Human Rights and the Care of the Self - Softcover

Lefebvre, Alexandre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822371316 ISBN 13: 9780822371311

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

When we think of human rights we assume that they are meant to protect people from serious social, legal, and political abuses and to advance global justice. In Human Rights and the Care of the Self Alexandre Lefebvre turns this assumption on its head, showing how the value of human rights also lies in enabling ethical practices of self-transformation. Drawing on Foucault's notion of "care of the self," Lefebvre turns to some of the most celebrated authors and activists in the history of human rights–such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Henri Bergson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Charles Malik–to discover a vision of human rights as a tool for individuals to work on, improve, and transform themselves for their own sake. This new perspective allows us to appreciate a crucial dimension of human rights, one that can help us to care for ourselves in light of pressing social and psychological problems, such as loneliness, fear, hatred, patriarchy, meaninglessness, boredom, and indignity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexandre Lefebvre is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney; coeditor of Henri Bergson and Bergson, Politics, and Religion, both also published by Duke University Press; and author of Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson's Political Philosophy and The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza.

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Human Rights and the Care of the Self

By Alexandre Lefebvre

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-7131-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
[1] The Care of the Self, 
[2] The Juridical Subject as Ethical Subject: Wollstonecraft on the Rights of Man, 
[3] Critique of Human Rights and Care of the Self, 
[4] Human Rights as Spiritual Exercises: Tocqueville in America, 
[5] Human Rights as a Way of Life: Bergson on Love and Joy, 
[6] On Human Rights Criticism, 
[7] An Ethic of Resistance I: Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 
[8] An Ethic of Resistance II: Malik and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 
[9] Human Rights Education, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE CARE OF THE SELF

In this first chapter I present Michel Foucault's concept of "care of the self." Straightaway, though, I should say that this is not a book on Foucault. I discuss him to the extent that his later work on ethics and care of the self allows me to spotlight an aspect of human rights.

What do I mean? A much-discussed topic in recent human rights scholarship is the role human rights play in shaping subjectivity and our sense of self. In fields as diverse as political theory, history, art and literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, several works examine how human rights are central not only to the protection but also to the formation of individuals. I would venture to say that there is an excellent book on how human rights impact nearly every human capacity or faculty, whether that is our political imagination, our aesthetic sensibility, our felt awareness of the suffering of others, our self-conception as agents, or even our notion of what it means to be a person.

These studies are crucial to my argument, but none exactly capture the phenomenon I am trying to identify: how human rights are used as a tool for self-transformation and self-improvement for the sake of oneself. That is why I draw on Foucault. His definition of care of the self encapsulates features that are surprising to find in the human rights tradition. As I said in the introduction, we do not expect to find a preoccupation with personal transformation at the heart of the human rights imagination. And it is certainly counterintuitive to discover a priority given to caring for oneself in an idea and institution devoted to global justice and concern for the other. Yet read with a certain Foucauldian eye, these themes of self-care are discoverable time and again at key junctures in the history of human rights. So much so, in fact, that by tracking these multiple iterations it is possible to identify a persistence of the care of the self, mutable and porous though it may be, that human rights have never been without.

But the value of using Foucault's notion of the care of the self to study human rights is not only historical. It is a resource for us here and now. To begin with, it helps to make key human rights authors speak to us anew. The main ones I discuss — Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Bergson, Roosevelt, and Malik — struggle against problems that are still very much with us. Chivalry, in Wollstonecraft's sense, is far from dead; neither is the individualism, xenophobia, conformity, and materialism that Tocqueville, Bergson, Roosevelt, and Malik respectively address. That all of them reach for human rights as a therapeutic aid may lead us to recognize attitudes and practices that can be adapted for our own use.

More generally, and these specific authors aside, there is another advantage to viewing human rights in terms of care for oneself: it gives human rights education and advocacy an additional anchor. Today, as we will see later, Roosevelt's slogan for human rights has truly caught on: over the past twenty years or so, policy documents, educational initiatives, and international law have routinely advocated for human rights to become "a way of life." But a shortcoming of much of this discourse is that it is virtually silent as to what can motivate people to do so. Why, to adopt a language of moral individualism that I believe human rights need to engage, perhaps even mimic, in order to be widely heard — why is it personally advantageous to adopt human rights as a way of life? Why should I do it? How will it help me? These are hard questions, especially in light of the diverse audiences of human rights education. But if human rights can be aligned with care of the self, one line of answer could be opened up.

I am getting ahead of myself. Before we turn to any particular human rights author, before we assess his or her ongoing relevance, and before we examine how care for the self can complement care for others in contemporary practice, we need to first ask what care of the self is.

Morality: Code, Conduct, and Ethics

"Care of the self" (le souci de soi-même, in French) is the defining concept of Foucault's later period (1981–84). It is the cornerstone of the work he produced in the last four years of his life, which includes two books, the delivery of five lecture series (published posthumously), and roughly a dozen essays and interviews. One way to introduce it is to say that, for Foucault, care of the self is a morality; that is to say, it is a particular kind of morality that emerges at a specific time and place. That time and place is Western antiquity: ancient Greece, Rome, and early Christianity. But given that Foucault has a rather idiosyncratic understanding of what morality is and does, this is not a particularly helpful starting point. We should begin, instead, by taking a step back and looking at his conception of morality in general.

A handy overview is found in the Introduction to The History of Sexuality, volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984). This piece is a gateway to Foucault's later period and serves as an introduction to this book and to its companion volume, The History of Sexuality, volume 3: The Care of the Self (1984). In it he states his reasons for undertaking a two-volume study of ancient Greco-Roman culture and, in particular, a study of its sexual practices. In brief, the classical world emphasizes a valuable dimension of morality that today has faded from sight (which he calls "ethics"). To reach this claim, however, he begins by setting out a broad schema of what he takes morality to be in and of itself and, from there, marks out the place and importance that care of the self occupies within it.

Let's start as Foucault does: with the big picture. Morality, he says, has three components. He calls them "moral code," "moral conduct," and "ethics." Each particular historical morality has its own distinct codes, conduct, and ethics. Nevertheless, Foucault insists that morality, any morality, is always an amalgam of these three components.

"Moral code" and "moral conduct" work as a pair and are straightforward to understand. By moral code Foucault means "a set of values and rules of action that are recommended to individuals through the intermediary of various prescriptive agencies." Moral conduct refers to the actual behavior of individuals, and considers whether or not it conforms to the code. A moral code, then, consists of the prescribed rules and principles of a morality, and moral conduct denotes whether or not the code is followed in practice.

There are any number of moral codes and instances of moral conduct...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822371316
• ISBN 13: 9780822371311
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar