The work of men is not durable : history, Haiti and the rights of man

The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today', Agamben writes in foreboding tones in Homo Sacer, 'is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen' (Agamben 1998: 133). In a critique that has been as controversial as it has been influential, he declares that, today, humanitarian organisations are able to grasp human life only in the figure of 'bare life' and therefore maintain a 'secret solidarity' with the powers they purport to oppose (133-4). Agamben's claim is twofold: first, he traces a transformation in human rights discourses and in the project of humanitarianism, in which the latter becomes increasingly complicit with state power, culminating in the management of survival of today's humanitarian biopolitics. Second, he suggests that the contemporary fate of human rights discourses was prepared at the origins of modernity when rights declarations enabled the passage from a divinely ordained sovereignty to a national one, thus enmeshing life in the order of the state. This chapter will interrogate Agamben's account of rights through the lens of Haiti- a nation that has been something of a crucible for the various stages of the development of human rights.