humanitarian action is always an emblem of failure”.^136 The “practical political aim”
of this thesis is to enable us, in the words of Samuel Beckett, to “fail better”, by
understanding more about how we negotiate the “politics of humanity”. The first
step, here, is to understand more about how professional humanitarians
conceptualise and make sense of human suffering, the visceral subject matter of
their endeavour. That is the topic of the next chapter. In concluding this one, I will
briefly set out how the argument will unfold over the course of the thesis.
IV Summary of the Argument
Chapter 2 begins by examining the concept of “humanitarian crisis” or
“emergency”. A crucial concern of professional humanitarians is that this concept
should not become an alibi for political failures. Yet already here, we discover a
reluctance to embrace the political dimension of professional humanitarians’ own
rejection of the suffering they encounter. The contours of this rejection are then
examined. Particular attention is paid to the rejection of cruelty, which is fleshed
out in the context of the work of liberal political philosophers such as Judith Shklar
and Richard Rorty, for whom cruelty is the worst thing we do to each other. In
examining the cruelty of those who inflict suffering, we also raise the question of
the tendency to contrast this with the innocence of those who suffer. I then
examine how the categories of humanity and inhumanity shift in relation to each
other, and focus on acts that explicitly try to dehumanise the other. Through the
analysis of this chapter, two crucial concepts emerge. The idea of “crisis of
humanity” captures the manner in which moments of rupture in the category of
common humanity lie at the heart of humanitarian concern, while in responding to
suffering, humanitarians have to negotiate, through a “politics of humanity”, the
boundary between the human and the inhuman. In doing so, they come to define
their own understanding of humanity.
136
Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 304.