On Making Dehumanization Possible

Abstract

Contemporary liberal assertions equate illegal oppression and practices of expulsion from the juridical order with exclusion from humanity. It is often argued that violence ensuing from the abandonment of persons beyond the pale of the law not only violates their humanity but also, and perhaps more crucially dehumanizes them or constitutes them as less than human. While the objective of these critical assertions is to expose the radical evil that illegal violence can institute, they also establish an equation between the protection of the law and the constitution of humanity, effectively granting the former a magical power to endow the latter. Moreover, these critical assertions reproduce a particular conviction that humanity is a status to be recognized and conferred, or seized and taken away. Rather than leave this relation between humanity and the law intact, by pointing to its political instrumentality in contemporary human rights campaigns, this paper examines what this relation does to politics and to subjects of violence beyond its instrumental use directed at highlighting the suffering of subjects (by employing a dehumanization rhetoric) and at insisting on human-rights-based remedies to combat it. The paper asks the following questions. First, what conceptual and theoretical assumptions about humanity and the law, as well as about the relation between them, make possible the dehumanization argument? Second, to what degree has the law's conception of humanity as a status moved beyond the juridical field, leading many humanist practitioners to assert, albeit critically, that certain groups and individuals are dehumanized? And, finally, what other ways of being human are foreclosed by the conceptual assumptions grounding the law-based humanity argument?

Producing juridical knowledge: “Rights of Nature” or the naturalization of rights?

“…Following Fanon, Coulthard (2014: 31) argues that crucial for the duration and stability of colonial social relations is the ability to “transform the colonized population into subjects of imperial rule.” Indeed, the colonial dynamic between inside/outside undergirds both contemporary human rights discourses and those of colonial jurists who equated law-lacking territories with dehumanized populations whose humanity must be granted or given back. For Esmeir (2006) it is precisely this colonial constitution of modern law that makes operations of juridical order occur through both dehumanization (withholding of rights) and humanization (granting personhood status). Moreover, this constitutive possibility of revoking recognition doubles the status of the human: as universal mankind and as yet-to-be human.…”

“…Moreover, this constitutive possibility of revoking recognition doubles the status of the human: as universal mankind and as yet-to-be human. Esmeir (2006: 1544) calls the way law comes to constitute what is “human” a process of “juridicalization,” which generates what she calls “juridical humanity.” Crucially, the more “we think of humanity as a juridical status, the more dehumanization is possible” (Esmeir, 2006; 1549–1550).…”

“…Not only does “juridical humanity” make dehumanization possible but the relationship between redemptive powers of colonialism and humanization makes necessary the continual identification of dehumanized subjects (Esmeir, 2006: 1546–1547). Only through suffering, wounding, infliction, and victimhood can those not recognized by the status of personhood be incorporated into the “brotherhood of Man” and acquire associated rights (Weheliye, 2014: 75–76; see also Brown, 1995; Hartman, 1997).…”

“…First, deliberating who deserves recognition requires comparing suffering (Weheliye, 2014). Second, juridical humanity erases the subjects of violence in exchange for possession of one’s personhood (Esmeir, 2006; Harris, 1993; Weheliye, 2014). Third, there is a nonreciprocal politics of recognition for colonial subjects or those whose personhood was once not one’s own possession (Coulthard, 2014).…”

“…As juridical constitution of individualized being (personhood) becomes universalized through species norms of embodied whiteness, “access to personhood as property” becomes managed and delimited by generating differences within collective being (juridical humanity) (Weheliye, 2014: 79). Esmeir (2006: 1547) argues personhood status is predicated on membership in some class, and these classifications come to articulate “what or who human is.” In turn, legal status of persons is both constitutive of and nonisomorphic with human beings. By bringing into being what is and isn’t human, practices of personhood not only render certain humans not quite human, but they also render certain nonhumans persons—as can be seen, under certain legal regimes, with the inclusion of animals, corporations, and other nonhuman entities as classes or categories of persons (Esmeir, 2006: 1547).…”