Inhumanity Handouts

Critical Legal Thinking, 2024

The fourth roundtable of the "Law and the Inhuman" workshop was entitled "The Inhuman as Refusal", and was curated and chaired by Marie Petersmann. The two speakers were Juliana M. Streva and Sarah Riley Case. The discussions focused on various forms of refusal as practices that reject and resist established norms, structures of power, or the modernist world as a given. Such practices are aimed at disordering, disrupting and dismantling norms and institutions that are foundationally unjust, oppressive and detrimental to certain groups or communities. By undoing the 'human' as a given, the 'inhuman' is affirmed as a premise for something else-a different mode of being and becoming with others.

2017

The manifesto mode of political writing is associated with some of the themes and topics I’ve engaged with the most – posthumanism, piracy, Marxism, open access, the commons. Nevertheless, I’m hesitant to respond to your invitation to help launch Media Theory by producing a manifesto as to why an open access journal on media theory is necessary, and what I would like to see it do. I’m not interested in setting agendas or laying out policies with my work. Nor do I wish to get involved in debates.

The Age of Human Rights, 2019

The prohibition on "inhuman treatment" constitutes one of the central tenets of modern international human rights law. However, in the absence of any legislative definition of the term "inhuman", its interpretation becomes challenging. The aim of this article is to critically analyze the interpretation of the term "inhuman" in international human rights law and to suggest a new approach to defining it. The first part of the article highlights the failure of supra-national institutions to provide an independent definition for the term "inhuman", while mistakenly equating it to other forms of ill-treatment. The second part of the article introduces philosophical concepts necessary for reconstructing the conceptual independence of the term inhuman. It primarily focuses on "the capability approach" and the notion of "human functioning", as developed by Martha Nussbaum.

History and Theory, 2012

This essay investigates the thesis that inhumanity breeds humanity. Many questions arise when we try to corroborate it: Can we say anything at all about the inhumanity of human beings? Why did large-scale inhumanity occurring before 1700 not elicit a human rights regime? Was the human rights takeoff from 1760 to 1800 triggered by instances of inhumanity, and why did the takeoff not last? Why did the human rights idea eclipse after 1800 only to reemerge after 1945? Were war and genocide the sole causes of the human rights revival after 1945 or were there also other factors? Was the breakthrough in 1977 of human rights as a mass movement related to any inhumanity? And, finally, is the contemporary enthusiasm for human rights, with 1998 as its stepping stone, sufficient to make atrocities unthinkable for good? I conclude that, at several moments in history, inhumanity did propel humanity, but also that there are many other instances in which inhumanity only gave birth to more inhumanity. If the inhumanity thesis were necessarily true, we would need more human rights catastrophes to inspire more human rights prog ress. And that would be a self-defeating paradox.

History of Humanities, 2019

This article provides a brief history of the inhumanities in both the East and the West. The term inhumanities gestures in two directions. Inhumanities refers first to humanistic texts and thinkers who provide "logical justifications" for dehumanizing human beings. The term also considers the logical justifications such texts and thinkers provide for disqualifying certain humans-for the purpose of this essay, slaves-from access to humanistic study. The article supposes that this history of the inhumanities is the longstanding first crisis in the humanities. With this in mind, it considers the reverberations of the history of the inhumanities in our current crisis in the humanities, and it concludes with a call to rethink the humanities in this contemporary moment of crisis. This is an idea with a powerful hold on the liberal mind-that great literature and art inoculate against illiberalism, that high culture properly interpreted offers a natural rebuke to all that is cruel [and] hierarchical.. .. And meanwhile the whole deep human past is still there. 1 I n the fourth Republican presidential debate of 2015, Marco Rubio, the junior United States Senator from the state of Florida, could not fathom the value of the humanities. Why shouldn't, Senator Rubio proposed, higher education simply respond to some imagined need for "more welders and less philosophers?" 2 Not fewer philosophers, but less. But maybe Rubio's formulation is more than a Freudian slip of the tongue. Perhaps Senator Rubio wants us to be less philosophical, as in a lessening of

Social Indicators Research Series, 2014

Educational Leadership, 1980

A t 3 time when many high school students are vandaliz ing, thieving, and even attack ing their peers and teachers, when the apostles of "self" and "looking out for #1" are lionized by society, and John Kenneth Galhraith (1980) feels it necessary to plead at Berkeley for a revival of the "social ethic" even now it is impossible to mention the need for "citizenship education" to intelligent people outside of the education establishment without their cringing and changing the sub ject. Why? One explanation is that those of

Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links Between the Human and Inhuman, 2018

Monsters are deeply embedded in our cultural fabric, moving across epochs from ancient mythology to folk and fairy tales to literature, and then film and television. The collected essays in this volume will explore the cultural implications of monsters, particularly those of the 20th and 21st centuries, delving into the various social, economic, and political issues that these monsters reflect. Long tied to ideas of the Other, the inhuman have represented societal fears for centuries. In fact, the dawning imperialist age saw a resurgence of these gothic horrors, particularly in fiction such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Civilized Victorian society reinvented the monstrous myths, projecting their fears about those they were colonizing onto the monsters that populated the pages. This resurgence expanded during Modernist times with the advent of radio, film, and television. Society quaked in terror over the reported aliens in War of the Worlds and Count Dracula floated eerily across the screen— just as ideas related to eugenics and racial purity permeated the Western world. The monster fiction and media of the postmodernist eras still reflect societal unease when it comes to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and other cultural issues. Yet, a transformation has occurred in contemporary works, a cultural shift, so to speak. In his essay “Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen says, “[t]he monster is . . . an embodiment of certain cultural moments—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy . . . giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture” (1996, 4). What we see as we move across the 20th and 21st centuries is a reclamation of the monstrous and an exploration of, as posthuman critics posit, the “us” in “them.” Rather than provoking only fear, many of these monsters now inspire sympathy, forcing audiences to question ideas related to the different social, political, and economic issues contemporary monsters represent as well as ideas about human nature.

2 Two children standing in a field. A little boy poses for the camera, his face obscured by a grotesque mask of animal bone. A little girl (his sister?) stares at the ground, raising her hand undecided, holding…(another piece of the carcass?). This travel portrait is for me a portrait of home. Walking the fields of my hometown, I see their hipbones screaming too loudly to the open air, sticking through a living skin, a black and white terrestrial torn into the blood of every day. A field of heavy udders, the labour of a pelvis that ended as a crown, adorning the head of this little Man-to-come. These wounds exposed to a sunny countryside have now become the horns of a devilish monster, and I am unwillingly the little sister (be-)holding the crime. I avert my eyes because I no longer recognize my brother. But what do I see positioning myself behind this borrowed camera, looking-with the death of cows at this Human made with Animal-death? What is it that my brother, the monster, might tell me, this Inhuman whose legacy of life and death I hold in my hand? What sisterhood do I fashion from this bone? 1 1 Inspired by "Reveries of the Wild Woman" (2006) by Hélène Cixous.

College English, 1978

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