Extraterrestrial diplomacy elements

Abstract

The film series Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, portrays an agency whose goal is to prevent the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth from causing problems – be they misunderstandings or violent aggressions. In a comical way, they allow us to understand the weak point of both universalism and particularism: there is no difference without undifferentiation – and neither undifferentiation without difference. At the moment when the dreams of equality and universality – as put into practice, for example, at the end of the Roman era, with the edition of the Caracala’s Constitution, which extended Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Empire – intend to materialize, it is not the protocols of legal abstraction that must do all the work, but those of a true alien diplomacy, whose starting point is to consider us as strangers to ourselves.