Suffering Subjects

As Talal Asad elaborates in Chapter 4 of Formations of the Secular (2003), “Redeeming the ‘Human’ through Human Rights,” human rights discourse has long been criticized for failing to attend to the systematic and modular relations between violence and redress. Defining the ‘human’ in human rights is dependent upon its adjudication by independent states (or those states honoring signed treaties) and the remedies those states can supply. The ‘human’ of human rights cannot be separated from its practical translation in context. My comments on this chapter of Formations of the Secular focus on the politics of transnational scale and how it mediates forms of injury. Specifically, these comments unfold parts of Asad's argument through the contemporary geopolitics of concern for Middle Eastern Christians (particularly centered around the discourse of ‘Christian persecution’) and if and how it fits into the idea of human rights. The main aims of the chapter center around how, “in a secular system like human rights, responsibility is assigned for it” (ibid.: 129). Human rights are not a simple set of principles to uphold universally—a standard list one can be for or against. Instead, one must critically attend to the field of violence that makes the discourse of and need for human rights possible (or impossible) in the first place (Mahmood 2006: 8). Put another way, some forms of violence become the substance of human rights discourse and some contexts of injury disconnect human rights discourse from its frames of translation altogether.