An article from Jacques Ranciere, Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
(South Atlantic Quarterly 103, 2/3 (2004): 297-310
As we know, the question raised by my title 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 movements 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 movement 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 conflicts and slaughters, religious fundamentalisms, or racial and xenophobic movements. The territory 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 threatened [End Page 297]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 Marxist 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 who have no rights, the mere derision of right.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. [End Page 298]
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 exception. 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 statement 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 political 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 depoliticizing 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 approach 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 paradox—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 [End Page 299] 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 The Will to Know and Society Must Be Defended, Foucault 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 exception.7 Schmitt had posited the state of exception as the principle of political 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 opposition 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 [End Page 300]this splitting. This means that the secret of democracy—the secret of modern power—can now show up at the foreground. Now state power has concretely 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 experimentally reduced to the condition of bare life.9 Therefore the Nazi laws suspending the constitutional articles guaranteeing freedom of association and expression can be thought as the plain manifestation of the state of exception, 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 "absolute 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 "biopolitical" 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 practice 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 ultimate consequence of Arendt's archipolitical position, of her attempt to preserve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. This attempt depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous [End Page 301]actors. As a result, the political exception is ultimately incorporated in state power, standing in front of bare life—an opposition that the next step forward turns into a complementarity. The will to preserve the realm of pure politics ultimately makes it vanish in the sheer relation of state power and individual life. Politics thus is equated with power, a power that is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny from which only a God is likely to save us.
