Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
- 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
- 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
from Part II: Territorial Rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
- 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
- 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘For’, the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’
Virginia Woolf, Three GuineasOnce they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.
[…]
The trouble is that this calamity arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness, or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because there was no longer any ‘uncivilized’ spot on earth, because whether we like it or not we have really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (341, 376–7)Even as Virginia Woolf controversially declared herself detached from her country on the grounds of her sex, a cosmopolitanism that, since Kant, had dreamt of a universal humanity framed by a global understanding of rights was confronted with the calamity of the radically stateless. Barely three years after the publication of Woolf's polemic, Arthur Koestler published his memoir of his wartime internment and eventual escape to Britain, The Scum of the Earth (1941). Koestler had been in the South of France writing his classic novel on the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, Darkness at Noon (1940). When he moved to Paris he was interned as an undesirable alien.
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- Information
- The Judicial ImaginationWriting after Nuremberg, pp. 101 - 117Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011