Afterword

Summary

This chapter synopsises and synthesises the contributions of the preceding chapters. Approaching cosmos as a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (in Jacques Rancière’s phrase), it traces the way kosmos operates to organize reality on the level of aesthetics, politics, ethics and epistemology and to integrate these various domains into a holistic vision. The chapter also stresses, however, the provisionality and partiality of that cosmic whole and considers the alternative visions of reality it precludes, the disorderly order that Heraclitus characterised as ‘the sweeping of random things scattered’ and that James Joyce terms ‘chaosmos’.