Humanity is an Exclusionary Empire Human rights as cause and solution of the pariah problem Julia Urabayen Departamento de Filosofía, ICS, Universidad de Navarra Pamplona, España jurabayen@unav.es Jorge León Escuela de Arquitectura. Universidad San Jorge Villanueva de Gállego (Zaragoza), España jleon@usj.es Abstract— Normally, the situation referred to by the “pariah problem” is that of an individual person who, despite being guaranteed membership of a political society, has his or her rights totally or partially unrecognized. Prior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights these rights were guaranteed exclusively by one’s belonging to a sovereign state that would grant each subject recognition as a citizen. Therefore, the Declaration of 1948 was made in order to provide a solution to the problem of the pariah that was so clearly evidenced during WWII. However, despite the intentions of its authors, the real effects of this declaration on the global political-legal situation have not been what was hoped for. It has given rise to true pariah-states which are excluded from the very human rights that they are accused of violating. Keywords: Arendt, Derrida, pariah, voyous, exclusion, human rights. “The ‘alien’ is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy”[ 1 ]. I. PARIAH CITIZENS Hannah Arendt was one of the many persons who, in 20th century Europe, were torn from their homes, expelled from their countries—and indeed almost from the face of the earth—only to be later thrown into an empty space where they lacked citizenship and rights. After living through this exclusion for who she was, this brutal and absolute rejection of difference led her to reflect on the roots of this Europe which degrades the Other. In doing so, she highlighted the fact that only an experience like the radical negation of alterity permits capturing the damage that is done to the human condition when one is denied the right to live in a given place in the world, and therefore, the right to have rights[ 2 ]. [ 1 ] H. Arendt, The Origins of totalitarianism. New York: Stocken Books, 2004, p. 383. [ 2 ] Cf. A. Enegrén, La pensée politique de Hannah Arendt. Paris: PUF, 1984, pp. 22-23. Taking into account the events of history, Arendt seeks, on the one hand, to discover their origins, and on the other, to analyze the different modalities under which exclusion has occurred, as well as its political consequences. Therefore, she emphasizes that pariahs are, in principle, persons who, despite being guaranteed membership in a political society, do not have their rights recognized. On the other hand, stateless persons, who are in a more radical situation, lack even the right to have rights, since they have lost the recognition of belonging to a political space: that of their nation of origin, which they have had to leave; and that of the rest of the nations, which do not accept them. From this perspective, the work of Arendt forms part of the extensive literature that is critical of the modern project, of Western politics and of the idea that human rights can be guaranteed via solemn and abstract declarations that do not take into account the fact that in the very moment in which someone comes face to face with a human being qua human being, all these supposed human rights collapse like a house of cards[ 3 ] and give way to a space of exception that adopts different, but always inhuman, forms. In the search to understand what happened, Arendt looks to Jewish tradition, to the hidden tradition. In this study, she emphasized that the Jewish people have always been excluded from the heart of the peoples of Europe, and therefore the Jews are those who have created the idea of a peculiar human type that has played a key role in the modern world: the pariah. This human type has adopted diverse figures, which Arendt gives as having four variants: the “schlemihl” of Heine, the conscious pariah of Lazare, the suspicious man of Chaplin and the man of good will of Kafka. Nevertheless, together with these figures, which as such are universal, one can include other examples such as that of Rahel Varnhagen, the Jewish woman that sought to have their identity accepted and her place guaranteed in a society that excluded her; that of the assimilated artist or intellectual, who suddenly loses his or her world (Zweig, Brecht); and that of the stateless person, the refugee and the undocumented immigrant. In fact, the first pariah figure analyzed by Arendt was that of Rahel. This German woman represents a stage in the [ 3 ] Cf. H. Arendt, The Origins of totalitarianism, pp. 372-373.