Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

Notes

225 q Notes Introduction 1. Cited in Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 53. There is an ever more voluminous body of scholarship that weighs in on the intellectual history of human rights. See, for instance, Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Moyn, The Last Utopia; Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights; Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN; and Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. 2. Hannah Arendt’s treatment of this paradox in The Origins of Totalitarianism remains perhaps the most widely cited. 3. Such a characterization of human rights is often partner to the charge of their cultural imperialism, although that basis for attacking human rights is increasingly seen as outmoded. Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab are usually credited with first launching that critique with Human Rights and Toward a Human Rights Framework, although they have since revised that position. See Pollis, “Cultural Relativism Revisited ”; Pollis and Schwab, Human Rights. Yet for many scholars the cultural relativism critique still carries substantial force, for instance, as Makua Mutua deems the human rights movement “a civilizing crusade aimed primarily at the third world.” See Human Rights, 19. 4. See Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer. Among countless other sources that construe human rights in terms of paradox, see Douzinas, The End of Human Rights; Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 11–13; Brown, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights”; Glendon, “Propter Honoris Respectum,” 1171; Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity. 5. Giving Offense, 14. 6. Article 1 of the UDHR unequivocally proclaims that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” In law, the concept of dignity is central to the juridical processes and legal documents of a wide variety of nation-states, including,among many others,Finland,Brazil,Angola,Peru,Hungary, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. See Bagaric and Allan, “The Vacuous Concept of Dignity,” 261–63. Roberto Andorno similarly observes how international human rights instruments repeatedly invoke the concept of dignity. See “Human Dignity and Human Rights.” Discussions of dignity and human rights are voluminous, but for a historical and philosophical overview, see Kretzmer and Klein, The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse. For the normative force of the concept of dignity within human rights discourse, see Schachter, “Human Dignity as a Normative Concept.” For the converse argument that dignity is a “vacuous concept” that “is used by academics , judges, and legislators when rational justifications have been exhausted,” see 226 Notes to Pages 3–7 Bagaric and Allan, “The Vacuous Concept of Dignity,” 260. See also Singer, Applied Ethics, 228. Jack Donnelly does not deny the shared nature of dignity; however, he disputes the notion that such an ideal is necessarily linked to the concept of rights. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 7. For instance, Mary Ann Glendon attributes such a function to dignity, which for her unifies the many disparate rights enumerated in the UDHR. See “Propter Honoris Respectum,” 1175. 8. For such an argument, see Douzinas, The End of Human Rights, 217. 9. This terminology owes much to Ian Baucom, even though Baucom argues that what he calls “an Enlightenment theory of the human” supports human rights. See Specters of the Atlantic, 56. Likewise, for an analysis of “the liberal rights tradition ,” see Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Legal Theory, 11. See also Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place. 10. For such language, see Cheah, Inhuman Conditions. 11. According to Benhabib, the international migration of human rights discourses has promoted a “creative jurisgenerative politics,” wherein standardized, rote connotations undergo revival and amplification, especially when requisitioned by nondominant actors. Another Cosmopolitanism, 49. 12. See Ignatieff,Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 90. Upendra Baxi describes the reality wherein more and more issues and concerns fall under the purview of human rights as “overproduction,” leading her to characterize the label human rights as a “floating signifier.” The Future of Human Rights, 66, 40. For a discussion of the “open-endedness” and “exhortatory nature” of human rights instruments, see Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 154. 13. As Wai Chee Dimock notes, “The language of rights is a language burdened by little awareness of conflicting, overlapping, or incommensurate claims. For that reason,it also has no ability to predict its own limits,no provision for any sort of selfqualifying responsiveness.” “Rethinking Space,Rethinking Rights,”254–55. Ignatieff likewise characterizes the problem as a tendency to think of rights as “trumps”rather than as a “basis for deliberation.” Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 95. 14. See...