As I prepare to write a review of Joseph Slaughter’s Wellek Prize winning book, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, I want to use this space to think through some moments including one that I misread.

In the third chapter, Slaughter argues for that human rights law presumes the existence of an operational public sphere that disseminates and naturalizes “the basic assumptions about the human personality and socialiaty” (146). If exclusion from this public sphere constitutes a human rights violation, a mode of repression, it is because “human rights law treats the individual person as a figural embodiment of (a synecdoche for) a group of which it part and effect” (160). The point, Slaughter argues, is that violations of individual rights also aim to harm “the texture of social relations and the scope of the public sphere” (162). Individuals, then, are not Enlightenment’s monads but the “atomic unit[s] of social relations––the embodiment of group personality and vulnerability.” A genocide victim, in Slaughter’s example, does not die as the particular but “as an instance of a racialized, ethnicized, nationalized” group (161). While this makes sense, especially given genocide’s etymology, I am disturbed by the weird epistemic system in play here.

Bluntly said, if Slaughter’s analysis is right, and I believe it is, human rights law necessarily dehumanizes the particular individual. Although the human rights person is in a dialectical relationship with a larger group identity through the public sphere, that relationship subsumes violations against individuals into a larger concern for the group or their shared public sphere. The point here is not to discredit human rights discourse, but rather to question again the relationship between epistemic and bodily violence. That is, despite legal human rights discourse’s explicit desire to prevent violence of all sorts, it nevertheless performs an epistemic violence by subtly dehumanizing the individual. Epistemic violence, then, does not necessarily lead to or a requisite for the possibility of bodily violence, but can in fact prevent or prosecute it. Weird.

I am unsure if this reasoning is correct, but this is the space of play.