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A narratable self as addressed by human rights

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Abstract

The paper extends the critique in earlier research of human rights as exclusive of otherness and difference by introducing the work of Adriana Cavarero (2000) on a narratable self. Hence, the formation of human rights is thus about the relations between different narratable selves, not just Western ones. A narrative learning, drawing on Cavarero (2000), shifts the focus in human rights learning from learning about the other to exposing one’s life story narrative through relationality.

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This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers.
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Book
What does it mean to lead a moral life? This book offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice—one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. It takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions “What have I done?” and “What ought I to do?” The book shows that these questions can be answered only by asking a prior question, “Who is this who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?” Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory. In three chapters, the book demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, it eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought. The book offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves? By recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, the book illuminates what it means for us as “fallible creatures” to create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness.
Chapter
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations was a result of a historical quest by humanity to find a universal ethical code by which humans could live together. Since Socrates concerned himself with the question: “ How should one live? ” (Williams, 2011), humanity, by means of religious and humanist traditions and texts, has explored and questioned the structuring of spaces of human togetherness (Ishay, 2004).
Chapter
Religious and cultural practices and traditions are part of the social rituals, values and belief systems of many cultures and religions. Some of these practices date back to many centuries ago. In some societies and communities one can argue that these practices (irrespective of their inhumanness according to the reasoning in postmodern societies), both in the past and in many instances even today, were, and are the seat of strength of character and moral fiber. The questions asked are whether these practices and positions are creating “safe spaces” for the young and the vulnerable – those who have no choice in participating in these practices (cf. Cairns, Gardner & Lawton, 2000).
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Human Rights Education (HRE) has traditionally been articulated in terms of cultivating better citizens or world citizens. The main preoccupation in this strand of HRE has been that of bridging a gap between universal notions of a human rights subject and the actual locality and particular narratives in which students are enmeshed. This preoccupation has focused on ‘learning about the other’ in order to improve relations between plural ‘others’ and ‘us’ and reflects educational aims of national identity politics in citizenship education. The article explores the learning of human rights through narratives in relations, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Sharon Todd. For this re-thinking of relations in learning human rights, the article argues that HRE needs to address both competing historical narratives on the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) as well as unique life narratives of learners.
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Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), pensadora política alemana. En esta obra analiza tres fenómenos políticos que prepararon y dieron origen al totalitarismo contemporáneo y sus manifestaciones: el antisemitismo, el imperialismo y el totalitarismo. De cada uno plantea los inicios de su gestación. Así, en el antisemitismo estudia a los judíos en la Europa central y occidental; del imperialismo lo sitúa en el siglo XIX; y del totalitarismo destaca los acontecimientos de los años 1929-1953 de Alemania y Rusia, con Hitler y Stalin, respectivamente.
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The 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 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. 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. 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. This analysis, articulated more than fifty years ago, seems tailor-made, fifty years later, to fit the new "perplexities" of the...
Relating Narratives: storytelling and selfhood
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A social justice and human rights education project: A search for caring and safe spaces
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Cultivating Humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education
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