Peg Birmingham: Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility.
Berkowitz, Roger
Peg Birmingham
Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common
Responsibility.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2007.
Pp. 176.
US$24.95 (paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21865-0).
Few formulas have so captivated political thinkers in recent times
as Hannah Arendt's invocation of the 'right to have
rights'. Arendt's readers have never tired of invoking her
ambitious reformulation of human rights even as they have ceaselessly
lamented her failure to offer a meaningful foundation for it. The signal
contribution of Birmingham's book is her reconstruction of a
coherent and convincing argument for Arendt's radical refoundation
of human rights.
Birmingham's is a careful and profound reading of Arendt that
should impact, for the better, both the burgeoning field of human rights
and the more prosaic world of the Hannah Arendt industry. She states her
thesis directly: 'Arendt's entire work can be read as an
attempt to work out theoretically this fundamental right to have
rights' (1). Dozens of books have been published recently that
dutifully detail and bemoan the fact that there is no ground for human
rights; Birmingham's book--despite its different genre--is a
welcome remedy that argues, largely convincingly, that Arendt does
develop just such a foundation.
The key to Arendt's re-formulation of human rights is based on
her demand that humanity 'itself must guarantee the right to have
rights' (6). What Birmingham sees is that Arendt never drops her
call for a new law of humanity; instead, in her later work, she
continues to explore the law of humanity under the heading of natality.
By connecting Arendt's concept of natality to her guiding project
of founding a right to have rights, Birmingham both deepens our
understanding of Arendt and makes clear Arendt's importance to the
human rights community.
Against the single-minded focus of Arendt scholars on the political
and participatory understanding of natality as a principle of beginning,
Birmingham sees that natality encompasses two related principles, the
principle of beginning and the principle of givenness. Chapters 1 and 2
enrich the traditional account of natality through a sympathetic reading
of Arendt's debt to Martin Heidegger and Franz Kafka. Birmingham
shows that the freedom to begin is rooted in a specifically human
temporality of mortality that is the ontological foundation of the right
to have rights. The right to have rights is best understood not as a
right in the legal sense of the term, but as a fundamental demand of
being human, that one be born and die. To be born, she argues, is to be
bound into a linguistic world; it is to be thrown into a world where we
are abandoned in a space of beginning that is 'always open to
something other than itself' (31). Human freedom, Birmingham
argues, emerges from an obligation to oneself and others in the
condition of natal vulnerability (61).
Birmingham develops her second and most original contribution in
Chapter 3, 'The Principle of Givenness: Appearance, Singularity,
and the Right to Have Rights'. Here Birmingham argues that natality
means more than beginning; in addition, natality names the givenness of
human being. Again Birmingham illuminates Arendt by exploring the source
of her thinking in Heidegger, this time through Arendt's own
critique of the discussion of physis in Heidegger's Anaximander
fragment. Since 'physis is genesis, an unpredictable
appearing,' it shares with natality a quality of an absolute
beginning free of any cause or governing telos (84). The principle of
givenness is an 'anarchic' principle that is '[c]ut off
and adrift from any sovereign constituting power or foundation . .
.' (86). Since each person is a radical beginning, human rights and
the right to have rights 'includes the principle of
givenness,' by which Arendt means the mere right to exist, to
appear as a singular, alien, foreign and isolated individual (91). It is
the obligation in the face of the alien that must be respected as part
of the human that, according to Birmingham, underlies Arendt's
guarantee of the right to have rights to every human being.
Since human existence, as physis, is cut off from any prior reason
or ground, man is unjustifiable and thus vulnerable. Man stands alone as
alien and strange. And this strangeness that attaches to man's
natality both underlies Arendt's defense of plurality and her
insistence that the right to have rights includes the right to be as you
are. Birmingham does not make the connection, but this right to be as
one is lies behind Arendt's passionate defense of a rich private
sphere, including the rights of parents to send their children to
segregated schools. Though much criticized, the Little Rock essay is, I
think, at the core of the principle of givenness Birmingham highlights.
The first three chapters of this book offer a discourse-shifting
reading of Arendt's work as providing an ontologically sound
foundation for human rights, something that modern human rights
discourse desperately needs. As strong as these chapters are, Chapter 4
seems a digression. Birmingham argues that Julia Kristeva's
psychoanalytic concept of abjection is a 'necessary' aide to
understanding Arendt's claim about the givenness of human
difference (119). Why this foray into psychology (which Birmingham knows
full well Arendt would not support) is necessary, is never clarified.
The short conclusion offers a preliminary inquiry into the
institutional forms that Arendt discusses that might support her account
of the right to have rights. The critique of sovereignty and the
distinction between (dangerous) globalism and (promising)
internationalism are suggestive, but the political potential of
Birmingham's account is never carried through. This was not the
goal of her book, and she generously points the way toward future
scholarship in these areas. Short, clearly organized, and densely
written, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking
deeply about human rights.
Roger Berkowitz
Bard College
