Cosmic Sensibility for Cosmopolitics: Making Sense in the Anthropocene

In response to Philippe Descola’s call for a cosmopolitics adequate to the crisis of the multiscalar Anthropocene, this paper interrogates the problem of entangled coexistence by shifting the analytical register to sensibility. The paper therefore proposes the speculative concept of cosmic sensibility, which mobilizes sense as constitutive of cosmopolitics and names a relational openness through which distinct entities become mutually sense-able without necessarily presupposing their commensurability. The concept synthesizes insights from the ontological turn (Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Hui), process-relational cosmology (Whitehead) and cosmopolitics (Stengers), as well as feminist STS (Barad, Haraway), in order to sketch its provisional contours across three interconnected registers: onto-epistemological, cosmopolitical, and ethical. Reading in parallel a line of authors who rethink the anthropocentric assumptions of the cosmos in relational terms, the paper contends that ontological plurality becomes cosmopolitically consequential only insofar as agents inhabiting heterogeneous worlds can enter into relations of mutual sense-ability. Cosmic sensibility thus reframes entangled coexistence as a practice of dwelling halfway, sustaining difference while remaining response-able to the worldings produced through the encounter.