2024
The Perplexities of the Rights of Nature
by Lindsay Stern
Abstract:
This paper examines the potential implications of Hannah Arendt’s critique of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) for contemporary environmental rights discourse. Reflecting first on canonical, but refreshingly strange early modern European formulations of “personhood,” the paper suggests that advocacy projects on behalf of nonhuman animals and environments court the same paradoxes Arendt identified. In that respect, the paper proposes that Arendt’s critique of human rights is less anthropocentric than prominent strains of its reception suggest. Considering Arendt’s critique against her discussion of “earth alienation” in The Human Condition (1958), the paper then frames Arendt’s account of legal personhood as an attempt to “speak from nowhere.” It concludes by tracing the first stirrings of Arendt’s development of the notion of this “nowhere” to an early, unpublished poem.
Keywords: Human rights, environmental discourse, Anthropocene, Hannah Arendt, legal personhood
About the author:
Lindsay O’Connor Stern is a writer and scholar of comparative literature. She is the author of two novellas including Town of Shadows (Scrambler Books 2012), which was adapted into a dance. Her novel The Study of Animal Languages (Viking/Penguin Random House, 2019/2020), an Amazon Editors’ pick, won a Lois Kahn Wallace Award and the Taylor-Chehak prize in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her essay, “In Praise of Socks: the ‘Poetic’ in Wittgenstein” won the 2023 Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History. Another essay, “The Divide,” was the cover story of Smithsonian Magazine’s July/August 2020 issue and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Amy Award, a Watson Fellowship, and the Austin Sarat Prize from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center.