Event date: Wednesday 17 June 2015, 9 – 10.30 a.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Auditorium D

“‘Humanity in Ruins’: Beckett’s Testimony”; given by Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of East Anglia) as part of the Human Rights and the Mobilization of Testimony symposium

Abstract

Testimonies to the suffering of others, it is claimed, are key to the mobilization of moral sentiments that underpin today’s global human rights regime.  For defenders of the progress of human rights, sad or sentimental stories are the means by which the rights-rich can come to tolerate, comprehend and even value the lives and identities of the rights-poor (Rorty). Others point out that these testimonies and the generous feelings and, sometimes, actions they provoke produce morally good but politically ambivalent consequences. While the stories of the abused are powerful precisely because they can elicit sympathy, care and, sometimes, political and legal recognition, that very humanitarianism paradoxically obscures the gross inequalities of rights and entitlements that give it cause (Fassin).

I tell you my story of pain so that you, whose life is so different from mine, might glimpse my humanity. But you only see that humanity in so far as it is in ruins, in so far as it is precisely not like yours. The growth in universal moral sentiment is not proportionate to the redistribution of global rights.

In this lecture I return to one of the founding moments of modern rights, the immediate postwar period, to suggest how contemporary worries about the mobilization of testimony were already making themselves present in the new age of rights that was rapidly emerging out of the ruins of Europe, its dominance and ideals.

My case history takes us both to a small chapter in the history of postwar humanitarianism, and to the beginning of a much larger one in the history of modern writing. In the early summer of 1946, Samuel Beckett went to work for the Irish Red Cross in the bombed-out ‘city of ruins’ Saint-Lô in Normandy. What he discovered there was a new and complex way of imagining what he described as ‘the having and the not having, the giving and the taking.’ This discovery coincided with Beckett’s famous decision to abandon English.  The first-person narrators who wander through the three short stories that he wrote in French that year, ‘Le Fin’ (between 1945 and 1946), ‘L’Expulsé’ (October 1946) and ‘Le Calmant’, (December 1946), are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference and restless agents, stumbling in a second language, groping for a new narrative. These are the new clowns of the postwar age of compromised humanitarianism, ironists of their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the rightless and the rest of the world.  Beckett, I argue, sets up the terms for a justly uncomfortable engagement with the new aesthetics of the very humanitarianism that became so necessary as the world struggled not only to legislate for, but also to conceptualize, the rightless.

Bio

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of East Anglia, where she co-directs the Writing and Rights Project as well as the interdisciplinary Humanities in Human Rights project. She specializes in Modern Literature and Critical Theory, particularly psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and, most recently, critical human rights and refugee studies. She is the author, most recently, of The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (paperback, 2014). Other publications include The Destructive Element (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). She is currently completing a new book, Reading Statelessness: Rights, Writing and Refugees. In this book, she compares the emergence of the refugee into critical and cultural consciousness in the 1930s with contemporary refugee writing, arguing for an interpretation of modern literature that focuses on the type of subjectivity that emerges in the cracks between nation states.

All are welcome. Admission is free, and registration is not required. For more information, please contact Stef Craps.