Theory & Event

Globalization, cosmopolitanism, human rights. It’s hard to imagine three more hotly contested terms that have of late come to preoccupy theoretical conversations. Indeed, we have become so engrossed with these concepts that it’s almost impossible to think of a major theorist who hasn’t felt the need to weigh in on them. A hasty catalogue of such commentators might begin with Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, K. A. Appiah, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Rancière, Simon Gikandi, Wendy Brown, and it would continue on and on. Pheng Cheah’s Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights takes these increasingly popular explanatory terms and exposes their interrelations, arguing that they collectively emerge from similar expectations about human freedom and, consequently, suffer from similar shortcomings. With a demandingly rigorous philosophical analysis, Inhuman Conditions is an important and timely contribution to these ongoing debates about our contemporary global predicament. Overall, Cheah’s argument presents something of a corrective to the majority of theorizations about globalization, which are either overly celebratory or wholly despairing, in that he seeks to embrace and to work within the limits posed by the “inhuman conditions” that he argues contaminate all social and political relations, and by extension all available approaches to social justice, in our increasingly interconnected world.

Cheah begins his argument by examining our reigning definitions of the “human.” These definitions, which stipulate the qualities of human flourishing and success, centrally motivate most arguments about whether the effects of globalization should be seen as enabling or inhibitory. While globalization discourse has commonly been theorized within the social sciences, Cheah asserts that we derive our attitudes toward globalization from the humanities. The humanities have historically posited the essence of human nature, which almost always involves questions of self-determination, dignity, and freedom. We typically believe that these qualities manifest themselves and are realized through human sociability and participation in cultural and political life. Á la Foucault, Cheah instead works with the assumption that these dominant ideas about human nature, particularly as they become normative, carry the potential to be disciplinary and constraining, despite the fact that they are ostensibly oriented toward the aim of freedom. In this sense, Cheah self-consciously interrogates the idealism of thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx, who have prioritized culture as innately oriented toward human emancipation.

Most positive assessments of globalization, particularly those arising from the social sciences, imagine globalization as gradual progress toward the advancement of freedom. According to Cheah, the two primary and most visible expressions of this understanding are cosmopolitanism and human rights. These two terms have gained contemporary relevance because they each independently promise avenues for transcending the force field of global capitalism. One of Cheah’s core undertakings in the book is to show that we have become insufficiently attentive to the ways that global capital permeates all human relations. Increasingly stratifying the global economy and, more importantly, instrumentalizing human relations, global capitalism makes up the “inhuman conditions” that Cheah seeks to call our attention to, and that represent the dark side of globalization. In opposition to the ways capitalism produces human deprivation, he heralds both cosmopolitanism and human rights as positive expressions of globalization which combat its negative tendencies. For example, human rights serve as a check on instrumentality, in that they safeguard the dignity of the individual. Moreover, according to Cheah, both human rights and cosmopolitanism derive from common philosophical precepts. They both gesture toward forms of international solidarity as the means of overcoming the exclusions of citizenship and the nation-state, categories seen increasingly to compromise human freedom. And they also both embrace “culture” as the primary vehicle for human transcendence of the objectifying conditions of capital, promising the progressive independence of the individual.

However, the expectations embedded in appeals to human rights and cosmopolitanism remain disingenuous. For Cheah, there is no outside to the force field of global capital. Culture, too, is predetermined by and implicated within its circuits of exchange, and thus the instrumentalization of human life...