Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

Introduction: Constructs by Which We Live

1 Introduction Constructs by Which We Live Affronts to the innocence of our children or to the dignity of our persons are attacks not upon our essential being but upon constructs—constructs by which we live, but constructs nevertheless....The infringements are real; what is infringed, however, is not our essence but a foundational fiction to which we more or less wholeheartedly subscribe, a fiction that may well be indispensable for a just society, namely, that human beings have a dignity that sets them apart from animals.... The fiction of dignity helps to define humanity and the status of humanity helps to define human rights. There is thus a real sense in which an affront to our dignity strikes at our rights. Yet when, outraged at such affront, we stand on our rights and demand redress, we would do well to remember how insubstantial the dignity is on which those rights are based. —J. M. Coetzee It is hard to imagine a viable approach to social justice today that does not rely on the language of human rights. The proliferation of the many norms and ideals associated with human rights no doubt represents a hallmark achievement in international law, at the same time as it exemplifies the salutary repercussions of globalization. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have,in turn,come to be widely touted as the era of human rights—a sentiment that captures both the growing preponderance of rights talk and the immense promise that it invariably carries. This internationalization of human rights has led Michael Ignatieff to deem human rights “the lingua franca of global moral thought” and Elie Wiesel to call them a “world-wide secular religion.”1 The global culture of human rights has, among countless advances, worked to combat the oppression of women, to consolidate international opposition to torture,genocide,and severe rights infringements, to minimize conditions of economic disenfranchisement, and to encourage sociopolitical rapprochement in the aftermath of rights abuses. 2 IntroductIon Yet it is also fair to say that these accomplishments have come with corresponding costs. In particular, critics have decried the many exclusions and impediments that prevent human rights from attaining universal reach. From a legal perspective, these exclusions and impediments are sometimes dismissed as unavoidable, a necessary by-product of the very structure of the nation-state and the circumscribed frontiers of citizenship.2 For others,however , the failures of human rights have been attributed to everything from the challenge of their practical enforcement on the ground to what critics at times identify as their predominantly Enlightenment-based philosophical heritage.3 In fact, it has become a near truism to say that human rights have “only paradoxes to offer,” and these paradoxes often appear even more fraught when approached from a postcolonial perspective.4 Such long-standing and intractable debates provide an important backdrop to this book’s inquiries, both contextualizing and prompting many of my analyses. In the pages that follow, however, I focus specifically on two of the many paradoxes that especially bedevil what I describe as “liberal” articulations of human rights. The first of these paradoxes emerges from the contradictory status of the body within dominant definitions of human rights. As I will show, liberal human rights discourses and norms exhibit a profound ambivalence toward embodiment. Not only are they underwritten by the dual fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity, but they yield a highly truncated, decorporealized vision of the subject—one that paradoxically negates core dimensions of embodied experience. Over the course of the book, I will look to literature to gain access to as well as incarnate those facets of selfhood that liberal human rights discourses obscure. The second paradox I examine in this book extends from a problem inherent in the very language of human rights. In the present geopolitical climate, the discourse of human rights has grown distant from the early hopes that forged it,becoming an obstructionist idiom that increasingly fulfills the opportunistic ends of selfish actors. This semantic colonization directly pollutes and compromises the social and political meanings of human rights,forfeiting their bearings on social justice. While this problem of language is far from unique to human rights,I explore the contemporary rhetoric of human rights to open up far-reaching questions about aesthetics and politics—enabling us to ask, above all, how certain modes of aesthetic expression can play a meaningful role in salvaging, as well as recalibrating, our existing social and political imaginaries. Ultimately, I...