John Lechte

‘Agamben, Arendt and Human Rights: Bearing Witness to the Human’

The key theme in this essay is the rethinking of the human, as inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The human here is not a model or concept to be realised, just as community to which the human is linked is not an ideal, but a ‘community to come’. This is revealed only by paying close attention to modes of bearing witness to the human, as instanced, for example, by Agamben’s text, Remnants of Auschwitz. Current notions of political community and the human thus need to be reassessed. Only by doing this will it be possible to address the crucial issues that currently confront human rights—issues such as the tension between the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and the reduction of human rights to biopolitical humanitarianism.

Agamben and the politics of human rights : statelessness, images, violence

Human rights today have become the meta-narrative of globalisation. However, the most casual glance reveals a world in which human rights are violated on an unprecedented scale, often by the very sovereign states who claim to promote them. This is no coincidence, according to Giorgio Agamben, who argues that despite the claims of NGOs, international legal scholars, global ethicists and governments, human rights today do not protect us from the excesses of state power, but, on the contrary, are a sign of our growing powerlessness and political alienation in the face of a sovereign state of exception that has become global. In this book, we take Agamben’s critique as our starting point and reveal the paradoxes central to the politics of human rights by exploring questions of statelessness, exclusion, the violence of securitization and the visual representation of refugees and illegal migrants in the media. Here we propose a radical rethinking of human rights. Human rights must be disengaged from humanitarianism, biopolitics, sovereignty and the society of the spectacle - they must become genuinely political.

Some Fallacies and Truths Concerning the Image in Old and New Media

Despite differences in approach most conceptions of the image fall prey to what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the ‘illusion of immanence’ – treating the image as a separate reality, as a thing. This article provides an explication of the ‘illusion of immanence’, then proceeds to evaluate Sartre’s theory in the context of digital versions of the image. The question is: does the ‘illusion of immanence’ still pertain when the digital image is involved? In this regard, consideration is given to Paul Crowther’s ontology of the digital image in art, where the issue of the manipulation of the digital is highlighted, along with the work of Lev Manovich on cinema and that of Mark B.N. Hansen on the body in relation to immersion in new media. A call is made for a new theory of the image which takes on Sartre’s insights – insights which are seen to be of particular relevance to immersion and interactivity in VR (virtual reality).

Heterology, Transcendence and the Sacred: On Bataille and Levinas:

This article examines the issues surrounding transcendence, the Other and base materialism in relation to Georges Bataille’s heterology and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face of the Other as infinity and transcendence. The article concludes that there is no facet of human existence – including work and the economy – which is not touched by transcendence, and that the idea that there are societies based in subsistence and in nothing but a ‘struggle for existence’ is a prejudice of modernity.

Rethinking Arendt’s theory of necessity: humanness as 'way of life', or: the ordinary as extraordinary

If genuine political activity can only be undertaken by citizens in the public sphere in a nation-state, what of stateless people today – asylum seekers and refugees cut adrift on the high seas? This is what is at stake in Hannah Arendt’s political theory of necessity. This article reconsiders Arendt’s notion of the Greek oikos (household) as the sphere of necessity with the aim of challenging the idea that there is a condition of necessity or mere subsistence, where life is reduced to satisfying basic biological needs. For Arendt, the Greek oikos is the model that provides the inspiration for her theory because necessity activities were kept quite separate from action in the polis. The ordinary and the undistinguished happen in the oikos and its equivalent, with the polis being reserved for extraordinary acts done for glory without any regard for life. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has, at best, been treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. With reference to Heidegger on the polis and Agamben’s notion of oikonomia, I endeavour to show that the so-called ordinary is embedded in a way of life that is extraordinary and the key to grasping humanness.

Book Reviews : AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF PIERRE BOURDIEU: THE PRACTICE OF THEORY. Edited by Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, Chris Wilkes. Houndshills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan, 1990. 247 pp. £14.99 (paper)

to anthropological fieldwork that included studies of kinship, ritual and pre-capitalist economy of the Kabyle in Algeria. Bourdieu acknowledges a considerable debt to LeviStrauss, despite his own questioning of some of the basic presuppositions of structuralism, such as the privileged position of the observer and the concept of rules (of marriage and kinship). These questions arose from his extensive fieldwork in Kabylia, but his own familiarity with the lives of other mountain peasants, in his region of origin, Bearn, also heightened his awareness of the limits of objectivism.