Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials

"Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials. This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science-fiction). With these aliens that Kant must have taken seriously as no one else in the history of philosophy did, what must be questioned above all else are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism. Yet before reading Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, we work our way through an analysis of the star wars raging above our heads. And we start by envisaging current international treaties that regulated the law of space and the figure of those cosmopirates that Carl Schmitt sometimes mentioned in his late writings. Turning then to track the comings and goings of extraterrestrials in Kant's work, it becomes clear that they are the necessary condition for an unattainable definition of humanity. Impossible to represent, escaping any possible experience, they are nonetheless inscribed in the very heart of the sensible. They are the Archimedean point of the sensible from whose perspective its distribution is woven. Reading Kant, and reading him in dialogue with science-fiction films he seems to have already seen, involves making him speak of the pressing questions that often oppress us: our endangered planet, ecology, the war of the worlds...But it also means attempting to think, with or beyond him, what a point of view might be.