My guess is that most readers of Political Theology understand themselves as human.
If not, then it is certainly the case that most people would look at you a little strange if you asked them whether they were human.
When I was teaching about human rights and playing a lot of tennis in Toronto, I would often teach Marxist and decolonial critiques of human rights. During those lectures, I would laugh with my students about how niche this critique of human rights feels: if I told a tennis partner at a Toronto park that I was vehemently critical of human rights, they would be more likely to assume I was a fascist than a decolonial theorist.
And yet, several important critical theorists (quite justifiably and insightfully) continue to question the value of “the human” as a concept today.
In this essay, I want to think with two critics of Eurocentric humanism who nevertheless remained humanists: Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. Their method, at once critical and reconstructive of “the human,” inspired my new book, which I am calling Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt.
Wynter and Said both draw upon Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and scholar of rhetoric and jurisprudence, because Vico offers a method focused on the importance of ordinary actions in cultural (Wynter) or secular (Said) life.
For Vico, these ordinary actions are where we should start in trying to explain the bigger systems that both surround and influence us.
On Wynter’s reading of Édouard Glissant, humans today suffer from “a colonization of the cultural imaginary” that has been hugely successful “at the level of the assimilation of the psyche.” What is needed in turn, she argued elsewhere, is a new“science of the human,” one that would study what it means to live amidst the “long process” of humanity.
For Wynter, we not only need to recognize that we are part of this longer process, which often feels out of our control, but we also need to recognize our agency or autonomy in this specific moment. In a later chapter, Wynter draws this lesson from Vico: “[T]hat which we have made we can unmake and consciously now remake.”
Wynter’s new science of the human can be read as following Vico’s New Science, just updated for our century and hemmed in not so much by the Church as by Eurocentric educational systems–with “systems” here including (well beyond formal schools) companies, advertisements, and cultural pressures.
Edward Said also talked about humanity in terms of a longer process, what he called in Culture and Imperialism “the slower process of culture and society” that has been unfolding around us and that “can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history.”
In Representations of the Intellectual, Said devotes a few paragraphs to Vico’s influence on his thinking. Here is one of them:
Vico argues that this is the only point of view to take about the secular world, which he repeats over and over again is historical, with its own laws and processes, not divinely ordained. This entails respect, but not reverence, for human society. You look at the grandest of powers in terms of its beginnings, and where it might be headed; you are not awed by the august personality, or the magnificent institution which to a native, someone who has always seen (and therefore venerated) the grandeur but not the perforce humbler human origins from which it derived, often compels silence and stunned subservience. The intellectual in exile is necessarily ironic, skeptical, even playful–but not cynical.
In this paragraph, Said starts with Vico’s method, but he ends with a larger point about intellectual life, which he puts in the more specific terms of intellectual exile.
My sense is that asking these kinds of questions about ordinary practice often takes one to a place of exile. Many of us avoid speaking on this level, which would involve giving an account for our lives.
Later in Representations, Said reads another Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci, for his relevance to intellectual exile:
Gramsci believed that organic intellectuals are actively involved in society, that is, they constantly struggle to change minds and expand markets; unlike teachers and priests, who seem more or less to remain in place, doing the same kind of work year in year out, organic intellectuals are always on the move, on the make.
Too often today it is the university that, as Said read Vico above, “compels silence and stunned subservience.” And just as in Said’s reading of Gramsci here, in many cases we can oppose professors (“teachers”) to organic intellectuals.
While many students and their encampments have responded to silencing and repression with irony, skepticism, and play, in some cases, rather than defending each other through the AAUP and other channels, we faculty have simply become cynical.
Based on his years in the academy and consulting, the legal scholar David Kennedy has noted about liberals and humanitarians that “we prefer to think of ourselves as outside power.” Said consistently asked us to refuse this way of thinking.
Said follows Vico to offer a method for social theory, a method that he would call “secular,” meaning not that it is against religion but that it examines a given social phenomenon, let’s say a tennis match or a war, starting from the “humbler human origins from which it derived.”
Why did humans start playing tennis, anyway? What causes war between two groups?
For Said, it is our task as social theorists to seek causes, and it is our task as social actors to create new beginnings.
Vico’s claim that all human institutions are made by us, as it is understood by Wynter and Said, has tremendous implications for social theory. In a powerfully simple sense, it means that when we look at an authoritarian ruler or a war, we have to ask: how am I a part of making this? And: How could I be part of consciously un-making and re-making this reality?
In April of this year, I was in Siena, Italy, a beautiful Tuscan city whose narrow streets and cathedral from the 1200s remind us, in a material sense, that that past is very much not even past.
What was most striking about Siena, for me, was the way that light snuck into the old streets, shooting through windows and gaps between roofs and buildings. The play of shadows caused me to pause my daily walks on multiple occasions.
During one of those pauses, I saw a banner hanging on a building just outside of the University of Siena. The banner, written in the colors of the Palestinian flag, asked the university to separate itself from Israel’s war, and it announced, in red capital letters, that there was a strike today.
By the time I captured this photo, the banner had grown a little tattered around the edges, suggesting that it had been up for a number of days beyond the initial day of strike; in this way, it could be read as a call for an ongoing strike, one that would last until the university becomes truly anti-war in its budget as much as in its curriculum.
Until that moment, each “oggi” is the “today” of the strike.
I am interested in this sense of the ordinary, ongoing strike. This humble strike—not necessarily modest but rather close to the ground—could involve a politics of refusal and boycott, where those terms could be understood not only as negatives, but also as holding space for a new international community, and thus connecting explicitly something already connected or entangled in practice.
So far this year (I write at the end of 2024), we have witnessed students quit buying coffee at Starbucks or otherwise stop purchasing items from Puma and HP, a method that has led to some success in getting companies to end their operations in illegal settlements. The past year has also witnessed students making larger demands: for their universities to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank.
These humble acts, which engage international law with the premise that we are always already bound up in power, could be read as a strike on one type of being human, a colonial one, that is also the beginning of another humanity, one that defends and universalizes human rights.
As I underscore (following Wynter) in Another Humanity, this is a way of thinking about humanity not in ontological, biological, or racial terms, but in terms of practice and performance.
Lara Montesinos Coleman, in her important new book Struggles for the Human, calls this an “insurgent humanism.”
As part of my editorial role here at Political Theology, this year I have edited a number of tremendously nuanced, reflective essays from anti-Zionist Jews who are critical of Israel’s violence and US universities’ support of this war in the name of Jewish safety.
We have not seen the same number of submissions from non-Jewish US citizens about what it means to live in a settler state–or about what our responsibility is in the face of this genocidal war.
But Said would ask us to make this connection.
When he spoke about Palestine, Said often spoke about “the idea of a human community.”
“It would be wrong to consider the struggle for Palestine only as a local struggle for land,” Said wrote in The Politics of Dispossession. “It is that, of course, but equally, it is a far-reaching struggle for democratic rights and principles.”
Understood this way, the idea of Palestine serves as a cause for reflection, a reminder that we are not just talking about a place that is far away. When we talk about Palestine, we are also talking about the places in which we find ourselves.
In these ordinary places–with friends and partners as much as with colleagues and students–we can ask: are there companies exploiting land rights and Indigenous people where I live? How has settlement, racialization, and the control of labor operated together in my city? What is a performance of humanity equal to this moment, and how can it be informed in humble ways through conversation with those around me?
In other words, how can we connect these struggles? Better: how can we show, to the widest possible audience, that these struggles are already connected, and that we have already taken part in their making?
These are some initial questions that Said’s notion of “the idea of Palestine”–taken as a point of departure for reflection, community, and universalization–asks of us.
Do people fight in far-off places just because they are jingoistic? Because they are uneducated or not modern? Because they are “terrorists”? Or might my country have a history in that region, and if so, what is that history? Do I know it? And is my country involved in that place right now? And if so, how is this war also being fought in my name?
Are people waging war in some place because of a commodity or natural resource? Does that resource somehow end up in my phone, or my computer, or in my clothes, or on my dinner table? If so, to what extent am I implicated in this war, even though I am neither soldier nor partisan?
If there is not war in the region where this commodity or resource is extracted, is there true peace there? Or is a repressive state and militarized police force better understood as a denial of peace? And what happens if I return these questions (again and again) to my own country? And what account can I give and actions can I take in turn, to strike humbly against this violent order of things?
Once we have asked each other (and ourselves) these questions, we might be able to say, in good faith, that we have begun, in Omar Saif Ghobash’s pressing phrase, “to grab hold of the responsibility for peace.”
The author thanks Shahrzad Sabet, Lara Montesinos Coleman, Ashley Bohrer, Max Tomba, Matt Elia, and Ashleigh Elser for conversation about the topics considered here.
