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SUMMARY:Personhood\, the State\, and the International Community in the Th
 ought of Charles Malik - Andrew Arsan (Corpus Christi\; History)
DTSTART:20130529T110000Z
DTEND:20130529T130000Z
UID:TALK45131@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ruth Rushworth
DESCRIPTION:Dr Andrew Arsan (Corpus Christi\; History) presents at the CRA
 SSH Postdoctoral Research Seminar.\n\nRegistration: http://www.crassh.cam.
 ac.uk/events/2434/\n\nAbstract\n\n'He tampers with the source of life itse
 lf who tampers with freedom': Personhood\, the State\, and the Internation
 al Community in the Thought of Charles Malik \n\nThis paper seeks to contr
 ibute to a critical history of human rights and international governance t
 hrough an examination of the thought of Charles Malik\, the  Lebanese phil
 osopher appointed Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Commission
  in 1946. Malik’s writings\, it argues\, can serve as a prism through wh
 ich to appraise the ambiguities and paradoxes of post-1945 rights talk\, a
 nd to identify hitherto under-appreciated influences upon this discourse. 
 While Malik stressed the ‘pioneering’ nature of ‘the Commission’s 
 work’\, regarding human rights as the product of a new post-war era\, hi
 s own thought looked backwards. He drew\, on the one hand\, on the phenome
 nology and process philosophy of his erstwhile teachers Heidegger and A.N.
  Whitehead and\, on the other\, on a conventionally exceptionalist reading
  of Lebanon’s society and place in the world. From the former\, he deriv
 ed hissense of personhood as a dynamic process\, a struggle to achieve the
  potential immanent in all human beings and to pursue ‘truth’\, the ul
 timate purpose of existence. This led him to his insistence that rights ha
 d to be individual if they were to be at all. But this stress upon individ
 ual personhood and conscience also owed much to his sense of Lebanon’s e
 xceptional religious and cultural diversity – national traits which coul
 d only be preserved through the protection of individual rights. At the he
 art of Malik’sthought lay an irreconcilable tension\, indicative of the 
 wider paradoxes of post-war rights debates: while he wished to protect the
  person against the state’s depredations\, this concern for the individu
 al nestled within a particular vision of the national. For all that he ost
 ensibly denounced the state\, then\,  Malik could not renounce it. It was 
 this paradox\, as much as the considerations of ‘power politics’\, whi
 ch led him away from a rights regime transcending national sovereignty\, a
 nd towards international cooperation.\n\n \n\nAbout Andrew Arsan\n\nAndrew
  Arsan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of History\
 , University of Cambridge\, and Fellow and Director of Studies at Corpus C
 hristi College. A political\, intellectual\, and cultural historian of the
  Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean\, he has previously held positions 
 at Princeton University and Birkbeck\, University of London. His monograph
 \, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Af
 rica is forthcoming with Hurst and Oxford University Press. 
LOCATION:CRASSH\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge\, CB3 
 9DT
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