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DIFERENCIAS ENTRE EL PERRO Y EL HOMBRE
Enlightenment, the control of knowledge and the relative success of Western empires to control and manage discontent, today everyone is speaking. The political society is marching next to—and sometimes in confrontation with—the civil society and NGOs. Muslim and Aymara intellectuals are jumping on the debate about the human, humanity and rights. And scholars in the Humanities and Chinese history are putting in conversation Confucianism and human rights. Afro-Caribbean philosophers are taking front stage. Global projects such as La via capeskin is following Monsanto’s steps more closely and proposing alternatives for the enhancement and preservation of life rather than initiatives for growth and accumulation and the fertilization of death.
What this means is that human and rights are no longer trusted to Western initiatives and its rhetoric of salvation. Human and rights have been placed in a different universe of discourse, that of the political society and de-colonization. And what all of this amounts to, with pros and cons that should be analyzed in each case, is that everyone is ready to speak for the human and for rights. The premise is to change the terms and
not just the content of the conversation. To provide a “new” and satisfy
modernity’s desire for newness will be more akin to the task of NGOs than to de-colonial projects. When, for example, Jamaican intellectual and
10 On “de-colonial Humanities” see www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/inputs/tagungen/
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activist Sylvia Wynter outlined a horizon “after man, toward the human”—a statement in which the story I told above is implied—we are already in a change of terrain in our conversation about Wynter’s question of “what does it mean to be human.” Once we have asked this question, the next one follows: how is it that human relations became “enclosed” in relation to rights and not framed in other terms? How a society organized to produce more and to succeed on the basis of domination and exploitation can be the “perpetrator” of rights violations and at the same time the creator of a concept of the human that legitimizes such a community as “savior”? Not long ago I attended a talk by a Danish NGO’s representative about violence in Guatemala. The NGO in question was heavily engaged in solving the problem of violence so that a transnational corporation, a chiefly Danish one, could invest and make Guatemala prosper. While it has to be recognized that Guatemalans have the right to live in a consumer society, it is not at all clear if that is what all Guatemalans are looking for. Certainly Danish are looking for that, but Danish and Guatemalan interests could be in conflict. It was in a following talk, by a Guatemalan himself, when I learned that many communities in Guatemala see themselves as poor but not as victims, and as poor they are taking their lives in their own hand and not putting their lives in the hands of Danish NGOs.11
The ideas of the human, humanity and rights became a contested arena. The “victims” are not always waiting for the “savior,” and the “savior,” willingly or not, may work to the benefit of the “perpetrator.” Taking their destinies into their own hands, political society’s diversity of projects involve actors whose experiences and subjectivities do not match the expectations of NGOs or of peripheral European economic investments. Some actors place themselves in the wide array of imperial interests, now widespread.
At another level, that of the nation-states instead of the sphere of the civil and political society current conflicts between the United States and the European Union on the one hand, and Russia, China, Iran, India and Brazil on the other, are conflicts between two types of nation-states: Western nation-states embedded in an imperial history congruent with capitalist economy, and nation-states encountering capitalism. A
11 I am referring to presentations made at the Business School and at the
Rehabilitation and Research Center for Torture Victims, Copenhagen.
www.cbs.dk/content/download/81673/1084891/file/PROGRAMMEFINAL%208.5 .08.pdf.
Who Speaks for the “Human” in Human Rights? 61
polycentric capitalist world is emerging. The principles of a capitalist economy are the same, but national histories, sensibilities, desires, tensions and anger with Western imperial arrogance, places the same economic logic at the service of particular interests, national or regional. The question of human rights emerges here as a place in which the so called “democratic and industrialized” states use the rhetoric of human rights violation to confront their economic rivals. Western expansion and capitalist economy is a terrain of “capitalist contention” today. In that controversy, a polycentric capitalist world order goes hand in hand with a polycentric discourse on human and rights set in non-Western histories and sensibilities that cuts across Western history of the idea of the human and of rights from the European Renaissance to the Second World War. The distinction made above between civil society and NGOs, and political society is also valid for the following analysis.12
The political society has been and continues to be formed by dissenters and activists whose goal is not to remedy the damages of capitalist economy in order to make its functioning smoother, but to de-link from that system and the belief that the more it is produced the better it is for “the people”, and to work toward a society not built on principles of accumulation. There is already enough evidence sustaining and justifying the directions de-colonial I would say of the political society.
Let’s make clear that the political society cannot be subsumed under de-colonial processes. Many sectors and projects advanced in the political society have a vision and horizon frame which is not de-colonial: theology of liberation, progressive and critical liberalism, Marxism, white feminism and white queer activists. Having said that, it is imperative to remember that the de-colonial option or de-colonial options if you prefer the plural is NOT the new and only game in town. It is called “option” precisely because it is an option among others. The purpose of de-colonial thinking is not to debunk concurrent projects neither to capture more converts and became the one and only. Pluriversality, and not universality, is the horizon of de-colonial thinking.
Under the de-colonial processes projects are under way and are emerging and proliferating all over the world and de-linking from the
12 This concept has been introduced by Partha Chaterjee. See, for example, Partha
Chaterjee, The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in most of
the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). I found it appropriate to
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major spheres of dissension in the West. De-colonial projects and the political society join forces when the horizon and the vision are guided by the struggle of liberation from the Western control of economy control of labor and of natural resources authority, knowledge, subjectivity, gender and sexuality.
De-colonial Humanities or the de-colonial option in the Humanities is coming into sight as a consequence born out of the demands of the de-colonial political society.13 De-colonial Humanities assume, in the first
place, that the Humanities have been and continue to be a fundamental dimension of Western scholarship. Secondly, it is assumed that the Humanities as a set of disciplinary formations are bound to the Renaissance concept of the human and to the Enlightenment concept of reason. In Western genealogy of thought the Humanities have a double face: under the name of Humanities, on the one hand, arts, literature, philosophy, and in certain degree the social sciences, flourished in the West and enchanted the non-Western world. On the other, the Humanities were the epistemic site in which it was possible, for social actors, to speak for the human. The Humanities naturalized, in the modern/colonial world, the long lasting distinction that has been brilliantly summarized and argued by Japanese scholar Nishitani Osamu, between humanitas and
anthropos.14
Osamu’s argument can be recast, I hope without making violence to it, in the language and the purposes of de-colonial Humanities. A de-colonial Humanities project is not to take in its hands the definition of the human, a definition that includes inclusion is off de-colonial discourse everybody and that presents de-colonial thinking as THE point of arrival. De-colonial thinking in this sense is naturally non-Hegelian. What the de- colonial option proposes, and Osamu’s article clearly illustrates this, is that: a) concepts of man, human and humanity are inventions of Western scholarship since the Renaissance; b) these concepts have links to the concept of rights, which is also a European Renaissance invention in its colonial expansion, i.e. its darker side; and c) in a world order of polycentric capitalist economies, the concepts of man, human and
13 For an example of how de-colonial Humanities are being thought out in Russia
see www.jhfc.duke.edu/globalstudies/currentpartnerships.html, and ww.jhfc.duke. edu/ globalstudies/Tlostanova_how%20can%20the%20decolonial%20project.pdf
14 Nishitani Osamu, “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of
‘Human Being’.” In Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006.
Who Speaks for the “Human” in Human Rights? 63
humanity became also a polycentric dispute at the level of states (Jordan, Iran, France) and international institutions. For example, Mohammad Khatami, former President of Iran, launched the project Dialogue among
Civilizations15 to counter Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations,16 and UNESCO in 2005 formed a truly international committee, Alliance of
Civilizations,17 whose main task has been to work toward peace.
UNESCO’s project is not the only one. Prince Hassan of Jordan has been leading a similar project under the name of Dialogue of Civilizations, which follows Khatami’s pronunciation. In the Middle East, Prince Hassan is mainly concerned with dialogue between Muslims, Jews and Christians. All these projects are, I repeat, unfolding at the level of States and institutions of international scope.18
De-colonial projects are closer to grass-roots movements than they are to States and institutions in which, directly or indirectly, the question of the human, humanity and rights is being redressed. This of course does not mean that collaboration between de-colonial and institutional is not possible. It only means that these two kinds of projects operate at different levels: one at the level of institutions and the civil society; the other in the sphere of the political society.
In de-colonial thinking, peace, a peaceful world, a peaceful society, requires two main conditions:
1) To de-link from capitalist economy, organized societies, nationally and internationally.
2) To accept even if for the ruling minority it will be difficult that indeed the vast majority of marginal human beings are human as the privileged economic and political elites, nationally and internationally.
If these two conditions are fulfilled, no one in particular will speak for the human because the human will just be taken for granted. And in such societies, there will be no need for rights, because there will be no perpetrators violating human and the life rights in the latter case the
15 www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2006/webArticles/102006_Khatami.htm.
16 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (London: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
17 www.unaoc.org
18 On these issues, see: www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-476/_nr-983
/webcom/show_article.php/_c-478/_nr742/i.html?PHPSESSID= ad16a32480e 888 ca549942f86da5191e).
Chapter One 64
victim being the life of the planet. That is to say, the life of all, including the species described as humanity. The concept of the human, as it has been articulated in Western discourse since the Sixteenth century—from Francisco de Vitoria to John Locke to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—went hand in hand with Frances Bacon’s conceptualization of Nature as something that has to be controlled and dominated by man.
In sum, de-colonial thinking is not arrogating upon itself the right of having the last word about what the human is, but proposing instead that there is no need for someone specific to talk about the human, because the human is what we are talking about. However, what lingers are five hundred years of epistemic and ontological racism constructed by imperial discourses and engrained in the last five hundred years of global history.
Bibliography
Bogues, Anthony, ed. After Man, Towards the Human. Critical Essays on
Sylvia Wynter. Kingston: Ian Randle Publisher, 2006.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press,
2004.
Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula. Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns and Africans:
Race and Self-Determination in International Law. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Hinkelammert, Franz. “The Hidden Logic of Modernity: Locke and the Inversion of Human Rights.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise Fall (2004):1–27.www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/dossiers/1.1/HinkelammertF.pdf. Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order. London: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Osamu, Nishitani. “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Beings’.” In Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, edited by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006.
Stiglitz, Joseph. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: WW. Norton, 2003.
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“Seen in the long perspective of the future, the whole of western European history is a provincial episode.”1
“So far as human rights are concerned, what matters is what presents itself in our world, now.”2
Intellectual historian David Hollinger has suggested that one of the most pressing problems of the Twenty-First century “is the problem of
For their comments on various portions and versions of this paper, I thank José- Manuel Barreto, Fred Beuttler, Marlene Clark, Neill Jumonville, Eduardo Mendieta, Samuel Moyn, Alvaro Eduardo de Prat and Roy Scranton. I would also like to thank the participants of both the 11th Annual Comparative Literature
Conference at the University of South Carolina on “The Futures of Human Rights”, and The Historical Society’s 2010 Conference at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where the earliest incarnations of this paper were first presented.
1 John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (1930), in The Essential
Dewey, Volume I: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, eds. Larry A. Hickman
and Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), 21. I thank……. for calling this quotation to my attention.
2 Bernard Williams, “Human Rights and Relativism,” in In the Beginning Was the
Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn
Chapter Two 66
willed affiliation, the problem of solidarity.”3 It is safe to say that the
topic of human rights, whether conceived in terms of discourse, legacy or practice, resides at the crux of this problem. Though their exact origins and their fundamental meaning are still debated, human rights are an inescapable part of the international community’s self-conception in the age of globalization. Depending on one’s perspective, they are either the last gasp or the final goal of human solidarity. What the proponents and critics of human rights have in common is the implicit recognition that, in the early Twenty-first century, human rights cannot be avoided—they can be supported or suppressed, enshrined or denied, extended or rescinded, but they cannot be ignored.
Hence the increasingly voluminous literature devoted to the subject, emerging from almost every corner of the contemporary academy. Students today can get their human rights lessons not only from faculties of law and international relations, but also from departments of politics, philosophy, literature, history and film, as well as the various other disciplines which comprise the social or human sciences, such as anthropology, economics and sociology. It goes without saying that this seemingly universal topical agreement does not immediately translate into scholarly consensus, but it certainly does reveal the intellectual preoccupations of the moment. It is significant that even historians, who are generally slowest to absorb the cutting-edge interests of their colleagues in other disciplines, are immersing themselves in topics relevant to the discussion of human rights. “We are all historians of human rights,” declared Linda Kerber, president of the American Historical Association, in 2006.4 Whether for good or ill, human rights
really do represent—as one recent study has put it—“the last utopia” of our age.5 The possibility of international solidarity seems to rest solely
with them.
No doubt part of the appeal of human rights is that they represent the age-old desire to actualize normative aspirations, to move from the realm
3 David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial,
Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2006), xv.
4 Linda K. Kerber, “We are All Historians of Human Rights” Perspectives Online
44 (2006). Available at http://www.historians.org/ perspectives/issues/ 2006/ 0610/ 0610pre1.cfm
5 See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge:
Provincializing Human Rights? 67
of the ought to the domain of the is. In the words of Jürgen Habermas, human rights represent a “realistic utopia.”6 However real human rights
have become in the contemporary world, though, their origins nevertheless remain linked to the imaginative, aspirational realm of ideas. Even after they entered into the concrete world of international legal and political discourse with the United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), human rights represented uncharted theoretical and practical territory. In this sense, the many philosophical and ideological debates that took place in the wake of the Universal Declaration were, we might say, struggles over how this new territory should be mapped. They were attempts to forge a new world, or, at the very least, to unveil an old world—as Mary Ann Glendon’s influential book has it—“made new.”7
But what, exactly, is the geography of this new world? And who is responsible for mapping it? If human rights are indeed a constitutive element of the new, contemporary world, it behooves us to inquire into the ways in which they emerged out of the fractured geographies of the old world. Any attempt to outline a geography or even a genealogy of human rights today must not only limn the contours of the future, but also the rough edges of the past.
What we find when we inquire into the contested terrain of human rights in the twentieth century, if not before, is a repeated struggle between those who situate human rights squarely in the intellectual terrain of the Western tradition, and those who do not. Given that so many of the key debates regarding the fate and future of human rights took place against