Joseph Slaughter
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
(workshop version)
The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality
Two Watts, both grappling with the legacy of the eighteenth century at the end of the
1940s, converge on Robinson Crusoe as a signal literary achievement marking the emergence of
rationalized individualism. The literary critic Ian Watt, studying the "relation between the growth
of the reading public and the emergence of the novel" (7), was writing what was to become his
seminal work, The Rise of the Novel, at St. John's College, Cambridge. Alan Watt, Australian
delegate to the Third Committee of the United Nations, sat in conference between Lake Success,
New York and the Palais Du Chaillot, Paris in the final revisory stages of the text of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). As a member of the UN oversight body, Alan
Watt shared responsibility for reviewing the product of three years of drafting, and for approving
the final legislative form and language that would be adopted by the General Assembly on 10
December 1948. During the discussion of Article 29, the sole statement of human duties to
remain after three years of drafting, Watt proposed to amend the language under consideration—
"Everyone has duties to the community which enables him freely to develop his personality"—
by replacing the relative clause after "community" with the more restrictive "in which alone the
free and full development of his personality is possible" (Third Committee 658). The debate
elicited by his proposal centered around the terms of debt that the individual owed to society for
having developed "his personality," and around the nature of the community to which some
obligations subsequently attached. It is to clarify these issues that Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe makes its remarkable appearance in the debates.
Or, this is one way to construe the history of the confluence of literature and the law, as
they combine in human rights, by staging a dramatic re-convergence, after two centuries of
estrangement, of twin disciplines through the narrative mechanics of a novelistic "meanwhile"1
that puts two Watts—Ian and Alan—at two tables, explicating the same text in the same year.
This both is and is not precisely how it happens, but it offers as good a place as any to essay an
analysis of the interdependencies and interdevelopment of literature and the law.
Joseph Slaughter
Writing of the novel as genre, Ian Watt would produce the famous insight that might
aptly describe the rise of liberal human rights legislation if we replace the words "novel" and
"literature" with "law" and "jurisprudence": "The novel's serious concern with the daily lives of
ordinary people seems to depend upon two important conditions: the society must value every
individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there
must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of
them to be of interest to other ordinary people" (60). Meanwhile, across the English Channel,
Alan Watt's proposal, foregrounding the social character of the individual, was greeted warmly
by the Soviet and Latin American delegations, who had consistently lobbied the committee to
frame the Declaration as a social contract with explicit statements about the individual's
obligations towards the society that makes possible legal subjectivity, the development of the
person as a bearer of both rights and duties. Watt's proposal had the added advantage, for these
representatives, that it moderated what was seen to be a document inclined to excessive
individualism, by reminding the individual "that he was a member of society, and that he must
affirm his right to be deemed a human being by clearly recognizing the duties which were
corollaries of his rights" (656).2 Belgium's delegate, Fernand Dehousse, raised the first
substantial objection: "the [amended] text proposed by the representative of Australia contained
an inaccurate statement, for while there was no doubt that society contributed to the development
of the individual's personality, it was no less true that the development was conditioned on other
factors" (659). In response, China and the US (in the persons of P. C. Chang and Eleanor
Roosevelt, both among the select "Nuclear Committee" of primary drafters) advised dropping the
word "alone"; Lebanon concurred, with the caveat that "the words 'his personality' should be
replaced by the term 'human personality'. That new wording would avoid the danger, already
pointed out by some delegations, that the text might be interpreted as implying that the individual
had duties to society only in so far as the latter secured the full development of his own
personality" (659). While the delegates held various opinions about the dynamics by which the
personality of the human individual develops in relation to the community, each seems to have
worked from a sociological presumption that their legislative project constituted an attempt to
protect the integrity of human personality.
Watt's proposal ignited an ideological debate, taken up in the old literary thematic terms
of man versus society, that culminated in antagonistic readings of Robinson Crusoe. Belgium
2
Joseph Slaughter
ventured the first explication du texte in an attempt to make vivid what he saw as a deterministic
error that the wording of Watt's amendment "might give rise to": "It might, first, be asserted that
the individual could only develop his personality within the framework of society; it was,
however, only necessary to recall the famous book by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, to find
proof of the contrary."3 In a conservative defense of a proto-cultural relativism, Dehousse added
that "A second error might be made so . . . as to give the impression that it was the duty of
society to develop the human being's personality; that principle, might, perhaps, be in harmony
with the philosophy of certain countries, but it might equally well run counter to that of other
peoples" (659). Attempting to trump competing national philosophies, Dehousse cited Defoe's
novel as, presumably, empirical evidence for the eternal and universal nature of humankind.
Alan Watt, apparently persuaded by the Belgian interpretation of the novel, retracted his
delegation's suggestion, finding perhaps insurmountable the ideological "difficulties its
amendment seemed to have caused." Taking up the amendment "in the name of his own
delegation," Alexei Pavlov of the USSR contested Dehousse's reading, arguing that the
restrictive language of Watt's amendment "rightly stressed the fact that the individual could not
fully develop his personality outside society. The example of Robinson Crusoe, far from being
convincing, had, on the contrary, shown that man could not live and develop his personality
without the aid of society. Robinson had, in fact, had at his disposal the products of human
industry and culture, namely, the tools and books he had found on the wreck of his ship" (65960). Instead of offering up a transparent meaning to resolve the question of the interdependency
of the individual and society, the novel became itself a medium for the expression of ideological
conflict. Pavlov's interpretation proved the more compelling to the majority of delegations,
causing the UK, France, and Lebanon to withdraw their objections. China called for a separate
vote on the word "alone," whose inclusion in the final article passed 23 to 5 with 14 abstentions;
human personality, as the dynamic product of the individual's social development within a
collective, was subsequently enshrined in the Declaration with no objections and six abstentions
as Article 29: "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full
development of his personality is possible."
It may be only an accident of legal drafting and the contingencies of debate that the
interpretive conflict over the nature of "human personality" happens to instrumentalize Robinson
Crusoe as an ideological litmus test. But it is no accident that the nature of the "human person"
3
Joseph Slaughter
emerged once again in the final debates as a source of dispute, because it is charged with the
theoretical questions about the grounding of human rights that had dogged the drafters for three
years. Although these disputes often fell out along the lines of a nascent Cold War contest
between capitalism and communism, it would be a mistake to render the debates in such stark
terms.4 The ideological battles do not completely front along the bipolar lines of a full-blown
geo-ideological conflict, but they do often intimate those politics, with the first and second
worlds each asserting their claim to moral authority in their designs for the human resources
located—even if accidentally, as Robinson castaway in the Orinoco effluence—in the third
world. In the long view from this side of the Cold War, it may be possible to assert with Michael
Ignatieff that "The Communist rights tradition--which put primacy on economic and social
rights--kept the capitalist rights tradition--emphasizing political and civil rights--from
overreaching itself," but in 1948 these two traditions shared at least as much as they contested
(Ignatieff et al. 19). Their interpretations never concern Friday (or the other "savages"); instead,
the competing interpretations each read Crusoe's shipwreck as a story of self-determination, of
the rationality of individualism, of the triumph of civilization manifest even in the isolated
individual, and as a polemic illustrating the necessary terms for a nurturing accordance between
the individual and society. It may be, as I said, accidental that Robinson Crusoe obtains the
position of ideological privilege in the UN committee's political discussions of modern
individualism so often assigned it in literary accounts of the rise of the novel, but the novel is not
set off by the drafters as a rarefied object of merely aesthetic and cultural value; it becomes for
the drafters a product of "human industry and culture," serving their aspirations for a new
civilization as the tools and books served Crusoe on his island. The Committee entertains no
doubts about the seriousness of the novel's attempts to grapple with the social anxieties of a
transition from customary collectivism to modern, economic individualism. The delegates cite
the novel as an artifactual authority on the nature of humanity and civilization, but the divergent
interpretive investments in the text reveal a crisis of authority in the human rights project itself,
because they threaten to reveal the delicate consensus established on a commitment to human
personality that serves as a crucial basis for the articulation of modern human rights.5 In part
what the Crusoe episode risks exposing, beyond the fragility of consensus, is the superficiality of
having solved the questions of the authority and source of human rights through a substitution of
human personality for natural law rationalism and divine sanction. As one of the primary
4
Joseph Slaughter
rationales enabling human rights, "human personality" appears to replace both the organicism of
natural law and the possessive individualism of liberal economic materialism; but the act of
substitution effectively cleaves "human personality," causing it to serve simultaneously as the
foundation and the aim of human rights. Thus "human personality," as the Declaration has it, is
both antecedent to human rights—what the species being brings to the world that is distinct from
all other entities—and is also (con)sequent to human rights—what is to be fostered by their
codification and observance.6 Human rights in such a conception aspire to enable a
developmental sequence that follows a posited originary human personality through a teleology
that will arrive at some expressive civil manifestation of this personality. Full demonstration of
the logic effected by this double substitution, a logic I will ultimately call by the name of
narrative, is complicated; and so to trace something of the operations of human rights as they
emerge from a notion of human personality, I will begin where two Watts converged, with a
consideration of personality in Robinson Crusoe.
"Rich in Subjects": Civil Personality in Triplicate
Most recent histories of "personality" trace the term back to its Latin and French roots,
where it denoted "the quality of being a person and not a thing" and had a collective connotation,
so that it signaled the quality humans share as a species, not a characteristic of the individual per
se (Williams 194). The word derives from the Latin persona, which, as the name of the mask
worn by an actor, allies it with the cluster of theatrical words that associates "character" with
dramatis personae and foregrounds the figural act of representation contained in the word.
Medieval usage carried a theological sense of embodiment (derived from theories of the Holy
Trinity) and of the aspects that belonged to that body.7 In each of these early uses, the word
retains something of the trace of its origination in mimetic reproduction, so that whether it names
a physical stage presence or a species characteristic, personality in some ways always represents
something else, always refers to a feature imagined either to mask or to emerge from (and stand
in for) a body. Raymond Williams dates the emergence of the current romantic individualist
meanings to the eighteenth century, where he finds a transformation of the word from describing
a shared quality of collective beings to describing characteristics discharged differently in
distinct human individuals. Williams, however, does not account for the jurisprudential
5
Joseph Slaughter
contribution to this shift effected by the rediscovery of Roman law which, Robert Elliott finds,
prompted the "essential step in the achievement of our Western idea of the person as an
independent entity," naming the capacity of such a personal entity, in practice the citizen, to bear
civil rights and duties (Elliott 24-5). The Enlightenment turn to Roman jurisprudence makes it
possible for Kant to characterize the "person" by its qualities of dignity and rationality in his
formulation of the categorical imperative: "Beings whose existence depends not on our will but
on nature's, have nevertheless, if they are irrational beings, only a relative value as means, and
are therefore called things; rational beings, on the contrary, are called persons, because their very
nature points them out as ends in themselves, that is as something which must not be used merely
as means" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals). In this jurisprudential tradition
"person" will predominate as the name of a "right and duty bearing subject," with "personality"
denoting the capacity to be, as it were, represented, or to make representations, within the law.8
Elliott locates the shift by which the modern subject becomes a moral person as the agential
subject of law (as opposed to a pure subjection to divine law) with Kant,9 characterizing as "one
of the greatest curiosities in the history of the language" the transformations effected to make the
word originally naming a mask "the term incorporating the moral essence of human beings" (19).
Elliott, fortuitously for my argument, understands the Kantian transformation of the subject as a
process of incorporation, and his use of the word to describe a metaphysical synthesis of
submissive subjection and agentive subjectship hints at what I will be elaborating throughout this
chapter—that incorporation becomes the tropic operation of human rights law itself, imbued with
the figural capacity to embody the seemingly boundless abstractions of the human personality
within the discrete body of the legal/physical "person." I can only for the moment gesture
towards the work of incorporation (since this is, in some sense, what the entire book attempts to
elaborate), so for now it must suffice to note that Elliott's characterization intends towards a
reunification of the legal person with its theatrical counterpart by drawing attention to
personality as a mode of representation of an abstraction and by suggesting that this mode
operates as a trope, a figural use of language that makes possible the representation of an
abstraction. The figure of the person that emerges from these discourses is a figure of integration
and substantiation, a figure incorporated by discourse as an entity with independent existence
that becomes the primary subject of human rights.
6
Joseph Slaughter
Defoe uses the word "person" on remarkably few occasions in Robinson Crusoe, and it
appears most often in its then pedestrian sense, signifying the physical body and aspect of the
human being: ". . . the captain knew the persons and characters of all the men in the boat, of
whom he said that there were three very honest fellows . . ." (254). Defoe distinguishes here the
material form of the person from what we might think of today as the abstract moral qualities of
personality, but even in this rather ordinary use of "person," the term marks these particular
sailors as a special class of beings, prefiguring and foreshadowing a future encounter when these
human subjects will prove to be capable of making legal representations on their own behalf, of
concluding civil contracts, and of being subject to representation within the law. The logic of
legal representability so importantly structures the notion of contractual personhood for Crusoe
that having exhausted his supply of ink on his diary produces anxiety over his status:
I gave him [the Spaniard] a strict charge in writing not to bring any man with him who
would not first swear in the presence of himself and of the old savage that he would no
way injure, fight with, or attack the person he should find in the island . . . ; but that they
would stand by and defend him against all such attempts, and wherever they went, would
be entirely under and subjected to his commands; and that this should be put in writing
and signed with their hands. How we were to have this done, when I knew they had
neither pen nor ink, that indeed was a question which we never asked. (243)
Crusoe has a certain obsession with the written word and a faith in the illocutionary force of the
written contract, in part, it seems, because he invests these documents (sworn oaths, legal
testaments, and his diary) with extraordinary textual authority to confer or confirm personality as
the sign of the agential subject. Personality in the novel emerges as the effect of contracts, but
while in Crusoe's eyes these documents legitimize his sovereignty, the contractual effect also
recognizes the legal personality of the other, implicitly confirming the civil agency of a subject
capable of bearing rights and duties, and of being representable in legal texts. These (contr)acts
of recognition both confirm the existential status of a legal person and, in effect, bring that being
into existence for all legal intents and purposes. But the consubstantial activity of contractual
personality in the novel effects a mutual recognition of two subjects according to a distributive
logic of predication.10 That is, the predicate enacted by oath-taking establishes the legal
personality of, in this case, the sovereign subjectivity of Crusoe, but the activity of swearing
depends upon the presence of a subject imagined capable of legal representation existing either
7
Joseph Slaughter
prior to, or in the act of, avowal itself. In the novel, the verbal act of oath-taking performs
intersubjectively, assigning personality bilaterally to both the grammatical subject and object of
the sentence. The predicates of the oath are both that which is said by the subject and that which
is said of the subject, so that the contractual language could be rewritten to better reveal this
operation: I, a subject (being an adult of sound mind and body) capable of making legal
representation, recognize you also as a capable subject of legal representation.
Crusoe's obsession with writing and documentation has been famously linked to the
mercantilist development of double-entry book-keeping (the formal accounting of profits and
losses that Max Weber makes central to the rise of economic rationalism), and Ian Watt notes,
almost in passing, Crusoe's enchantment with legal texts as an effect of the increased utility of
literacy which promoted formal "contractual relationships, as opposed to the unwritten,
traditional and collective relationships of previous societies" (63). In this sense, contractual
personality in the novel may be seen as a manifestation of the classic sociological distinction
between collective pre-modern forms of filiative association and what are taken to be modern
forms of affiliation based on common interests.11 Crusoe's personality contracts distribute
subjectship to both parties as a legal mechanics of affiliation, but the potential democratizing
enfranchisement of these contracts is further situated within a residual hierarchical framework of
courtly incorporation which, from Crusoe's point of view, invests him with relatively more
personality that the other subjects and which he mistakes for a patriarchic prerogative to grant
personhood: "There was my majesty, the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of
all my subjects at my absolute command. I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away; and
no rebels among all my subjects. Then to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by
my servants. Poll, as if he had been my favorite, was the only person permitted to talk to me"
(147). Not fully reconcilable with each other, the two illocutionary modes by which personality
is figured—the sovereign's grant as an extension of divine authority and the intersubjective
contractual structure by which two personalities recognize and enfranchise each other—produces
a curious collective of island personalities. Poll's capacity to speak, for example, appears to
qualify him as a special candidate, among the other animals, for a conferment of personality,
with an attendant right to speech, through the figurative operation of literary personification.
While a hierarchy is maintained in the logic by which Crusoe enfranchises Poll as a speaking
subject, such an extension of the franchise of personality announces, at least theoretically, the
8
Joseph Slaughter
beginning of the end of singular monarchic authority, reflecting parodically the historical
introduction of the right to petition first codified formally in the 1689 English Bill of Rights as
"the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such
petitioning are illegal."12 Defoe's novel was published in 1719, but dating internal to it locates
Crusoe's remove from British civil society within the twenty-eight year period of the Stuart
Restoration, and it places his return to English soil on the eve of the Glorious Revolution that
instituted the citizenry's right to address the sovereign. Construed as a product of Crusoe's own
labor, Poll's speech has little in common with the content of petitions to the king, but the
discursive form of address shares in the subject-confirming activity of petition. In this sense, the
Poll-Crusoe relationship is one of mutual, and perpetual, contractual constitution (particularly
obvious as an artificial contrivance where the space from which the other hails Crusoe as subject
is avian). Assigned to Poll as the primary charge of his new subjectship is the service of naming,
incessantly and excessively, Crusoe as the proper subject: "Poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you?
Where have you been? How come you here?" (141). If Crusoe's royal grant of personality to Poll
creates a sort of sycophantic parliamentarian whose "will" is to maintain the integrity of the
sovereign, the relationship establishes a perpetual mechanism that confirms subjectivity while it
appeals for narrative through the parroting of the epic questions that drive the Odyssean story of
identity—"What man are you? And whence?"13 In Homer, these interrogatives operate as oral
narrative contracts of mutual recognition that drive Telemachus' quest for identity; similarly,
Poll's mimicry of these classical literary questions serves to attach customary, if not fully
contractual, personality to Crusoe, confirming in his island dominion the persistence of some
form of civil personality.
The treatment afforded Poll is quite distinct from the representation of Friday. Crusoe
names both, even calls his savage "my Man Friday," but while Friday may measure to a man, in
Crusoe's eyes he never rises to the level of personhood. Crusoe's assumption of sovereign
personality becomes more complicated as the island is peopled by human subjects whose
presence and recognition in contracts begin to threaten the delicate fantasy by which he has
imagined his personal sovereignty to be also that of a polity. No longer willing to assume the
risks entailed in embodying the person of the governor, Crusoe conceals the frailty of sovereign
power by mythologizing it institutionally, and he recreates himself in the persona of its
plenipotentiary mask, whose only office is to act on behalf of—to represent—sovereign
9
Joseph Slaughter
authority: "When I showed myself to the two hostages, it was with the captain, who told them I
was the person the governor had ordered to look after them, and that it was the governor's
pleasure they should not stir anywhere but by my direction; . . . so that as we never suffered them
to see me as governor, so I now appeared as another person, and spoke of the governor, the
garrison, the castle, and the like, upon all occasions" (265). In effect, Crusoe occupies three legal
personalities at once: the individual Enlightenment monadic subject, imagined capable of selfgovernment; the sovereign monarchic subject, in whom legislative functions and executive
authority resides; and a corporate subject, in whom certain limited rights and responsibilities are
vested as a functionary of sovereignty. In this sense, it is possible to read Crusoe's panoramic
vision of his island as an ironic commentary on his own multiple personalities:
My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a
merry reflection, which I frequently made, how like a king I looked. First of all, the
whole country was my own mere property, so that I had an undoubted right of dominion.
Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected. I was absolute lord and lawgiver; they all
owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion
of it, for me. It was remarkable, too, we had but three subjects, and they were of three
different religions. My man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a pagan and a
cannibal, and the Spaniard was a papist. However, I allowed liberty of conscience
throughout my dominions. But this is by the way. (my emphasis 236)14
On the island, Crusoe can think himself "very rich in subjects" through a conflation of
occupation and possession, so that his self-possession (autarky) and self-sovereignty (autarchy)
are imagined as coextensive with the island domain itself, but the occupation of multiple
personalities is tenuous, as the slippage between the first person singular and plural in the
passage illustrates, a product of exceptional circumstances and a misconception about the
illocutionary modes of subject production.
Where Crusoe attempts, ultimately without enduring success, to stabilize the
administration of personality in isolation, off the island the demands of civil society necessarily
deflate Crusoe's richness of person, where the prevailing civil economy incorporates the "person"
as a singular, technical entity, capable of owning property and entering contracts, of suing and
being sued, sanctioned by law's sovereignty, the terms of which are themselves in transition.
Such civil personality may be categorically stable in its legal implementation, but it has the
capacity to circulate since it is not necessarily coextensive with the physical existence of any
material body, floating in legal abstractions that come to rest on the substance of the human
10
Joseph Slaughter
body. Personality is, in fact, transferable, portable; thus, before his shipwreck, Crusoe effects the
transportation of his property through legal declarations of personality (to which property
attaches) by asserting his rights to possession in contracts, instructions, and testaments:
"'Seignior Inglese,' says he, for so he always called me, 'if you will give me letters, and a
procuration here in form to me, with orders to the person who has your money in London to send
your effects to Lisbon, to such persons as I shall direct, and in such goods as are proper for this
country, I will bring you the produce of them, God willing, at my return" (40). The figural work
of the law that effects such transference is guaranteed by God's will, but it is not primarily
property that is transferred through legal representation (which is a secondary effect) but rather
the personality to which that property belongs. Divided among trustees and partners in his
absence, Crusoe's personal capacities (to hold and transfer property, to enter into contracts) have
dispersed among various interests, and it takes a contractual oath—a re-entry into the civil
literature—to effect the legal miracle of civil resurrection, the re-incorporation of his polyarchic
personalities in the singular civil subject of Crusoe: "he made me enter my name in a public
register, with his affidavit, affirming, upon oath, that I was alive, and that I was the same person
who took up the land for the planting the said plantation at first" (276). Affirming that the body
has a biology (that it is alive) becomes the first assertion of civil existence, upon which is
subsequently scaffolded civil personality.
Reclamation of his lost English civil personality returns not only his legal capacity to act
as a subject, but also returns his material possessions, which have continued to amass in his
absence. The effects of his person persist, but when the law can find no person to which these
effects attach, the subject is, for all civil intents and purposes, dead: ". . . the government claimed
the administration [of Crusoe's plantation], as being the effects of a person not to be found,
which they called civil death" (277). While dissociation from civil society provides Crusoe with
the freedom to compound the fortunes of personality, the cost at home is civil death, but with his
return to civil society he forfeits his autarchic/autarkic personalities, accepting the legal terms of
his civil subjection. Crusoe re-enters civil society explicitly in the form of a contract, an assertion
of legal personality as a voluntary social compact, for which he is compensated as a bearer of
rights and obligations—which Defoe also rewards with an increase in material wealth. The
liminal period of civil death makes possible Crusoe's socialization as a subject of civil law by
converting the demand of submission to the law into an expression of personal will. If Crusoe's
11
Joseph Slaughter
story ended here, we might have a Rousseauean social contract bildungsroman,15 but the novel
continues with a second visit to the island and the sequels proliferate this pattern of remove and
return. The novel effects an accord between the rebellious will of the young Crusoe (who defies
the traditional collective will of his family) and the demands of society by extracting him from
the civil order, granting him a degree of personal freedom (or the freedom to inhabit personas) in
such a way as to reveal the socio-political dynamics by which is produced the singularized
subject of legal personality capable of rationalizing such subjection as an effort and effect of
personal will.
Defoe's fabulous study of fledgling modern individualism may account for the novel's
privileged status both within the history of the novel and in the UDHR debates, but Ian Watt
accounts for its appeal to readers in the eighteenth century on the basis of its generic innovation
and its capacity to bridge the social and civic isolation of economic specialization (a fantastical
overcoming of the capitalist alienation in the division of labor as Durkheim saw it). Watt
identifies, within the novelistic study of the psychology of homo economicus, a generic
dependence upon the popular forms of confessional autobiography characteristic of
Protestantism. To this generic debt, Richard Barney adds the discursive engine of Lockean
"supervisory pedagogy" (224).16 Barney takes measure of the apparent generic conflict between
the instructive and the introspective by placing the novel in the context of Defoe's pedagogical
treatises, suggesting that the novel becomes generically schizophrenic because of the multiple
systems of subject formation that inflect the text. Crusoe's multiple personalities arise not only
from the conflation of the generic forms that Barney identifies; they are also the products of his
penchant for book-keeping, which, more than a mere "theme in the modern social order," as Watt
writes, obtains in the novel as a textual principle of narrative itself (63). The bottom line of
Crusoe's figural narrative accounting on the island shows a profit of personality whose surplus is
expressed in the three levels of personal capacities Crusoe assumes: the individual (Robin as
castaway), the sovereign (Robin as king), and the corporate (Robin as producer, manufacturer,
accountant, and functionary of sovereignty itself).
Personality, like any other product of his labor, is, in a word, invoiced—accumulated and
documented. Like all extensions of his personality,17 outside an economy of exchange, his
products exceed personal use, to such a degree that Elaine Scarry, in the "Making" section of The
Body in Pain, takes the novel as paradigmatic of creation's tendency to excess: "Because so
12
Joseph Slaughter
many of the invisible attributes of creating are themselves objectified and made visible in the
materialized structure of the object world, it may be that the inherent, self-amplifying largesse of
creating also comes to have a visible . . . registration in the tendency toward numerical excess"
(319). For Scarry, the novel offers numerous instances of this material tendency to accumulation:
three bibles, two houses, two boats, the multiple layers of fortification around his house. In
modern editions of the novel, which are usually printed with chapter breaks and titles not
appearing in the original, the obsession with the self as subject registers in the sheer excess and
insistence of the first person singular pronoun that heads 23 of the novel's 31 chapters.18 Scarry
links the material excess of Crusoe's creative labors to psychological surfeit, concluding from the
novel's representation that "the continual multiplication of the realm of objects" inheres in every
act of "making" as "the continual excess of self-revision that is occurring at the original sentient
site of all creation" (her italics 320).
If Scarry's "excess of self-revision" is materialized by a magnitude of the products of
Crusoe's labor (and fortune), the accretion of predicables attributable to Crusoe as subject is also
the product of the surfeit of personality textualized in his journal, which, as much as it serves as
confessional autobiography or a record of supervisory pedagogy is also, quite simply, a corporate
ledger that inks the self in the red and the black. Crusoe emerges as the subject of his labors—
physical, mental, spiritual, psychological, administrative and textual—through the invoicing of
the hyper-extensions of his personality. That is, the person as subject, as the notional entity to
which personality belongs, is accounted into existence, is accounted for, through the material and
textual effects of its presence as a mode of what I have elsewhere called narrative invoicing. 19
More than an accounting of the spiritual and tuitional self, and more than a stock-book, as Marx
has it—that "contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations
necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour-time that definite quantities of those
objects have, on an average, cost him"—, the journal narrates personal existence and experience
in the mode of corporate account-keeping (Marx, Capital I 77). Crusoe asserts his self-possession
through a narrative of invoice in which writing itself becomes a mode of production that turns
raw thoughts and self-apperceptions into useful personal goods. Before embarking on his formal
journal, he first endeavors "to comfort myself as well as I could, and to set the good against the
evil, that I might have something to distinguish my case from worse; and I state it very
impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered, thus:
13
Joseph Slaughter
Evil
I am cast upon a horrible desolate island,
void of all hope of recovery.
I am singled out and separated, as it were,
from all the world to be miserable.
...
I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me.
Good
But I am alive, and not drowned, as all my
ship's company was.
But I am singled out too from all the ship's
crew to be spared from death; and He that
miraculously saved me from death can
deliver me from this condition.
...
But God wonderfully sent the ship in near
enough to the shore, that I have gotten out
so many necessary things as will either
supply my wants, or enable me to supply
myself even as long as I live." (68-9)
Compare this to the first days of the formal journal:
September 30, 1659. I, poor, miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked, during a
dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal unfortunate island, which I
called 'the Island of Despair,' all the rest of the ship's company being drowned, and
myself almost dead. . . . At the approach of night, I slept in a tree for fear of wild
creatures, but slept soundly, though it rained all night. October 1. In the morning I saw, to
my great surprise, the ship had floated with the high tide and was driven on shore again
much nearer the island, which, as it was some comfort on the one hand . . . , so on the
other hand, it renewed my grief at the loss of my comrades . . . (72-3)
The diary, like the double-entry account, counterposes the losses and gains (miserable but alive;
fearing but sleeping soundly; grief but comfort), constructing a calculating narrative that invoices
the experience of daily life as a balancing of the books. The ostensibly private language of the
diary begins in the mode of a legal testament that asserts the continuity of subjectivity ("I . . .
being shipwrecked"), but when the collective that might make sense of such a declaration is
discovered dead at the end of the very same sentence, the recording revives the ledger domain as
a genre of narrative account keeping. (The full exit of his shipmates from the subject-regime of
civil society is marked in the novel not by they inert bodies but by the absolute absence of any
body.)
"Supplying" the self in the possessive or economic individualist mode tends to lead to
autobiographical narratives of invoice, where moral, ethical, spiritual and other commonly
intangible qualities can be calculated, quantified, and accounted in columns of profit and loss. In
this mode, "I was absolute lord and lawgiver; . . . However, I allowed liberty of conscience
throughout my dominions" becomes more than a statement about sovereign administration; the
14
Joseph Slaughter
profits and losses of exchange (of liberty of conscience for "perfect subjection") are also
calculated according to the codes of ethical liberal governance. This is an incorporating,20
capitalized autobiographical narrative discourse that attempts to unify, in the body of the singular
individual, the divisions of labor (production and its accounting, in this example) generally
distributed among discrete aspects of corporate production. The three imbricated layers of
personality in Robinson Crusoe constitute a hierarchy of personality that progressively assumes
the representation of ever greater numbers of volitional entities. That is, the human individual, as
a possessor of rights and duties, is an isolate personality who combines with others (in Defoe's
novel, Crusoe himself represents many of those others in his various personal capacities) to form
the corporate and the state collectives—the "I" of individuality, the "we" of fraternity and
collective embodiment (corporate personality), and the royal "we" of the embodied sovereign, or
the sovereignty of the law. But in the case of Crusoe, these three levels are, to misconstrue Marx,
the personalities of one and the same Robinson. If Robinson Crusoe suggests that it is
theoretically possible, according to the logic of legal personality, to occupy simultaneously
multiple personalities, the novel also intimates that these too are the products, not the resources,
of labor and a certain civic-mindedness. Defoe rescues the shipwrecked individual, susceptible to
spinning yarns of excessive self-revision, through the figural work of incorporation—the trope
that binds a body and will with the various predicates of which that personality is imagined
capable—by returning him to civil terra firma where the individual occupies a singular, now
naturalized human personality.21
In its ordinary political sense, incorporation names the process by which a set of
previously distinct (sometimes legal) entities combine to form a new collective, but singular,
legal person with rights and duties. For the purposes of law, it produces a body capable of
sustaining legal personality where no "natural" body existed previously. Incorporation is, thus, a
rhetorical figure (a trope) that produces an image of an entity capable of predication within the
law, reserved, ordinarily, for the process of figuring collective civil personhood, characterized as
having a civil body (a person) and a form of civil expression (a personality). In its political form,
incorporation effects enfranchisement, situating the subject within the prevailing system of rights
and duties as a double process of liberation (from traditional forms of filiation) and accession to
the dominant socio-political order. I am calling this figural work the trope of incorporation,
rather than by the more common literary/rhetorical name of personification, not only because, as
15
Joseph Slaughter
I hope to show throughout this chapter, the illocutionary model upon which it is based is that of
the company charter but also because the name stresses the importance of the body to the work
of the law, the primary process by which law gives a body to the entity capable of bearing rights
and duties, conceived as expressions of personality.22
Incorporation charters self-governance (the suzerainty if not the sovereignty of the legal
subject), which Richard Barney finds to be the pedagogical effect of narrative in Defoe's novel:
"Crusoe's task as narrator, then, can best be described as a form of narrative government, since
that term has several personal and public nuances pertinent to its double register of political
administration and pedagogical supervision. . . . The goal of education, furthermore, whether
public or private, is self-government, the power and obligation to submit one's passions or
inclinations to rational adjudication authorized by social mores" (Barney 241). Crusoe's selfchartered self-governance takes the Enlightenment ideal of a rationalized subject to excessive
proportions. In his accounting terms, Crusoe suffers the ironic misfortune of an excess of legal
personality, the price for which is isolation but for which he is compensated with a capacity to
accompany himself. Collectivized and corporatized in the body of a singular individual, the three
modes in which his personalities find expression are unified as emanations of his biographical
existence, and the emergent capitalist divisions of (personality) labor are organized under the
sign of his singular volition. In this sense, the legal instruments so precious to Crusoe permit him
to forget, while he is on the island, the analogical operation by which his being "like a king"
comes to be confused for his inhabiting the person(ality) of the king. The effective figural
operation of incorporation in fact depends upon forgetting the enabling work of analogical
substantiation, upon taking the "artifice" of legal personality for the "real" thing and acting as if
the existence of personality itself depended upon it.
Chartered Personalities: The "Artificial" and the "Real"
If Crusoe's multiple personalities are only sustainable in the ahistorical context of a
personal colony, an island removed from central civil authority, Defoe's novelistic treatment of
personality explores the effects of having forgotten (such amnesia signified as shipwreck or
casting-away) that incorporation's work is figural, dependent upon a civil structure capable of
substantiating the analogy by which the legal person achieves civil personhood. In some ways,
16
Joseph Slaughter
this forgetting is also at the center of the historical crisis of figural authority in England that
precipitated the first modern stock market crash in 1720, a year after publication of Robinson
Crusoe. Defoe, himself a promoter of British colonial expansion in South America, expressed his
support for the South Sea Company's private ventures "on the Orinoco in the Weekly Journal, 7
February 1719, one month before publication of Robinson Crusoe: 'We expect . . . a most
flaming Proposal from the South Sea Company, or from a Body of Merchants who claim kindred
of them, for erecting a British colony on the Foundation of the South-Sea Company's Charter, . .
.'" (Seidel 43). The South Sea Company, granted a Royal Charter for a monopoly of trade in the
Americas in September of 1711 after a Parliamentary directive required the sovereign to
incorporate the company, was a venture concocted by Parliament, the Treasury, and private
business interests to refinance the public debt.23 A hybrid body by virtue of its unorthodox
incorporation, the South Sea Company's proposal and promise never materialized. With the
Royal seal on the right to charter corporations broken by Parliament, the company's early stockmarket success precipitated an explosion in the number of joint-stock companies claiming,
unilaterally, to have legal personality, and thus to have legitimate rights to pursue various
lucrative enterprises. When it became apparent that many of these corporations had nothing more
than a counterfeit paper personality, unsanctioned by law's sovereignty, confidence in the jointstock system itself was shaken. The South Sea Company manipulated this crisis to retrench its
own advantage by supporting the Bubble Act of 1720, which returned chartering authority to the
purview of the monarch, revoking such authority from the messy sovereignty of parliament.
Unable to deliver on its Charter, the South Sea Company itself finally suffered a spectacular
collapse, destroying numerous private fortunes and threatening the economic stability of
England.
More than the financial public trust was at stake in the crash; conceptually, faith in the
figural operations of incorporation—the terms by which a group of private citizens acquire a
legal, corporate personality as a collective, independent of their own personalities as
individuals—was also jeopardized. Some economic historians suggest that the scandal
disillusioned the British public to such an extent that, in comparison to the European continent, it
retarded development of the legal machinery necessary to govern the joint-stock, limited liability
company for the next century. In fact, the conclusion to the South Sea episode demonstrates the
historical difficulty of imagining corporate personality as an analogue to the human, since the
17
Joseph Slaughter
British Parliament found it necessary to redress the financial disaster by establishing extraordinary measures to hold the individual directors of the company accountable for the rights and
duties attributed to it as a collective. This history is of interest to my analysis of human rights
personality not merely because it supplies some legal and economic background for Defoe's
novel, but also because the illocutionary mode in which rights and duties are ascribed to
personality in the company charter illustrates something of the analogical operations of
incorporation that are also found in the discursive architecture of human rights.
The royal charter embodies the legal personality of the corporation under the name "The
Governour and Company of Merchants of Great-Britain, Trading to the South-Seas, and other
Parts of America; and for Encouraging the Fishery." The clause that effects incorporation
ascribes authority for the figural act to "Her Majesty" who "Incorporates the present Subscribers,
and all the Proprietors of the several Species intended to be provided for by the Act, who should
hereafter Subscribe, to be One Body Politick and Corporate." The rights and duties attached by
incorporation are enumerated explicitly as the "Power to Purchase Lands, etc." along with which
"[Her Majesty] Impowers the Company to Sell, Grant or Dispose of same Lands, etc. And
Grants, That they and their Successors, by the Name aforesaid, may Sue and be Sued, Implead
and be Impleaded, Answer and Defend, and be Answered and Defended, in Courts of Record."
The Charter goes beyond these general ascriptions of rights and duties to prescribe such minutiae
as the form which oaths of loyalty (its affiliative mechanics) to the corporation must take, the
manner in which the account and stock-books are to be kept (the narrative invoicing of its
personality), provisions for schoolmasters and the attachment of a minister of the Church of
England to every shipping venture over a certain size.
No aspect of legal personality accrues to the company that is not explicitly detailed in the
charter; and nothing may be changed in the terms of its personality that is not sanctioned by the
sovereign through amendment of the principal charter. Because of these provisions, and the
dependence on the force of the sovereign's authority to incorporate the "body politic," corporate
personality was generally treated as artificial, a product of a legal fiction based upon an analogy
to the individual human, taken to be the primary, real and natural person. We might suggest that
the mathematical/rhetorical definition of analogy as an equality of ratios ( a relation by
proportion) becomes a proportioning of ratio (logos/reason) between the human and the
corporate in the law that effects incorporation. It is somewhat anachronistic to read corporate
18
Joseph Slaughter
personality back into Defoe's novel, but only somewhat, since there was a notion of collective
legal personality obtaining at the time that had already been naturalized in the corporate body of
institutions like the Church and State,24 but there is no organic personality recognized in the
business enterprise as such. Organic corporate personality develops in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Instead, there is a chartering of corporations concluded at the pleasure of
the sovereign or parliament. This personality has only such rights and obligations as are
explicitly established within the chartering mechanism itself.
The degree to which the enabling analogy of the corporate to the human has been
forgotten in contemporary discourse is perhaps best demonstrated by Sanford Schane's 1987
linguistic study of the characteristics and capacities of group associations. "It is normal linguistic
usage," he writes, "to talk about institutions (such as corporations) as if they are persons"
(Schane 565). Schane arrives at this conclusion by examining the types of predicates that
ordinary language attaches to corporations, which arguably demonstrate that, grammatically and
conceptually, corporations are believed to share many of the agential capacities typically
recorded as human: "[Institutions] think and they feel and they say. . . . language does not regard
institutions as fully human, but it does impute important human characteristics to them—
mentalities and the ability to pursue social activities" (607). Useful as Schane's findings are, they
do not resolve the debate over the type of personality (fictional or real) that the corporation
possesses; rather, and I think more profoundly, his conclusions provide evidence of the
progressive naturalization of corporate personality, the active forgetting by which the analogy of
personality in incorporation is deactivated.
The content and source of corporate personality have been the subject of controversy
among legal scholars for the past two centuries, and these debates are inflected (and bounded) by
the same Enlightenment rationalism that enshrined the human as the natural and proper subject
of personality and civil rights. John Dewey tackled the question in 1926, when corporate
personality had already become a categorical fact of Occidental law, finding that the history of
"personality" as "a synonym for a right-and-duty bearing unit" led to two dominant competing
theories (Dewey 656). The Germanist "person theory" (also called the "natural" or "real" theory)
finds that the corporation is a natural entity, with real existence not only as a body, but as a body
with a will. The Romanist "fiction theory" (also referred to as the "artificial" theory), on the other
hand, takes the corporation to be a creation of law, based upon an analogy to the human person,
19
Joseph Slaughter
which is presumed to be a natural entity by virtue of its "real" existence. Dewey traces the
conflict between the fiction and person theories to the development of natural law, in which the
human being derives its status as a bearer of rights from natural endowment with certain
inherent, inviolable, and inalienable human qualities.25 But once this natural person enters into
positive law as a legal subject, the category of personality effects a split between the natural and
the artificial: "even if it were true, as it is not, that 'natural person' is a wholly unambiguous term,
to term a 'natural' person a person in the legal sense is to confer upon it a new, additive and
distinctive meaning" (657). For Dewey, this logic of supplementarity must operate if the legal
category of personhood is to be anything other than a restatement of the obvious: "'person' might
be used simply as a synonym for a right-and-duty-bearing unit. Any such unit would be a person;
such a statement would be truistic, tautological. Hence it would convey no implications, except
that the unit has those rights and duties which the courts find it to have. What 'person' signifies in
popular speech, or in psychology, or in philosophy or morals, would be as irrelevant, to employ
an exaggerated simile, as it would be to argue that because a wine is called 'dry,' it has the
properties of dry solids" (656). Dewey's analysis of legal personality in many ways begins from
where my own analysis of human rights personality begins, with a suspicion about the apparent
tautological form in which personality receives expression in the law. His "exaggerated simile,"
which is an analogy about analogical substantiation, provides a concise parable about the textual
mechanics of legal representation, which historically has found it necessary, either through force
or forgetting, to stake its authority on some primary figural operation of language that initiates a
formal relation between the legal and the "natural."26
Writing from Budapest in 1938, Alexander Nékám, in contrast to Dewey, starts from the
premise that "If legal personality were not a creation of the law but a characteristic inherent in
the nature of man, it ought to be found even in those to whom the legal system has not given it"
(Nékám 24). Not finding it anywhere but in the law, Nékám comes to his proto-deconstructionist
conclusion that "Personality therefore cannot be the source, as the theory supposed it, out of
which every right evolves; it is but an artificial concept, which can only with great difficulty be
extended to cases originally not contemplated, but which, none the less, because of the premises
of the theory, must be brought under it" (81).27 Nékám takes the position that "If legal concepts
are artificial, they are just as much so when they relate to the human being as when they relate to
groups " (65), and so he finds "personality" to be merely the legal expression of a communal
20
Joseph Slaughter
judgment that prizes the social importance of a particular entity which merits "special
protection" (26). Our confusion of the artificial for the real, Nékám suggests, arises from a
failure to distinguish between two distinct subject positions (or subjective effects) established by
the law that institutes legal personality, what he calls the "beneficiary" (who receives positive
rights) and the "administrator" (who authorizes such rights) (28). "It is," he claims, "only a
coincidence that these two conceptions seem to overlap in our system of today in the case of the
rights belonging to the normal adult person" (29), and his analytic distinction can be seen in the
history of corporate personality which in its earliest form reserved the administrative capacity to
the authority of the sovereign while instilling the company with some benefits of legal
personality. Human rights will attempt to do something different with this model by
incorporating the benefactor and beneficiary together in the singular human rights person. For
Nékám, law's figural work is imaginary, since it constitutes a discursive order that operates on
images of beneficiaries, the things "in whose experimental existence the community believes.
But the legal entity is only the legal image of the beneficiary, its legal abstraction" (40). That
this image requires active administration, in the case of the corporation by the authority of the
sovereign, suggests the fragility of faith in the existence of corporate personality independent
from the sovereign's capacity to guarantee it. In this sense, the sovereignty called upon to charter
incorporation is also called upon to insure the material existence of a corporate entity, to certify
the fundamental analogy of incorporation which needs, if it is to have historical effect, to
naturalize the correspondence between the corporate and the human. Both Dewey and Nékám
implicitly vest law with the figural capacity to guarantee its tropic operations, whether under the
authority of a monarchically embodied sovereignty or through the discursive operations of a
sovereignty no longer so discretely embodied; the metaphorical work of the enabling analogy at
the bottom of corporate personality law works in an illicit mode (as catachresis) that I. A.
Richards finds characteristic of metaphor in general: "But what is needed for the wholeness of an
experience is not always naturally present, and metaphor supplies an excuse by which what is
needed may be smuggled in" (Richards 240).
In the South Sea Company's articles of incorporation, the authority of the sovereign
serves to warrant the analogy of the corporation to the human, to give it effect, to make it
"legitimate," and to make it stick, but as sovereignty becomes more widely dispersed within (the
population of) the State, the sanctioning authority moves away from the person of the sovereign
21
Joseph Slaughter
to be invested in the discursive operation of law itself, taken to be an expression of the people's
sovereignty. In relation to personality, then, law's force and legitimacy is founded upon its
underwriting of the figural operation of incorporation, and the extent to which the corporate
personality comes to correspond to the human personality depends upon the force of the
ideological investment in law's capacity efficaciously to constate as it declares. Speech Act
Theory argues that every linguistic locution comes in an illocutionary mode that structures, by
convention, its meaning beyond the terms apparent in the words themselves. In this sense, the
meaning of a particular statement depends upon the situational context in which it is enunciated,
the mode it takes, and the effects that it produces. The "declarative" and the "constative" are just
two of these illocutionary forms.28 As I am using it here, the "declarative" is presumed to bring
into effect the state, condition, or quality predicated in the charter of incorporation. The
illocutionary force of the declarative is performative, through a logic of inducement (that brings
into effect or existence the condition, state, or quality named) whose guarantee rests with a
perhaps conventional belief in the authority and capacity of the authorizing agency to effect such
a condition. The "constative" is here understood as the illocutionary act of confirmation and
identification that works according to a logic of adducement, a citational act by virtue of the fact
that the condition, state, or quality being named is believed to exist prior to the statement that
confirms (or constates) its existence. The guarantee of the constative resides not in the authority
of the subject but in a shared belief that the condition, state, or quality obtains in the "real" world
(Searle 66-7). I will be arguing that in the case of human rights and human personality, law's
incorporative capacity necessarily depends, for very particular reasons, upon the simultaneity of
declaration and constatation to prepare the human subject capable of assuming the role of the
"human" in human rights. This double illocutionary mode of incorporation operates according to
the metaphysics that Judith Butler summarized in relation to gender and sex: "In philosophical
terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative" (Butler 11).
If law's authority to authorize personality rests, in part, in the capacity to guarantee the
analogy through which the process of incorporation inaugurates the person and personality of the
corporation, in human rights the analogy that empowers law appears to be absent, because the
UN lacks executive sovereignty in 1948 and because the modern human rights charter maintains
an attitude of suspicion to an ultimate authority outside of the human itself that could warrant its
analogical work. And yet, historically, human personality, as human rights has it, comes in the
22
Joseph Slaughter
illocutionary modes of incorporation, chartered, like corporate personality, as both a declaration
and a confirmation of personal rights. My point is not here to trace fully the genealogy of how
the notion of corporation became bound up with the notion of person in the legal sense; rather, I
am arguing that once that happened in the nineteenth century, and as it became consolidated in
the twentieth, the "person" of human rights articulation is inflected by discursive structure of
corporate personality developed over the preceding century of corporate personality. 29 In other
words, the legal machinery that enabled corporate personality as first an artificial category and
then naturalized it as organic supplies the discursive stipend that will single out the human
personality as the source and aim of its human rights articulation. In this regard, the figural
processing of personality that conferred it to the corporation (a process that made the company a
right-and-duty-bearing subject) implicitly supplies the model according to which human rights
articulate the human as a person, a subject capable of bearing rights and duties. The
predominance of the corporate model of legal personality (even for human legal personality) was
becoming apparent to many thinkers, like Dewey and Nékám, in the century before human rights
received their modern formulation in the UN declaration as a shift away from an acceptance of
natural law to the constructivist terms of positive law such that it was possible to claim, with del
Vecchio in 1920, that "No longer . . . do we have an order of rights belonging to the individual
because he is an individual, an order which is involved in his very nature; we have only the
series of positive historical rights, only the legal relations which are regulated by effective rules"
(Del Vecchio 138). In their assumption of the corporate model, declarations of human rights run
into a logical problem of authority and authorization that provide the executive sanction to make
law's figural work effective; without traditional recourse to an originary or transcendent
sanctioning authority, human rights law is left to guarantee its own figural operation. Such
declarations construct their own authority in the apparently necessary mode of self-legitimacy
and self-evidence. The impossibility of avoiding the problem of self-authored legitimacy is
reflected, it seems to me, by the change in the names of the documents that constitute the body of
contemporary international human rights law. So, while the first stroke of the International Bill
of Rights claims for itself the illocutionary force of declaration in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the completion of the Bill—with the two 1966 Covenants (the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights)—reforms the terms of that authority, alluded to in their
23
Joseph Slaughter
names as the artifice of contractual convention. Despite its apparent absence, I hope to show that
behind the human rights incorporation of human personality there is, in fact, a functional,
subtextual analogy whose figural work is called upon to warrant and effect human rights, even if
by custom, and by popular use, this analogy has been deactivated.
"Any one can like what a verb can do": Articulations of the Human Rights Person
If it is true that Locke's civil society is modeled on the joint-stock company, the
individual is incorporated into an international human rights civil society as a person before the
law according to a similar model (Macpherson 195). In international human rights law, natural
law's belief in the human being as the primary person is announced in the illocutionary mode
that, in the absence of ultimacy, splits that person into a legal image and its material referent,
which is presumed to exist experimentally and to which the legal image refers fully and
naturally. The UN Human Rights Commission (HRC) was charged in 1946 with articulating a
declaration of human rights by the United Nations Charter that incorporated the UN as an
international body endowed with the "conscience of mankind." In establishing the terms of its
constitution, the Charter begins by subsuming the individual and the collective character
(dispersed in nations) of the people to a group will "determined to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in
the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small . . . ." Dignity and human
personality become the central philosophical/moral categories upon which the HRC constructs
modern human rights as a self-authorizing legal discourse.
On the evening of 10 December 1948, after the General Assembly adopted the UDHR,
Eleanor Roosevelt, one of its principle drafters, penned a short diary entry for her nationally
syndicated "My Day" newspaper column: "Paris, December 10—I would have been delighted to
see in the preamble a paragraph alluding to the Supreme Power. I knew very well, however,
there were many men around the table who would violently be opposed to naming God, and I did
not want it put to a [roll call] because I thought for those of us who are Christians it would be
rather difficult to have God defeated in a vote" (Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day 156-7). What role a
named god might have played in the preamble that an unnamed one cannot remains unaddressed
24
Joseph Slaughter
in her terse valediction for the Declaration. Tireless in her campaign for the cause of human
rights, Roosevelt may have been responding, as she did on other occasions, to a domestic antiinternationalism grounded in religious and political resistance to a perceived threat to national
sovereignty in the corporate will of the United Nations.30 Roosevelt finds in the UDHR a divine
force that the drafters collectively felt it necessary to exclude. Stripping the mask of motivational
anonymity to reveal an unnamed god in the spirit of the preamble may reflect both her own
abiding faith and that of the readers of the popular press where her column appeared,31 but
whatever the rhetorical or spiritual motivation for naming the unnamed, Roosevelt's column
attests to an anxiety about the sanctioning authority of human rights common to debates that
continue, although in much attenuated form, to surround the documents.
Roosevelt's French colleague, René Cassin, recalled that assembling "the general
principles touching the unity of the human species and the essential attributes of the human
person (dignity, liberty, equality, and the necessity of fraternity, etc)" required a consensual
"form that did not oblige the committee to delve into the nature of man and of society and to
confront the metaphysical controversies, notably the conflicts between spiritual, rationalist, and
materialist doctrines on the origins of human rights" (my translations, Cassin 108). Cassin's
recollection suggests that Roosevelt's lament for the displacement of God as a prime mover is
just one version of traditional arguments about the etiology of human rights, about the form
which their original sanction takes that resonates with the displacement of the sovereign in the
history of corporate personality. In natural law arguments for human rights, the articulated
entitlements and obligations proceed from something prior to the human, dependent upon some
creative force that brings both the human and the rights that accrue to the human into existence
simultaneously. While the UDHR ostensibly dispenses with the traditional source of ultimacy,
the delegates to the HRC substantiate human rights on a number of categorical human qualities
(personality and dignity in particular) presumed to pre-exist the human of human rights. Where
in its Enlightenment precursors these human qualities served to ground the source of rights
themselves, in the UDHR they are animated as the source of sanction and the end of human
rights law, conjugated in verbal form as the process by which the human becomes capable of
bearing rights and duties. In other words, the UDHR resolves the problem of ultimacy through
the articulation of a set of self-substantiating co-operative tautologies in which the human person
is personified as a civil person, human dignity is dignified as civil dignity. It is the discursive and
25
Joseph Slaughter
narrative operations of these apparently tautological structures that the remainder of this chapter
attempts to unpack.
The recent historical experiences of World War II and recognition of Nazi atrocities
committed lawfully in the name of an organic humanity provided the immediate impulse for both
the establishment of the United Nations and the articulation of the UDHR. But while the drafters'
work responded to the force of circumstance, many hoped to mark the document with some form
of transcendent legitimacy, moored by metaphysical connection to something larger and more
absolute than the historically vulnerable human, to warrant—functionally, if not logically—the
legal force of authority. For some, such a warrant was to be found in the divine; for others,
material history (in a Hegelian/Marxian sense) was persuasive enough. Ultimately the practical
need for some statement condemning what the UDHR calls "barbarous acts which have outraged
the conscience of mankind" and declares a "universal" commitment to the aspiration of "a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want
. . . as the highest aspiration of the common people" was compelling enough to set aside
questions of origin and legitimacy: "They did not need a philosophical argument in addition to
the experience of the Holocaust" (emphasis added, Morsink, "W.W.II" 357). If discussions of
metaphysics were supplemental to the perceived historical need for articulating the specific
nature of human rights, that does not mean, of course, that philosophies of the subject did not
animate the debates, as the Defoe controversy shows.
When UNESCO proposed to undertake a survey of opinions about the philosophic
feasibility of a prospective declaration of human rights by canvassing eminent thinkers
representing the various member nations of the UN,32 the project received cold greetings from
the HRC. Introduced as an "enquiry into the theoretical problems" of an international bill of
rights, the committee rejected the project as "unauthorized" and chose "not to reproduce the
UNESCO report for distribution to all the members of the United Nations" (quoted in Morsink,
"WWII," fn. 216). In some sense, questions about the etiology of human rights were essentially,
and strategically, buried in favor of historical exigency. UNESCO's notorious report, Human
Rights: Comments and Interpretations, was later published independently in 1949 with an
introduction by French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who characterized the
committee's task as a contest between "violently opposed ideologies" (9) of natural law—which
posits that human beings are endowed by a creator "with certain fundamental and inalienable
26
Joseph Slaughter
rights antecedent in nature, and superior, to society, and are the source whence social life itself,
with the duties and rights which that implies, originates and develops" (13)—and of a materialist
vision which finds that "man's rights are relative to the historical development of society, and are
themselves constantly variable and in a state of flux; they are a product of society itself as it
advances with the forward march of history" (Maritain, "Introduction" 13). Maritain concludes
from the thirty-one opinions gathered in the volume what the HRC had already concluded about
the philosophical disputation and the possibility of consensus based not on "common speculative
ideas, but on common practical ideas" (10): "If thereafter we adopt a practical viewpoint and
concern ourselves no longer with seeking the basis and philosophic significance of human rights
but only their statement and enumeration, . . . then . . . not only is agreement possible between
the members of opposing philosophic schools, . . . [but] [t]he gains of the collective intelligence
under the influence of its several cross-currents go far beyond the disputations of the schools"
(14). Concluded in the name of the dispossessed and disenfranchised, such a document would,
Maritain writes, "Pending something better, . . . be a great thing in itself, a word of promise for
the downcast and oppressed throughout all lands, the beginning of changes which the world
requires, the first condition precedent for the later drafting of a universal Charter of civilised life"
(17). In fact, from a formal perspective, the HRC's task was to make a charter of civil life a
"thing in itself," a self-substantiating discourse.
Assembling "the rights and faculties indispensable, in our epoch, to the blossoming
[épanouissement] of the human person [personne humaine]" becomes, in both the UNESCO
document and the HRC, a project of translating into legal language a commitment to a rather
abstract conception of human personality and personalism (Cassin 109). If it can be said of a set
of theoretical expositions that there is a sort of argumentative mean, personality in the UNESCO
collection obtains that status, perhaps reflecting the popular currency of various philosophical
doctrines of "personalism" in Europe and the US from the late nineteenth century onwards. Each
of these schools of thought revives something of the medieval scholastic arguments about the
Catholic trinity as the origin, and emblem, of personality, but these are inflected with a humanist
sensibility that places at the center of a social revolution the "human person" as an emanation of
the divine meant to counteract the debasing and alienating forces of a capitalist, bourgeois
individualism and a communist collectivism.33 Whether specifically committed to romantic
individualism, to the development of particular genius, the capacity to occupy a differentiated
27
Joseph Slaughter
and important space in the group or society, the capacity to embody history and culture, or to the
human as an instantiation of the divine, most of the contributors to the UNESCO volume identify
the development of the personality as the fundamental, and legitimate, drive of human rights. On
this account, the philosophers and human rights legislators appear to agree, that the human
personality provides the basis for a consensual articulation of human rights as it does also the
object of human rights protection.
In her recent Oxford-Amnesty lecture, Gayatri Spivak has excavated what she calls a
"begged question" at the bottom of contemporary human rights: "that the question of nature must
be begged (assumed when it needs to be demonstrated), in order to use it historically, has been
forgotten" (G. Spivak 4).34 At the conclusion of WWII (as with the responsiveness of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to the "ancien régime"), the question was not so
much begged as beggared by historical circumstance. It is certainly true that questions about the
naturalness of the legal category of the person have been mostly laid to rest in human rights
scholarship, but studies of its constructedness and the terms of its internationalization continue to
occupy contemporary thinkers.35 What makes these different from the discussions of legal
corporate personality analyzed earlier is precisely the location of this new personality within
developing international systems of rights and responsibilities, so that the legal structures that
accommodate and produce international personality are progressively emerging along with the
personhood of non-governmental bodies: NGOs, multinational corporations, and classes of
people. Spivak's insight is important for its stress on the extent to which these theoretical
questions have been historically begged, and that this has been, perhaps necessarily, forgotten in
the predominantly crisis-driven mode of acting upon human rights historically.
Roosevelt's complaint about an unnamed god is partly a complaint, from her perspective
of faith, that the question of origins was begged within the halls of Hunter College and the Palais
du Chaillot. But if many of the drafters felt that the document slighted god,36 in textual terms
divinity and nature are sublimated (even strategically begged) to the language of personality and
dignity. Personality and dignity (and later self-determination in the language of the two
Covenants from 1966) come to occupy the place of nature and become the secularized names of
a prime mover. Social historian Orlando Patterson describes the displacement of nature as a
"rhetorical revolution,"37 marked by the endpoints of Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 "four freedoms"
speech and his issuance of an "Economic Bill of Rights" in 1944 which brought the "language
28
Joseph Slaughter
and rhetoric of rights, now called 'human rights,' . . . back with great force in the vocabulary of
politics" (Patterson, "Freedom" 175-6). For Patterson, the secularization of natural rights into
human rights reflects "the changed intellectual climate in which it was no longer felt necessary to
derive rights from a god, especially a Christian God, or reason, or innate moral sense or nature"
(176). The UDHR neither completely begs nor completely rejects nature as the source of human
rights since it fills the structural position vacated by Enlightenment "nature" with other, perhaps
even less stable, categories. What makes possible Patterson's rhetorical revolution (and the
apparently mutually exclusive readings of the presence or absence of an ultimate rationality
within the document) is the manifold nature of "personality" and the nature of the condensation
elided by its synecdochical operation for both the spiritualist and the materialist drafting parties.
The discursive syntax of human rights remains, more or less, the same after the displacement of
god and nature, but the statements authorized by centralizing "personality" within the discourse
permit the materialist/constructivist vision to co-exist with the spiritualist/naturalist ones in the
name of a rationalism dependent not upon transcendent ultimacy but upon historical
contingency.
The drafting history of the UDHR, particularly in relation to personality, demonstrates in
practice Dewey's point that "person" can mean whatever law (or the lawmaker) wants it to mean.
If the word "person" and its expressive variant "human personality" are acceptable for grounding
a spiritualist human rights based upon divine transcendence, the word also carries an acceptable
materialism, designating a particular social, civil, and legal entity endowed with particular rights
and duties, particular capacities, that are responsive to, and productive of, history.38 For the
practical purposes of legislation in 1948, the notion of personality permitted a singular,
"universalist" confession underpinned by a notion of dignity as an antidote to the perceived
excesses and antagonisms of a proto-Cold War division between communist collectivism and
capitalist individualism;39 this geo-political division would become exacerbated as international
politics became more frigid and new terms, like self-determination, emerged to do the work
personality had done in the early UN language of rights. In part, the discourse of personality
served the purposes of consensus because while its philosophical, psychological, and
sociological contents might have been the source of endless controversy, its juridical contents,
which appeared separable from the others, proved to be less so.
29
Joseph Slaughter
While the drafters may have come to substantial, if unexplicated, agreement on the
centrality of human personality to human rights, the UDHR itself conflates, in effect if not in
intent, distinct lexical registers that have made claims on the word throughout its etymological
history. The impossibility of neatly extracting the word from its multiple valences in psychology,
philosophy, theology, sociology, jurisprudence, and common parlance is what prompted John
Dewey's exasperation with the prevailing legal and philosophical discourses by calling for the
wholesale "overhaul [of] the doctrine of personality which underlies both of them" (Dewey 658).
The term is not univocally stabilized by its inscription in the UDHR; instead its semantic excess
delivers a matrix of significations ambivalent and fundamental enough for ideological détente,
and while the drafters chose to call this personality "human," they did so in a rather classical
mode that values the citizen as the fullest expression of the human: ". . . especially in his
relations to law and right, the man had been identified with the citizen in Greece as well as in
Rome. Just because the individual's absolute need of the state had stood out clearly, it was only
in those who were in possession of civil rights that human personality appeared to philosophers
as complete" (Del Vecchio 123). The drafters chose to beg the question of human personality in
some natural condition to concentrate on personality as a civil construct, and they situate this
civil personality in the discursive place of the "natural" human personality by way of analogy. In
other words, the UDHR in effect deconstructs the difference between natural law human
personality and positive law civil personality, charting a narrative telos by which the civil and the
human come to be co-designated within human rights personality.
The imbrications of juridical and human personality find expression within the UDHR at
a number of crucial points. Foremost, in relation to our discussion here, is Article 6, where the
document construes existential presence in the form of a right to recognition: "Everyone has the
right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law," or, in the French "Chacun a le droit
à la reconnaissance en tous lieux de sa personnalité juridique." If this were the only citation of
personality within the document, we might concede to it a solely jurisprudential meaning as the
guarantee of a "right and duty bearing" embodied subjectivity, the terms according to which
Cassin mounted his defense of the language as he had drafted it: "To affirm that an individual
was a person before the law, was to declare that he had rights and duties. Such a declaration
might seem unnecessary if the most recent history did not offer an example of forms of slavery
under which juridical personality had been withdrawn from certain individuals. . . . they should
30
Joseph Slaughter
be guaranteed certain elementary rights indispensable to their well-being and to their dignity"
("Third Session Fifty-Eighth Meeting" 3).40
Cassin took the notion of "juridical personality" from the annals of continental European
law, which received the category through the rediscovery of Roman law. The Anglophone
delegations initially balked at the idea because, as Roosevelt noted, "there was no equivalent in
Anglo-Saxon law" (5). Wanting to accord the international law with domestic precedent, the
Anglo-American resistance threatened to hold up articulation of the very idea of a "right and
duty bearing subject," –an idea that seems fundamental as the premise for a declaration devoid of
any prior sanctioning force. However, the Anglo-American delegations—whose legal notions
were more akin to the jurisprudence of Germany, who was not represented in the UN
committees—presented the only substantial objection to the notion of juridical personality; the
Latin-American and Eastern Bloc countries each spoke of the importance of the concept,
Uruguay noted, for example, the presence of the term in its own constitution and suggested that
if the "difficulty was how to express the idea in a way that would be clear to the English
speaking countries . . . the Commission should not be afraid to make an innovation by employing
a term that would certainly be established by usage if the legal concept it expressed was
recognized" (5). When Belgium expressed disbelief that "Anglo-Saxon legal terminology could
not express the Roman concept of 'civil rights'," Roosevelt asked for a clarification between the
concepts of "juridical personality" and "fundamental civil rights" (7). Cassin provided a formalist
definition: "speaking figuratively, juridical personality was the vessel and fundamental civil
rights were its contents. After the individual's right to recognition of his juridical personality had
been affirmed he should be assured of full enjoyment of his fundamental civil rights" (7-8).
Latinate versions of the UDHR retain the term "juridical personality" while the compromise
language, "person before the law," appears in the English, accepted by Roosevelt's delegation
based on a fortunate misreading of the US Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision and on a desire
to repair, at least legislatively, the legal machinery necessary to prohibit slavery. 41 Personhood in
Article 6 comprises what the drafters felt to be the essential quality of human existence that made
it possible to affirm and ensure the civil existence of the human person—faith in whose "dignity
and worth" the entire project is predicated upon in the preamble; the particular character and
characteristics of that personality, however, are articulated (in the sense of brought together or
embodied) across the UDHR's remaining articles as modes of expression of a fundamental
31
Joseph Slaughter
"contractual capacity" (6). Nowhere does the document explicitly outline a right to enter into
contracts, and yet it is clear from the course of the debates that legal personality intends to
comprehend the capacity "to assume contractual obligations" (cited in Volio 187). Personhood is
naturalized in the UDHR "as something in its essence the subject of legal predicates" (Nékám
47), but this sanction takes the curiously passive form of a contractual right to recognition that
attaches to the subject "everyone," to whom the characteristic of person attaches consequently:
"Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law." On the surface,
the logic of this article is awkward, since "everyone" could not be a "person" if everyone were
not already a person. But the apparent tautology of the right to be recognized as a person
becomes in the course of the Declaration, not a mere affirmation of a desirable legal condition or
natural fact, but a constructive positivist processing of an aspirational civil subjectivity. As such,
the natural grammatical subject of the sentence comprises both a human subjectivity imagined to
exist prior to the delivery of a civil subjectivity by the Article's predicate and the qualities of civil
subjectivity deposited by the predicate. In effect, this seemingly tautological form charters
human rights personality as a self-substantiating existential category through the operation of a
bi-lateral, and simultaneous, predication that formally begs the question of the source of its
authority.
Article 6 introduces juridical personality as a predicable category of a legal entity in
abstraction that assigns real locus standi, recognizing the capacity of the subject to sue and be
sued ("to implead and to be impleaded"), to be called before the bar, and thus interpellated
through legal reference; but this model of personality is bound up with another that marks the
social and civil engagements of that entity as articulated forms of self-expression and selffulfillment. These two degrees of personality—the abstract form of human personality to be
filled with the articulated contents of civil personality—are compounded when the UDHR
articulates them with the adjective human (to distinguish the human person from the state and
corporate persons) in its social, cultural, and economic protections. In other words, by the effect
of Article 6 the human person comes to have juridical personality, and the article models the
aspirational telos of human rights, by which the two personalities are to become co-extensive in
the modern international human rights person. In the interest of clarity, I shall try to maintain a
distinction between human personality (the expression of the so called natural person prior to
entry into international law) and the juridical/civil person, and I shall call the entity and its
32
Joseph Slaughter
expressive contents imagined to emerge from human rights the human rights person and
personality. However, the UDHR contributes to the confusing vocabulary where it calls this
emergent international personality by the name of "human personality."
In international human rights law, the personality that corresponds to each type of person
consists of the forms of expressive extension into the social, political, civil, economic (etc.)
orders imagined proper to each of these persons. Civil personality, thus, names the collection of
modalities by which the person interacts with and extends into the civitas. This conception of
personality can be perhaps most clearly seen in the formulation of a right to education in Article
26, which "shall be directed to the full development of the human personality" into the human
rights personality. Education thus becomes a modeling, civilizing activity that channels the forms
of the personality's expression, and its personifying contents are directed "to the strengthening of
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance
and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the
United Nations for the maintenance of peace." Human personality achieves its fullest expression
in human rights personality in which its forms of expression have been reconciled with those of
the civil personality. The UDHR draws its model of education from UNESCO's project of
Fundamental Education, developed two years earlier with a focus on education for "human
betterment" as a means to fostering peace, mutual understanding, and a "spirit of brotherhood."
UNESCO's educational project is a modernizing one, designed to effect a "radical revolution"
with the "launch upon a world scale [of] an attack upon ignorance" (10), but the primary subjects
being prepared for global brotherhood are conceived as peoples and nations, not as individuals.
This educational revolution intends to accomplish what industrial development had not by
providing the "minimum education which would enable them [the underdeveloped peoples] to
make better use of the tools and equipment of a scientific age . . . to promote better standards of
life in larger freedom . . . to play their rightful role in the comity of nations. . . . The present
educational inequality between nations represents a danger to the peace of the world, which
cannot become One if half of it remains illiterate" (UNESCO, Fundamental Education 10). As it
distills this program, the UDHR reconditions UNESCO's project, intended to develop a people's
corporate (inter)national personality, for service to the full expression of the individual human
rights person. By laying stress on the development of personality and articulating rights as the
terms guaranteeing the expression of the contents of that personality, the right to education
33
Joseph Slaughter
within the UDHR invokes both registers of the juridical and human personality that I have been
tracking; in some sense, education in the UDHR names a tandem process to (or gives another
name for) the figural work of incorporation by which human rights produce the human rights
personality. By modeling its educational commitments on UNESCO's, the UDHR implicitly
recognizes that the civil (even international) person is inscribed and inflected by a national
corporate personality, but making the individual the primary subject of human rights also makes
of the individual a medium through which corporate personality finds expression (whether of the
universalized or nationalized civil person).
The trajectory of education within the UDHR (which not only makes the human
personality an end of human rights but also makes it a means to their perpetuation) constructs the
human individual as a node of social, cultural, economic, civil and political relationships. In fact,
whenever the document invokes "the full development of human personality" as an end of
human rights, it does so within the explicit intersubjective context of the individual's obligations
and rights in relation to others and not to the state or the law. Thus, the community becomes in
Article 29 the source, or at least the substrate, "in which alone the free and full development of
human personality is possible." Article 22 similarly realizes the right to social security, construed
broadly, as "the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free
development of his personality."42 So human personality is inscribed within the network of
human relations, not as a purely individualist self-expression, but, at least in part, as a species
expression through the individual. In this sense, there is a homology between human personality
within human rights and the individual's relation to language where, as Bakhtin suggests, the
language is already "saturated" with the presence of others' usage. For, if I as an individual am
born into a language that pre-exists and will outlive me, I only ever occupy so much of that
language as I occupy, although I can desire and endeavor to occupy more than I do. So too with
what we might call a saturated culture. And similarly human rights personality exists
independently from and interdependently with the individual human being and a human
personality, so that human rights inaugurate a narrative that attempts to articulate the terms
according to which one can come to occupy not only that much of a saturated civil humanity as
one does but also those parts of international human rights personality that are not yet of the
human person.43 As formulated in the UDHR, "humanity," "personality," and "dignity" pre- and
post-exist the individual, and the drafting project details an aspirational program for the
34
Joseph Slaughter
dispositional occupation of the internationalized "human" of human rights. In this sense, the
individual human being of human rights chartering becomes the mode of expression of the
universalized human rights personality and dignity (as I will show in a moment). In fact, both
words in "human personality" are conceived to operate along these lines, so that the individual
human being, as a subject of rights and responsibilities, is also the concrete interpellation (the
incorporation, literally and figuratively) of the human person with the civil person in becoming
the human rights person. In other words, within human rights, it is the human person's career (in
the double sense of trajectory and (self-)occupation) to become the civil person, imagined as the
fullest expression of human personality itself.
Human personality is, within the document, inscribed in a system of recursion, so that it
conduces the species interest of the corporate entity by animating (in a teleological sense) the
inclination towards human rights personality as a species quality within the individual.44 This
human rights logic has a debt to cultural conservatism, and it is clear that in the 1940s, a number
of the drafters felt that they were rescuing, and defending, the cultural legacy of the
Enlightenment by establishing a firm and productive relationship between the patrimony of
mankind, however so partial, and the development of human personality. In its delegation's
commentary on the right to education, Brazil, for example, risks the wholesale substitution of
human culture for the human individual when it makes this equation the primary rationale of
human rights: "The right to share in the heritage of mankind formed the basis of our civilization,
and could not be denied to anyone. Without education, the individual could not develop his
personality, which was the aim of human life and the most solid foundation of society" (United
Nations 597). The compulsory character of this education means, then, that the development of
personality becomes, in the idealism of the document, not a mere accessorial right of selfadornment, cultivation, or an egoistic drive, but an obligation to the community (micro-socially
and macro-socially construed45) to be subjected as a means of expression of the speciespersonality, in accord with the norms of social and civil will. Thus the freedoms "from fear and
want" in the preamble are cast positively in the modes of the enjoyment of "freedom of speech
and belief," credited throughout the document as freedoms to the "full development of human
personality" as an end in itself. And yet, this end is cast as a solemn duty, making personality
also the means of freedom, dignity and self-determination (which are supplemental but not quite
interchangeable terms within human rights). Personality is set at the benefit of the collective (the
35
Joseph Slaughter
family, community, state, universal/international) in the name of peace and a "spirit of
brotherhood," which can only be spirit when the natural law personality and executive sanction
of the father has been unnamed, unseated.
Despite the drafters' practical decision to avoid metaphysical analysis, the project of the
articulation of human rights (as the memberment of the human rights person) requires a prior
analytical disarticulation (dismemberment) of the human and civil persons that of course entails
something of a metaphysical understanding when it is distributed across the text of the thirty
articles; the aspiration of the document involves, then, also a hope that the person can be put
back together in the future. In other words, it becomes clear that there can be no avoiding the
metaphysical questions when drafting a declaration of the necessary legal conditions to make a
space in international civil history the size of the human being. That the model of the chartering
of human rights subjectivity proceeds along the lines of corporate chartering (giving legal body
to a dispersed will) is perhaps implicit in the concluding article of the UDHR where it names
together the three forms of legal personality that I earlier identified as convergent in the subjectbody of Crusoe: "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group
or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of
any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein" (my emphasis). In fact, recognizing the potential
legal confusion of using the generic term person to describe the human person, the final review
committee unanimously voted to change "everyone" and "every person" to "every human
being," despite the assurance by the UK delegation that "person" alone had a distinctive enough
meaning from "legal person." However, through whatever accidents of bureaucracy, the final
language of the UDHR in French and English still bears the unmodified "person," although the
change was effected in the Spanish. The Soviet delegation chose the moment of this discussion
to lay bare the general theory of rights that obtains through the notion of personality: ". . . each
individual was a possessor of rights and could, therefore, insist that his rights should be
recognized wherever he might be, . . ." (United Nations 227). Many of the drafters conceive
personality as a possession of the person, and in some sense personality comes to possess the
person as a form of legal occupation by which the human is incorporated within the civil order.
The multiple theoretic valences of "personality" supplied the basis for historical action in 1948,
but it may well be that this polysemy also made the solution temporary, giving way to the
language of self-determination and later to developmental agency. Under the suasion of the
36
Joseph Slaughter
evidence that Hitler's foremost crime was to have treated personality as a form of civil chartering
(which could be revoked by the authority of the state), the drafters attempted to assert the
primacy of subjectivity in the form of a personality that had the right to demand recognition of
its personhood, and they attempted to articulate human personality in an illocutionary mode that
could not be revoked. If personality provided merely the basis for human rights, the Declaration
might be understood to act primarily in the illocutionary mode of the constative—as recognition
of extant facts and conditions—, but the document situates personality also as the end of human
rights, as one of its effects, and as such the constative becomes also performative, making law's
figural work of incorporation reflexive and risking precisely the dangers of chartering
subjectivity.
Begged Personalities: A Person is a Person is a Person
A crude distinction can be made from this study of the controversies and consensus
arising from the drafting process between, on the one hand, the notion of person as an
ontological state of being, "what one is," taken as axiomatic in the debates, and, on the other,
personality as expressions of "what one has," through endowment, birth, historical experience, or
acquisition. The terms of that "having" provide one source of ideological controversy, although
the arguments indicate that each of the drafters subscribed to some form of a theory of possessive
individualism. As explanations of the liberal tradition of civil rights in the West, theories of
possessive individualism assert that the Lockean right to property is primary, and that the
primary proprietorship is to hold property in the self.46 Labor (perhaps even the labor of
personality, as in Crusoe), in this theory, can be alienated from the individual as a commodity to
be bought, sold, rented or leased, transforming the juridical personality of natural law into, as
Bloch writes, "nothing more than a certification of the aptitude of people or corporations to
participate in commercial juridical relations" (218). From the perspective of possessive
individualism, it is possible to make sense of the interpretive conflict between delegates
Dehousse and Pavlov in terms of the propriety of the individual's right to contract. Dehousse is
working with a Lockean notion of possession, where the development of human personality is
necessarily the product of individual labor on the self. Pavlov, on the other hand, who has
contested the right to private property (the rather banal compromise between the two positions
37
Joseph Slaughter
appears in Article 17 of the UDHR: "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in
association with others"), argues that human personality (of the individual as with the species) is
necessarily the property of the collective, and the responsibility for its development rests with
that collective, to which are due certain obligations as part of a social compact. This ontological
distinction between an essence and possession is, however, analytical and unstable, because in
the UDHR the two forms of personhood are interlaced, imbricated, although the verbal activity
attached to each is suggestive of the division to which I am calling attention. The human person
exists in the present or infinitive, and has, as a quality of personality in the form of an ambiguous
expression, the right to be recognized as such: everyone is a person and has the right to be treated
as a person. Attached to human personality are verbs of possession, of progression, gerunds—
becoming, developing, unfolding, blossoming— and verbs of acquisition, of teleological
manifestation of historical and species experience. In fact, even the right to recognition of
personality is delivered, finally, as a possession, as an expression of personality itself.
To summarize this as blatantly, and tautologically, as possible, human rights personality
makes human rights personality possible. And for this to be anything other than a historically
necessary axiom, we might recognize that time passes between the first and the second
personality, and the UDHR, along with the extra-textual commentary by its drafters, marks this
intervening time as the time of aspiration, a future-oriented projection of dignity and personality
that requires a present and progressive affirmation of dignity and personality to imagine an
efficacious future in which these dignities and personalities will have been incorporated. The
time of the arrival of human rights personality is, then, situated as anticipatory retrospection,47
the time of the future anterior, the imaginary condition of a future bodily integrity (in this case of
the person) as Drucilla Cornell derives it from Lacanian psychology.48
This temporal complex of personality secures a foundation for and rationalizes the end of
human rights articulation; it supplies the a priori condition of humanity that merits declarative
recognition and the a posteriori product of human rights themselves. I noted earlier that Spivak
has found at the root of contemporary human rights the begged question of nature, but, in fact,
she finds there two begged questions: "Speaking with reference to The Rights of Man and the
Universal Declaration, I am insisting that in the European context, it used to be recognized that
the question of nature as the ground of rights must be begged in order to use it historically. The
assumption that it is natural to be angled toward the other, before will, the question of
38
Joseph Slaughter
responsibility in subordinate cultures, is also a begged question" (13). For Spivak the
contemporary work of human rights and, more particularly, of human rights redress, fail to
remember, or perhaps even to recognize, that in their current deployment the foundational logic
of a rights-meriting subject and of a subject bent on assisting the other in realizing those rights
has been naturalized,49 often in the name of a facile cultural relativism, as "the condition and
effect of the simple value-judgment that rights-thinking is superior—'fitter'" (fn.16). Spivak's
begged questions resonate with my own identification of the forgetting of the discursive
analogical guarantee that warrants law's figural work of incorporation as a chartering of
personality; for her, the forgetting of the begged questions at the bottom of human rights is the
condition of their contemporary historicity, "contingent upon the turbulence in the wake of the
dissolution of imperial formations and global economic re-structuring" (6-7).50 An instance of
the difference between 1948 and now is to be found in the palpable memory of the begging (in
Roosevelt's "My Day" column, for instance) and in what I am following of the traces left within
the documents themselves. If it proved necessary to beg the question of nature to use human
rights historically, this was in part because human rights aspired to effect a beginning51—one
that attempts to begin again, not from precisely the same premises as the Enlightenment, but in
its progressive mode that human rights will, in effect, be human rights when they are recognized
as human rights, not through the force of authority or source but through their material and
metaphysical en-force-ment. Spivak sees this begging as of historical necessity; I am arguing that
part of that historical necessity has to do with the terms of authority upon which the
linguistic/legal act of declaration is predicated as a condition of the textualization of human
rights. That is, where the nature of authority warranting incorporation resided in an enabling
analogy between the corporation and the human person (first guaranteed by the sovereign and
then by the analogical discursive structure itself), the enabling analogy at the bottom of human
rights is found to be so precariously grounded that, by a sort of logic of collective superstition, to
inspect it too closely risks breaking the analogical relation.
Locating the begged questions of nature and the call of the other in the contemporary
human rights regime goes part of the way toward recognizing the content and conditions of
human rights practice, but it also bypasses consideration of the form that human rights assume in
their articulation. Today's begging of questions (and their forgetting) is, it seems to me, the
foreseeable result of an architecture of human rights that is formally begged.52 That is, human
39
Joseph Slaughter
rights, codified with an unnamed transcendent source, are structured according to a logic of
petitio principi,53 in their articulated form, so that not only do they entail the logical begging of
multiple questions, but they are themselves suspended, and perhaps necessarily so, across the
impossible span of analogical substantiation54 whose form is that of the begged question itself. In
other words, human rights posit the primary existence (as natural, divine, materialist,
psychological, whatever "fact") of what they seek to articulate, because this articulation effects
more than a representation, even if understood as an idealized confirmation, of the human
condition; it also constitutes the subject capable of bearing the weight of rights and legal
representation. So, human rights claim as a priori what is simultaneously, impossibly, and
necessarily also post hoc. This may be the logic and operation of law in general—a conclusion
perhaps to be drawn from the insights of Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies in
which the law is understood not primarily as a reflection of present social arrangements but as
productive of them—operating in both the constative and declarative modes as performance.
Human rights presume, necessarily and impossibly, that the person is a subject to effect the
person as subject, and this form depends upon a foundational analogy between, in its simplest
form, the person and its ostensible self, and more complexly, between a human personality and a
legal/civil/textual one. That something can be analogous to its ostensible self supplies the curious
tautologic of human rights, but rather than read this as a negative structure of stultified
commonsense, the human rights version imbues this articulation with kinetic potential productive
of the human rights person in the form of a teleological narrative.55
Predications of the Subject: Narratives of Self-Attachment
The illocutionary simultaneity of reflection and production (confirmation and
constitution) of human rights law makes manifest the complex operations of predication that
have "everyone is a person" meaning something more than "everyone cannot be a person unless
everyone is already a person." Generally, the work of confirmation and constitution (the
constative and the performative) are distributed between the nominal work of the noun and the
active work of the verbal forms of "predication"—between what is said of the subject of a
sentence as a quality that attaches to it and the act of declaration itself, which itself requires a
prior subject capable of predication, to whom predicates may be attached. The grammatical
40
Joseph Slaughter
predicate is that which follows in a relation of attachment to the subject, expressed in the activity
of a verb that establishes the terms of that relation. But a predicate is also that which is logically
necessary, in a relation of priority or anteriority, for a particular action, condition, or result to
follow. In this sense, the development of human rights is predicated upon Enlightenment
concepts of natural law, but it could similarly be said that human rights predicate the extension
of the franchise of the Enlightenment. Both of these obtain in the UDHR, where human
personality follows from the activity of declaring human rights and, simultaneously, human
personality is the necessary condition of for their elaboration. The person as subject (as the
bearer of rights and responsibilities) is capable of legal predication; that is, it can occupy the
place of the grammatical subject to which rights and duties attach. This capacity to occupy the
place of the grammatical subject should not be confused as fully corresponding to the place of
the agential subject of Enlightenment individualism, because in some way this is the analogy that
human rights law aspires both to transact and to de-activate, so that the self can be the self-same.
The gap between these two subjects is exposed by the articulated form of human rights when the
predicate attached to the subject delivers the capacity to have predicates attached to that subject.
In human rights, where the attachment is personality (the name of the quality that distinguishes
the subject as a right and duty bearing subject from all others), we have a reflexive predication
that makes the attributes assigned in the predicate (personality) necessary for the prior
assignation of a subjectivity dependent upon personality in the first place. The logical
architecture of reflexive predication suspends (or articulates) the subject across the verbal
activity of the sentence, so that the copula blurs, rather than clarifies, the genitive nature of the
relation between the grammatical subject and object, between, that is, the human person and the
civil person.
I argued of Robinson Crusoe that the terms of contractual subjectivity, according to
which the sovereign recognizes the person as a subject within the order of rights and duties (in
the name of subjecting the individual sovereignty of the other to the civil authority of Crusoe),
functioned in the mode of a distributive predication.56 On Crusoe's island, distributive
predication effected the mutual recognition of the legal subjectivity of both parties through the
illocutionary force of oaths that simultaneously demanded explicit recognition of, and
submission to, sovereign corporate personality while implicitly recognizing the legal contractual
capacity of the person to effect such recognition. Crusoe himself hangs onto a residual structure
41
Joseph Slaughter
that hierarchizes civil subjectivity according to a monarchic order, but the discursive forms of
subject-recognition to which he resorts have an intrinsic logic with constative and performative
effects beyond his ability to control. Both subjects are the cause and the product of the predicate
that distributes civil sentience. The structure of predication is perhaps best discernable when the
subject and object do not appear to denote the same entity—as when Crusoe's Spaniard vows to
recognize and defend Crusoe's personality, and in so doing assumes the role of person himself. In
Defoe, this simple distributive predication operates rather directly on two subjects, conferring
subjectivity to both the subject and the ostensible "object" of the oath through the bilateralization of the copula.57 Distributive predication assigns the same quality (in this case
subjectivity) to two different entities, identified grammatically as the subject and the object of a
particular proposition; it functions in the mutually constitutive mode of recognition as reciprocal
consecution.
When the subject and the object name, or appear to name, the same entity, the predication
becomes reflexive, if it is not to be a merely banal truism, a tautology. Reflexive predication is
conceptually more complex because the copula stands in for the begged question of authority and
the terms of relational sanction, linking the subject and the object of the sentence in the mode of
a bi-lateral (or intersubjective) consubstantiation as forms of self-adhesion, self-possession,
and/or self-propulsion. Reflexive predication assigns the same quality to both the grammatical
subject and object of a statement that, conceptually, seem the same—"a person is a person"58—
the logic of which makes each necessarily prior to the other. This formulation is doubly
predicated, since it simultaneously recognizes a subject capable of bearing predicable attributes
while its capacity to do so is predicated on those attributes. As a textual effect, articulated
between a subject and an object that are, lexically, coequal, reflexive predication conjugates the
subject with the object, in a mode that looks something like desire or aspiration, to make them
semantically equivalent, so that the subjectship and personhood come to name the quality of civil
existence.
I have over-simplified the human rights articulation of personality for the sake of
establishing the base logic of reflexive predication, but if we excise only the complicating
language of recognition (which I have argued works according to the logic of distributive
predication) to restate Article 6 in its most basic terms, the essentialist tautology of human rights
surfaces: "Everyone/Each person59 is a person." The existence of personality here appears in the
42
Joseph Slaughter
form of a banal assertion of fact, except that we already know that there are multiple forms of
personality embedded within the term "person," and so some form of personality is being
ascribed to every person. And even if we did not know the full contents of the UDHR's
consensual "personality," most linguistic analyses of predication would invite examination of the
relation of the particular person (everyone/each), as the subject of the article, to the generalized
"a person" in the predicate. In this sense, every person might be understood as a particular
instance of the universal person, or personhood; certainly many of the drafters seem to have
imagined the article as a sort of neo-platonic statement of ideal personhood, and it makes the
phrase something more than a tautology since it implies a relation normally conceived of as
some form of inherence. But juridical personality, as a civil legal category in the documents, can
have no a priori universal status not only because such status emerges as an effect of declaration,
but also because human rights intend to universalize the category of civil personality.
Neither an a priori nor a post hoc universalism adequately accounts for the relation
between the subject and object of personhood articulated in Article 6 because the formulation
depends for its effect on the simultaneous operation of both. The form in which human rights
personality is articulated (along with the multiple lexical registers combined in the word
"personality") transforms, perhaps inadvertently, the subject-predicate relation from one of
existential permanence or transcendence into a mode of becoming—the person is becoming a
person. This movement is marked by the work of recognition in the legal language of Article 6
("Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law"), but it is also
intrinsic to the form of our reductive tautology where the copula of being is forced to labor in the
progressive tense, which corresponds to the aspirationalist, future anterior progressive tense that
characterizes the modality of the Declaration itself: "The General Assembly proclaims this
Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples
and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this
Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for
these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure
their universal and effective recognition and observance . . ." (my emphasis). If the logic of
recognition permits the chartering of human rights as a teleology of the particular becoming
recognized as a particular instance of universal civil personhood, the tautology at the base of this
article (excising recognition) shows that a kinetics of civil personhood subtends and precedes the
43
Joseph Slaughter
work of recognition. If I am right about the discursive mechanics of reflexive predication, "the
person" and "a person" are mutually constitutive, not purely terms in a discrete dialectic, because
their oscillations trace an infinite regression of priority to and dependency upon each other.
Recognition is the predicative mode in which civil personhood is to achieve presence, and it
enters the UDHR to stem the regressive tendency of a human rights that is formally begged in
cyclical relations of priority and primacy by attempting to offer a progressive narrative in which
the ontology of the copula is transformed into an agentive teleology.60 In doing so, human rights
personality animates the career of the human being from the particular toward the universal (in
the form of the civil), from the natural (or "real," in the nineteenth century legal vocabulary)
toward the artificial (or "fictional"), and back, with the eighteenth century bourgeois
revolutionary impulse of making the "man" and the "citizen" indistinguishable through the
universal extension of the human rights franchise.61 That is, the person described by human
rights is inclined simultaneously towards the self and towards the other, as all that is manifest in
the universal civil person which is not yet of the human person, and from this articulation of the
kinetic disposition of the personality emerges the rudiments of a human rights narrative of selfexpression, self-adhesion, self-chartering, and self-incorporation whose general plot lines
describe the trajectory of the relation entailed within the activity of the conjugation of the
individual subject to the universalized civil object-subject62
Having disbarred nature, god, and the patriarchal sovereign from the function of
executive sanction, modern international human rights law excluded (and many would argue still
has not obtained) the force of authority that traditionally guaranteed its domestic figurative work.
In other words, international human rights law operates discursively without the usual extra-legal
guarantees for its figural work of incorporation (this is not just a post-structuralist theoretical
condition but the political condition of international law itself), and the rhetorical solution
adopted by international law was a borrowing of the tropic model by which the corporation
became a self-substantiating entity (through the long nineteenth century) to characterize the
human being as a self-predicating, self-incorporating international civil person. The law itself is
left to tautological formulations of international civil subjectivity in the form of begged
questions, positing as natural and given what it also intends to make civil and effective by
legislating for subjects now conceived as self-substantiating in their own right and shifting the
burden of its executive authority to warrant its figural work to the subjects of the law themselves.
44
Joseph Slaughter
The analogy that animates law's incorporation, but which it cannot itself guarantee, figures the
international civil person as analogous to itself, in the mode of the future anterior where the civil
person will have come to correspond to itself as an expression of its personality and an extension
of its person. In this sense, the international legal person and the international law of that person
emerge simultaneously, mutually constituted by their capacities and their inclinations to selfincorporation. This is a re-naturalization of once positive law since its figurative authority may
be said to derive from a displacement of responsibility for the act of incorporation of its human
rights subjects to those subjects themselves. In other words, the ideological work of human rights
law requires that responsibility for the incorporation of subjects be taken up by those subjects as
part of the figurative process of becoming those subjects—one of the liabilities it imposes—so
that law's figural making is in some sense international self-making, a making of selves
conceived as embodiments of a telos that unfolds as narrative.
[To shorten this version, I have elided 11 pages on "dignity," which operates in the human rights
documents similarly to "personality."]
I am proposing that what we have in the human rights commitment to personality and
dignity (in these early stages of codification) is a legal draft for a narrative order that models the
progressive aspirationalism of human rights themselves. Narrative aspirationalism is, in Bloch's
phrase, the bourgeois revolutionary "stipend of human rights . . . so anticipatory of humanity"
(174). Human rights personality is not a tautology (what George Puttenham described in 1589 as
"selfe saying"), because it is not yet a tautology, because the human person is not yet the civil
person, and vice versa. Instead, the narrative movement of human rights, in reference to
personality, from the human to the civil (universalized), foresees a time when the "natural"
person of Enlightenment essentialism will have come into correspondence with the "artificial"
person of civil law and society who is not only amenable to legal representation but who
recognizes in such representation the "natural" self. The project of human rights envisions and
encodes a self-saying civil human rights person who is self-incorporating, where the tautologies
of human rights are merely the corresponding forms of articulation for a tautological selfsubstantiating subjectivity. As its form of enablement, human rights figures the contemporary
human analogically (and importantly) as a metaphor for the Enlightenment "natural" one that it
45
Joseph Slaughter
takes to be earlier, and whose nature the drafters chose to beg by focusing instead on the social,
political, civil, economic, and cultural conditions of the international civil person. As such,
human rights codify the positive jurisprudential effects of the originary analogy that made the
corporate person a legal personality on the order of the human, re-naturalizing civil personality
itself as the analogical foundation of law's figural work. In this sense, human rights operates in
the figural mode of incorporation, so that no longer is legal personality based on analogy to the
human but based on an analogy of the person to its ostensible self. Human rights aspire, in this
sense, to vitiate the enabling analogy of corporate personality by making the human and the civil
personality redundant, not as a mere coincidence of contemporary political thought (as
Alexander Nékám suggests of the correspondence between the administrator and the beneficiary
of rights) but as its central illocutionary project to make the beneficiary self-administrating.
Personality and its co-operative dignity are understood within the documents as species
qualities that, in contrast to their eighteenth century precursors' conceptual dependence upon
endowment and inherence, can be made manifest in the individual person; the international
human rights person becomes the expression of a manifest destiny within the human being itself.
The reflexive predicative structure of human rights conscripts the force of executive sanction,
making of its civil subjects themselves the warrants of self-legitimacy and self-authorization of
human rights, so that a narrative entelechy (the career of the self becoming its self) posited as an
inhering tendency of the human being, while no less mysterious than the motivational engines of
nature and the divine, are conceived as up to the task of attaching the self to the self, the person
to the person, and dignity to dignity. In this sense, human rights do not so much recognize the
fundamental equivalence of personality in the human and the civil person as they promote the
generic narrative terms by which such personality might come to be read, equivalently; they do
not so much recognize the human personality as intrinsically worthy of special legislative
consideration as they promote a process by which that personality might be made manifest in the
state of civil personality, and so dignified ultimately as an end. Encoding personality and dignity
as trajectories of the human, the rights documents valorize not the static categories peculiar to
natural law endowment, but rather the narrative nature of a process of endowment as an intrinsic
tendency of the human towards self-expression, its self-extension in becoming the civil person.
That is, it is not the givenness of personality or of dignity that makes each human equally
valuable in human rights law but the inherent motion of the human towards personhood and
46
Joseph Slaughter
dignity, a motion that narrativizes how civil inherency comes to (and to effect) the human rights
person. The literary critic Wayne Booth has formulated, as a disciplinary revision of human
rights thinking, what I am identifying as operative, if not always palpable, within the logic of
human rights itself: "If the value of each person resides primarily or exclusively in what is
different or unique, then Amnesty [International]'s way of thinking becomes suspect indeed. . . .
What is essential about that self is not found primarily in its differences from others but in its
freedom to pursue a story line, a life plot, a drama carved out of all the possibilities every society
provides" (Booth 86-9). Although I am tempted by the appeal of his literary model of human
rights, I am wary of the risks entailed in a simplistic substitution of "life plot" or text for the
material existence of the human being.63 I have attempted to show that behind the formal
obviousness of a human rights ontology (asserted as self-evident in its tautological form) stir
teleological narratives of human development, of personification and dignification, of the
development of a human capable of occupying the place of the "human" in human rights as a
self-incorporating narrative agency.
While recognition of the narrative underpinnings of human rights does permit us to
contribute uniquely literary critical tools to the study of human rights, shifting the stress from an
essentialist ontology of human being to a narrative teleology of human becoming in no way
dispenses with the problematics of normativity and prescription, because (life) plotting comes
burdened by its own laws of genre. With this warning in mind, I have so far only been able to
uncover the kinetic narrative energy latent within human rights; however, human rights valorize
a particular generic narrative content that prescribes the preferred terms by which the human
individual is to be normalized as the international civil person through the force of social will
and desire that co-operates with, from their shared inception in the eighteenth century, the
classical formalization of the bildungsroman. As such, both human rights and the novelistic
genre may be identified as technologies of subjectivity that aspire to modernize the human being
by transforming "pre-modern" collective personality and dignity (as natural endowments of
filiation) into a universalized modern personality that will have chosen to have been an
instantiation of the human rights personality as an individual expression of volitional affiliation.
The remainder of this project attempts to specify the particular generic content offered in its
general narrative form here.
47
Joseph Slaughter
Woven together as pinion and process, dignity and personality are reflexively predicated,
not only independently upon themselves, but also interdependently upon each other. That this
predication is related, albeit surreptitiously in the human rights drafting, to the metaphysics of
the relation between the form and the content, between the universal and the particular, is taken
for granted in the international codes. Human rights locate within the human a latent kinetic
energy to be liberated in the transitive relation between the subject and the object (even, or
especially, when they seem to denote the same entity), or the agent and its aim that is principally
narrative in mode. The logic of reflexive predication, as I have found it here, motivates
personality and dignity as the ends and origins, and thereby also transforms them into the means,
of both human rights and human rights narrative. Personality, dignity, and human rights in
general, hinge upon this seemingly reciprocal consecution, upon the relationship of the
consequent international rights human to the posited antecedent natural human. Narrative (rather
than some formal relational logic or the authority vested in law to ensure the analogical
substantiation of corporate incorporation) becomes the name of the creative, cognitive activity
that describes what takes place in the time and space between the two terms, accounting for the
analogy of the person to the person with a kinetic inclination of the human person to become
coextensive with the civil person. Where personality and dignity appear to name, as the same, the
starting and end points of consecution, the narrative faculty aspires to articulate how the human
person becomes the international human and thus the civil subject of human rights.
Human rights personality formalizes a kinetic inclination of the human person to its own
unfolding as a civil person ("Entfaltung der menschlichen Persönlichkeit" in the German version
of the UDHR; "plein épanouissement" in the French; and the blander "full development" in the
English). Recognition, rather than declaration, becomes the illocutionary shorthand for this
human movement. That is, the aspiration of human rights privileges recognition as the moment
of re-unification of the disarticulated personalities I have been examining throughout this
chapter, so that it could be said that the UDHR charts a developmental narrative whose
dénouement is the final recognition of the individual person as both a discrete member and an
embodied expression of the universal (the personified/incorporated person as a concrete
universal), simultaneously individuated and corporatized, and most fully realized when the
processes of individuation and universalization fully conflow under the sign of personal will.
48
Joseph Slaughter
How this tropic incorporation of the person is to be achieved through the narrative terms of
incorporation is the subject of the following chapter.
Reflexive predication, which replaces the originary analogy of personality law with the
analogical tautology of contemporary human rights law, opens a space in the discursive
Enlightenment logic of rights that marks the limits of a narrative elision. That is, the analogical
form, emptied of its traditional contents, institutes an ellipsis within the text of human rights
whose void sustains life narratives as stories of civil self-incorporation.64 We have here not yet
the content or the specific generic features of this narrative, but rather the conditions for human
rights narrative, a set of fundamental narrative elements: two actors (the human and the civil
person), whose agency is so far indeterminate, and an event that characterizes the relationship
between the two actors (as human rights becoming), inscribed within an ambiguous spatiotemporal and causal relation. What we have is the fabula of structuralist narratology ("material or
content that is worked into a story . . . defined as a series of events" (Bal 7)): not yet a story
(sjuzet—the ordering of the elements of the fabula), and not yet a narrative ("a story that is 'told'
in a medium . . . converted into signs . . . . by an agent who relates, who 'utters' the signs" (8)).65
In human rights, the event posited abstractly in this fabula becomes the story of narrative itself,
of how agency is to be attached to the actors as a narrative capacity that transforms the event of
the person becoming a person into an agentive (both agent-forming and agent-confirming)
activity. In the following chapter I shall attempt to put the narrative flesh of human rights on this
skeletal fabula by identifying the normative terms modeled in the articulation of narrative agency
as the effect and function of the transformative story of human rights personality. I shall trace,
through the on-going process of conventionalizing human rights, how this fabula becomes a
story and then becomes a privileged narrative of human rights as the attachment of narrative
agency as the normative mode of the human rights person's civil expression and self-extension.
As a linch-pin in the drafting debates over the UDHR's commitment to personality,
Defoe's novel afforded rich literary material for thinking through the simultaneous logics of the
individual's independence from and dependence on civil society for the "full development of
human personality" since it constructs two apparently exclusive models of personality formation.
Cast away from British civil society, Crusoe's island isolation permits a full accord between the
natural-real-human person and the civil-artificial-legal one, their selfsameness arriving in the
form of self-sovereignty. Across the ocean, England offers the capitalist possibility of material
49
Joseph Slaughter
riches and social mobility, but it requires a singular personality, the subjection of the person to
the sovereignty of civil authority. Civil subjection and island sovereignty appear to offer Crusoe
a dilemma, but, in fact, the two are mutually predicated, and the gap between them—lying
somewhere geographically between the North Sea and the South Atlantic—becomes the location
of Crusoe's subjectivization, textualized as a process of emergence and self-attachment (of the
civil with the human) in the perpetual mechanics of his narrative account-keeping, by which he
becomes an international citizen subject.66 In other words, Crusoe incorporates himself as the
subject of his life narrative by subjecting himself to the demands of narrative account-keeping in
a process that looks very much like the tropic work of incorporation as I have been describing it,
where Crusoe is doubly subjectivized, enfranchised simultaneously as liberation from and
subjection to the law of civil society. Defoe's novel encapsulates the dynamic interplay between
sovereignty and subjection that will emerge from the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century
revolutions as the dynamics of civil subjectivization itself, capable of bifurcating and
rationalizing both European nationalist sovereignty and its colonialism (but also underpinning
anti-colonialism), but united most fully in the human rights project of producing international
civil subjectivity. Crusoe's narrative of losses and gains economizes the story of his civil
subjectivization, but it does so by imagining (perhaps foreshadowing Foucault) the twin
processes of the Enlightenment (liberation and subjection) combining in a sort of self-civilizing
mission.
Works Cited
Allport, Gordon W. Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: H. Holt and
Company, 1937.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. 1983. Revised ed. London: Verso, 1991.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1958.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. William James Lectures, 1955. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1962.
Bäck, Allan. Aristotle's Theory of Predication. Philosophia Antiqua, V. 84. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 1980. Trans. Christine Van
Boheemen. 2nd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.
50
Joseph Slaughter
Balen, Malcolm. The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble: The World's First Great Financial
Scandal. 1st ed. London: Fourth Estate, 2003.
Balibar, Etienne. "Citizen Subject." Who Comes after the Subject? Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter
Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991. 33-57.
Barney, Richard A. Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century
England. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Baxi, Upendra. Mambrino's Helmet?: Human Rights for a Changing World. New Delhi: HarAnand Publications, 1994.
Benjamin, Lewis Saul. The South Sea Bubble. London: D. O'Connor, 1921.
Booth, Wayne. "Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self; or, Does Amnesty Have a Leg
to Stand On?" Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992. Ed.
Barbara Johnson. New York: Basic Books, 1993. 69-102.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1984.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge,
1993.
Cassin, René. "Historique De La Declaration Universelle De 1948." La Pensée Et L'action. Paris:
Editions F. Lalou, 1972. 103-18.
Cornell, Drucilla. "Bodily Integrity and the Right to Abortion." Identities, Politics, and Rights.
Eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns. Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and
Social Thought. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. 21-84.
Del Vecchio, Giorgio. "Right and Human Personality in the History of Thought." The
International Journal of Ethics 30.2 (1920): 121-41.
Derrida, Jacques. "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy." Trans. Alan Bass.
Margins of Philosophy. 1972. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 207-71.
Dewey, John. "The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality." Yale Law Review
35.6 (1926): 655-73.
Dimock, Wai Chee. Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996.
Donnelly, Jack. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
Elliott, Robert C. The Literary Persona. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
Hickey, Jr., James E. "The Source of International Legal Personality in the 21st Century."
Hofstra Law and Policy Symposium 2.1 (1997): 1-18.
Humphrey, John P. "The Magna Carta of Mankind." Human Rights. Ed. Peter Davies. New
York: Routledge, 1988.
Ignatieff, Michael, et al. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001.
Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962.
Malcolm, John. Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms: Early and Middle Dialogues. New York:
Oxford U P, 1991.
Malik, Charles Habib. Man in the Struggle for Peace. [1st ] ed. New York,: Harper & Row,
1963.
51
Joseph Slaughter
Maritain, Jacques. "Introduction." Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations. Ed. UNESCO.
New York: Columbia UP, 1949. 9-17.
---. The Rights of Man and Natural Law. Trans. Doris C. Anson. New York: Scribner's Sons,
1943.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Ed. Frederick Engels. Vol. I. New
York: International Publishers, 1967.
---. "On the Jewish Question." Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher 1844.
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. 1987. New
ed. London: Verso, 2000.
Morsink, Johannes. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent.
Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999.
---. "World War Two and the Universal Declaration." Human Rights Quarterly 15 (1993): 357405.
Nékám, Alexander. The Personality Conception of the Legal Entity. Harvard Studies in the
Conflict of Laws. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1938.
Patterson, Orlando. "Freedom, Slavery, and the Modern Construction of Rights." Historical
Change and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1994. Ed. Olwen Hufton.
New York: Basic Books, 1995. 131-78.
---. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1977.
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism. 1924. International Library of Psychology
Philosophy and Scientific Method. Ed. C. K. Ogden. 2d , 10th Impression. ed. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul ltd., 1948.
Robert, Rudolph. Chartered Companies and Their Role in the Development of Overseas Trade.
London: Bell, 1969.
Roosevelt, Eleanor. Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day: The Post-War Years, 1945-1952. Ed. David
Emblidge. New York: Pharos Books, 1990.
---. "Making Human Rights Come Alive." (1949).
---. "The Promise of Human Rights." Foreign Affairs 26 (1948): 470-77.
Roosevelt, Elliot. "Foreword." Christmas 1940. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.
Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. 1975. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
---. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983.
Saleilles, Raymond. De La Personnalité Juridique: Histoire Et Théories: Vingt-Cinq Leçons
D'introduction á Un Cours De Droit Civil Comparé Sur Les Personnes Juridiques. Paris:
A. Rousseau, 1910.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Schane, Sanford A. "The Corporation Is a Person: The Language of a Legal Fiction." Tulane
Law Review 61 (1987): 563-609.
Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 1969. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1972.
Seidel, Michael. Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel. Twayne's Masterwork Studies.
Boston: Twayne, 1991.
52
Joseph Slaughter
Slaughter, Joseph. "A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law."
Human Rights Quarterly 19.2 (1997): 406-30.
Slaughter, Joseph R. "'A Mouth with Which to Tell the Story': Silence, Violence, and Speech in
the Narrative of Things Fall Apart." Omenka—the Master Artist: Critical Perspectives on
Chinua Achebe. Ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004.
Slaughter, Joseph, and Jennifer Wenzel. "Letters of the Law: Women, Human Rights, and
Epistolary Literature." Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective. Ed.
Marjorie Agosín. New York: Rutgers UP, 2001. 289-311.
Spivak, Gayatri. Righting Wrongs (Her Amnesty Lecture in Ms).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Righting Wrongs." Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Oxford
Amnesty Lectures. Ed. Nicholas Owen. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2003.
Staves, Susan. "'the Liberty of a She-Subject of England': Rights Rhetoric and the Female
Thucydides." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1.2 (1989): 161-83.
Stein, Peter. "Nineteenth Century English Company Law and Theories of Legal Personality."
Quaderni Fiorentini 11/12.1 (1982/3): 503-19.
"Third Session Fifty-Eighth Meeting." Commission on Human Rights. 3.58 ed. Lake Success,
NY: United Nations, 1948. 1-8 of ECOSOC.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community & Society (Gemeinschaft Und Gesellschaft). Trans. Charles P.
Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State U P, 1957.
UNESCO. Fundamental Education: Common Ground for All Peoples: Report of a Special
Committee to the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization, Paris 1946. New York: Macmillan, 1947.
---, ed. Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations. New York: Columbia UP, 1949.
United Nations. Third Session, Proceedings of the Third Social and Humanitarian Committee,
1948.
Volio, Fernando. "Legal Personality, Privacy, and the Family." The International Bill of Human
Rights: The Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Ed. Louis Henkin. New York:
Columbia UP, 1981. 185-208.
Warren, Samuel D., and Louis D. Brandeis. "The Right to Privacy." Harvard Law Review 4.5
(1890).
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP,
1976.
1
Benedict Anderson has argued that the modern novel participated in the discursive production of the modern nation
in part through the development of technical mechanisms "for the presentation of simultaneity in 'homogeneous,
empty time,' or a complex gloss upon the word 'meanwhile'." Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
2
Such was the assessment of Cuban delegate Pérez Cisneros, who supported his position with reference to the
centrality of duties in the text of the "American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man" concluded by the
International Conference of American States in Bogota during the summer of 1948.
3
I am indebted for my first encounter with this discussion of Robinson Crusoe to the thorough archival work done
by Johannes Morsink and synthesized in his excellent book on the drafting history of the UDHR. Johannes Morsink,
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent, Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). I must also acknowledge his generous assistance in
decoding the complex citation systems necessary to track down the original source of this interaction in the UN
archives.
53
Joseph Slaughter
4
In his history of the drafting of the Declaration, French delegate René Cassin, often cited as the architect of modern
legal human rights, remembers a moment in 1947 when the work of the non-binding Declaration was separated from
that of the two Covenants that would not be concluded until 1966 (International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)) for the pragmatic
reason of wanting to accomplish something by the end of 1948. Ideologically, the coming bipolarization was, he
notes, becoming ever more frigid in the meeting rooms, and the opportunity for agreement was seen to be waning.
From this perspective, the UDHR emerges as the very last moment when some ideological consensus of the human
personality was possible. René Cassin, "Historique De La Declaration Universelle De 1948," La Pensée Et L'action
(Paris: Editions F. Lalou, 1972) 111.
5
The drafting committee made a pragmatic decision not to delve into the theoretical bases of human rights as part of
their charge. In fact, when UNESCO took upon itself to collect the opinions of contemporary philosophers and
eminent political thinkers on the potential for drafting an International Bill of Rights to discover a fundamental,
cross-cultural and cross-traditional consensus, the Human Rights Committee challenged UNESCO's authority even
to survey the field. UNESCO was left to publish its volume of responses independently from the work of drafting
the UDHR. For those opinions, see UNESCO, ed., Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (New York:
Columbia UP, 1949).
6
This dispersion of the human personality across the articulation of human rights takes a structural form akin to the
metaphysical questions of the place of the divine and the natural that Gayatri Spivak identifies as begged questions
(the introduction of the conclusion as a premise in an argument for the conclusion) at the bottom of human rights. I
take up her argument explicitly in a later section of this chapter. I am working from the manuscript for Spivak's
2001 Oxford-Amnesty Lecture, but it has since been published. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Righting Wrongs,"
Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Nicholas Owen (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2003).
7
See Raymond Williams' Keywords and Gordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New
York: H. Holt and Company, 1937).
8
For detailed histories of legal personality throughout the Western tradition see the following works. Raymond
Saleilles, De La Personnalité Juridique: Histoire Et Théories: Vingt-Cinq Leçons D'introduction á Un Cours De
Droit Civil Comparé Sur Les Personnes Juridiques (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1910), Alexander Nékám, The Personality
Conception of the Legal Entity, Harvard Studies in the Conflict of Laws (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1938),
Sanford A. Schane, "The Corporation Is a Person: The Language of a Legal Fiction," Tulane Law Review 61
(1987), Peter Stein, "Nineteenth Century English Company Law and Theories of Legal Personality," Quaderni
Fiorentini 11/12.1 (1982/3).
9
In this, Elliott's reading prefigures Balibar's correction to Heideggar's influential misreading of the Cartesian
subject as the figure of modern subjectivity. I take up Balibar's reading in the following chapter. Etienne Balibar,
"Citizen Subject," Who Comes after the Subject?, eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (New
York: Routledge, 1991).
10
We will see what I am calling the logic of predication working in a number of ways throughout this study. In
Defoe, the logic might be called simple predication because the oath operates rather directly on two subjects,
conferring subjectivity to both its grammatical subject and predicate through the bi-lateral work of the copula. A
more complex operation occurs with what I will call reflexive (or recursive) predication later in the chapter.
"Predicate" here is both a noun and a verb: what is said of the subject of a sentence and the act of declaration (to
affirm on predicated conditions) itself, which requires a prior condition of predication that confers subjectivity and
the capacity to attach predicates to the subject. In some sense, it is this double operation of predication that produces
the legal subject as a bearer of rights and duties, and "the human personality as a natural foundation of legal
predicates." Nékám, The Personality Conception of the Legal Entity 53.
11
In the field of sociology, the classic work on modernization as a shift from community to society, traditional ties
to civil ties, is the late nineteenth century work of Ferdinand Tönnies, Community & Society (Gemeinschaft Und
Gesellschaft), trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State U P, 1957). Edward Said reworks this
developmental logic of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as a movement from filiation to affiliation, which he locates
respectively to "the realms of nature and of 'life'" and "to culture and society"—the latter of which produces, in its
university form, "the company of educated individuals" Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983) 20, 21. Rita Felski recodes this distinction in the context of feminism and the
female Bildungsroman to argue that Gemeinschaft (the 'sisterhood'), characterized by "shared interests and
traditions, bonds of kinship or friendship, or other meaningful symbolic ties" exists within Gesellschaft, "a type of
association governed by rational will," as "an oppositional community which seeks to challenge and alter the basis
54
Joseph Slaughter
of existing social values." Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989) 140.
12
For a discussion of the development of a right to petition in relation to the generic conventions of literary writing
see the following works. Susan Staves, "'the Liberty of a She-Subject of England': Rights Rhetoric and the Female
Thucydides," Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1.2 (1989). Joseph Slaughter and Jennifer Wenzel, "Letters of
the Law: Women, Human Rights, and Epistolary Literature," Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global
Perspective, ed. Marjorie Agosín (New York: Rutgers UP, 2001).
13
As a quest for the homecoming of personal identity, The Odyssey may be read as a Bildungsroman if the hero is
taken to be the adolescent apprentice Telemachus rather than the epic master Odysseus. In such fashion, the story no
longer recounts the epic founding of a nation, but the training of a son for the volitional, and vocational, assumption
of a destined social and civic responsibility. In this sense, the story is about preparation for the patriarchal perpetuity
of the city-state, of home, and for the cultivation necessary to effect a peaceful transition from one generation of
social/civic order to the next.
14
There is one further use of "person" made in the novel to describe the savage old God of Friday and his father, "a
pagan and a cannibal." Despite Crusoe's "liberalism" and "tolerance," the materialist legal notion of "person" inflects
the spiritualist aspects of the Papist trinity, slighting the latter by staining it with the cannibalism of the savages.
This usage is not, however, of relevance to the immediate trajectory of my argument.
15
In this sense, the novel shares something of the social/civil dynamics of the classical bildungsroman, which might
be characterized as the story of an individual who rejects the normative terms of social/civil accession to narrate the
experiential path by which the individual comes to choose those very terms as expressions of personal volition.
Franco Moretti, however, calls the classical bildungsroman an anti-Robinson because whereas labor and capital
accumulation require a narrative of endless growth, "A Bildung is truly such only if, at a certain point, it can be seen
as concluded: only if youth passes into maturity, and comes to a stop there" (26). Franco Moretti, The Way of the
World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, New ed. (London: Verso, 2000).
16
Careful never to label Robinson Crusoe a bildungsroman, Barney nonetheless places it within his history of the
rise of the novel as a narrative link between British pedagogical theory and the continental bildungsroman, in part,
through Rousseau's use of the novel as the only reading material permitted to Emile before he emerges from his
nonage. For Barney, Defoe's writing "introduced in England a new sense of 'modern' identity by portraying it as the
formation of improvisational subjectivity" (16). In Barney's account, this "improvisational subjectivity"
subsequently influenced European continental philosophers, Rousseau and Humboldt among them.
17
Crusoe's penchant for projecting himself into his property has been a common topic of critical, psychoanalytic
study. Michael Seidel formulates this self-extension bluntly: ". . . Crusoe's condition in isolation is such that all his
extensions of self, property or parrot, are versions of himself" (65). Michael Seidel, Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths
and the Novel, Twayne's Masterwork Studies (Boston: Twayne, 1991). My reading is compatible with Seidel's if we
understand the proliferation of the material products of Crusoe's industry as emblematic extensions of his
personality, but I suggest that the material products of labor are more than symbolic, they are homologous to the
proliferation of Crusoe's personalities.
18
In this regard, it is interesting to note that until Crusoe's first subject-granting chapter "I Call Him Friday" (after
which there is a short spate of chapters that presumptively begin with a corporate "We"), the only two chapters that
do not begin with "I" are the announcement of the "The Journal" (which heralds the subject's self-constitution
through literacy) and "It Blows a Most Dreadful Hurricane," which suggests the continued submission of the
ostensibly sovereign individual to the agency of a nonreferential, impersonal pronoun of nature, or providence.
Crusoe's recognition of his continued subjection to the divine power of nature, however, is rewarded, since the storm
delivers the wreck of civilization to his beach and makes possible the amplification of his personality.
19
I have argued that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a narrative of invoice, produced as an effect of what I am
calling the discursive principle of "narrative invoicing" as a tendency of colonial writing tied to the globalization of
imperialist accounting. Robinson Crusoe suggests that this corporate narrative tendency is animated as much by
Protestant introspection as by capitalist economics, both of which take a particularly pernicious form in the
imperial/colonial context. Joseph R. Slaughter, "'a Mouth with Which to Tell the Story': Silence, Violence, and
Speech in the Narrative of Things Fall Apart," Omenka—the Master Artist: Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe,
ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004). Seidel makes a similar argument about the novel:
"Everything is accounted for, recounted, counted up . . ." (79), and he argues that here at the beginnings of novelistic
narration, "To tell . . . means to count as much as it means to narrate. And Defoe must be aware of the overlap, the
merging of his 'account' and his narration . . ." (77). I am not so certain that the etymological richness of "to tell"
adequately accounts for the particular mercantile colonialist animus of this particular text, or of the novel as such.
55
Joseph Slaughter
My argument about narrative invoicing sees the method inflected historically, intimately bound up in a topos of
accumulation and accretion that extends to personality.
20
The root stress on "corporate" here does not mean merely the making of a singular body out of multiple ones. It
also indicates a process of abstract "embodiment" to which is necessarily attributed a singular and independent will
that effects corporate personality. In some sense, this is the process literalized by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
monster, which read as an allegory of the instability of corporate personality (in the sense of the enterprise company)
is ultimately, as a fictional entity with real body and will, beyond the control of the figural powers that incorporated
it because of the problems raised by the (dis)location of liability for the rights and duties ascribed to it.
21
In this sense it might be important to note that despite the cyclic structure of return from and remove to the island
that occurs over the course of Defoe's Crusoe series, the second sequel, The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe,
opens with an ostensibly extra-novelistic legalist attestation of non-fictional personality: "I, Robinson Crusoe, do
affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical . . . Further, that there is a man alive, and well known too,
the actions of whose life are the just subject of these three volumes, and to whom all or most part of the story most
directly alludes . . . and to this I set my name."
22
The ways in which this trope sets to work on the human being and the implications of that figural work for
literature and human rights law are the central concern of the entire book and cannot be adequately elaborated here,
but it might help quickly to distinguish incorporation from personification (which I do fully in the following
chapter) by noting that personification assumes the prior material existence of a body to which human qualities are
extended; incorporation, on the other hand, deposits the body upon which personification subsequently operates. I
am using incorporation as the name for both processes: the primary deposition of the body and the ancillary
attribution of a personified will and desire.
23
Lenders to the State Treasury were asked to trade their claims on the debt for stock in the company, a service for
which the company itself was to be compensated at 6% annual interest and with exclusive trading rights to the South
Atlantic. As a joint-stock company, its shares rose a thousand percent over the course of ten years. The bubble
finally burst when the stock credit so far exceeded the resources of the company, due to Spain's refusal to recognize
the company's right to trade freely in the Americas, that the board of directors began profit-taking, exposing the
over-valuation of the company's assets and sending the market tumbling. See Malcolm Balen, The Secret History of
the South Sea Bubble: The World's First Great Financial Scandal, 1st ed. (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). Lewis Saul
Benjamin, The South Sea Bubble (London: D. O'Connor, 1921). Rudolph Robert, Chartered Companies and Their
Role in the Development of Overseas Trade (London: Bell, 1969).
24
Most legal histories agree with John Dewey's, which traces the foundation of the "fiction theory" of corporate
personality to Pope Innocent IV, whose personae fictae doctrine was enlisted to explain why excommunication of an
ecclesiastic body as a body was ineffective, since "they have neither body nor will. . . . The doctrine did not imply,
however, that excommunication was of no effect; on the contrary, it signified that, in order that a decree of
punishment or excommunication should not lack effect, it was to be applied to all, omnes singulos." John Dewey,
"The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality," Yale Law Review 35.6 (1926): 665.
25
Peter Stein offers a slightly different account of this in a nineteenth century shift in British jurisprudence from the
"fiction theory" to the "person theory" of corporations. The fiction theory, which remained dominant throughout the
1800s, recognizes the work of incorporation as analogical, based upon a proportional relation to the human, as
William Markby wrote in his 1871 Elements of Law: "There is a fictitious or, as I prefer to call it, a juristical person
(to distinguish it from a real person) to which all the rights are supposed to belong and upon whom all the duties and
obligations are imposed." Stein, "Nineteenth Century English Company Law and Theories of Legal Personality,"
514. The emergent "person theory," on the other hand, appears to deny the analogical work of incorporation, and yet
its foremost theorist, Otto von Gierke, consistently employs analogies to the human to substantiate it: "the
personality of a corporate body was a reality, a living organism with a group-will of its own. It acts through the men
who are its organs in the way a human acts through his mouth or his hands" (my emphasis 516). The Germanic
tradition prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century in such a fashion that, as Stein notes, even when corporate
personality was not taken to be coequal with "natural" human personality, it had become custom to treat it as such
and so "it was now unhistorical to regard an association as a fictitious person" (517). In some sense, the prevalence
of the "person" theory can be seen, even in Stein's review, as part of a historical/discursive process that forgets the
primary analogy that made the corporation a legal person in the first place.
26
In "On The Jewish Question," Marx makes a similar point about the effects of the bourgeois political revolutions
that, for him, initiated the separation between "man" and "citizen," between the civil egoistic individual and the
political representation of that individual: ". . . man as a member of civil society is held to be man in his sensuous,
individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical,
56
Joseph Slaughter
juridical person. The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized
only in the shape of the abstract citizen." Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question."
27
Nékám argues that historically in the West, the first "person" to emerge as a legal entity was the group, not the
individual: " We can safely say, though it sounds paradoxical, that in the order of evolution it was a so-called
artificial person, the family, and not the so-called natural person, the individual, which made its first appearance in
law. . . . Even when, finally, the individual truly appears on the scene of the law as a subject of rights, we are still
very far removed from the times when it can truly be said that he is taken for such simply because of his being a
human individual." Nékám, The Personality Conception of the Legal Entity 23. In Nékám's gloss, the human
personality is itself based upon an originary, if only suppositional and lost, analogy to the group.
28
For greater detail on illocutionary acts, see the following works. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words,
William James Lectures, 1955 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay
in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972). Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory
of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).
29
I use the word "articulation" throughout to describe the architecture of human rights because it combines a number
of denotative senses that I want to keep in the forefront of my analysis of the construct of human rights: 1) it stresses
the illocutionary fact that human rights are the products of enunciation and are thus textualized and liable to the
figural operations of language; 2) it foregrounds the analytical process by which human personality is divided into
its component parts to be re-membered as a body of discrete parts that are elaborated in each article of the human
rights Declarations—as such, the word identifies a productive tension between the simultaneous tendencies in
human rights towards dissection and collection, dismemberment and memberment; 3) it stresses the precariousness
of the project of verbalizing human rights—this follows from the last meaning, because it takes "joining" as a
unifying movement of articulation to also mean "jointing," so that articulation necessarily requires a mechanisms
capable of flexibility (which, I am arguing, human rights finds in pinioning concepts such as personality, dignity,
and self-determination).
30
Roosevelt tackled this resistance in various fora throughout 1948, just as she continued to campaign for human
rights after her years with the Human Rights Commission. Writing in Foreign Affairs, in the spring of 1948,
Roosevelt foregrounded the contingent and aspirational features of the Declaration to weaken some of the force of
the domestic objection that had rallied around the rhetorical appeal of a loss of US sovereignty: "If the Declaration is
accepted by the Assembly, it will mean that all the nations accepting hope that the day will come when these rights
are considered inherent rights belonging to every human being." Eleanor Roosevelt, "The Promise of Human
Rights," Foreign Affairs 26 (1948): 473. The language of this defense is important, because it stresses the apparently
awkward notion that the Declaration is designed with the hope that rights will become inherent.
31
In his foreword to the reprint of Eleanor Roosevelt's short story "Christmas 1940," which appeared originally in
Liberty magazine, Elliot Roosevelt writes that the optimism of rebirth and renewal expressed in the story in the
context of the Nazi expansion and occupation in Europe evinces the double sustenance of "her faith: by her religious
faith, yes, but also by her confidence in human kind." Elliot Roosevelt, "Foreword," Christmas 1940 (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1986) 11. Roosevelt was rather strategic in her public arguments for human rights, often recognizing
and addressing prejudgments that her particular audiences brought to the topic.
32
It needs to be remembered that in 1948, except for recently independent India and Pakistan, member nations did
not include any of the African and Asian nations that would achieve independence, partly through political changes
reflected (and effected) in the work of the Human Rights Committee over the next decades. Despite (or perhaps
because of) the limits to claims of universal representability, the UNESCO report enjoins the appeal of an argument
from diversity by featuring the response of Mahatma Gandhi, whose short letter to Director-General Julian Huxley,
is reprinted in full, in which he excuses himself from such questions for lack of time: "I learnt from my illiterate but
wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. Thus the very right to live
accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world." UNESCO, ed., Human Rights: Comments and
Interpretations 18.
33
This should not be read as a specialist's footnote but as a generalist's study of these complex movements. The
Bostonian School, centered around the Protestant theology of Borden Parker Bowne (1847—1910), tends to be more
absolutist in its conception of the dignity and worth of the human being than does Max Scheler's (1874—1928)
German version or Emmanuel Mounier (1905—1950) and Jacques Maritain's (1882-1973) French Catholic versions,
which develop humanist theologies responsive to what they perceive as the particular depredations of the historical
period between the two world wars. I spend more time in this section on the thinking found in the French "school"
not only because of Maritain's demonstrable influence within the United Nations (especially within UNESCO) but
also because his and Mounier's work attempted a synthetic theorization intended to effect a revolution in human and
57
Joseph Slaughter
social consciousness capable of supporting a just and equitable civil order that depended upon, and was attentive to,
the ethics of individualism and collectivism that also mark the competing ideologies within the human rights
commission itself. ATTACH BIBLIOGRAPHY—Bowne's version was influential on MLK, the French version on
Pope John Paul II.
34
Spivak's point that in the contemporary human rights regime the question of nature as the source of human rights
has been begged, and that this has been forgotten, is not, of course, entirely true, since numerous thinkers have
attempted to both remind us of this fact and to find a new universalism that might sanction contemporary human
rights, most often on a multi-cultural model. See, for instance, Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory
and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989).
35
See, for instance, the entire issue of Hofstra Law and Policy Symposium, and especially Jr. Hickey, James E.,
"The Source of International Legal Personality in the 21st Century," Hofstra Law and Policy Symposium 2.1 (1997).
36
Charles Malik, the Lebanese representative to the committee, retrospectively attests to a similar dissatisfaction in
1963 in the face of what he sees as a creeping secularism and materialism, tantamount in his mind to a communist
threat to the "Western democratic" legacy of natural freedom. Charles Habib Malik, Man in the Struggle for Peace,
[1st ] ed. (New York,: Harper & Row, 1963). Despite the fact that both Malik, who was Lebanese Christian, and P.
C. Chang of China are cited as evidence of the racial and cultural diversity of the drafting participants, the primary
drafters were primarily tutored in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
37
Michael Ignatieff calls it a "juridical revolution." Michael Ignatieff, K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger,
Thomas W. Laqueur and Diane F. Orentlicher, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001) 5.
38
Jacques Maritain's oeuvre evinces, more completely than most, the accommodation between a spiritualist and a
socialist humanism: "To say that a man is a person is to say that in the depth of his being he is more a whole than a
part and more independent than servile. It is to this mystery of our nature that religious thought points when it says
that the human person is the image of God. . . . A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct
relationship with the absolute in which alone he can find his complete fulfillment" Jacques Maritain, The Rights of
Man and Natural Law, trans. Doris C. Anson (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1943) 4.. Where Maritain situates the
fulfillment of human personality within the productive relationship to the divine, the UDHR itself characterizes this
as a dialectic between the individual and the community in language very similar to Maritain's: "Everyone has duties
to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible" (29.1).
39
The language of human personality had enough political currency by the 1930s that readers of the British journal
Adelphi were already engaged in intricate theoretical polemics about whether Soviet communism or British
democracy—styled as representatives of the two primary traditions claiming universality of social and civil order—
had the most legitimate claim to restore "the sovereignty of human personality." See especially John Middleton
Murry's article "The Isolation of Russia: and the Way Out" (Adelphi. January 1932 3.4) and the responses to it in the
February issue.
40
Cassin defends the notion of juridical personality as a prohibition of the "civil death" of slavery. Orlando
Patterson, of course, has objected to the banal interpretation of slavery as "civil death" arguing that the mechanisms
of slavery always depended upon the civil personality of the slave "to define the owner's own identity" (176)
through natal alienation and social death. See especially his landmark work Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social
Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982). The drafting committee might seem to be guilty of
what Patterson calls in this book a "ringing piece of liberal rhetoric" that declares triumphantly the irrepressibility of
human dignity, but Cassin, who had himself been declared civilly dead by the Vichy government during WWII, and
the others appear to have a more nuanced view about precisely the repressibility of human dignity as the historical
conditions against which they aspire to legislate.
41
In a speech to Pi Lambda Theta at Columbia University on March 30, 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt recalls the debates
over "juridical personality" to stress the collaborative nature of the Declaration. According to her version of the
event, Roosevelt, "without any legal knowledge," translated Cassin's article into English as "No one shall be
deprived of their juridical personality." The phrase started "a storm" because "behind my back, where the lawyers
sit from the departments in Washington . . . all said, 'There is no such expression as 'juridical personality' in English
or American Law'." Finally, the American contingent accepted the phrase because it had once been used in "the
Dred Scott case when Justice Taney said 'a slave has no juridical personality'." Eleanor Roosevelt, "Making Human
Rights Come Alive," (1949). The present phrase, "a person before the law," was Cassin's concession to the British
contingent who could find no precedent. It is not clear to me whether or not Roosevelt has this account wrong, or
whether her lawyers do, since the phrase "juridical personality" does not in fact appear in the Dred Scott decision
written by Supreme Court Justice Taney in 1856. Dred Scott's suit was declared to have been heard by a circuit court
58
Joseph Slaughter
in error because as a slave (and more especially as a man of African descent) he did not possess the rights of the
citizen, of locus standi, under the US Constitution. Certainly "legal personality" was at issue, but the term was not
used and the scope of the limitation of legal personality dealt with the jurisdiction of the Federal Courts and not with
the fractional notion of a three-fifths person used in the accounting clause of the Constitution.
42
In the broad sense comprehended here, social security can be seen to redress a category of non-existence not
explicitly discussed in the drafting process; in its effect, the document is responsive to "social death," what Patterson
identified as the universal condition and effect of what he calls the "natal alienation" of the slave. Patterson, Slavery.
Social security thus attempts to ensure social existence along with and through its more commonly recognized
contents of welfare protections.
43
This aspirational subject merits critical scrutiny, but in the mode appropriate to a critique of proleptic
individualism where personality, dignity, and humanity are still to come. Such a critical intervention in human rights
would be an intervention in narrative. As such, I attempt throughout this project to focus my analysis on the
teleologies that are prescribed and proscribed by human rights rather than accepting human rights as static
identitarian categories, criticism of which tends to further reify these categories even as it intends to contest them.
44
This logic will sound familiar to readers of cultural conservatives like Mathew Arnold, Lionel Trilling, T. S. Eliot,
and more recently E. D. Hirsch, William Bennett, and Dinesh D'Souza. The extent to which this logic can be
extracted from its participation in cultural conservatism is, in part, the subject of another chapter.
45
Excavation of this dialectic should go some way towards suggesting that the rigidity of a
communitarian/individualist split invoked in criticisms of human rights undertaken in the name of a cultural
relativism—a much abused relativism at that—have, when they assert essentialist difference, been mostly arguments
that distract from questions about the adequacy of this model of the individual/communal relationship. Many of
these arguments appear motivated by vested economic and power interests (on both sides of the debate) taken up in
the name of culture as a convenient marker of disinterest, but they too often leave crucially underexamined the
model of the individual as an expression of the corporate and abstract category of humanity, inflected by culture,
economics, religion, racial experience, ethnic identification, gender, and the appeal of nationalism. The bibliography
documenting these debates, which occupied most of the discussions of human rights throughout the 1990s, is too
elaborate to even be cursorily ventured here. Any issue of Human Rights Quarterly from that period will offer a
starting point.
46
The need for an explicit jurisprudence of property as it conjoins with personality and privacy within common law
can be found in "The Right to Privacy," co-authored by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in 1890. They argue that
common to all "rights recognized by the law, there inheres the quality of being owned or possessed—and (as that is
the distinguishing attribute of property) there may be some propriety in speaking of those rights as property. But,
obviously, they bear little resemblance to what is ordinarily comprehended under that term. The principle which
protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but
against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate
personality." Their argument claims that the right to privacy, as a guarantee of the immunity of the person and of
property, is essentially "the right to one's personality" emerges from their reading of British and American case law,
among which are not only cases about the publication of private letters but also examples of suits against people
who have published corporate "trade secrets." In other words, Warren and Brandeis are working with a notion of
personality that covers the individual, the corporation, and the Sovereign (in Wyatt v. Wilson), all of whom should
have a realm of privacy protected that is construed as a realm of personality and personal expression to be
safeguarded from public intervention, inspection, and interest on the grounds that the private belongs to the person
as property. Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy," Harvard Law Review 4.5
(1890).Wai Chee Dimock reads this argument in the context of her insightful study of the operations of subjectivity
and subjectivization in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law,
Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 191-223.
47
Peter Brooks describes the condition of narrative and the reading experience of plot the "anticipation of
retrospection." In this sense, human rights, in their temporality, correspond to the readerly activity of plotting and to
the expectation that the human rights narrative will come to satisfy the conditions posited at its beginning. Peter
Brooks, Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984) 23.
48
Cornell defends a right to abortion on grounds other than those of a right to privacy that has prevailed in the US
context. She argues that the right emerges from the general commitment to a right to identity which depends upon a
sense of bodily integrity: " The idea that we own our bodies is a fantasy that imagines as completed that which
always remains in the future anterior. Therefore, to protect 'ourselves' from threats to our bodily integrity and our
sense of capability and well-being, we have to protect the future into which we project our unity and have our bodily
59
Joseph Slaughter
integrity respected by others." Drucilla Cornell, "Bodily Integrity and the Right to Abortion," Identities, Politics, and
Rights, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought (Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995) 29.
49
One version of the history of the novel could find at the root of its modern rise these two questions unbegged, as
topoi within the development of the novel itself: Robinson Crusoe, as I have argued, can be seen to be a literary
study of the status and terms according to which Robin becomes a claimant of personality rights; Don Quixote, on
the other hand, asks what it means for the supreme romantic "righter of wrongs" (desfacedor de agravios) "to be
angled toward the other, before will," "naturally" in Spivak's phrase, as something more than a figurative tilting at
windmills. Gayatri Spivak, Righting Wrongs (Her Amnesty Lecture in Ms), 13. Upendra Baxi draws an explicit
parallel between "knight-errantry" and "adventures in human rights protection and promotion," arguing that the true
calling of human rights "seeks to reenchant the world . . . . to address the human future." Upendra Baxi, Mambrino's
Helmet?: Human Rights for a Changing World (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1994) xi, xii. It might, in fact,
be possible to trace a generic association between the picaresque as a form of social commentary through a
subjectivity exposed to the other and the bildungsroman as the most formally elaborated genre that seeks the terms
by which one takes possession of the self, by will and by right.
50
I am aware, I should say, that from the perspective of the crisis-driven activist, ruminations over the foundations
of human rights can be deleterious; since it may now be claimed that human rights are sufficiently grounded in that
unmarkable moment when the UDHR passed from the aspirational into the realm of international customary law.
Spivak proposes in "Righting Wrongs" a pedagogy that aspires, through the "noncoercive rearrangement of desire,"
to change the terms of these questions in a future to come.
51
The question of origins is too often confused with that of a beginning. I am using the two terms in the senses
Edward Said distinguishes in the opening pages of Beginnings, so that a beginning is a contingent starting point that
impacts a future instead of a claim to be the primal source. Beginnings are, in this sense, active. Edward W. Said,
Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia UP, 1985).
52
I have written about this structure previously in an early article that attempted to show how "dignity" had been
deployed in the UDHR as a substitute for -isms that traditionally accounted for the value and worth of the human
being. Joseph Slaughter, "A Question of Narration: The Voice in International Human Rights Law," Human Rights
Quarterly 19.2 (1997). The UDHR's settlement on "dignity" as a solution to the question of origins, however,
introduced for me questions at the heart of narrative and a narrative logic because "dignity" within the Declaration,
rather than providing the static and stable rationale for an ordaining of human rights, was set in motion, in
development, as the a priori character of being human by virtue of being human and the a posteriori product of a
process of "dignification" that is animated by human rights. Since that 1997 article, I have come to recognize that
there are multiple attributes of human personality within the human rights documents that function similarly, so
while I speak there of a double duty of dignity, what I present here is something of a revision of the idea of doubling
elaborated there. Spivak's "begged question" becomes useful as a rhetorical figure, a point of departure for my
argument about the structure, in addition to the analytical condition of the historical enablement of contemporary
human rights.
53
The formal rhetorical term for "begging the question," which highlights its association with the voice, petition,
and appeal.
54
Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that torture emerges as a technique of subject production when there is a
crisis in the analogical substantiation of civil society. For Scarry, society introduces new conceptual terms that
facilitate its operation on the basis of analogy. The body generally comes in as the absolute material guarantee of
such analogical work, providing the substance necessary to support a particular abstraction. I pick up the threads of
this argument in the chapter on torture. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
55
In the context of human rights, if not more generally, the line between teleology/tautology is a fine one, and the
slant mark that graphically separates them on the page represents the incision of analytical, disciplinary, perspective.
This slant, as a perspective, informs Balibar's reading of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen when he asks "Is the founding notion that of man, or of the citizen? Are the rights declared those the citizen
as man, or those of man as citizen? In the interpretation sketched out here, it is the second reading that must take
precedence: the stated rights are those of the citizen, the objective is the constitution of citizenship—in a radically
new sense. . . . this sovereignty must be founded retroactively on a certain concept of man, or, better, in a new
concept of man that contradicts what the term previously connoted." Balibar, "Citizen Subject," 44. My reading
suggests that this slant shows the diaphanous difference between teleology and tautology in human rights. The
thinness of this difference can be found in Aristotle's notion of entelechy, where an entity is alike to itself only
60
Joseph Slaughter
through the extensive process of its becoming what it is. I take this up in the next chapter in relation to Hannah
Arendt's arguments about the vita activa and her narrative notions of becoming. See Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition, Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958).
56
I am not using "predication" in its precise linguistic, logical, or metaphysical senses, although I am exploiting
something of each of these as they are bound up in the singular word "predication." The philosophical problem of
predication questions the way in which the particular participates in the form (or the universal). See Bäck and
Malcolm for discussions of the Aristotelian and Platonic strains in the history of predication. Allan Bäck, Aristotle's
Theory of Predication, Philosophia Antiqua, V. 84 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). John Malcolm, Plato on the SelfPredication of Forms: Early and Middle Dialogues (New York: Oxford U P, 1991). Linguistics examines predication
in terms of the form in which objects are related to subjects. For a history and a criticism of the standard accounts of
predication see Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. And logic . . . [CHECK BIBLIO]
57
Allan Bäck's "aspect theory" of predication is similar to what I am identifying in Robinson Crusoe as "distributive
predication." His theory, which he derives from Aristotle's categories of predicables and whose adherents he
uncovers mostly in Islamic commentaries of Aristotle, finds that the proposition "S is P" asserts not only the relation
of P to S but the existence of S itself—in a sense "S is" and it "is a P" as an expression of an aspect of the existence
of S. Bäck's demonstration of the "aspect theory" depends upon the fact that the negation of either S or P negates the
truth of the claim. We could substitute for his symbolic algebra "the S[ubject] is a P[erson]" to understand his
argument to such that if the subject does not exist it is not, then, a person, and if the category of personhood does not
exist (or apply to the subject), then with regard to personhood, the subject does not exist. See Bäck, Aristotle's
Theory of Predication.
58
John Malcolm's study of "self-predication" and "interpredicability," similar to my reflexive predication, locates in
Plato only two pure instances of this tautological form, and it is no mere coincidence, I think, that the metaphysical
difficulty of finding a suitable source for the predication, the grounding, of human rights resonates with the
problems Plato confronts in finding an exogenous sanction for "holiness" and "justness." See Malcolm, Plato on the
Self-Predication of Forms: Early and Middle Dialogues.
59
I am using both "everyone" and "each person" to remind us of the phrasing as it appears in the various official
language of the UDHR which, as I stated earlier, were never reconciled due to bureaucratic oversight.
60
On the ontology of the copula see Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,"
trans. Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982). [FLESH OUT]
61
My argument here has affinities to Marx's in On the Jewish Question, where he concludes that "Only when the
real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a
species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has
recognized and organized his forces propres as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power
from himself, in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished." My
aim, however, is to extrude from human rights the formal structure of this articulation of the figural incorporation of
the human rights person to identify its narrative logic and the civil narratives that it enables.
62
Elaboration of the full generic terms of this self-attachment is the subject of the rest of this study, but it should be
possible now to note that the narrative I am identifying is not a mere re-statement of Enlightenment rationalized
individualism, because the generic/universal/civil self is set in a consubstantial relation with the discrete individual
self, even if one still desires to read the discrete self along the lines of possessive individualism.
63
I examine the terms of this risk in the next chapter where I distinguish the tropic work of incorporation from that
of personification, which has very often led critics to personify the text in a way that makes the cultural artifact
substitutable for the civil-human one.
64
The figure of this void and its life (story) sustaining nature are taken from the discourse of emergency and rescue
which promulgates the hope that in the wake of an earthquake or in the rubble of a collapsed building exist voids in
which life can survive.
65
See Bal, Bakhtin, and Brooks.
66
Etienne Balibar reads the emergence of the "Citizen Subject" as the dialectic effect of the great "transition" that
Foucault describes "between the world of subjection and the world of right and discipline" (55). In this account, the
citizen subject emerges as both the subjectum (the substantive subject of predicates) and the subjectus (the obedient
subject subjected to civil sovereignty).
61