In the Waiting Room of Humanity: Rupturing Cosmopolitan Ethics, Revisiting Kant, Refracting (In)Human Rights

Abstract

By asking the question “who is the subject of humanity upon
 whom human rights are attached?” this thesis poses to
 cosmopolitan ethics an ontological question of how the being of
 the human of human rights is formulated. It inquires into the
 conditions of possibility of the anomaly of the cosmopolitan
 appeal to a universal right to humanity. This is an anomaly
 exposed by the aporias of war fought in the name of
 humanitarianism, dispossession of land as the consequence of an
 entitlement to hospitality and detention for an
 “unauthorized” assertion of the right to asylum. The thesis
 argues that the anomaly of universal human rights can be
 explained by the diagram of (in)humanity that has, like an
 abstract machine, circulated alongside the history of
 cosmopolitanism, constituting humanity as a human-inhuman complex
 that makes possible its denial. Rather than extending outwards,
 the boundary that divides inside from outside (human from
 inhuman) so as to make humanity a more encompassing and inclusive
 category for its legal-political mobilization, this thesis seeks
 to make sense of the boundary as a liminal space-time where human
 and inhuman come into conflict as the (in)human condition
 underlying the human rights conundrum. I describe this diagram as
 the “Anthropocentric Waiting Room” in order to designate how
 it is that humanity can be a condition for which some must wait.
 My central aim is to advance, in four phases, its theoretical
 importance to cosmopolitan studies. The first involves rupturing
 cosmopolitan ethics to highlight the space the (in)human occupies
 within contemporary discourses of cosmopolitan ethics. The second
 concerns recovering the archive to give the (in)human a history
 alongside cosmopolitanism’s humanity. The third engages in
 revisiting Kantian cosmopolitanism to establish its contribution
 to the intellectual history of the (in)human via a racist
 anthropology concerned with the production of the subject
 “Man” as “citizen of the world.” The fourth returns to
 the question of human rights through the problem of the anomaly
 by way of refracting this (in)human presence onto our
 contemporary dilemma.