loss and multiplication
worlds coincides with human plurality, which is a condition of political life.21 
With every proper act, a bifurcation of worlds takes place. While it is true that 
an excess of new beginnings threatens the stability of the common world of po-
litical action, it is not worldlessness that is at the gates, but a proliferation of a 
multitude of worlds. Action, therefore, is not a principle of structural worldless-
ness, but a principle of the radical singularisation of worlds.
Arendt’s focus on the loss of the world in modernity, however, prevents her from 
following this thread and developing the implications of an excess of worlds. 
In a seemingly paradoxical manner, Arendt claims that the loss of the world 
coincides with the process of its global unification. The unification of the globe 
in terms of travel and communication succeeded in “alienating man from his 
immediate earthly surroundings,” uprooting the experience of having one’s de-
fined place within a particular and limited world.22 Expropriation in the context 
of accelerating capital accumulation is another central factor contributing to 
modern world alienation for Arendt, which brings her close to Marx (although 
she claims Marx wrongly emphasised self-alienation over world-alienation).23 
Yet, even economic globalisation is “of minor significance” compared to the “al-
ienation underlying the whole development of natural science in the modern 
age.”24 Arendt thus comes close to Heidegger and his reflections on the dark-
ening of the world due to the domination of modern science and technology.25 
Science does not connect us to the world, Arendt believes, but alienates us from 
it, since it introduces an ontological split. With modern science, “being and 
appearance part ways,”26 which undermines the very foundations of the phe-
nomenological experience of worldliness. In a true phenomenological fashion, 
Arendt claims that the reality that science explores has nothing to do with the 
world as the framework of meaningful experience, in which being (in its plural-
ity) and appearance are one.
21 Ibid., p. 7.
22 Ibid., p. 251.
23 Ibid., pp. 253–256.
24 Ibid., p. 265.
25 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, New Haven, 
Yale University Press, 2014, p. 29.
26 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 275.
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From this perspective, the narrative of modernity is no longer the narrative of 
progress towards the realisation of a globally shared world, as it was for Kant 
and the cosmopolitan tradition. This realisation itself coincides with the process 
of world alienation, which seems irredeemable. Regaining the possibility of a 
shared world – as a singular world, constituted by singular beings – in the midst 
of global worldlessness nevertheless remains the stake of politics, but how this 
task can be achieved is a difficult question. From an Arendtian perspective, this 
would entail not only countering the worldless effects of global capitalism – the 
end of which, as the saying goes, is harder to imagine than the end of the world 
itself – but also dismantling modern subjectivity, along with its forms of ration-
ality and their ontological implications.
Many political thinkers have since pursued a similar line of thought, with Jean-
Luc Nancy perhaps delivering the most philosophically sophisticated version 
of opposing worldless globalisation with a renewed sense of non-totalisable 
worldliness. The multiplication of worlds already suggested by Arendt receives 
in Nancy a more direct conceptualisation. For Nancy, the world is always a mul-
tiplicity of worlds: “The unity of a world is nothing other than its diversity, and 
its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds. A world is a multiplicity of worlds, 
the world is a multiplicity of worlds, and its unity is the sharing out [partage] 
and the mutual exposure in this world of all its worlds.”27
Unity and multiplicity come together through the connection between shar-
ing and mutual exposure. This is essential to Nancy’s conception of being and 
world, which moves beyond Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein (being-there) as 
the centre of the phenomenom of worldliness to rather emphasise the dimen-
sion of the mitsein (being-together).28 In Nancy, existence is defined by mutual 
exposure, which constitutes world(s) as plural. Each singular being offers a dif-
ferent access to the world, its own singularisation of the common world. Yet, for 
Nancy as well as for Arendt and Heidegger, the world-making capacity of human 
beings is put under threat by the process of globalisation, and global capitalism 
in particular, which alienates the plurality of world(s) within the uniformity of 
27 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. F. Rajfoul and D. 
Pettigrew, Albany, State University Of New York Press, 2007, p. 109.
28 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne, Stanford, 
Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 93.
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world at the border: the cosmopolitan ideal between loss and multiplication
general equivalence and commodification.29 In the face of such alienation, it 
is necessary to redeem the capacity of creation, “to create a world tirelessly.”30 
Nancy thus seems to further integrate the two paths already opened by Arendt 
– the loss of the world, on the one hand, and the proliferation of worlds, on the 
other, but emphasises more directly the pluralisation of world(s) as the means 
of a potential reversal of the creeping worldlessness of modernity.
The problem that emerges with such political appropriations of the phenomeno-
logical concept of world is that the emphasis on the opposition between global 
worldlessness and a singular worldliness leaves out of sight the question of the 
relations between singular worlds and potential conflicts between them. When 
the plurality of worlds is considered as an ideal in itself, it misses potential con-
flicts cutting through the very field of plurality. Antonia Birnbaum thus claims 
that Nancy’s ontologisation of plurality equates conflict with “a catastrophic de-
struction of the frame of compossibility,” which excludes conflict from under-
standing plurality.31 While the task of politics is limited to keeping the field of 
the singular plural open, conflict closes the becoming of plurality. For Birnbaum, 
this indicates a powerless and inconsequential conception of politics. She claims 
instead that it is precisely through conflicts that the shared world is actualised. 
A similar critique, but of Arendt, was proposed by Tassin, according to whom 
Arendt has not paid sufficient attention to the social conflicts and political strug-
gles that are constitutive of political action. Even though political action indeed 
presupposes the Arendtian “being-with” and “acting-together”, it also implies 
“being-in-conflict-with” and “acting-against”.32 The concept of world as a plu-
ral singularity or singular plurality ultimately reduces the question of multiple 
worlds to the question of ethical and political coexistence within a common 
world. This deposits any notion of conflict or antagonism on the outside, as an 
intrusion of worldlessness, to which the ideal of worldliness is opposed.
29 Ibid., p. 73.
30 Nancy, The Creation of the World, p. 112.
31 Antonia Birnbaum, Trajectoires obliques, Paris, Sens & Tonka, 2013, p. 86. Composibility is 
a term derived from the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz and indicates the logical possibility of 
coexistence within a world. At the end of the present article, I use the negative term incom-
possibility to indicate a conflictual coexistence of worlds as incompatible transcendental 
frameworks.
32 Tassin, Un monde commun, pp. 14, 143, 155.
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The Border Between Cosmopolitanism and a Conflict of Worlds
The turn from Kant to Heidegger is also present in some postcolonial reflections 
on politics. As David Harvey notes regarding Jarava Lal Mehta’s and Dipesh 
Chakrabarty’s endorsement of Heidegger as a way of challenging the abstract 
universalism of liberal cosmopolitanism: “There is, these authors seem to pro-
pose, no other way to compensate for liberal or socialist universalism and by ex-
tension Kantian failings other than by leaping straight from the Kantian frying 
pan into the Heideggerian fire.”33 Be that as it may, many postcolonial thinkers 
remain attached to the idea of cosmopolitanism, although in a radically trans-
formed way. Concepts such as “rooted” (Kwame Anthony Appiah), “vernacular” 
(Homi K. Bhabha), or “subaltern” (Bonaventura De Sousa Santos) cosmopoli-
tanism, and “afropolitanism” (Taiye Selasi, Achille Mbembe), aim to preserve 
the world as a political ideal while discarding its normative basis of abstract 
universality often associated with colonial and imperial practices.34 According 
to these approaches to cosmopolitics, which range from humanist and liberal to 
radically anticapitalist, the universality of the world can only be activated when 
articulated with some kind of a particularity, singularity, multiplicity, and/or 
marginality. In more radical versions of this line of thought, the subjectivities 
emerging in political struggles surrounding these conditions are seen as form-
ing a radical cosmopolitics from below. Cosmopolitanism is thus preserved on 
account of its singularisation, meaning that its universalist perspective can only 
be opened up from specific perspectives within social antagonisms and local 
33 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, New York, Columbia 
University Press, 2009, pp. 44–45.
34 See Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 
2005, Chapter 6; Homi K. Bhabha, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”, 
in L. Garcia-Morena and P. C. Pfeifer (eds.), Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on 
Cultural and National Identities, London, Camden House, 1996, pp. 191–207; Bonaventura 
De Sousa Santos, “Beyond Neoliberal Governance: The World Social Forum as Subaltern 
Cosmopolitan Politics and Legality”, in B. De Sousa Santos and C. A. Rodríguez-Garavito 
(eds.), Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality, Cambridge, 
Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 29–63; Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar”, Callaloo, 
36, (3/2013), p. 529; Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism”, in B. Robbins and P. Lemos 
Horta (eds.), Cosmopolitanisms, New York, New York University Press, 2017, pp. 102–107. 
On the distinction between universal and plural cosmopolitanisms, see also Harvey, 
Cosmopolitanism, p. 79.
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world at the border: the cosmopolitan ideal between loss and multiplication
political struggles involving the people living a cosmopolitan condition on the 
margins of society.
Can such a perspective still rely on a phenomenological concept of world? In 
his own reflections on the political charge of the concept of world, Tassin at-
tempts to reconcile the Arendtian conceptual framework with an emphasis on 
the conflictual dimension emerging within emancipatory politics. For Tassin, a 
common world in the political sense is not an existential given but made of “the 
intangible materiality” of human actions and relations “born out of struggles 
and conflicts.”35 It is within a common struggle in the midst of concrete social 
conflicts that a common world emerges. The concrete nature of political strug-
gles gives such worlds a necessarily singular character, as opposed to both the 
particular nature of exclusive communities and the abstract universal commu-
nity of cosmopolitism, which constitutes the “‘transcendental illusion’ of polit-
ical reason.”36 According to Tassin, cosmopolitan political projects aiming for 
the world as a whole in fact serve to distract from actual conflicts and emanci-
patory struggles.37 His own version of “cosmopolitics” goes beyond the cultural 
or communitarian conception of common worlds toward properly political com-
mon worlds, in which singularities, irrespective of their identities, are united in 
a common struggle.38 The struggles forming in migrant camps at borders are one 
of Tassin’s primary examples of such emerging common worlds.39 Tassin suc-
ceeds at dialecticising the opposition of political worldliness and worldlessness 
by understanding social conflicts – the very condensations of modern world-
lessness – as the site of the emergence of common worlds.
Looking closely at the way Tassin develops his argument, it becomes clear that 
what ultimately allows him to reaffirm Arendtian worldliness in terms of eman-
cipatory political struggles is his adoption of Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of 
political subjectivation.40 Both Rancière and Tassin also feature as crucial refer-
35 Tassin, Un monde commun, p. 295.
36 Ibid., p. 19.
37 Ibid., p. 211.
38 Ibid., pp. 177, 297–298.
39 Étienne Tassin, “Cosmopolitique et xénopolitique”, Raison présente, no. 201 (1/2017), 
pp. 99–107.
40 Tassin, Un monde commun, pp. 241, 277–278, 287–290.
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ences in Agier’s anthropology of being-in-the-world in border situations.41 While 
the concept of world indeed plays an important part in Rancière, who identifies 
politics as a conflict of worlds, the concept of world he operates with is, I argue, 
incompatible with the phenomenological one, even in its Arendtian version.42 
Tassin assumes the compatibility between the Arendtian and the Rancièrian 
frameworks of political thought without engaging with Rancière’s own critique 
of Arendt. What thus remains unaddressed is the tension between two very dif-
ferent political concepts of world, namely world as a phenomenological ideal of 
meaningful experience and world as a transcendental structure that determines 
what can appear within it and how.43
The problem with Arendt’s approach to politics, as Rancière understands it, is 
that politics can only take place within a sphere constituted by a defined col-
lection of individuals and clearly delimited from the social sphere and domes-
tic life.44 As Arendt herself admits, not everyone is in a position to lead a pub-
lic life.45 Only adult men, freed from the necessities of the private sphere, can 
be seen as capable of constituting a political world. From this perspective, the 
stateless are indeed seen as excluded from any such sphere and therefore ban-
ished into worldlessness. For Rancière, in contrast, politics is not a sphere but a 
process, one in which the very limits of what constitutes a world is questioned. 
From this perspective, rights are not assigned to fixed collections of individuals 
but verified in acts of political subjectivation, which also challenges the per-
ceived distinction between the public and the private. Rancière gives the exam-
41 Agier, Borderlands, pp. 100, 155–156. The discussion on the politics of a decentred subject 
in Part II of the book is significantly inspired by Rancière.
42 Regarding distinctions between Arendt and Rancière, see Jean-Philippe Deranty and 
Emmanuel Renault, “Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle against 
Domination and Injustice?”, in A. Schaap (ed.), Law and Agonistic Politics, Farnham, 
Ashgate, 2009, pp. 43–56, and Andrew Schaap, “Enacting the Right to Have Rights: 
Jacques Rancière’s Critique of Hannah Arendt”, European Journal of Political Theory, 10 
(1/2011), pp. 22–45.
43 For a more detailed discussion on the transcendental concept of world I have in mind here, 
see Rok Benčin, “Worlds as Transcendental and Political Fictions”, Filozofski vestnik, 42 
(2/2021), pp. 221–243. This is also the topic of my book with the working title Rethinking 
the Concept of World: Toward Transcendental Multiplicity, forthcoming from Edinburgh 
University Press.
44 Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, in Dissensus: On Politics and 
Aesthetics, trans. and ed. S. Corcoran, London, Continuum, 2010, pp. 62–75.
45 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 32–33.
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world at the border: the cosmopolitan ideal between loss and multiplication
ple of women in the French Revolution, who – in relation to the Declaration of 
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen – had the rights of men in principle, but 
were excluded from many of the rights belonging to citizens and therefore re-
duced to their private domestic existence. Their political subjectivation, which 
resulted in Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the 
Female Citizen, consists of a double demonstration: “Women, as political sub-
jects, set out to make a twofold statement. They demonstrated that they were 
deprived of the rights that they had thanks to the Declaration of Rights and that 
through their public action that they had the rights denied to them by the con-
stitution, that they could enact those rights.”46 For Rancière, politics takes place 
in such a verification of rights in which political subjects show that they do not 
have the rights that are supposed to belong to them, but also exercise the rights 
that are denied to them.
Rancière does indeed articulate politics with a concept of world, but of a very 
different kind. This can be clearly seen in his critique of Arendt’s notion the 
rights of man. For Rancière, as we have seen, politics is not defined as a sphere 
which emerges as a given among a stable collection of individuals and the envi-
ronment they create for themselves. In fact, “it is a division inserted in ‘common 
sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see 
something as given. […] This is what I call a dissensus: the putting of two worlds 
in one and the same world.”47 Political dissensus therefore puts two worlds in 
conflict: the world in which certain people have rights and the world in which 
they do not. This conflictual coexistence of worlds involves the same people and 
the same ontological reality, but transcendentally given in two very different, 
incompatible ways. This also implies that the problem cannot be solved by op-
posing globalisation with a more meaningful experience of singular common 
worlds, as plural as they may be. The problem is that any sense of worldliness 
is predefined by the question of who can take part in such a world and in what 
sense. If Rancière does not share the ideal of worldliness as developed by Arendt 
or Nancy, it is because he views political action not only as world-building, but 
also as a bifurcation of worlds. When Rancière defines politics as a conflict of 
worlds, the concept of world at play is no longer the phenomenological horizon 
of authentic existential experience transformed into a political ideal. It is a pro-
46 Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, p. 69.
47 Ibid.
106
rok benčin
saic conflict between incompatible transcendental frameworks of how the given 
is supposed to be constituted as a common world.
What happens, then, to the political concept of world when it is faced with the 
problems imposed on it by contemporary border situations? A comprehensive 
answer to this question would demand a wider examination, but from what I 
have attempted to show here, it seems that neither the universality of cosmopol-
itanism nor the singularity of worlds as spheres of meaningful coexistence can 
address the being-in-the-world of a stateless refugee or a migrant deemed to be 
illegal. The border is not a site of the affirmation of the world as a political ideal, 
nor a site of worldlessness. It is the stage of a conflict of worlds – not the cultur-
al worlds of those who come across the border and those who are already there, 
but political worlds as “incompossible” framings of the common.
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