It was the first few pleasant moments in a two-day event, the second annual “Human Rights and the Humanities” conference at the National Humanities Center, held in March 2013. Greetings had been extended, sponsors thanked, the distinguished keynote speaker introduced, and the audience settled in. But almost immediately the speaker was parting company with many in his audience. His title was “Do States Have the Right to be Wrong about Justice?,” and the argument, surprising and disturbing to many in the room, was that yes, they did.
The question of high-seas interdiction of asylum seekers has not come before the United States Supreme Court ever since Sale v. Haitian Centers Council. A comparative perspective, however, reveals quite a different story.
James Ron and his colleagues have started a new discussion at Open Democracy called "Open Global Rights." Ron and friends posted an early piece concerning
"If things were worse, they would be worse; and if they were better, they would be better. So I suppose that makes me a reformist, in those terms. I do not think that somehow without the velvet glove, all illusions would be undone and the masses would come to consciousness."
"It is important to recognize that this thing we call neoliberalism is an intellectually complex field, and that there is not a single politics that we can neatly and unproblematically attach to the style of reasoning that we identify as neoliberal."
Humanity co-editors Nils Gilman and Miriam Ticktin spoke with James Ferguson on May 31, 2013, at Stanford University. This week their conversation will appear here in three installments, starting with today's.
Issue 4.1, featuring the work of photographer Murtada Bulbul and a dossier on transitions and reconciliation, is now live!
<< Against political imagination I would also like to briefly defend The Body in Pain, a splendid, subtle book that I think offers a way around many of the snares that Moyn identifies in post-ideological politics generally, and in Rorty’s disaster-aversion project in particular. Scarry’s book has two parts. The first is about torture and war: means of “unmaking” the world. The second part, composed as a response to the first, is about human creativity: the way we make, as the case may be, “remake,” the world.
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When I was 18 years old, about to head off for college, a friend’s father gifted me a copy of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope. His explanation was cryptic.
A new piece in this week's issue of The Nation considers Elaine Scarry and, through her criticism, the how and why torture has become so appalling.
