CONTENTS
List of Illustrations Foreword by Lynn Hunt
Introduction
ONE The Spectator of Human Rights
Textual versus pictorial evidence. Following the picture trail opens a view of the spectator of human rights whose task is to judge. Hannah Arendt’s return to Kant on the distinction between moral and aesthetic judgments. Adolph Eichmann exposes the frailty of judgment. Critiques of the spectator. Lyotard’s emphasis on dissensus in the sensus communis. The scene of human rights as a scene of aesthetic conflict.
TWO Humanity from the Ruins: 1755
November 1, 1755: a beautiful and clear day . . . The Lisbon earthquake as the first international mass media event. “Truthful” versus “fantastical” representations. The sublime quaking of a worldview and the emergence of a notion of a common humanity. The quake frames later responses to atrocity. The Disasters of War. Goya’s judgment: “They do not want to.” Print pedagogy for the spectator of human rights.
THREE The Kodak on the Congo: 1904
The first use of “crimes against humanity.” King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo Free State. Early humanitarian responses. The intervention of the photograph. The phantasmagoric appeals of the Congo Reform Association. Dreaming of human rights. The first international human rights movement ends with a whimper.
FOUR Rolleiflex Witness: 1945
Before there was the idea of the Holocaust, there were the pictures. Photographic evidence becomes the standard for claims of atrocity. Lee Miller’s reports for Vogue. The Dachau Death Train: images bear the mark of this horror. Testimony visualis, or, communication without understanding. Dignity and the “abstract nakedness” of being nothing but human. The “philosophically absurd” claims of the Universal Declaration. The time of our singing: political hymns of belonging.
FIVE Genocide, Again: 1992
Genocide as “an exercise in community building.” Lemkin’s linguistic invention and the legislation of international law. Yet neither visibility nor legibility could prevent the reoccurrence of this phenomenon. Yugoslavia: the first televised genocide. The barometer rises in Rwanda. A catalogue of breakdowns. Toward an ethics of failure.
Coda
Acknowledgment Notes Index