The Bush Administration announced on Monday plans for drafting "new legal doctrine" that would allow prisoners at Camp X-Ray to be brought before a military tribunal without specific evidence of committing war crimes. Another decision among many that Judith Butler has said will indefinitely suspend Guantanamo prisoners in a limbo of human rights violations, and expand the Bush Administration's attempts to make extra-legal practices appear legal. Delivering a talk at Bard last week entitled "Infinite Detention," Butler warned against the evasion of international human rights law, as well as the inadequacies of that law to address America's new "War on Terror." In the following interview, Butler discusses the climate and conditions of the "War on Terror," as well as the place of the 'human' in human rights.
Butler is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley, and well known as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality, and identity. Some of her most notable works include Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter, and Excitable Speech.
KC: You've noted that explanation has been confused with exoneration in anti-war sentiment, what advice do you have for the activists in getting out of this trap, especially as people from all over the country are converging on Washington for an anti-war protest? Is this type of action effective, what other approaches might be taken?
[JB:] Well, I think this action is very effective; it's really important. The problem with demonstrations is that it depends on the media to cover them, how they estimate the numbers, where they place the reporting. And I've been in enough of them over the years to know that there are a lot of politics in who estimates, and how much they estimate, and how they estimate. And then also its a matter of where the demonstration is - will the demonstration be on the front page of The New York Times or The Washington Post or will it be on A18 on the bottom left corner? And in a way, the effect that a protest has on government officials to take stock of public sentiment has to do with how it's publicly portrayed.
But the demonstration clearly has another purpose, which is to bring like-minded people together, or, at least, to bring people together who are agreed on the necessity of ending US military actions at this time, or people who are generally opposed to war....
KC: You've alluded to this question, but how do you define the human in human rights?
[JB:] It's interesting, I think, you see, that we have not yet become human. Or, I might say, in a different way, that the category of the human is in the process of becoming. What constitutes the human is a site of contestation. there are clashing cultural interpretations about what the human ought to be, and that every time you assert human rights, you are also adding to the meaning of what the human is.
For a long time, I remember, it was very hard for Amnesty International to accept gay and lesbian rights as human rights. They finally did come around and now have a whole program devoted to it. But in the early days, when they were resistant, I attended some meetings with the leadership in New York, and it was clear that they were afraid that in certain cultures homosexuality was not part of what was admissibly or valuably human. So to have gay and lesbian human rights was a kind of contradiction in terms for some cultures.
And some people at Amnesty were worried that it would be an act of cultural insensitivity to oppose that notion. But if it's true that some cultures don't want to think of homosexuality as part of the human, and want to think of it as bestial, or un-human, they nevertheless have to live in a world in which others do want to make that claim.
And I think that there are very often provocative encounters that take place in human rights negotiations where different notions of the human have to yield. They have to yield to new notions of the human. And they have to yield to new notions that are promoted in the name of a more expansive, or more universal notion of what the human is. I think currently, we're seeing the US government make an argument that the Guantanomo Bay detainees, Arab-Americans, and Arab immigrants or residents, who have been detained illegally since September 11th, that they are not entitled to certain kind of civil liberties, or that they don't fall under the rubric of international human rights. And I think implicitly we're being told that these humans are not humans in the ordinary sense. Or that they are 'suspected' to not be human in the ordinary sense.
And what that means is that there's an ordinary sense of the human that is sometimes defined by a racial or racist episteme, which has a certain view of what qualifies as a human, who are subjects entitled to certain rights. And so when another so-called human comes along who doesn't fit that, there are authorities, such as the US government, that do not consider these people subjects entitled to human rights - these rights, which we nevertheless deemed universal! So they just commit this extraordinary contradictory act, by which they claim the universality of human rights in one breath, and then they insist on the exceptions to this universality in another. And we have to ask, under what conditions, do certain members of certain populations get targeted as exceptions to that universal. And as long as that continues to happen, we have not yet achieved the human....
KC: What is preoccupying you now, where do you see your upcoming work going?
[JB:] Well, it's complicated, right? Because everybody had a project going until September 11th, and now I've written four pieces about the war and about the detainment effort. You know, I think I started actually doing a project on accountability, trying to think about what it is to give an account of myself or to give an account of others. And then September 11th happened, and I wrote that essay on explanation and exoneration, trying to explain that these might be two different ways of giving an account of something. A moral one and a historical one. I seem now to be examining two different uses of ethical discourse, wondering about how say the invocation of evil works to stymie critical thinking, and also how one might render compatible radical critical thinking with moral accountability. So I guess that's the perimeter of what I'm doing, but I keep responding to world events and I'm not sure I'm elaborating the book I'm supposed to be writing.
<http://www.bard.edu/hrp/events/spring2002/butler_interview.htm> -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>