The anti-human: Man and citizen before the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 103, Issue 2-3, 2004, Pages 357-374

  Maslan, Susan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950466728     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-357     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. Henri Grégoire (abbé). Motion en faveur des juifs (Paris: [n.p.], 1789), 1. Throughout this essay I construe "homme" as human being as, I believe, did Grégoire and his contemporaries
2. Grégoire, Motion, ii. Abbé Grégoire opens himself up here for some potential contradictions or corrections. His conception of "humanity," like that of so many of his contemporaries, privileges above all sensibility: human beings are those who suffer, who feel, who sympathize, who are touched by the feelings of others, who are happy and, especially, unhappy. The capacity to feel, rather than the capacity to reason, is the necessary condition for inclusion in the category of the human. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of course, is a crucial figure in the development of the cult of sensibility. But he is far from alone; indeed, he is typical in his assertion that the capacity to feel is the primary qualification for humanity. Rousseau argues in the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, the work in which he seeks to discover and to represent the very nature of man, that man's nature, at its most essential, is constituted by two principles: the instinct for self-preservation and the "natural repugnance at seeing any sentient being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer." Natural law and natural rights stem from the combination of these two principles. Rousseau goes on to note that animals are feeling creatures and that "since they in some measure partake in our nature through the sentience with which they are endowed, it will be judged that they must also participate in natural right" (Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans. Victor Gourevitch [New York: Harper and Row, 1986], 132-33). Rousseau can thus be seen as a theorist of animal rights. But my point here is that Rousseau's argument for the shared nature of man and animals undoes Grégoire's attempt to assert Jews' humanity by distinguishing Jews from beasts of burden
3. Archives parlementaires, first series (Paris, 1867-) 8:221
4. Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 33
5. See also Christine Fauré, Ce que déclarer des droits veut dire: histoires (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997)
6. Archives parlementaires, 8:320
7. On Olympe de Gouges's declaration, see Joan Wallach Scott, "French Feminists and the Rights of'Man': Olympe de Gouges's Declarations," History Workshop Journal 28 (1989): 1-21
8. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovano-vich, [1951] 1973)
9. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sour: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
10. Foucault defines biopolitics in Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997), 216-20
11. On the notion of a citizen within a monarchy, see Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
12. Pierre Corneille, Théâtre complet, ed. Alain Niderst (Rouen: Université de Rouen, 1984-1986), 1.3
13. For the claim that Curiace is feminine, see Serge Doubrovsky's classic Corneille et le dialectique du héros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). For Doubrovsky, Curiace's expressions of desolation, self-pity, and anger at the gods demonstrate his impotence (a feminine trait for Doubrovsky) and underscore, in opposition, Horace's virtue. Doubrovsky argues that Horace is a more noble character than Curiace because he has powerful sentiments, but he forces himself to overcome them. In fact, the textual evidence for Horace's emotional ties to others is very slim
14. My account here opposes that of Louis Herland, who argues that Horace's project of self-transcendence and self-mastery makes him a true man, with man defined as being a creature of his own making. See Herland, Corneille ou la naissance de l'homme (Paris: Minuit, 1952)
15. For a psychoanalytic reading of Horace and Camille as the play's central male-female couple, see Mitchell Greenberg, Canonical States, Canonical Stages: Oedipus, Othering, and Seventeenth-Century French Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)