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Observing the Breach: Dignity and the Limits of Political Theology

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Abstract

This paper draws together a number of debates concerning ‘dignity’. It points to reasons for the endurance of the concept of dignity, and thereby indicates some limits to analysis via political theology. Dignity is incongruous in law and ethics: it is naturalised theology illicitly augmenting liberal and postmodern theory. At the same time, phenomenologies of dignity suggest that it is something ‘observed in the breach’ when we encounter the diminution of the individual. Political theology would encourage us to treat this appearance of diminution as a point of aporia in ethics and closure in law, ostensibly articulating the loss of ‘humanity’ but in fact revealing nothing more than the reduction of all norms to sovereign decision. However, deconstructive counter-arguments to political theology are possible. First, the persistence of dignity hinges upon perception of loss rather than on any distinctive norms. Second, language games invoking dignity should be seen as performing solidarity. Third, there is a productive instability in the languages of dignity and human dignity. Together, these qualities mean that dignity, despite its theological genealogy, can justifiably play some role in both liberal and postmodern ethics.

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Notes

  1. Illicit, that is, unless the natural law tradition is embraced, see Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the End of the Century (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000). See also Ernest Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Dennis J. Schmidt, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), hereafter: Natural Law and Human Dignity.

  2. Mirko Bagaric and James Allan, “The Vacuous Concept of Dignity”, Journal of Human Rights 5/2 (2006), 257–270.

  3. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (London: Polity Press, 1989).

  4. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Edmund Jephcott trans. (California: Stanford University Press, 2002). Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’, Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950), 49–64.

  5. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Essays on Sovereignty, George Schwab trans. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

  6. Ibid., at 36.

  7. Oxford English Dictionary.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Kevin Attell trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), at 83.

  10. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Heller-Roazen trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1999), at 67.

  11. Cicero contrasts dignity with the ‘obscure, dirty, ugly, contemptible’. See David Kretzmer and Eckart Klein, eds., The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000), at 23.

  12. On nobility and ‘resistance to stimulus’ see Hamilton’s work on Nietzsche. Christopher Hamilton, “Nietzsche on Nobility and the Affirmation of Life”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000), 169–193.

  13. Herschal Baker, The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947).

  14. Hume uses ‘dignity’ exclusively, while Kant uses the German Menschliche Würde – ‘human’ – throughout his ethical works. ‘Dignity of Man’ has stoic origins while ‘human dignity’ (as humana dignitas) is used, inter alia, by Aquinas (Kretzmer and Klein eds., supra n. 11 at 36).

  15. David Hume, “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature”, in Thomas H. Green and Thomas H. Grose eds., Hume: The Philosophical Works (Germany: Scientia Verlag Aaalen, 1964).

  16. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals H. J. Paton trans. (London: Harper and Row, 1964), at 101.

  17. Ibid., at 91, emphasis in original.

  18. Ibid., at 96.

  19. Thomas E. Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992).

  20. Douzinas, supra n. 1, particularly Chapter 10.

  21. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, James H. Nichols trans. (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1969), at 3.

  22. Kretzmer and Klein, eds., supra n. 11, at 36.

  23. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus Books, 1991), at 97.

  24. For an account of the transition between the two see Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (Thetford: Verso, 1983).

  25. This is true of Bloch (see below). Inconsistency is discussed by Gerald L. Neuman in his “On Fascist Honour and Human Dignity: A Sceptical Response”, in Christian Joerges and Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, eds., Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism and Fascism over Europe and its Legal Traditions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2003), at 267–273.

  26. Ernest Levinas, The Levinas Reader (Bodmin: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

  27. See generally, J.A. Frowein, “Human Dignity in International Law” (in Kretzmer and Klein, supra n. 11, at 121–132).

  28. See the Preamble to, and Article 1 of, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

  29. Supra, n. 27. The problem with attributing this ‘jus cogens’ status to dignity is that without clear substantive formulation it is not clear what has been contracted into in the first place.

  30. George Kassimeris, Barbarisation of Warfare: Barbarity, Morality and Torture in Modern Warfare (London: Ashgate, 2006).

  31. UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).

  32. Also, Article 75 of Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (#1) (1977).

  33. It has been claimed in this context that humanitarian law and international human rights law are linked by the fact that they both arise from dignity: see Prosecutor vs. Anto Furundzija, (1995) ICTY Case No. IT-95-17/1, para. 183.

  34. For example, Human Rights Watch 2004, “The Legal Prohibition Against Torture,” http://hrw.org/press/2001/11/TortureQandA.htm#. Accessed 10 January 2008.

  35. For example, Ireland v UK (1976) 2 E.H.R.R. 25.

  36. Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword, Human Dignity in Bioethics and Biolaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  37. Ibid., 233f.

  38. Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell and Lung-Chu Chen, Human Rights and World Public Order: The Basic Policies of an International Law of Human Dignity (New York: Yale University Press, 1980).

  39. Nikolaos K. Tsagourias, Jurisprudence of International Law: The Humanitarian Dimension (New York: Juris Publishing, 2000).

  40. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), at 94.

  41. Ibid., at 113.

  42. Natural Law and Human Dignity, at 207–208.

  43. Ibid., at 84.

  44. Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (Salisbury: The Macmillan Press, 1982), at 165.

  45. Natural Law and Human Dignity, at 237, emphases in original.

  46. Ibid., translator’s intro. xviii.

  47. Hudson, supra n. 44, at 216.

  48. Ibid., at 24.

  49. Tarik Kochi, “Anticipation, Critique and the Problem of Intervention: Understanding the Messianic: Derrida Through Ernst Bloch”, Law and Critique 13 (2002), 29–50.

  50. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), 919–1045, at 991.

  51. Natural Law and Human Dignity at xxx.

  52. Ibid., at 10.

  53. Ibid., at 6.

  54. Supra n. 50, at 985.

  55. See J.Q. Whitman “On Nazi ‘Honour’ and the New European ‘Dignity’,” (in Joerges and Ghaleigh, eds., supra n. 25).

  56. Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santer and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), at 11, emphasis in original.

  57. Agamben, supra n. 10.

  58. Agamben, supra n. 9.

  59. Schmitt, supra n. 5, at 36.

  60. Ibid., at 5.

  61. Oscar Schachter treats dignity as a norm of international law, but his account rapidly translates dignity into a synonym of ‘respect’ within additional communitarian connotations. Oscar Schachter, ‘Human Dignity as a Normative Concept’, American Journal of International Law 77/4 (1983), 848–854.

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  1. School of Law, Sheffield Hallam University, 236 Southbourne, Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield, S10 2BP, UK

    Stephen Riley

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Correspondence to Stephen Riley.

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Lecturer in Law, Sheffield Hallam University. My thanks are due to Dr Peter Thompson, Director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies, for sharing invaluable expertise on Bloch. An early version of this paper was presented at the Sheffield Hallam University D&S Faculty Research Day, 2007, where it received insightful comments from Philip N. S. Rumney and John Coldron. Subsequent versions were greatly improved by the input of Sam Burton, David M. Seymour and Lesley Klaff. Special thanks are due to Ruth Riley. All errors remain my own.

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Riley, S. Observing the Breach: Dignity and the Limits of Political Theology. Law Critique 19, 115–138 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-008-9025-y

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