The affirmative’s promotion of global jurisprudence is inseparable from international law’s concern for human rights. Since Nuremberg, humanity has been the guiding moral principle of international courts, and the Rome Statute—in letter and spirit—testifies to the common humanity of its members and non-members alike. The resolution’s deliberate focus on “crimes against humanity” highlights the importance of the human condition to the affirmative’s juridical order. But, the empirical universality of human rights is not a normative principle, but a matter of artificial treaty obligations and reservations. Costas Douzinas writes:

The higher status of human rights is seen as the result of their legal universalization, of the triumph of the universality of humanity. The law addresses all states and all human persons qua human and declares their entitlements to be a part of the patrimony of humanity, which has replaced human nature as the rhetorical ground of rights. Every state comes under the mantle of the inter- national law of human rights, every government becomes civilized as the ‘law of the princes’ has finally become the ‘universal’ law of human dignity. But this is an empirical universality, based on the competitive solidarity of sovereign governments and on the pragmatic concerns and calculations of international politics. The variable universalism of classical natural law or the Kantian univer- salization acted as regulative principles: they gave a perspective from which each particular action could be judged, in theory at least, in the name of the universal. The empirical universality of human rights, on the other hand, is not a norma- tive principle. It is a matter of counting how many states have adopted how many and which treaties or how many have introduced which reservations or derogations from treaty obligations. When normative universality becomes a calculable globalization, it turns from a lofty, albeit impossible ideal, into the lowest common denominator of state interests and rivalries. The community of human rights is universal but imaginary; universal humanity does not exist empirically and cannot act as a transcendental principle philosophically.

The affirmative’s submission to an international court designed to prosecute crimes against humanity exploits a modern human vulnerability and installs a meaningless set of protections to quell anxiety. Douzinas-2 continues:

What are the stakes between the debate? Postmodern mass societies and globalization increase existential anxiety and create unprecedented insecurity about life prospects. In this climate, the desire for simple life instructions and legal and moral codes with clearly deﬁned rights and duties becomes paramount. Codiﬁcation transfers the responsibility of deciding ethically to legislators and moralists, to false sovereigns and fake tribes. In our over-legalized world, rules and norms discourage people from thinking independently and discovering their own relation to themselves, to others, to language and history. The proliferation of human rights treaties and the mushrooming of legal regulation are part of the same process, which aims to relieve the burden of ethical life and the anxiety or, in Heidegger’s terms, the “homelessness” of postmodern humanity. International human rights law promises to set all that is valuably human on paper and hold it before us in triumph. The world picture of humanity will have been ﬁnally drawn and everyone would be free to follow their essence as deﬁned by world governments.

Human rights thusly affirmed required contestation and defense, creating conflict. The codifications of rights aimed at protecting humanity only extends the domain of ideas to be fought over. Douzinas-3 writes:

And yet the moralization of politics and the criminalization of political opponents can scarcely resolve conflict. The West does not have a monopoly on morality and human rights are not the only code that claims universal validity. Serbs massacred in the name of threatened community, while the Allies bombed in the name of threatened humanity. Both principles, when they become absolute essences and define the meaning and value of culture without remainder or exception, can find everything that resists them expendable. We can see why by briefly exploring their structure, as they move from the moral to the legal domain. Universal morality claims that all cultural values and norms are not historically and territorially bound but should pass a test of universal consistency. As a result, judgements which derive their force and legitimacy from local conditions become morally suspect. But, as all life is situated, an ‘unencumbered’ judgement based exclusively on the protocols of reason goes against the grain of human experience. The morality of religion and community, on the other hand, is potentially even more murderous. It draws its strength not from abstract ideas and universal reasoning but from specific stories of domina- tion and humiliation and from concrete aspirations of retribution and redemp- tion. What these two apparently lethal enemies have in common is the arrogance of moralism: if there is one moral truth but many errors, it is incumbent upon its agents to impose it on others. The agent of ‘real’ morality, be it the ethical alliance and representative of the universal or the proud communitarian and religious zealot, knows what morality demands. Universalism easily leads to imperialism and an impotent communitarianism to atrocities and massacres like those we recently witnessed.

Because the affirmative’s political solution is a violent imposition and institutional attempt to order and manage the world, I offer an alternative of releasement from the political obsession of humanity. Clare Geiman describes this idea as it appears in Heidegger’s work:

What Heidegger is calling for here is a radical departure from politics as we have understood it up to now, that is, as the human agent’s personal or collective attempt to systematically order and control both physical and human nature. Heidegger offers no principles of justice, no treatise on the proper organization of institutions, no way to guarantee a better future—in short, no systematic guidelines for action whatsoever. The utter indeterminacy of what Heidegger is calling for leads many to accuse him of reckless and stubborn quietism in the face of pressing issues facing humankind. But it is precisely Heidegger’s point that the conception of politics (and of thinking itself) as the violent and willful imposition of a “program” on Being is what we need to let go of. He calls us to consider that the factors that drive our modern politics, in all its plurality, in the direction of the consolidation of power and control and (sometimes subtly but often violently) in the direction of conformity and homogenization cannot in turn be effectively overcome by exerting a counter force, by attempting to control and secure the human drive to control, by demanding conformity to another universal norm. Gelassenheit, on the other hand, [Releaseement] means, in part, letting politics as the polos come to us. Heidegger argues that the “being-with” and interaction that would make up a more vital and essential human community require that we risk “exposure” to the other (a word he tries to “care”) and suggests that it is a mistake to think that we can properly engage and listen to others so long as we are simultaneously protecting and advancing our own separate spheres and identities. The openness that would appropriately situate human Being is only possible in the move away from all attempts to systematize and control, from all attempts to fix the historical appearance of Being in some manageable form. Heidegger is calling for a new kind of respons-ibility, one that has its measure and only safeguard in the willingness to risk openness and let be. This of course entails a very real political risk, yet it remains compelling that the best way to confront large-scale violence is to reshape our personal and political action in such a way that it is fundamentally nonviolent. Poetic thinking points to just such a move.

Douzinas 2003. [Costas, Prof. Public Law and Legal Theory and Head of School of Law, Birbeck College, University of London. Humanism, military humanism, and the new moral order. Economy and Society Vol. 32 No. 2, May 2003: 159-183.]

Costas Douzinas. “Postmodern Just Wars and the New World Order.” Journal of Human Rights 5:355-375, 2006.

Douzinas 2003. [Costas, Prof. Public Law and Legal Theory and Head of School of Law, Birbeck College, University of London. Humanism, military humanism, and the new moral order. Economy and Society Vol. 32 No. 2, May 2003: 159-183.]

Clare Pearson Geiman, "Heidegger's Antigones." 2001. A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. Ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Trinity Prep	Douzinas NC	1/1

Jake Nebel

2009-04-28

Trinity Preparatory School