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Abstract
Does rhetoric have a place in the discourse of human rights? Without certain reply, as the dilemmas of defining, claiming, and promoting human rights appear both to include and exclude the rhetorical gesture, this question invites inquiry into the preface of the contemporary human rights regime, the moment of the aftermath that provokes a struggle with language. Grasped partly through Richard McKeon's extended thought on human rights and conflict resolution, including his collaboration with a committee of philosophers charged by UNESCO to assess the grounds for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this preface opens the work of discovery, an inquiry that recognizes how the hypocrisy of “acting words” constitutes a potential for expression which beckons being toward its human rights.
Notes
1. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 10–12, 15, 23.
2. For a survey of McKeon's work, see George Plochmann, Richard McKeon: A Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Gerard Hauser and Donald Cushman, “McKeon's Philosophy of Communication: The Architectonic and Interdisciplinary Arts,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 211–34.
3. BBC News, “Kofi Annan's Final Speech,” December 11, 2006, http://www.newsvote.bbc.co.uk.
4. Jeremy Bentham, “Nonsense upon Stilts, or Pandora's Box Opened, or the French Declaration of Rights Prefixed to the Constitution of 1791 Laid Open and Exposed—With a Comparative Sketch of What Has Been Done on the Same Subject in the Constitution of 1795, and a Sample of Citizens Sieyès,” in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Rights, Representation and Reform, ed. Philip Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkins, Cyprian Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 330.
5. For an important exception, see Gerard Hauser, “The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 440–66.
6. Following the attention paid to how Aristotle's account of “political man” (politikon zôon) suggests speech as a “defining” characteristic of the human, Depew's work is crucial reading. David Depew, “Humans and Other Political Animals in Aristotle's ‘History of Animals,’” Phronesis 40 (1995): 156–81.
7. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 35.
8. See Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
9. See Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 308.
10. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), 24.
11. See Wendy Brown, “‘The Most We Can Hope For …’: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 451–63. Here, I also draw from Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, From the Rights of Man to the Republican Idea, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 383; Werner Hamacher, “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks),” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 343–56.
13. See Hamacher, “Right to Have Rights,” 350–52; Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
14. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, trans. Joan Tate (New York: New Press, 1997); Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1938–1940, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.
15. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 55–56.
16. See Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava, “The Claims of Human Rights: An Introduction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 282.
17. Werner Hamacher, “The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 689.
18. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 14–16.
19. The expression is Butler's. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 9–22.
20. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 40.
21. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 43, 55.
22. My concern for the “taking place” of language draws on Agamben's development of the concept (Agamben, Language and Death, 37) and its intimate connection to Benjamin's thought.
23. This sense of (im)potential follows from Aristotle's account of a non-teleological sense of dunamis, one that Agamben has considered in significant detail and that Farrell developed at some length. While “(im)potential” is a bit cumbersome and arguably redundant—as potentiality is that which contains and carries impotentiality—the construction is useful to the degree that it underscores a need to think the word's (non)operativity in two directions simultaneously. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Thomas Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
24. See Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
25. Jan Herman Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of the Human Rights Idea in the Twentieth Century,” Human Rights Quarterly 14 (1992): 447–77.
26. Richard McKeon, letter to Julian Huxley, 13 March 1947, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 183, folder 4, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
27. Julian Huxley, letter to Richard McKeon, 5 May 1947, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 183, folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. UNESCO, “Memorandum on Human Rights,” 27 March 1947, p. 6, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 183, folder 1, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. The book was published (UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1949]).
28. The mailing appeared to go out to roughly seventy-five individuals. See “Suggested Names to Be Invited to Contribute to ‘The Rights of Man,’” n.d., papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 183, folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. There is perhaps another story to tell here, one that diverges from McKeon's work and focuses instead on how the various submissions shed light on the debates that occurred in Roosevelt's commission.
29. The committee published its questionnaire as an appendix to its collection of responses. See UNESCO, Human Rights, 251–57. Also see UNESCO, “Memorandum on Human Rights,” 6.
30. Julian Huxley, letter to Richard McKeon, 30 April 1947, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 183, folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
31. Julian Huxley, letter to Richard McKeon, 30 April 1947; Richard McKeon, letter to Julian Huxley, 4 June 1947, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 183, folder 3, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
32. Among others, the committee received responses from Benedetto Crocce, Lewis Mumford, Arthur Compton, Quincy Wright, Jacques Maritain, John Lewis, and a scratched note from Mahatma Ghandi. A selection of the replies was published in UNESCO, Human Rights.
33. “Report on the Meeting of the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Principles of the Rights of Man, Paris, June 26–July 2, 1947,” n.d. (ca. July 1947), p. 1, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 184, folder 10, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
34. “Report on the Meeting of the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Principles of the Rights of ‘Man,’” n.d. (ca. July 1947), papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 184, folder 10, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
35. Compare the committee's report with Richard McKeon, “The Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances of the Rights of Man,” in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (Paris: UNESCO, 1948), 35–46. Very little of the report's substance was changed between the time of its drafting, its submission to Roosevelt, and its subsequent publication in 1949. Respectively, compare “Report on the Meeting of the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Principles of the Rights of ‘Man,’” and UNESCO, “The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights—Report of the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Principles of the Rights of Man,” 31 July 1947, papers of Richard P. McKeon, box 184, folder 10, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
36. UNESCO, “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 1, 4. The committee's report is hereafter cited by paragraph as “Grounds of an International Declaration.” In this essay, I am relying on the first version of the report and not the one published subsequently. For the first version, see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, “The Grounds of an International Declaration of Human Rights: Report of the Unesco Committee on the Philosophical Principles of the Rights of Man to the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations,” 31 July 1947, UNESDOC Database, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001243/124350eb.pdf.
37. Glendon, World Made New, 73–78.
38. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 57; Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
39. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 15.
40. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 6.
41. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 5.
42. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 5.
43. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 8.
44. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 10 (emphasis added).
45. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par .3.
46. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par .4 (emphasis added).
47. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 16, 13 (emphasis added).
48. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 2, 6.
49. John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 18–19.
50. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 15 (1985): 7–15.
51. Hamacher, “Right to Have Rights,” 355.
52. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 13.
53. Richard McKeon, “Knowledge and World Organization,” in Foundations of World Organization: A Political and Cultural Appraisal, ed. Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, and Harold D. Lasswell (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), 297.
54. McKeon, “Knowledge and World Organization,” 323.
55. Richard McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political Conflicts,” Ethics 54 (1944): 236–37.
56. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 236–37. On McKeon's commitment to theoretical inquiry beyond the pragmatic idiom, see Richard McKeon, “Philosophy and Action,” Ethics 62 (1952): 98–100; Richard McKeon, “Dialectic and Political Thought and Action,” Ethics 65 (1954): 23; and Richard McKeon, “A Philosophy for UNESCO,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948): 576–77.
57. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 236–37.
58. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 243, 237.
59. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 236–37, 246–51, 255. For the underlying conceptual argument and its commitment to rhetoric, see McKeon, “Philosophy and Action,” 84–85, 96, 100; Richard McKeon, “Philosophic Differences and the Issues of Freedom,” Ethics 61 (1951): 105–35; Richard McKeon, “Dialectic and Political Thought in Action,” Ethics 65 (1954): 1–33.
60. See McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 237–38.
61. Richard McKeon, “Economic, Political, and Moral Communities in the World Society,” Ethics 57 (1947): 79 (emphasis added). See McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 261; Richard McKeon, “Power and the Language of Power,” Ethics 68 (1958): 106, 111.
62. McKeon, “Power and the Language of Power,” 111, 106–13; Richard McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” Ethics 61 (1950): 233. See Richard McKeon, “Philosophy of Communications and the Arts,” in Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, ed. Mark Backman (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1987), 99.
63. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 246; McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 233.
64. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 258.
65. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 259.
66. McKeon, “Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances,” 35.
67. McKeon, “Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances,” 39.
68. McKeon, “Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances,” 35, 36.
69. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 236. Also see McKeon, “Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances,” 35, 40–41; McKeon, “Power and the Language of Power,” 109.
70. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 259.
71. McKeon, “Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances,” 40.
72. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 260; McKeon, “Power and the Language of Power,” 113, 112. For one example of this dynamic, see Erik Doxtader, With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985–1995 (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip Publishers, 2009), 92–139.
73. McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 246.
74. McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 243.
75. McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 238.
76. Richard McKeon, “A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” in Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, ed. Mark Backman (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1987), 220; Richard McKeon, “Philosophy and History in the Development of Human Rights,” in Ethics and Social Justice, ed. Howard Kiefer and Milton Munitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968), 321. Also see Richard McKeon, “Philosophic Semantics and Philosophical Inquiry,” in Freedom and History and Other Essays, ed. Zahava McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 242–56.
77. McKeon, “Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” 198.
78. McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 258, 255.
79. McKeon, “Philosophy and History in the Development,” 313–14.
80. McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 243, 255.
81. McKeon, “Philosophy and History in the Development,” 315.
82. McKeon, “Philosophy and History in the Development,” 321.
83. McKeon, “Philosophy and History in the Development,” 311, 322; McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 255.
84. “Grounds of an International Declaration,” par. 4.
85. McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 238, 254; McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 236. For the fullest discussion, see McKeon, “Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” 195–220.
86. McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 238.
87. See McKeon, “Philosophy and Action,” 97; McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 257. For an early view of McKeon's defense of rhetoric and an account of its limits, see McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 246–51.
88. McKeon, “Philosophy and History,” 313, 322.
89. McKeon, “Power and the Language of Power,” 112. See McKeon, “Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” 219.
90. McKeon, “Philosophy and History,” 318; McKeon, “Philosopher Meditates on Discovery,” 220.
91. Richard McKeon, “Creativity and the Commonplace,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1973): 208.
92. McKeon, “Philosophy for UNESCO,” 580–81.
93. In many ways, McKeon's approach recalls Hegel's hope for recognition (Annerkennung) as unity in difference. To trace McKeon's early reliance on the grammar of recognition, see McKeon, “Discussion and Resolution in Political,” 246; McKeon, “Philosophic Bases,” 45; McKeon, “Philosophy and the Diversity of Cultures,” 258. McKeon's deepest appeal to recognition is found in the 1948 essay, “Philosophy for UNESCO.” I take the terms of McKeon's position to be aligned with Düttmann's concern to supplant an identitarian conception of recognition with the ongoing (rhetorical) struggle of recognizing. See Alexander Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition (London: Verso, 2000).
94. On re-cognition, see Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 30–31.
95. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 100–101, 97. See Frans-Willem Korsten, “The Irreconcilability of Hypocrisy and Sincerity,” in The Rhetoric of Sincerity, ed. Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 60–77.
96. See Sarah K. Burgess, “Transitional Bodies of Law: The Demand for Recognition in the United Kingdom's Gender Recognition Act,” in Engaging Argument: Selected Papers from the 2005 NCA/AFA Summer Conference on Argumentation, ed. Patricia Riley (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2006), 286–92.
97. Benjamin understood this as “mythical violence.” Walter Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1913–1926, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–52. See Düttmann, Between Cultures, 42, 96.
98. See Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
99. In words, we are set beside ourselves as recognizing unfolds in a becoming as we are not within a relation to what we are not (able to define). Düttmann, Between Cultures, 46–64.
100. I draw here from Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 124–30. See Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91–110.
101. For an account of the law's underpinning “rule of recognition,” see Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 78–102.
102. Here, I draw from Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).