Disembodied Liberalism, Embodied Human Rights

Elizabeth S. Anker’s Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature brings to bear a bracing critique of the damaging abstractions and idealizations intrinsic to liberal conceptions of persons, rights, and human dignity. It advocates a shift toward embodiment, made accessible through literature and twentieth-century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of embodied perception,” as a resource for “an imaginative refurbishment of liberal discourses of human rights” (51). Anker’s study locates a contemporary crisis of legitimacy in human rights culture stemming from the way definitions of the human have been almost completely co-opted by a reductive liberalism that identifies human dignity with bodily integrity, in the process creating “a highly truncated, decorporealized vision of the subject—one that paradoxically negates core dimensions of embodied experience” (2). Liberalism’s distrust of embodiment, according to Anker, derives from its privileging of both a disembodied rationality as a source of generalized control and an autonomous, self-regulating individual mind lodged in an “always already inviolable body, one fully integrated and thereby dignified through reasoned self-determination” (16). This equation of dignity with autonomy is also entailed in liberalism as a political philosophy and worldview: “The presumption that the rational faculties of the mind must wield sovereign authority over and thereby discipline material, physical being has provided a key justification for the exploitation of not only the natural world but also different human populations over history … which is to say that a particular breed of dualism has underwritten innumerable of global modernity’s epidemic wrongs” (55). These abstract liberal definitions of the subject have “coloniz[ed]” (2) the language of human rights and framed definitions of the body politic in reference to devalued subordinate groups: “both the myth of the integrity of the natural human body and the symbolic economy of the national body politic are paradoxically consolidated by the specter of abused, broken, and profaned bodies, which in popular human rights discourses are often complexly raced and gendered” (16). This paradox gives rise to liberalism’s incessant preoccupation with disqualified and damaged bodies (33).

According to Anker, liberal dualisms take the place of and negate commonalities issuing from diffuse and unbounded aspects of human corporeality, sense perception, sexual desire, and physical vulnerability. Setting aside liberalism’s preoccupation with epistemology, therefore, Anker turns to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, due to its focus on ontology and its philosophical quality as “an exercise in unconcealment aimed at divulging the self’s cohabitation with other beings” (71), including nonhuman species. Despite the “calcifi[cation|” and “depleted reservoirs of language” blamed by Merleau-Ponty for afflicting politics and “deaden[ing] perception to the self’s intertwining within the larger cosmos and its reciprocities” (70), shared aspects of embodiment can still be registered linguistically and symbolically. Literature can provide such access to embodiment, according to Anker: “One of the key aims of this book is to consider how literature can help negotiate the progressively diffuse and turbulent discourses of human rights” (5).

Fictions of Dignity makes the convincing and valuable point that to correct disembodied notions of the human by grounding an understanding of human dignity in the body requires that human rights discourse grapple with the body’s lack of integrity and vulnerability as definitional and intrinsic rather than aberrant aspects of such dignity: “Affirmatively recasting embodiment as a ubiquitously shared site of disorder, flux, and brokenness would thus overwrite the stigma and shame that attach only to some bodies and not others” (59). The dignified body must therefore become visible and legible within forms of disability, pain, and suffering rather than functioning as an abstract starting point or ideal. Related to this shift is Anker’s cogent questioning of the linkage of rights to a capacity for rational speech: “If the capacity for speech acts as a barometer for a being’s relative humanity, then it regulates the more comprehensive equipment of citizenship, providing a key warrant for deeming some lives and not others...