wherein common humanity necessarily asserts itself as weightier than merely
common biology.
This is the crux of the matter when it comes to understanding what
humanitarianism is rescuing, or saving, the sense that a human being is not just a
human body and that, in consequence, we can never arrive at a satisfactory account
of humanitarian action if we work only from the perspective of bodily need. It may
seem that the rescue of human bodies is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
the rescue of a human being. But even that need not necessarily be the case.
Certainly the claims of a humanitarian perspective that consistently ignored present
bodily suffering would most likely soon ring hollow. But acts of memorialisation of
dead individuals or lost communities can quite plausibly be understood as
humanitarian acts.^15 This can function both by addressing injustices committed by
those who would erase people from history, but also by constructing a narrative
that aims to prevent future injustices. For example, the enormous body of literature
on the Holocaust does this in several ways: it aims to recover some of the detail and
complexity of the human lives that were annihilated, but also to remind us of those
acts of courage in the face of inhumanity that led to acts of rescue, or of attempted
rescue. For some, as for the Goya of The Disasters of War , horror cannot fit into any
message of hope. It simply is.^16 But the wishful, indignant call of “never again” is,
among other things, an instance of humanitarianism using the process of
memorialisation of those rescued and unrescued to obviate the need for future
rescue.^17 While it may seem that this idea of memorialisation as rescue is a story
about prevention, about rescue-in-advance, there is very much a sense that it is also
a last-ditch act of rescue which aims to save something of the humanity of those
who were not rescued in the bodily sense.
Dwelling on the intangible meanings of rescue of course takes us close to
religious discourses of salvation, which clash somewhat with the idea that
15
16 Laqueur, "Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making Of "Humanity"".
17 Francisco Goya, The Disasters of War (New York: Dover, 1967).
For an interesting analysis of the politics of “never again” see Jacob Schiff, "The Trouble
with ‘Never Again!’: Rereading Levinas for Genocide Prevention and Critical International
Theory", Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 2 (2008).