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Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Büchner's

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Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Büchner's Sebastian Wogenstein Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights: Dissensus in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade In his seminal work Making Sense of Human Rights, James W. Nickel argues that, “human rights, as we know them today, are the rights of the lawyers, not the rights of the philosophers” (Nickel 2007, p. 7). Nickel, a professor of law and philoso- phy, points to the specificity of the rights found in the declarations, conventions, and other treaties that make up today’s international human rights framework, as opposed to the broad and abstract concepts that dominated the philosophi- cal discourse on human rights in the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, our pre - sent-day human rights as legal concepts do not depend on the acceptance of a particular philosophical foundation and are realized through institutions. This chapter considers the place of literature, and more specifically the theater, in relation to today’s human rights discourse, which is dominated by institutional orientations. One path toward addressing this question would be to discuss literary works that involve specific human rights issues and raise aware- ness of rights violations. My approach takes a different direction and focuses on what I will describe as the “an-archic” leaning of many literary texts. I will argue that such texts raise questions about the institutional framework itself and the ideas on which institutions are built. Instead of presenting institutional praxis as a solution to the problem of the ideas’ abstraction, such literary texts instead reveal the realities of power that are all too often eclipsed by the institutional focus of much human rights discourse. The two literary examples provided here, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, dissect the institutional implementation of human rights ideas in the context and legacy of the French Revolution. Although today’s human rights are different from the Droits de l’homme of 1789 both in scope and applicability, they share an underlying assumption about the equality of humans and the possibility of reform, however these ideas of equality and progress might be framed. It is precisely the plays’ commentary on institution-based realization of equality and progress that speaks to human rights discourse today. At the same time, a look at the authors’ commitments to social justice reveals that the criti- cal perspective of a text does not necessarily imply resigned acquiescence in the face of perceived social injustice. Rather, these literary texts – in the imagina- tion that produced them and the imagination they might spark in the observer or reader – are both more radical and more realistic than the political leanings © 2015 Sebastian Wogenstein, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 140 Sebastian Wogenstein of their authors. Danton’s Death and Marat/Sade challenge us to critically review our preconceived narratives or ideas and, by opening up a “dispute about what is given,” speak to us in a voice that Jacques Rancière calls “dissensus” (Rancière 2004, p. 304). The Anarchic Origins of Equality When Hannah Arendt decried the plight of the stateless refugees during the Second World War as a fundamental rightlessness in a well-known passage of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), it was precisely the absence of effective ins- titutions beyond the state that revealed the idea of human rights to be a grand illusion. Without the protection of a supra-national institution, she argued, the elementary rights that should have applied to everyone proved worthless: “The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were sup- posed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their mini- mum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (Arendt 1966, p. 293 f.). As Étienne Balibar has pointed out, Arendt’s argumentation reflects an “extreme form of institutionalism” (Balibar 2007, p. 729). Stateless people were not only deprived of the one (and, in Arendt’s thinking, only) human right, the “right to have rights” (Arendt 1966, p. 296), but she also makes clear that this condition separated the stateless from the very world that Arendt understands as comprising political life. Cast out of the institution of political life, they were also cast out of the communal world in which one’s voice is heard and counts. Not only were they deprived of particular rights, but their sit- uation was in fact much more severe: they became “worldless.” For the stateless person, no longer belonging to the political sphere amounted to a loss of one’s place in the world: “the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity” (Arendt 1966, p. 297). As Balibar makes clear, Arendt’s “idea of rights is indistinguishable from the construction of the human, which is the immanent result of the historical invention of (political) institutions” (Balibar 2007, p. 733 f.). Political life is fundamental in Arendt’s thinking because only through the institution of the communal world, the polity, can we become equals. This ins- titution creates fellow humans, and in so doing, the “natural” inequality of the human physis, or “mere givenness” (Arendt 1966, p. 301), is overcome. Whoever is expelled from this communal world is thrown back into pre-political insigni- ficance, bare life, a condition in which being human means nothing other than being “some specimen of an animal species called man” (Arendt 1966, p. 302). Poetic Anarchy and Human Rights 141 Balibar calls this a “tragic contingency” in Arendt’s philosophy – that for her being truly human (as opposed to a mere designation of species) hinges on one’s recognition as a member of the polity (Balibar 2007, p. 734). The same institutions that let human subjects emerge through mutual recognition destroy them when this recognition is withdrawn. At the heart of Arendt’s ideal institutionalism, however, is also a fundamen- tal an-archic principle in the sense of an ideal nicht-herrschaftliche, or “no-rule,” organization of political life. In her treatise On Revolution, Arendt explains that in the prime example of the polity, the Greek polis, equality and freedom were guaranteed through isonomy: a form of political organization, “in which the citi- zens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled” (Arendt 2006, p. 20). It is clear to Arendt that this isonomy depends on a mutual agreement among peers that is observed and enacted and, as such, was not to be confused with democracy, the rule of the many. In isonomy, the “outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule (the ‘archy’ from archein in monar- chy and oligarchy, or the ‘cracy’ from kratein in democracy) was entirely absent from it” (Arendt 2006, p. 20). To Arendt such isonomy is only possible within the “artificial institution” of the polis. As Balibar observes, however, this assumption of a “no-rule” condition within the polis is contrary to Aristotle’s and other Greek philosophers’ insistence on an arché, on the principle of rulership. In Aristotle’s opinion, the ideal citizen is “the one who successively knows how to give orders and take orders from others (archein te kai archesthai dunasthai)” (Balibar 2007, p. 735). Arendt, by contrast, takes the notion of isonomy from a story told by Herodotus about the Persian prince Otanes who neither wanted to rule nor be ruled. Arendt’s decision to follow this understanding of an “an-archic” equality instead of Aristotle’s give-and-take orders is indeed remarkable and leads Balibar to suggest that in a very concrete sense, Arendt’s institutionalism is built on the notion of a concerted “civil diso- bedience.”¹⁰⁹ Such disobedience “suppresses the ‘vertical’ form of authority and creates a ‘horizontal’ form of association in order to recreate the conditions of a ‘free consent’ to the law” (Balibar 2007, p. 736). Although Arendt’s concept of the person – or even the human itself, as noted above – is often criticized as being predicated on the condition of having a voice in the political realm, the notion of a concerted collective disobedience, and thereby the creation of a new “place in the world,” seems to suggest at least the possibility of newly emergent spheres of the political within the framework of her thinking. 109 Balibar bases his argument on reading Arendt’s essay “On Civil Disobedience.” 142 Sebastian Wogenstein In responding to Arendt’s institutionalism and what he calls her “archipo- litical position,” Jacques Rancière rejects the notion that speaking as a human subject depends on an institutional framework, that reciprocal recognition is a precondition for politics (Rancière 2004, p. 299). For Rancière, politics refers to a process of emancipation in which those who are marginalized within, or excluded from, the polity contest their marginalization or exclusion. This con- testation does not necessarily involve formally claiming certain rights, such as one’s human rights. Instead, it may appear when those who are marginalized or excluded speak or act when they are expected to remain silent or unseen. Rather than accepting their exclusion or marginalization, those who are consi dered unqualified to participate in the polity (the “uncounted”) act as if they were quali- fied to do so (Rancière 2004, p. 305). In contrast to what Rancière calls “police,” i.e. a “way of counting” that makes it commonsensical to distinguish between those who are considered qualified and those who are not, “politics” involves the questioning of this division.
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