Indignity

After the War it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds and thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. . . . The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

What if human beings, in humanism's sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that's the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is "proper" to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman? . . . The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development (among others) must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage. . . . The system rather has the consequence of forgetting what escapes it. But the anguish is that of a mind haunted by a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating it, sending it delirious but also making it think—if one claims to exclude it, if one doesn't give it an outlet, one aggravates it. Discontent grows with this civilization, foreclosure along with information.

—Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman

Introduction

In her complicated essay, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the Ends of the Rights of Man," written and then edited in the late 1940s and through the early 1950s, Hannah Arendt refers to stateless peoples as "the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics."¹ In her argument, those who are entirely unprotected by any polity or any possibility of political life are denied humanity. What is more, the constitutions of nations, increasing nationalism in post–World War I Europe, the so-called protections offered by the League of Nations, and the language of human rights deriving from the French and American revolutions all paradoxically conspire to give no recognition to stateless persons unless they are either criminals (in which case they may have a lawyer assigned to them, and they will be recognized by the law by virtue of breaking it) or, like Arendt herself, geniuses. She writes:

Just as the law knows only one difference between human beings, the difference between the normal noncriminal and the anomalous criminal, so a conformist society has recognised only one form of determined individualism, the genius. European bourgeois society wanted the genius to stay outside human laws, to be a kind of monster whose chief social function was to create excitement and it did not matter if he actually was an outlaw. Moreover, the loss of citizenship deprived people not only of protection, but also of all clearly established, officially recognised identity, a fact for which their eternal feverish efforts to obtain at least birth certificates from the country that denationalised them was a very exact symbol; one of their problems was solved when they achieved the degree of distinction that will rescue a man from the huge nameless crowd. Only fame will eventually answer the repeated complaint of refugees of all social strata that "nobody here knows who I am"; and it is true that the chances of the famous refugee are improved just as a dog with a name has a better chance to survive than a stray dog...