Ranciere - Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man, Ranciere
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Jacques Rancière
Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
A
sweknow,thequestionraisedbymytitle
took on a new cogency during the last ten years
of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or
Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the
seventies and eighties by the dissident move-
ments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—
a rejuvenation that was all the more significant
as the ‘‘formalism’’ of those rights had been one
of the first targets of the young Marx, so that
the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear
as their revenge. After this collapse, they would
appear as the charter of the irresistible move-
ment leading to a peaceful posthistorical world
where global democracy would match the global
market of liberal economy.
As is well known, things did not exactly go that
way. In the following years, the new landscape
of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism,
became the stage of new outbursts of ethnic con-
flicts and slaughters, religious fundamentalisms,
or racial and xenophobic movements. The ter-
ritory of ‘‘posthistorical’’ and peaceful humanity
proved to be the territory of new figures of the
Inhuman. And the Rights of Man turned out to
be the rights of the rightless, of the populations
hunted out of their homes and land and threat-
The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.
Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.
298
Jacques Rancière
ened by ethnic slaughter. They appeared more and more as the rights of
the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any rights or even
any claim in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld
by others, at the cost of shattering the edifice of International Rights, in
the name of a new right to ‘‘humanitarian interference’’—which ultimately
boiled down to the right to invasion.
A new suspicion thus arose: What lies behind this strange shift from Man
to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian? The actual subject
of these Rights of Man became Human Rights. Is there not a bias in the
statement of such rights? It was obviously impossible to revive the Marx-
ist critique. But another form of suspicion could be revived: the suspicion
that the ‘‘man’’ of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the
only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights attached to a national
community as such.
That polemical statement had first been made by Edmund Burke against
the French Revolution.
1
And it had been revived in a significant way by
Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism included a chapter devoted
to the ‘‘Perplexities of the Rights of Man.’’ In that chapter, Arendt equated
the ‘‘abstractedness’’ of ‘‘Men’s Rights’’ with the concrete situation of those
populations of refugees that had flown all over Europe after the First World
War. These populations have been deprived of their rights by the very fact
that they were only ‘‘men,’’ that they had no national community to ensure
those rights. Arendt found there the ‘‘body’’ fitting the abstractedness of the
rights and she stated the paradox as follows: the Rights of Man are the rights
of those who are only human beings, who have no more property left than
the property of being human. Put another way, they are the rights of those
whohavenorights,themerederisionofright.
2
The equation itself was made possible by Arendt’s view of the political
sphere as a specific sphere, separated from the realm of necessity. Abstract
life meant ‘‘deprived life.’’ It meant ‘‘private life,’’ a life entrapped in its
‘‘idiocy,’’ as opposed to the life of public action, speech, and appearance. This
critique of ‘‘abstract’’ rights actually was a critique of democracy. It rested
on the assumption that modern democracy had been wasted from the very
beginning by the ‘‘pity’’ of the revolutionaries for the poor people, by the
confusion of two freedoms: political freedom, opposed to domination, and
social freedom, opposed to necessity. In her view, the Rights of Man were
not an ideal fantasy of revolutionary dreamers, as Burke had put it. They
were the paradoxical rights of the private, poor, unpoliticized individual.
Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
299
This analysis, articulated more than fifty years ago, seems tailor-made,
fifty years later, to fit the new ‘‘perplexities’’ of the Rights of Man on the
‘‘humanitarian’’ stage. Now we must pay close attention to what allows it to
fit. It is the conceptualization by Hannah Arendt of a certain state of excep-
tion. In a striking passage from the chapter on the perplexities of the Rights
of Man, she writes the following about the rightless: ‘‘Their plight is not that
they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that
they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them.’’
3
There is something extraordinary in the statement ‘‘nobody wants to
oppress them’’ and in its plainly contemptuous tone. It is as if these people
were guilty of not even being able to be oppressed, not even worthy of being
oppressed. I think that we must be aware of what is at stake in this state-
ment of a situation and status that would be ‘‘beyond oppression,’’ beyond
any account in terms of conflict and repression, or law and violence. As a
matter of fact, there were people who wanted to oppress them and laws to
do this. The conceptualization of a ‘‘state beyond oppression’’ is much more
a consequence of Arendt’s rigid opposition between the realm of the politi-
cal and the realm of private life—what she calls in the same chapter ‘‘the
dark background of mere givenness.’’
4
It is in keeping with her archipolitical
position. But paradoxically this position did provide a frame of description
and a line of argumentation that later would prove quite effective for depo-
liticizing matters of power and repression and setting them in a sphere of
exceptionality that is no longer political, in an anthropological sphere of
sacrality situated beyond the reach of political dissensus.
This overturning of an archipolitical statement into a depoliticizing ap-
proach is, in my view, one of the most significant features of thought that
was brought to the fore in the contemporary discussion about the Rights
of Man, the Inhuman, and the crimes against humanity. The overturn is
most clearly illustrated by Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of biopolitics,
notably in Homo Sacer.
5
Agamben transforms Arendt’s equation—or para-
dox—through a series of substitutions that equate it, first, with Foucault’s
theory of biopower, and, second, with Carl Schmitt’s theory of the state of
exception.
In a first step, his argument relies on the Arendtian opposition of two
lives, an opposition predicated on the distinction between two Greek words:
zoe, which means ‘‘bare physiological life,’’ and bios, which means ‘‘form
of life,’’ and notably the bios politikos: ‘‘the life of great actions and noble
words.’’ In her view, the Rights of Man and modern democracy rested on
300
Jacques Rancière
the confusion of those two lifes—which ultimately meant the reduction of
bios to sheer zoe. Agamben equated her critique with Foucault’s polemics on
‘‘sexual liberation.’’ In TheWilltoKnowand Society Must Be Defended, Fou-
cault argues that the so-called sexual liberation and free speech about sex
are in fact effects of a power machine that urges people to speak about sex.
They are effects of a new form of power that is no longer the old sovereign
power of Life and Death over the subjects, but a positive power of control
over biological life. According to Foucault, even ethnic cleansing and the
Holocaust are part of a ‘‘positive’’ biopolitical program more than revivals
of the sovereign right to kill.
6
Through the biopolitical conceptualization, what, in Arendt, was the
flaw of modern democracy becomes in Agamben the positivity of a form
of power. It becomes the complicity of democracy, viewed as the mass-
individualistic concern with individual life, with technologies of power
holding sway over biological life as such.
From this point on, Agamben takes things a step further. While Foucault
opposed modern biopower to old sovereignty, Agamben matches them by
equating Foucault’s ‘‘control over life’’ with Carl Schmitt’s state of excep-
tion.
7
Schmitt had posited the state of exception as the principle of politi-
cal authority. The sovereign power is the power that decides on the state
of exception in which normal legality is suspended. This ultimately means
that law hinges on a power of decision that is itself out of law. Agamben
identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life. What
is correlated with the exceptionality of sovereign power is the exception of
life. It is life as bare or naked life, which, according to Agamben, means life
captured in a zone of indiscernibility, of indistinction between zoe and bios,
between natural and human life.
In such a way, there is no more opposition between sovereign power and
biopower. Sovereign power is the same as biopower. Nor is there any oppo-
sition between absolute state power and the Rights of Man. The Rights of
Man make natural life appear as the source and the bearer of rights. They
make birth appear as the principle of sovereignty. The equation would still
have been hidden at that time by the identification of birth—or nativity—
with nationality, that is, with the figure of the citizen. The flow of refugees
in the twentieth century would have split up that identity and made the
nakedness of bare life, stripped of the veil of nationality, appear as the secret
of the Rights of Man. The programs of ethnic cleansing and extermination
would then appear as a radical attempt to draw the full consequences of
Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
301
this splitting. This means that the secret of democracy—the secret of mod-
ern power—can now show up at the foreground. Now state power has con-
cretely to do with bare life. Bare life is no longer the life of the subject that
it would repress. Nor is it the life of the enemy that it would have to kill. It
is, Agamben says, a ‘‘sacred’’ life—a life taken within a state of exception,
a life ‘‘beyond oppression.’’
8
It is a life between life and death that can be
identified with the life of the condemned man or the life of a person in a
state of coma.
In his analysis of the Holocaust, Agamben emphasizes the continuity
between two things: scientific experimentation on life ‘‘unworthy to being
lived,’’ that is, on abnormal, mentally handicapped, or condemned persons,
and the planned extermination of the Jews, posited as a population experi-
mentally reduced to the condition of bare life.
9
Therefore the Nazi laws sus-
pending the constitutional articles guaranteeing freedom of association and
expression can be thought as the plain manifestation of the state of excep-
tion, which is the hidden secret of modern power. Correspondingly, the
Holocaust appears as the hidden truth of the Rights of Man—that is, the
status of bare, undifferentiated life, which is the correlate of biopower. The
camp can be put as the ‘‘nomos’’ of modernity and subsume under one and
the same notion the camps of refugees, the zones where illegal migrants
are parked by national authorities, or the Nazi death camps.
In such a way, the correlation of sovereign power and bare life takes place
where political conflicts can be located. The camp is the space of the ‘‘abso-
lute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application,
exception and rule.’’
10
In this space, the executioner and the victim, the
German body and the Jewish body, appear as two parts of the same ‘‘bio-
political’’ body. Any kind of claim to rights or any struggle enacting rights
is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life and
state of exception. That polarity appears as a sort of ontological destiny: each
of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference
grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political prac-
tice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap.
Agamben’s view of the camp as the ‘‘nomos of modernity’’ may seem very
far from Arendt’s view of political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that
the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is the ulti-
mate consequence of Arendt’s archipolitical position, of her attempt to pre-
serve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life.
This attempt depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside its always-
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