The Properly Improper: Making Sense of Humanity through Derrida, Butler and Rosaldo

That which is proper to humans or which makes a human proper- of which hundreds have been conceptualized- consists of ethics, moral values, expression, responsibilities at the nexus of society, culture, individual differences. As these conceptualizations are closely scrutinized, the universality of a proper being begins to disintegrate, binaries emerge along with the ethical questions to which the answers are not easily found. In this paper, beginning with the religious theorization of what is a proper human, making sense of it through Kafka’s Metamorphosis and elucidating on the aspects of humans like Gaze, Animality, and Rage that puts propriety into question, ethical questions are raised which are suggestive of human ignorance towards the obvious. Abstracting from the works of Jacques Derrida, Renato Rosaldo, and Judith Butler, this paper attempts to answer the question of what is being a proper human by examining the culture, contexts, and contemporary intersectionality.