"It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for others to treat him as a fellow man"¹. With this sentence, taken from the study on Imperialism which forms the second part of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt defines the fundamental condition of human rights: A human being has rights only if he is other than a human being. And if he is to be other than a human being, he must in addition become an other human being. Then "the others" can treat him as their fellow human being. What makes human beings alike is the fact that every human being carries within him the figure of the other. The likeness that they have in common follows from the difference of each from each.

Thou shalt not kill thy fellow human being: To kill a human being is not to kill an animal of the species Homo sapiens, but to kill the human community present in him as both capacity and promise. And you also kill it in yourself. To banish the stranger is to banish the community, and you banish yourself from the community thereby.

What is this figure of the other in me, on which, it is said, my right to be treated as a human being rests? It is this question to which I devote the rest of my reflections.

"Nothing but a man", writes Hannah Arendt. That is, nothing other than an individual of the species Homo sapiens. A powerful species; in the struggle for life enacted in the theater of the world, Homo sapiens has emerged victorious over all other species. And it continues, successfully, to combat them, using hygiene, sanitary arrangements, the protection of the environment, and so on. Each human being is a specimen of this species. He resembles any other member of the species, as a chimpanzee resembles a chimpanzee.

Is the figure of the other (ape) present in every ape? Apes are able to tell each other apart and to distinguish themselves from other species of animal. They can communicate amongst themselves by systems of sensory signals based on the five senses and motility. These systems constitute a sort of language which endows the animals with a sort of community in which affective states (Aristotle's pathemata) are exchanged, along with admonitions as to conduct.

This signal-based language is not wholly lacking in the human species, but its role is confined. Animals' capacity to communicate is determined by the genetic stock common to the species, and is of the order of instinct. Human beings have very few instincts. In comparison with their animal brothers, young human beings are slow to realize their capacity in the language of their fellow. And this human lan- guage is not common to the species. It functions not by bodily signals, but by signs. These arbitrary signs, combined according to rules which are also arbitrary, but which are fixed by syntactic structures, make it possible to designate any object, real or not, internal or external, as their referent, and to signify something about that object. Finally, and this is what interests us here, this signification is addressed.

It is what we today call the "pragmatic" function of human language which governs the formation of the figure of the other. Explicitly or implicitly, every human sentence is destined to someone or something. Some answer, some response, some link or follow-up is expected. The polarization is marked in our languages by the verbal "persons" and the personal pronouns. I is the one who is speaking now; you is the one to whom this communication is currently addressed. You are silent when I speak, but you can speak, has spoken,and will speak.

Animal communication is, we might say, homogeneous. By contrast, the distinguishing characteristic of interlocution is the relation of simultaneous similarity and disparity introduced between the speakers. The instances I and you cannot merge, since while the one speaks the other speaks no longer or not yet. I and you are deictics, and as such are correlated with now, and now designates the present of speech. From it, the temporality of past and future unfold. But relative to the capacity to speak, which by definition is not confined to the present but extends to every possible interlocution, I and you are alike. Persons capable of speech alternately occupy the instance I and the instance you. When they say I, they are a past or future you, and when they are in the position of you, they are so because they have spoken or will speak as I.

Interlocution thus implies that human beings cannot, as animals can, merge into a community based on signals. They do so only when the impossibility of interlocution reduces them to that meager resource. In theory, the human we does not precede but results from interlocution. In this we, the figure of the other remains clearly present to each, to the extent that the other is his possible interlocutor. The one and the other can come to an agreement, after reasoning and debate, and then establish their community by contract. This is the principle of the Greek politeia or the modern republic. The citizen is the human individual whose right to address others is recognized by those others.

It is important to distinguish the republican principle from the democratic fact. The demos is not a contractual but a natural and cultural community. The individual of the demos is recognized as such not for his right to speak, but for his birth, language, and historical heritage. These individuals form a nation (in the medieval sense in which one hears nature), whose principal characteristic is the homogeneity of its constituents. Interlocution does not engender this community; between the members of the nation, language and mores function as signals of recognition. Though possessed of interlocutory capacity, the demotic individual, whether a serf or a free man, uses the language to signal emotions and actions to other specimens of the variety of Homines to which they collectively belong. This relationship to language excludes the alterity implicit in civic interlocution. The other remains alien, and does not enjoy the rights reserved to nationals. The very Greeks who invented the politeia excluded barbaroi. The right of interlocution is not granted to every human being. The figure of the other is that of a threat weighing on the national community from without, which cannot help but undermine its integrity.

I oversimplify my description to bring out the essential opposition between the demotic and the civic. The difference between them is the consideration given to interlocution, which modifies the figure of the other. The people keeps the other out; the city interiorizes the other. In contemporary human communities, for various reasons, these two aspects are for the most part not distinguished: more or less nation, more or less republic. For example, the institution of a European community undoubtedly draws its justification exclusively from the civic principle.

In the republic, there is a principle of universalization which relates to the function, inherent in speech, of addressing the other. If a human being can speak, he is a possible interlocutor. The principle is not invalidated merely by the fact of his speaking a language foreign to the national language. Homo sapiens has always spoken a multitude of languages. But they are all human languages comprising the structural characteristics I have briefly outlined. These characteristics guarantee that an unknown human language can in principle be translated into a known one. I do not wish to take up here the difficulties and enigmas of translation. The theoretical possibility of translation is quite sufficient to extend interlocution to any human individual whatsoever, regardless of natural or national idiom. Civility may become universal in fact as it promises to do by right.

The form in which civility is in fact extended to national or demotic communities is a serious question. History offers a profusion of different modes, linguistic as well as political and economic. These include: an obligatory single language, an oflicial language alongside which traditional languages are tolerated, compulsory multilingualism, effective multilingualism, and so on. The pattern established depends on the balance of military, political, economic, and cultural power. These relations determine how interlocution extends, but they cannot curb its extension. There is no limiting the function of destination inherent in the structure of sentences: One may beg a service of a tree or a river, and issue a command to a cat. If the addressee is human, he is immediately vested with the status of interlocutor, capable, in his turn, of addressing the first speaker.

There is no a priori limit to the interlocutory capacity. By its association with the recursiveness and translatability of human language, it cannot help but bind all human speakers in a speech community. From this effective (de facto) power there arises what I shall term an effect of right (un effet de droit). If any human being can be an interlocutor for other human beings, he must be able to, that is, must be enabled or allowed to. We move from the potential implied by competence to the permission implied by entitlement. We know, however, that capacity does not legitimacy make. But it is tempting to merge the two categories in the case of interlocution, both because the capacity to enter into dialogue with others is possessed equally by everyone, and because interlocution in itself implies reciprocity of speech. Reciprocity respects not only the alterity of interlocution but the parity of the interlocutors. It thus guarantees their respective liberty and their equality before the word. These are the characteristics of justice itself. The slippage here from the fact to the right resembles the contemporary confusion of democracy and republic. But how can we avoid it?

Let us take it that the capacity to speak to others is a human right, and perhaps the most fundamental human right. If the use of this capacity is forbidden, whether de facto, by some injustice of fate, or on principle, for example as a punishment, a harm is inflicted on the speaker thus constrained. He is set apart from the speech community of interlocutors. To no one is he any longer someone other, nor is anyone now his other. There are many ways of imposing silence. Amnesty International knows them better than anyone. Its vocation is modest but decisive. It is minimal. Amnestos meant he who is forgotten. Amnesty does not demand that the judgment be revised or that the convicted man be rehabilitated. It simply asks that the institution that has condemned him to silence forget this decree and restore the victim to the commuruty of speakers.

Amnesty's task is in accordance with the provisions of the public law of the republican democracies. I nevertheless maintain that this legality conceals a confusion between a capacity, the aptitude for speech, and a legitimacy, the authority to speak. In other words, there is, strictly speaking, no natural right. It is of the essence of a right that it be merited; no right without duty. The same goes for the capacity to enter into dialogue. It is not true that it realizes itself spontaneously. It requires care and attention, an entire learning process. It requires precisely what is called civilization. The human being as such is no other than a member of the species Homo: an animal that can speak. It is true that its language is so constituted that it effectively contains the promise of interlocution. But if he is to bring out and respect the figure of the other that this promise bears in it, he must free himself from that in him which will not recognize the figure of the other, that is, his animal nature. Children do not spontaneously enter into dialogue. There is something in us which resists, something which does perhaps 'speak", but in signals rather than according to the rules of interlocution.

Civilization, understood here as the process of learning how to share dialogue with you, requires a moment of silence. Aristotle said: The master speaks and the pupil listens. For that moment, the status of I is forbidden to me, I am assigned the position of you for the master, at the tacit pole of destination. Tacit does not imply passive. The exaltation of interactivity as a pedagogic principle is pure demagogy. The pupil has the capacity to speak; he has to win the right to speak. To do so, he must be silent. The suspension of interlocution imposes a silence and that silence is good. It does not undermine the right to speak. It teaches the value of that right. It is the exercise necessary for excellence in speech. Like the pupil, writers, artists, scholars, and novices must enter into retreat in order to learn what they will have to say to others.

The master, whatever his title, exempts his pupils from the sharing of speech in order to tell them something that they do not know. He may even speak to them in a language that they do not understand. The master is not the figure of the general other, of you, but the figure of the Other in all its separateness. He is the stranger, the foreigner. How can one dialogue with the foreigner? One would have to learn his language. This question is in some measure analogous with that of literature and the arts, testifying to something that is "present" otherwise than as interlocutory expectation: something opaque, Beckett's the "Unnamable".

The silence that the learning process of civilization imposes is the moment of a labor of estrangement. It is a matter of speaking otherwise than is my wont and saying something other than what I know how to say. Through the alterity of the master, the strangeness of another logic is, in silence, imposed. He takes me hostage in order to make me hear and say what I do not know. Emmanuel Levinas has elaborated this theme better than anyone.

From this brief analysis, it follows that the interlocutory capacity changes into a right to speak only if the speech can say something other than the déjà dit (what has already been said). The right to speak implies a duty to announce. If our speech announces nothing, it is doomed to repetition and to the conservation of existing meanings. The human community may spread, but it will remain the same, prostrated in the euphoria it feels at being on such very good terms with itself. It is the main function of the media today to reinforce the interlocutory consent of the community. They are boring to the extent that they teach us nothing. Interlocution is not an end in itself. It is legitimate only if, through others, the Other announces to me something which I hear but do not understand.

We should then distinguish three different levels of the"right to speak". First, the faculty of interlocution, a principle factually inherent in human languages; second, the legitimation of speech, due to the fact that it announces something other, which it strives to make us understand; and last, the legitimacy of speech, the positive right to speak, which recognizes in the citizen the right to address the citizen. The latter aspect merges the two former. But this confusion is good. By authorizing every possible speaker to address others, the republic makes it every speaker's duty to announce to those others what they do not know. It encourages announcements; it instructs. And, on the other hand, it forbids that anyone be arbitrarily deprived of speech. It discourages terror. In this way it governs silence in everyone's best interest, authorizing the silence of discipline and outlawing the silence of despotism.

This picture of the republic is idyllic, but the idyll conceals something far from idyllic. The threat of being deprived of speech is not contingent; it weighs constantly on the interlocutory right. This is precisely why the republic is indispensable. The human speaker is always afraid that a "keep quiet" will debar his words. He complains of the precariousness of his membership in the speech community. Even the good silence of the writer, the monk, or the pupil contains an element of suffering. Any banishment is a harm inflicted on those who undergo it, but this harm necessarily changes to a wrong when the victim is excluded from the speech community. For the wrong is the harm to which the victim cannot testify, since he cannot be heard. And this is precisely the case of those to whom the right to speak to others is refused.

The right to impose silence which the community grants itself as a sanction is always dangerous. The death sentence evidently does an irremediable wrong to the condemned man, even if he is guilty of a heinous crime. But in relation to our present topic, death is not necessarily the wrong done to him. There are, as the Greeks put it, "beautiful deaths", of which the citizens continue to speak long afterward. It happens that a speaker is more eloquent dead than alive, and does not therefore die for the community. So we must reverse the relation: It is the wrong which is the cause of death, since it implies the exclusion of the speaker from the speech community. The community will not even speak of this exclusion since the victim will be unable to report it and cannot therefore defend himself or appeal.

Those who escaped extermination in the camps are aware of this. Restored to the community, they can describe and narrate what the administration of death was. But how can they communicate the abjection to which they were reduced? It was first and foremost the severing of communication. How can one communicate by means of interlocution the terror of what it means no longer to be destined to anyone or anything? They were not spoken to, they were treated. They were not enemies. The SS or Kapos who called them dogs, pigs, or vermin did not treat them as animals but as refuse. It is the destiny of refuse to be incinerated. The ordeal of being forgotten is unforgettable. It reveals a truth about our relationship to language that is stifled and repressed by the serene belief in dialogue. Abjection is not merely when we are missing from speech, but when we lack language to excess. Our debt to announcement can never be acquitted. The Other in language, the Other that language is, does not say what must be said. It keeps silent. Does it even wait? Excluded from the speech community, the camp victims were rejected into the poverty, the misery of this secret. In that misery resides the true dignity of speech. Clearly, the ordeal of being forgotten cannot be expressed in the sharing of speech, which is, ex hypothesi, ignorant of it. Neither I nor you, the deportee is present in the language of his lords and in that of the deportees themselves only as the third person, who is to be eliminated. He is superfluous as any speaker is superfluous in relation to the Other. But precisely for that reason, absolutely responsible for himself.

The abjection suffered in the camps horribly illustrates the threat of exclusion which weighs on all interlocution. On the school playground, the child to whom the others say "We're not playing with you" experiences this unspeakable suffering. He suffers a wrong equivalent, on its own scale, to a crime against humanity. Even those who submit themselves to the ascesis of separation in order to exalt the annunciatory power of language run the risk of abjection. True, they forswear the company of others only in order to listen more intently to the foreign master. But this enslavement to the Other is perceived as a suspicious dependence on a power alien to the interlocutory community, as a sort of betrayal. The Latin sacer (sacred) expressed the ambivalence of the abject: human refuse excluded from the interests of the speech community, yet a sign, perhaps, in which the Other has left its mark and deserving of respectful fear.

In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed horror the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night. Though we seek to tame it by dialogue, it does not have the figure of the you. It may be well- or ill-disposed. We hear it. We cannot understand it. It may be God, it may be Animal, it may be Satan. In silence we strive to translate its voice in order to announce it to the community of speakers. In this way we seek to make our relation to the Other dialectical. But the strangeness of the other seems to escape any totalization. The effort of translation must be endlessly renewed. It is precisely when we think we have reduced the abject or the sacred to transparent meanings that it becomes most opaque and returns to us from without like an accident. The discontent from which contemporary societies are suffering, the postmodern affliction, is this foreclosure of the Other. It is the reverse of the triumphant identification with the Other which affects modern republics at their birth. Saint-Just enacted law in the name of the Other, and instituted the first totalitarian reign of terror.

Wiser than the dialecticians, the Jacobins, and the deciders, Freud acknowledged that abjection was not an episode but a situation constitutive of the human relation to interlocution. As children, we are kept on the margins of interlocution, and condemned to exile. The situation of infantia is that of the incomplete human being who does not yet speak. The child is spoken to and spoken of, but is not an interlocutor even though he is plunged into the interlocutory community. The statements that concern him have no value for him except as signals or gestures; they are difficult for him to decipher because they are arbitrary, and he has little instinct. He is affected by them, but has no language in which to articulate his own affective states. These reside within him unconsciously, in a forgetfulness which is always present. They do not enter the temporality associated with the instances of destination I and you. They loom up in the course of the individual life history in apparently unmotivated ways. They block interlocution. With them, the inevitable wrong and abjection of infantia erupt into adult relations.

From our native prematurity a mute distress results. It is to this distress that we owe our capacity to question everything around us. But we also owe to it our need to be welcomed, the request that we be authorized to enter the speech community. In interlocution a drama is played out between me and you; it is the drama of authorization. The question or assertion that we address to others is invariably coupled with an entreaty: Deliver me from my abandonment, allow me to belong among you. This entreaty allows of a wide variety of modalities: friendship, hatred, love, and even indifference. But in it resides the foundation of the right to speak. For it is this right that assures me that my request will be heard, and that I will not be rejected into the abjection of infantia. Yet at the same time, I have to announce to you the opaque Otherness that I have experienced, and still am experiencing, as a child.

The law says: Thou shalt not kill. Which means: you shall not refuse to others the role of interlocutor. But the law that forbids the crime of abjection nonetheless evokes its abiding threat or temptation. Interlocution is authorized only by respect for the Other, in my words and in yours.

[ Jean-François Lyotard, "The Other's Rights", in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (eds.) On Human Rights, BasicBooks, New York, 1993, pp. 135-147 ]

Webmaster: Slobodan Markovic (twiddle@eunet.yu)

All rights reserved. Belgrade Circle Journal encourages the reproduction of material appearing on its pages, provided that the source and the author are cited, except in cases where this would constitute violation of copyright held by other organisations or individuals.