Joseph SlaughterDepartment of English and Comparative LiteratureColumbia 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.

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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

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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" (659-

60). 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"

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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.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

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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.

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 of existing social values." Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989) 140.

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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

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 self-

government; 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

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.

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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

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

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.

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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

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.

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).

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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

many of the invisible attributes of creating are themselves objectified and made visible in the 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.

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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 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. My argument about narrative invoicing sees the method inflected historically, intimately bound up in a topos of accumulation and accretion that extends to personality.

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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:

EvilI 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.

GoodBut 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 . . .

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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

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

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.

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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

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 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.

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inclinations to rational adjudication authorized by social mores" (Barney 241). Crusoe's self-

chartered 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,

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

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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 stock-market 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 joint-stock 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

British Parliament found it necessary to redress the financial disaster by establishing extra-

ordinary 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

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).

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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

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

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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,

which is presumed to be a natural entity by virtue of its "real" existence. Dewey traces the

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.

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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

judgment that prizes the social importance of a particular entity which merits "special

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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

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, 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."

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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

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 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).

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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

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 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).

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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

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

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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

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 anti-

internationalism 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

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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

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.

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is personified as a civil person, human dignity is dignified as civil dignity. It is the discursive and

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,

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.

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"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

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

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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

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

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 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.

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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

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

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.

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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

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.

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sociological contents might have been the source of endless controversy, its juridical contents,

which appeared separable from the others, proved to be less so.

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

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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

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

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.

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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

"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

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 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.

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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 self-

fulfillment. 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

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

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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

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

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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

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.

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.

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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 self-

adornment, 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 species-

personality, 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

family, community, state, universal/international) in the name of peace and a "spirit of

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.

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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 subject-

body 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

evidence that Hitler's foremost crime was to have treated personality as a form of civil chartering

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(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

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.

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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

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

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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

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

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 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.

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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

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

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).

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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

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

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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

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 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).

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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 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 bi-

lateralization of the copula.57 Distributive predication assigns the same quality (in this case

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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 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 Self-Predication 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.

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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

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 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.

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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

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 self-

expression, 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 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.

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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.

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 self-

incorporation. 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"

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(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 self-

substantiating 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

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

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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

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

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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 spatio-

temporal 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) 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.

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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

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 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).

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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.

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