Looking back at the beginning of my odyssey of studying cosmopolitanism, an apparently paradoxical aspect may be noticed: I was afraid of grand narratives, but I have elaborated a new grand narrative which includes everything – dissent, protests, ontology, migration, a World Republic, laughter, fear, ‘conversion’, sex, love and thinking. However, there is no contradiction in this trajectory, since the totality presupposed by this grand narrative is a totality of critique or of ‘altering the value of all currencies’. I was looking for an approach to cosmopolitanism that would resist criticisms and the discovery is that such an approach does not need moderation but radicalisation through altering the values of all currencies. Through this radicalisation, the thinking about cosmopolitanism reclaims the legacy of the Ancient Cynics in its radical and militant core. In addition, two more questions persist and have to be addressed: is this new grand narrative called ‘totality of critique’ free from a colonising intent? Is not the militant cosmopolitics a dangerous avant-garde of the few militating in the name of the whole world?

My research on cosmopolitanism started only when I overcame the fear of a grand narrative and only when I found the resources to advance a cosmopolitanism that will resist criticism such as ‘a dangerous illusion of a world hegemony of one dominant power’ (Mouffe 2005: 107); ‘oppressiveness of abstracted universalism’ (Harvey 2009: 80); ‘an ideology’ (Cavallar 2011: 1), a ‘cosmopolitan crusade’ (Hayden 2013: 195); ‘another threatening modernist ideology of human betterment – a new political religion of immutable truth’ (Hayden 2013: 196); and numerous criticisms of a cosmopolitanism with a colonial intent expressed by the repeated question, ‘Whose cosmopolitanism?’ (Latour 2004), as in an edited book where half the chapters have the title, ‘Whose cosmopolitanism?’ (Glick Schiller and Irving 2014). So, how does the grand narrative of the totality of critique avoid criticisms, and in particular how does it avoid a new grand narrative with a colonial intent? The answer is that the totality of critique or of ‘altering the value of all currencies’ not only does not have a colonial intent but, on the contrary, it inscribes itself into a continuation of decolonisation struggles.