Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition by J. Paul Narkunas

Author:J. Paul Narkunas [Narkunas, J. Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, philosophy, General, Movements, Post-Structuralism, political science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780823280308
Google: EoEotAEACAAJ
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-11-15T00:10:06.392524+00:00

Conclusion

Natural rights are enfigured by humans and translated into a series of human and property rights: one group of rights concerns claims to territory or property, and the other group is based on the sheer fact of being human, casting aside all the metaphysical questions that subtend such a claim. Furthermore, the human personality seeks and expresses rights within a language that precedes the rights-bearing individual and the institutions of the nation-state. Indeed, humans, though they are theoretically endowed with natural rights through the sheer fact of existence, are not endowed with language, but must learn a national language that allows them to exercise the reason with which they are born. By marking this point, I merely want to emphasize in closing that the person is a legal fiction, created in language, that stages the persistent tension between transindividual relations that get subjectified into individual subjectivity and a larger collective (the nation, the species). This tension is at the heart of the subject seeking human rights or justice for war crimes. The desire for coherent language and fixity of meaning is part of the establishment of a unitary concept of the human. The process of naming, expressing, declaring rights brings them into being, and simultaneously naturalizes and polices a concept of the human who can lay claim to these rights. Nevertheless, to demand rights requires utterance, inscription, and deployment of a vehicle of communication for these rights that exceed the human and any possibility of subjectivity. The process emblematizes the arbitrariness of who, or what forms of life, can be considered humans, worthy of protection, as well as who or what can be expunged without concern.

Techniques of incorporation of the subject or subjectification operate to adjudicate the limits of the human within a specific national language; French and English offer clear advantages in terms of conferral of human status. Humans who cannot express themselves in English or French can be lost in translation.37 Translation is a form of endless substitution that highlights rhetoricity and the allegorical or metaphorical elements of all language, as well as the contingent nature of the subject. Is cultural awareness enough, once it has been reincorporated into legal procedure to guarantee justice? Is this still too instrumental an approach to language and rights? Rather than seeing the cultural sensitivity of language as a failure of universal instrumentality, the contextual use of language at every moment forces the speaking subject to acknowledge what J. L Austin called the performative function of language, its ability to not only describe but to do something, which demonstrates how language can create actions, new forms of existence, and types of subjectivity. In other words, we have to acknowledge not only that we may not be able to say what we mean, but also that the addressor and addressee have a discontinuous relation before absorption into culture, a point I elaborated earlier with regard to culture’s utility for monetization. In the legal context of translation, the addressor and addressee are brought together only by the translator.

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