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Abstract
This paper begins with a critique of the concept of “rights” as that term is discursively deployed in the service of conventional human rights interventions. Four aporias of human rights discourse are foregrounded and serve as the basis on which six post-humanist claims are advanced. These claims are made to reimagine the concept of “rights” and rights-based discourse along the philosophical pathways mapped by Alain Badiou. Those pathways lead to spaces where the global and the local can be rethought as, in large measure, scale invariant; substantively, the local and the global differ dramatically; processually, the positions along the arc articulating substance to process function as immanent analogues. Multicultural immigration circumstances in Copenhagen preceding the “cartoon controversies” are discussed in discursive terms more or less unrelated to the discursive figures of “human rights,” demonstrating the possibility of realizing immanent human rights objectives without resorting to transcendent human rights discourse.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Bryan C. Taylor for encouraging me to submit my manuscript for consideration in this Special Issue of CCCS. The ideas, arguments and perspectives are my own and are not a reflection of his thinking.
Notes
2. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For three essays with direct bearing on this point see Alistair M. Macleod, “The Structure of Arguments for Human Rights,” Rex Martin, “Human Rights: Constitutional and International,” and David Duquette, “Universalism and Relativism in Human Rights,” in Universal Human Rights, ed. David A. Reidy and Mortimer, N.S. Sellers, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 17–77.
3. Ignatieff, Human Rights, 21.
4. Mark Tushnet, “A Critique of Rights: An Essay on Rights,” Texas Law Review 8, no. 2, May 1984, 1360–406.
5. Mark Tushnet, “A Critique of Rights: An Essay on Rights,” Texas Law Review 8, no. 2, May 1984, 1364–71.
6. Tushnet, 1371–84.
7. Tushnet, 1384–94.
8. Tushnet. 1394–402.
9. For a more extensive discussion of other-wise, see Leonard C. Hawes, “Becoming Other-wise: Conversational Performance and the Politics of Experience,” in Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Culture, ed. Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks, CA :Sage 2006): 23–48; see also Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Ann Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001).
10. Ignatieff.
11. Amy Gutmann, “Introduction,” in Human Rights in Politics and Idolatry, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), vii–xxviii.
12. Ignatieff, Human Rights.
13. Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Tansformation Using Conflict and Diversity (Portland, OR: Lao Tse Press, 1995), xv.
14. Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Tansformation Using Conflict and Diversity (Portland, OR: Lao Tse Press, 1995), 73.
15. Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Tansformation Using Conflict and Diversity (Portland, OR: Lao Tse Press, 1995), 75.
16. I would like to thank the reviewer for her/his close reading of my manuscript and her/his thoughtful critical concerns about my use of Badiou for my “post-humanist” critique of human rights discourse. “What happens if a theorist or an activist wants to carry out a post-humanistpolitics but doesn't share Badiou's commitment to the Platonic idea of truth …”. I would like to point out that Badiou's commitment is not to a Platonic idea of truth, but rather to mathematics in general and to open set theory in particular. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 66–76; see also Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought. Oliver, trans. Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2005), 1–28.
17. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 9.
18. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 16.
19. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 20.
20. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
21. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981); Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993); Richard Rorty, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53: 719–38; and Alain Badiou, Ethics.
22. See Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassrooms Post-modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed, 1998).
23. Amnesty International, Rights for All: Country Report, the USA (London: Amnesty, 1998), 13–14.
24. Ignatieff, Human Rights,33.
25. For a thorough discussion of these cultural, political, economic and historical dynamics see Ann Sørensen and Emily Gayong Setton, “No Safe Haven: Iraqi Asylum Seekers in Denmark,” Human in Action Denmark, (3 July 2008), at http://www.humanityinaction.org/docs/Reports/2008-DK-reports/HIA-report-AnnSorensen-and-Emily-Gayong-setton.pdf.
26. The Gacbaca court is one component of a system of community justice established in Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. The Gacaca courts grew out of the Garara court system of traditional cultural communal law enforcement procedures. Gacaca courts are a form of transitional justice designed to promote healing and moving on from the crisis. For a more detailed account see Gacaca Courts in Post-Genocide Rwanda (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/warcrime/Papers/webley-thesis.pdf). Full report on the Gacaca courts in Rwanda by Radha Webley of University College Berkeley War Crimes Study Center 2005.
27. This particular communicative practice we borrowed from the Quaker process referred to as a Clearness Committee. A Clearness Committee is constituted when a member of a Quaker community asks particular other members to be in service to him or her. The member asking other members to serve on a Clearness Committee asks because he or she is confronting a dilemma, a difficult decision, or a problem of some kind that remains unresolved. The members asked to participate are to ask only questions for which they have no answers. The purpose of this process is to support the thinking, clarifying, and decision making of the focus person. There are other conditions, such as a particular form of confidentiality, that pertain to a Quaker Clearness Committee that we did not borrow for the “gatherings” in Copenhagen.
28. Were there space enough and time, I could argue that such a characterization describes the historical arc of the development of The Declaration of Human Rights following the Second World War.
29. I have in mind here many of the ways Mikhail Bakhtin theorizes some of the ways Dostoevsky wrote his novels. See particularly Chapter 5, “Discourse and Dostoevsky,” in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MH: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 181–269.
30. For a much more detailed discussion of these challenges see Bernard Mayer, Staying with Conflict: A Strategic Approach to Ongoing Disputes (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009). Although Mayer is not addressing post-humanist critiques of human rights discourse, his discussions of the many paradoxes of such pragmatic work is quite valuable.