Poignancy as Human Rights Aesthetic

Abstract

This essay offers an aesthetic of “poignancy” as a potential theoretical ground of human rights, as opposed to Kantian formulations currently finding expression in the language of “cosmopolitanism.” The lack of concern with health and life found in Immanuel Kant's definition of human freedom is reproduced in what the author calls “magisterial” human rights practice, which tends to emphasize civil proceduralism and is advanced by a global elite. An immanental aesthetic indebted to Theodor Adorno, by contrast, might coincide with an immanental justice responsive to the physical and spiritual demands of human subjects, thus advancing vital if underdeveloped impulses of the UDHR, namely those expressed in its recognition of freedom from want and freedom of worship. This aesthetic is described with reference to the Orpheus myth, to John Keats's odes, and to a January 2009 account of shelling in Gaza. It is furthermore deployed in response to the dismissal of human rights emerging from such leftist intellectuals as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.

For their generous and incisive responses to a talk based on a portion of this essay, I am grateful to members of the English Department at Vanderbilt University. For their thoughtful and thorough comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Eleni Coundouriotis, and “Reader 2.”

Feisal G. Mohamed is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois and a member of the Executive Committee of the Milton Society of America. His articles have appeared in PMLA, Journal of the History of Ideas, Dissent Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and is currently completing a book project tentatively titled Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Epistemology, Ethics, Politics, Terrorism.

Notes

1. See Mohamed (2008) on Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, though that essay appearing on October 13, 2008 preceded the utter collapse of this deeply flawed mechanism, a collapse precipitated by the huffy resignation of head commissioner Harry LaForme over power-sharing squabbles with his then co-commissioners, Claudette Dumont-Smith and Jane Morley, both of whom have now also resigned. Replacement commissioners were announced on June 10, 2009 (see Indian Residential Schools 2009).

2. For the definition and legal significance of the “crime against humanity” and its application at Nurembeg, see Tomuschat (2006) and Robertson (2006: 252–253, 260–261).

3. Several current formulations of “cosmpolitanism,” it should be noted, seek to emphasize the unprivileged rather than elites transcending the constraints of nationality; see Robbins (1998) and Goodlad (2009).

4. In developing her ideas on a “literary habit of reading,” Spivak critiques the view of Richard Rorty that would make the American university a utopia toward which other reading communities should aspire (Spivak 2008: 17–18). Slaughter incisively associates the views of Rorty and Martha Nussbaum with eighteenth-century sentimentality and the humanitarian figure who “is an intermediary between ourselves and the ones who suffer” (Slaughter 2009: 102). See Rorty (1993: 127) and Nussbaum (1997: 88–89).

5. Adorno's sense of the inhumanity of the aesthetic object might also shed light on the enigmatic concluding lines of “Grecian Urn,” where the urn remains “in midst of other woe / Than ours” declaring “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Stanza 5). T. S. Eliot famously described this concluding aphorism as “a serious blemish on a beautiful poem; and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue” (Eliot 1950: 231). Some of that confusion might be cleared by Keats's statement in a letter to Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination—what the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth” (Keats 1958: November 22, 1817). The urn's beauty is a fleeting reminder of the joy to be gleaned in that slow time approaching eternity, even as it is simultaneously a reminder of life's suffering and of the limits on our apprehension of truth (see Sharp 1979: 155).

6. Sharp (1979) observes that in “Keats's aestheticism, his solution to the problems posed by his skepticism and the inevitability of suffering, has the character of temporary consolation rather than apocalyptic transfiguration” (60).

7. See, by contrast, the opposition of the sublime as true misfortune and pathetic as artificial misfortune in Schiller (1967: 209).

8. See Bohm (2007: 25) on Keats's favoring of the beautiful over the sublime, though that argument might take fuller account of how he complicates the former.

9. See White (1999) on the firsthand exposure to suffering of Keats's medical training and its impact on The Eve of St. Agnes (63–64).

10. Doloff (2003) notes the debt of “Grecian Urn” to Ovid's story of Pygmalion in the Metamorphoses; Bohm (2007) reads the poem in light especially of Ovid's Amores (3.13).

11. Despite her admirable Arendtian critique of Kant's aesthetics, Sliwinski justifies Badiou's criticism of an anthropology of suffering in concluding that “a history of human rights … focuses on our shared frailty, our radical vulnerability, and our susceptibility to what Arendt called the ‘banality of evil’” (2009: 37).