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The Legitimacy of Humanitarian Actions
and their Media Representation: The Case of France
Luc Boltanski — Écoles des Hautes Études en Science Sociales — Paris
The question of humanitarian action appeared in
France in the public arena at the beginning of the
1990s, almost twenty years after the creation of
`Médecins sans frontières' by Bernard Kouchner
and Xavier Emmanuelli. The humanitarian debate
in France developed in a political context marked
by two essential features: on the one hand, the
bureaucratization of humanitarian actions with its
own secretary of state, an office occupied by
Bernard Kouchner between 1988 and 1993 and, on
the other hand, the war in ex-Yugoslavia, first in
Croatia, then in Bosnia.
One can distinguish two partly overlapping
phases in the course of the previous ten years:
initially there was a phase of media enthusiasm for
humanitarian actions, and particularly for the figure
of Bernard Kouchner, but this gradually gave way
to a wave of intense criticism in the major Paris
newspapers and journals such as Le Monde,
Libération, and the journals Le débat and Esprit.
We should note that this criticism is formulated
primarily by intellectuals, most of whom tend more
towards left-wing views. But it is also voiced, in a
somewhat paradoxical fashion, by certain major
figures in the field of humanitarian action, such as
Rony Brauman, former chairman of `Médecins sans
frontières'1. Many of these internal critics continue
pursuing their activities within humanitarian
organizations while at the same time questioning
the forms or results of humanitarian action. In the
many texts he published at the end of the 1980s and
the beginning of the 1990s, Bernard Kouchner
himself, while defending humanitarian action, took
these criticisms into account and recognized their
validity by incorporating them into his discourse of
justification. These criticisms appear to reach a
culmination in 1993-94, after which the debate
started to wind down and was replaced by others,
particularly the social question. One could argue,
however, that criticism won out over praise, at least
in intellectual circles: from 1995 until today,
humanitarian action is invoked mainly in order to
criticize it.
Criticisms of Humanitarian Action
and their Presentation in the Media
It seems to me that a distinction must be drawn
between two main types of criticism directed to
humanitarian action. In the first place, criticisms
bearing on the action itself, on what the activists
and members of NGOs are doing on the ground. It
seems that criticisms of this sort are rather infrequent before the major crises that took place in late
1989 — the war in Bosnia, Somalia — and perhaps
especially before the massacres in Rwanda in 1994.
Until then, for instance during the war in
Afghanistan, action carried out by humanitarian
workers is not criticized as such, but is considered
to be courageous and generous. Their actions are
seen as putting into practice on a planetary scale the
right, claimed by intellectuals during the Dreyfus
affair, to intervene in political matters that do not
directly concern them in the name of principles of
universal morality. Even in the case of the major
crises after 1989, what is being criticized is not so
much what the humanitarian workers are doing day
after day on the ground, but the linkage of their
actions with motives drawn from international
politics. They are more an object of criticism
insofar as they are `manipulated' by forces that
transcend them than because of their actions
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 3
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themselves. The detrimental role they are
sometimes accused of playing is not directly
imputed to their actions, but rather to their being
manipulated by others.
One should be able to classify these criticisms
as a function of the kind of forces that are said to
`manipulate' humanitarian actions. This might refer
to the states in which the humanitarian workers
intervene. So, for example, in the case of the
famine in Ethiopia, there was criticism of the
humanitarian aid for having been `manipulated' by
the Ethiopian government. It could just as easily
refer to the various forces working against each
other on the ground, particularly to the fact that
deductions are imposed on humanitarian aid and
this is accused of sustaining the war, as was the
case with the intervention in Somalia.
The principal targets of criticism, however, are
Western countries — the countries of Europe and
especially the US. They have been the object of
accusations from two different, even opposing,
directions. The first type of accusation, often heard
during the war in Bosnia, consisted of criticizing
these states by charging them with placing the
emphasis on humanitarian action in order to mask
their own political and military inaction. This
charge was particularly virulent in France at the
beginning of the 1990s because of the ambiguous
position occupied by none other than Gérard
Kouchner, both a symbol of humanitarian action
and a member of a government that was deaf to the
urgent demands that it intervene politically and
even militarily. In this case, humanitarian action
was criticized as an excuse for not doing something
politically.
The second type of accusation, one that was
expressed in a poignant way during the crisis in
Kosovo, consists of charging the countries of the
West, and primarily the US, with carrying out
directly political, even imperialistic actions under
the cover of humanitarian action. This is the inverse
of the preceding type of accusation: here,
humanitarian action is said to be merely a facade
for dissimulating political actions. In France, this
criticism has mainly been voiced by those who,
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since quite recently, call themselves “sovereigntists”. Opposed to the US and, for many among
them, to European integration, they defend the right
of states to complete sovereignty, seeing the threat
of imperialism in humanitarian interventions. For
this reason, such a criticism might come from the
left, the extreme left, as well as from the right or the
extreme right.
Underlying these criticisms, we find in both
cases an opposition between humanitarian action —
which is assigned a negative value — and political
action — thought to be positive. How, then, should
we understand the term “politics” in this
argumentation? It seems to me that it must be taken
in a similar sense to that used by Schmitt: a
sovereign action that rests on the opposition
between friends and enemies is a political, hence a
valid action. Most of the time, this distinction rests
on the specific interests of a sovereign nation or a
people. On the other hand, what is being challenged
is the validity and even the possibility of action
which would rest on moral motives detached from
interests or on universalist claims. This criticism is
historicist and leans towards nihilism: it denies the
existence of legitimate motives for action capable
of surpassing the interests of a nation-state or a
people in a specific historical situation. It is
logically accompanied by a critique of human
rights of the sort that can emanate, since the French
revolution, both from the conservative right and
from the extreme Marxist left2. On this view, the
reference to universal morality and human rights
only serves to dissimulate certain interests: those of
the liberal bourgeoisie, those of the imperialist
states, etc.
I am going to deal fairly rapidly with the
criticisms of humanitarian action in the strict sense
in order to linger a bit longer over a second group
of criticisms whose target is not humanitarian
action as such, but rather its representation —
particularly its representation in the media. Criticisms of this type are often mixed up with those of
the first type. When humanitarian action is accused
of being an alibi to cover up the absence of political
action or of being a moralizing mask to cover up an
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 4
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imperialistic politics, the accent is placed on the
effects that media representation can have on
democracy and on public opinion.
But there is more to it than this. Criticisms of
the mediatization of humanitarian action are not
reducible to the classical charge of propagandamongering nor are they simply criticisms of the
protagonists acting as if they were movie stars by
seeking to appear in the media or seeking media
notoriety — though such accusations were often
expressed in France, particularly at the beginning of
the 1990s. At that time, it was once again Bernard
Kouchner who found himself at the centre of the
controversy, for instance when the media portrayed
him disembarking on the beach in Somalia
shouldering a bag of rice. Criticisms directed to the
mediatization of humanitarian action are mainly
concerned with the question of the representation of
human suffering that necessarily accompanies the
representation of humanitarian action: how is it
possible to represent humanitarian action with a
justificatory aim without at the same time
representing the suffering of those to whom the
action is directed?
In criticisms of this sort, the accusation is not so
much directed against the actors involved but
against the spectators of the action. On this view,
the representation of the suffering that goes together with a portrayal of humanitarian action,
especially on television, is intrinsically bad because
it transforms the spectator into a voyeur,
stimulating his perverse desire to take pleasure in
the suffering of others or, at best, provoking
feelings of shame for not being able to assuage the
suffering that is being shown.
The proliferation of shows that present real
situations in which human beings suffer is often
considered to be a new phenomenon linked primarily to the development of television but also to
a new form of state politics that, supported by the
spectacle, plays on the emotions of its citizens and
viewers. This theme has been developed
specifically by Régis Debray in his book L'État
séducteur3.
One can look at things differently, however, and
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place the emphasis on the traditional nature of this
critique as it has often been formulated in the
course of history. The critique of the representation
of suffering is, as everyone knows, a very old
theme, one which lies at the origin of reflection
about the theatre — in particular reflection about
tragedy and the effect of tragedy as catharsis. To be
more explicit, it occupied the reflection of the
Church Fathers on theatre, as can be seen for
instance in Tertullian's writings against spectacles4.
It is possible, however, that this critique of the
representation of suffering took on a new meaning
and assumed its modern form — the form under
which we still recognize it today — when, in the
second half of the eighteenth century, suffering and
the pity it inspires became political arguments of
the greatest importance. This is the hypothesis that I
would like now to examine.
The Politics of Pity
In order to interpret the current, often obscure
debate about the representation of suffering in the
media and in politics, we need to take a historical
view and reconstitute the context in which this
debate is inscribed. It seems to me that the most
relevant context is that posited by Hannah Arendt
in her Essay on Revolution5. In the chapter devoted
to `the social question', Arendt develops the idea
that the French Revolution emphasized not so much
the question of liberty but a politics of pity, one
which had been unfolding since the mid-eighteenth
century, especially in the work of Rousseau. If we
follow Arendt, we can point to certain typical
features that accompany this introduction of pity as
a central political argument. There is, first of all, the
distinction between those who suffer and those who
do not, between the unfortunate and the happy.
There is also the emphasis placed on sight, on the
gaze, on the spectacle of human beings suffering, a
suffering where it would be indecent to ask whether
or not it is justified. Finally, there is the insistent
demand for action to be taken, and its urgent character.
How can we say that this new sensibility to
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 5
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suffering is inscribed in a political framework
rather than in the traditional framework of charitable institutions? Arendt explains by opposing
compassion to pity. Within the register of compassion, the action is carried out in the presence of
the suffering, locally and without being accompanied by a representation that aims at generality.
What falls under our gaze is also within our reach,
so the normal response to the feeling of compassion
is immediate local action for the benefit of the one
who suffers (as we see in the parable of the Good
Samaritan). In compassion, the proximity of what
we see to our action leaves little room for emotions,
discourse or pathos.
It is not the same in the case of pity, which
characterizes situations where the spectator is a
happy person, not immediately concerned with, and
at a distance from the one who suffers. This
distance makes reference to a form of generality
that could be called political. The unfortunate
sufferers are at a distance; they cannot be the object
of an immediate action. What falls under our gaze,
or can at least be the object of mediated knowledge,
is not within our reach. The sufferings of these
people must be collected and represented, must
become the object of a pathos, so as to make more
fortunate people sensitive to the problem and to
gather them around a cause. In the case of pity, the
question of suffering is under political tension
because it gathers people together and unites them
around a cause. Such a gathering function must
occur in such a way that situations which are local
in space and time can acquire a general significance
in being brought together and placed in series: it is
the same suffering, resulting from similar causes,
that occurs in this particular case — e.g., a beggar
on the streets of Paris — and in this other case far
away — e.g., a widow in a remote village in the
centre of France.
Following Louis Dumont, I take politics in this
case to be the operation of generalization which
allows a move from the local to the global, and vice
versa, such that disparate individuals are gathered
together around common causes, whether in order
to involve them in an action or to seek their
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approval and support for an action carried out in
their name.
The Question of the Spectator
How can this incorporation of pity into politics be
carried out? Or to put it another way, how can we
give form to the representation of suffering at a
distance, so that it can establish a political
connection? The answer to this question bears on
the relationship between representation and action.
It is subordinate to the following question: under
what conditions can the sight of suffering be
legitimate? The obvious answer is that it can be
legitimate when it leads to something being done to
lessen or stop altogether the suffering being
witnessed. The sight of suffering is only legitimate
when it leads to action. Otherwise, one could easily
be accused of perversity if it is an exhibition of
suffering for its own sake. But then how can a
person who views suffering take action when there
is no possibility of intervening directly? In a sense
that can be quite precisely defined as political, a
spectator can become indignant and attempt to
share this indignation with others in such a way as
to establish a political cause around this indignation, a movement capable of inciting direct action
in those who have the power to act at a distance,
i.e., governments. So the form of action allowing
the spectator to suffering at a distance to avoid
perversity is, in the first place, language.
What form should this language adopt for it to
be judged acceptable and legitimate? It must have a
very specific form in the sense that it should allow
for two different operations in one and the same
enunciation. The first is to transmit to others what
has been seen in the register of an objective report,
“demodalized” as the linguists say, valid in itself
and for everyone. But this form is not enough when
speaking about human suffering. What quickly
happens is that the concern for objectivity leads to
an objectification of the suffering, with those who
suffer being treated as objects. Imagine the
discomfort that would be produced by the
description of a hanging, for instance, in perfectly
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 6
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cold, neutral and objective terms, the same way an
engineer would describe a building's structure in
order to facilitate its reproduction. The spectator to
suffering must, therefore, immerse this discourse
aiming at objectivity in another discourse capable
of transmitting his own emotions and
communicating the way in which he was personally
affected by the sight of suffering.
A report of suffering with a political aim must
be expressed in a discourse which allows individuals to transmit among themselves a representation
of suffering — thus linking them together through a
shared common representation — in statements
constructed so as to incorporate, at the same time,
the object of representation, i.e., the sufferings of
the unfortunate, as well as the feelings of pity,
indignation, revulsion, etc. felt by the one who is
exposed to this representation. This introduces a
tension between two demands: that of an
objectivity without perspective, as Loraine Daston
says in another context6, and that of exhibiting
one's concern by showing emotion and sentiment.
The Topics of Pity
There are only a limited number of legitimate ways
to integrate into a single statement a description of
suffering that claims to be objective and the
feelings or emotions that it evokes. In order to
describe these forms of emotional and political
engagement between the parties involved in suffering at a distance, I would like to rehabilitate the
old term topic — a word which has the advantage of
emphasizing the conventional character of these
engagements in the face of suffering. Indeed, the
conventions on which these topics rest have, like
literary or narrative conventions, a historical
character.
I shall distinguish three topics: a topic of
denunciation and a topic of sentiment, corresponding respectively to indignation and emotionality, as well as a third topic of the aesthetic
order, constituted as a critique of the two preceding
topics and in reaction to them. For a description of
these topics, I will rely mainly on literary forms
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such as the pamphlet or the novel. Such forms are
particularly appropriate for the description of
emotional states that are not normally reflected in
legal, economic or political documents.
The Impartial Spectator
In addressing the first two topics, that of denunciation and that of sentiment, I will make a detour by
way of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
It is in this work, published in 1759, as well as in
the writings of Rousseau, that the conceptual
structure of a politics of pity appears most sharply.
In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the metaphor of
a disinterested spectator observing a suffering
person is used in a very rigorous and systematic
way to establish a moral theory which is also
presented as empirical social psychology and as
political philosophy, since it clears the way for the
possibility of a harmonious and peaceful
relationship between human beings in society.
Adam Smith, who was keenly interested in
astronomy, saw it as his project to transfer to the
treatment of moral problems the method utilized by
Newton in the field of natural philosophy, with the
same demands of simplicity and familiarity, i.e., by
making an entire mechanics rest on a single
principle. In Smith's system, the equivalent of
universal gravitation is the relationship between an
unfortunate sufferer and a spectator who observes
without being directly involved in the suffering.
Smith, who poses the political problem of the
convergence of judgements, rejects the idea of a
kind of intuitionist communion or empathy between the spectator and the sufferer. The spectator
cannot really feel what the sufferer feels; he cannot
put himself in the other's place. But Smith endows
his characters with a capacity that plays a
fundamental role in his entire system: imagination.
A man, he claims, cannot feel what a woman in
labour feels, but he can gain access to it by way of
imagination. The suffering that he imagines will be
less intense than the suffering felt by the woman.
The suffering woman in a sense anticipates this loss
due to the intervention of the imagination and
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 7
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presents her pain in a less vivid way than she
actually feels it, in such a way that a balance can be
established — which Smith calls a sympathetic
equilibrium — between the spectator's sentiments
and the sentiments of the one who is suffering. A
sympathetic equilibrium is reached when there is an
agreement between the spectator's imaginative
offerings and the sufferer's demands for attention or
pity. According to Smith, this mechanism
introduces an element of moderation in society
since the sufferer — who might be each one of us at
certain moments — places voluntary limits on the
manifestations of his suffering.
Yet the conceptual apparatus that Smith uses to
establish the natural laws of morality includes not
only a sufferer and a spectator who, because he is
endowed with this faculty called imagination, can
be receptive to suffering. To follow his
demonstration, two other actors must be introduced: on the one hand, an ideal inner spectator
and, on the other hand, someone whose actions
have a direct influence on the sufferer and who, for
this reason, I will designate by the term agent.
Alongside the empirical or rather embodied
spectator (`the man within the breast'), Smith places
an impartial spectator who represents not the
opinions of others but the point of view of a
spectator completely detached from every communal tie. This is an ideal, internalized spectator,
one who introduces an element of reflexivity into
the system and who facilitates coordination among
various different spectators confronted with the
same suffering. The desire to gain the other's
approval (a central feature of human nature in
Smith's anthropology) or, if you prefer, to coincide
with the other, can only be fulfilled by adopting the
impartial spectator's point of view on one's own self
and one's own feelings, without any particular
perspective or particular interest. To the extent that
everyone falls under the gaze of this impartial
internalized spectator, there can be a coordination
among the different ways of being concerned and
the different modes of emotional involvement.
On the other hand, Adam Smith introduces into
his scheme what I have called the agent because his
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actions have a direct effect on the fate of the
sufferer. In the second part of the Theory of Moral
Sentiments, where the “sentiment of the merit or
demerit of our actions” is analyzed, Smith
complicates the presentation of sympathy by
demonstrating that it is a “composite sentiment”.
For this, he must include in his description an
“active” figure: “the person who acts”. Two cases
are examined, corresponding to merit and demerit.
Smith imagines a scene where the one who suffers
is placed, first of all, next to a beneficent person
who helps the sufferer and for which the sufferer
displays gratitude; then he is placed next to a mean
person who is the cause of the victim's suffering
and for which the sufferer feels resentment. In this
way, we are presented with a benefactor and an
offender.
When the agent is a benefactor, the spectator's
sentiments will be a composite of direct sympathy
for the agent and indirect sympathy with the
sufferer's gratitude. But if the agent is an offender
or a persecutor, the spectator's sentiments will be
composed of direct antipathy regarding the agent
and “indirect sympathy with the resentment of the
sufferer”.
The fact that the sufferer is presented in a
relationship with a persecutor or with a benefactor
also introduces two different commitment
proposals, drawing on different emotional resources: in the first case, a sentiment of indignation
is invoked; in the second, a sentiment that one
could call fellow-feeling. These two commitment
proposals, at the same time emotional and political,
are expressed in different stylistic or enunciative
registers when confronted with the spectacle of
suffering. It is precisely these different registers that
I have called topics: the topic of denunciation and
the topic of sentiment. These topics are formed and
transmitted in distinct literary genres capable of
framing a wide variety of cases, situations, histories
and stereotypes in such a way as to form and
nourish the imagination of empirical spectators
who, faced with new suffering, can re-apply these
schemes which have fed their imaginations. I would
like now to briefly present these two topics which
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were constituted in the second half of the 18th
century and which we still interiorize today.
The Topic of Denunciation
Indignation clearly has its source in pity. In the
absence of pity for the sufferer, there would be no
reason to be indignant about his suffering.
Indignation breeds anger and, if the persons are
standing face-to-face, it can lead to violence. But
when the one who suffers and the one who observes are at a distance, so that the spectator cannot
act directly, this violence is condemned to occur in
language. In that case, the speech act that manifests
this violence is an accusation.
In a commitment proposal formulated within the
topic of denunciation, the spectator to suffering
tends to turn away from the victim and concentrate
more on the persecutor who must be identified. The
identification of the persecutor can be a matter of
course, as is the case when, for instance, someone
shows you a photograph of a soldier mistreating a
child7. But in the majority of cases, the persecutor
is not on the scene and must be selected from
various possible candidates.
On the other hand, once the persecutor is
identified and exposed to public condemnation, the
accuser can seek to exonerate himself of the
violence constituted by accusation. For this reason,
denunciation tends to find a place in a structure of
controversy. Encountering resistance, the accuser
cannot stop at invective; he must find a basis for his
position, he must argue. The violence of accusation
must be justified by means of proofs, which can
always be contested in turn. This process taking
place in the public arena is what we call an affair.
The model was laid down by Voltaire in the course
of two affairs in which he intervened: the affair of
the knight la Barre, accused of blasphemy, and the
Callas affair, in which a father was accused of
killing his own son for religious reasons. The
archetypically social character of both of these
affairs was recently brought to light by the fine
work of Elisabeth Claverie8. In France, the notion
of the affair found its most typical example and, in
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a sense, its institutionalization with the Dreyfus
Affair at the end of the 19th century.
At the heart of the notion of the affair, we can
clearly see Smith's impartial spectator. Indeed, this
kind of engagement in the suffering of a victim,
which takes the form of indignation and accusation,
is conceived in opposition to another, more
traditional form of indignation that one might call
unanimous indignation, manifest in another notion,
that of the scandal. In cases of scandal and
unanimous indignation, there is nothing impartial
about the spectator. The requirement of detachment
from all interests and community ties is absent.
With a scandal, one is indignant as a member of a
community, out of community solidarity, and one
accuses usually a stranger or deviant of having
violated the community's norms. Such indignation
can be designated as `unanimous' because the
community reacts as one against the supposed
troublemaker, who is accused and then ostracized
or punished.
The most specific feature of the affair is that it is
formed in opposition to this unanimous indignation.
In a sense, it expresses a second-level indignation,
invested in the defence of an individual who is
already a victim precisely in the sense that he is the
object of a communal indignation and accusation.
The denouncer turns against his own community,
thus exhibiting impartiality and detachment, and
rallies to the defence of this unjustly accused victim
by accusing his accusers. For instance, in the case
of the knight La Barre — and the same remarks
could be made about the Dreyfus Affair — the
victim is the object of unanimous indignation on
the part of the entire community. His defender —
Voltaire in the first case, Zola in the second —
presents himself as one man alone, disinterested, in
disagreement with the others, who undertakes to
defend the unjustly accused victim by turning the
accusation against the accusers. In France, it should
be noted, this is closely linked with a left-wing
political position. The most typical form of
expression in which this topic is constructed and
transmitted is the pamphlet, with its characteristic
mix of invective or irony and a minute and detailed
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 9
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use of proofs to describe the victim's suffering and
reinforce the accusation.
The Topic of Sentiment
I shall now examine the second possibility available to the spectator of suffering at a distance:
instead of sympathizing with the resentment that
the victim harbours for the persecutor — which
gave rise to indignation, denunciation and accusation — the spectator follows the other path traced
out by Adam Smith and sympathizes with the
feelings of gratitude that the benefactor's intervention inspires in the victim. In this case, it is also
pity for the other's suffering that lies at the source
of the spectator's commitment, but pity in the form
of compassion. Obviously the spectator's
commitment has a greater chance of being oriented
in this direction when the commitment proposal
that is made highlights the presence of a benefactor,
as was the case recently with the media
presentation of humanitarian action. Yet it should
be pointed out that it is never a matter of a strict
determinism. The media spectator is not passive. As
studies on reception have shown9, the spectator
interprets the messages and the scenes that are
presented, and can always reject the commitment
proposal that is made. But then it falls to him to
show that this proposal is incomplete or false.
Let us now examine the main features of this
second topic.
a) The emotion released is not directed towards
anger, as in the previous case, but towards a
demand for urgency: some action must be taken to
help the victim. If it cannot be fulfilled in an action,
this sense of urgency has to be demonstrated in
speech and in gestures characterized by rapidity of
execution, as if one were prepared to leap to the
victim's aid.
b) Because it does not insist on accusations, the
topic of sentiment is not involved in the logic of a
trial: it is not constrained to cite a system of proofs
or to take offended justice as its principal reference.
The topic of sentiment adheres more to a
metaphysics of interiority than to a metaphysics of
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justice. In a metaphysics of interiority, the moment
that emotion rises out of a person's interior is the
moment of truth. The truth then takes the form of a
manifestation of the interior in the exterior, through
bodily modes of expression. This is why emotion is
considered to be authentic when it is nonintentional. Similarly, for the commitment proposal
to be judged authentic, instead of being criticized as
`bought' or `fabricated', it cannot make use of
intentional means that are too heavy, too obvious,
explicitly designed to provoke this emotion: in
order to be valid, the emotion must be spontaneous.
Today, one can find numerous examples of this
critique: when the `sensational' character of the
media is denounced, i.e., the attempt to deliberately
arouse emotion when portraying suffering.
c) Whereas the expressive resources of the topic
of denunciation were put to use in the literary genre
of the pamphlet — particularly in the pamphlets and
lampoons of Voltaire — the resources required by
the topic of sentiment are constituted and
transmitted in the rhetoric of the novel and, more
specifically, in the writings of Rousseau. How is
the spectator involved with sentiment to give free
rein to his feelings and communicate them in public
language? By mixing with his report that describes
the victim's suffering — and that, directed towards
the external world, can be called a report of
exteriority — another report, one that is a report on
interiority, in the sense that it is devoted to inner
life and aims to reflect what is contained in the
heart of the reporter, the states through which his
heart passes (sadness, fellow-feeling, hope, joy,
etc.) or the events that affect it.
The two topics just outlined have determined
the way in which an external spectator — one not
directly involved — can relate to the suffering of
another since their introduction at the end of the
18th century and the first half of the 19th century.
But they have also been the object of criticism for
almost the same length of time, making them
somewhat suspicious. I will now present the broad
outlines of these criticisms, and I will try to show
how their radicalization in recent years has led to a
crisis of pity with significant repercussions for the
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 10
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legitimacy of humanitarian action insofar as it is
associated with representation in the media.
The Critique of Denunciation
Two main criticisms have been directed to the
expressive forms concerning the topic of denunciation.
a) The first questions denunciation at a distance
inasmuch as it might be an illusory substitute for
present action. Denunciation, on this view, is not a
real engagement. It is merely an engagement in
words — a `verbal' engagement — to appease the
spectator's scruples without doing anything about
the victim's suffering. The only way to respond to
this criticism is to point out that verbal
denunciation comes at a price for the one who
expresses it, as is clearly seen in totalitarian
regimes. But in a democracy, it is very difficult to
counter this criticism.
b) The second criticism, historically the more
important one, casts doubt on the impartiality of the
denunciation by attempting to show that, far from
being disinterested, the spectator takes the side of
someone to whom he is connected by secret ties
(e.g., the denouncer and the victim he defends are
both Jews, homosexuals, etc.). Consequently, the
denouncer is himself accused of satisfying a desire
for revenge. He is accused of harbouring a passion
for accusation. Under the guise of fighting against
suffering, denunciation in fact only multiplies and
distributes it among all members of society since it
creates further suffering and further victims by the
accusations that accompany it.
This criticism was a central theme in the
counter-Revolution. It lay at the heart of the
arguments invoked against the sans-culottes and,
even more, against Saint-Just and Robespierre,
whose discourse was, for Hannah Arendt, the most
striking example of the political use of pity, with its
references to `the people' assimilated to `the
victims', to “the imperious force that attracts us to
the weak”, to the “capacity for suffering with the
immense group of the poor”, etc. One only has to
think of the portrait of “Saint Robespierre” painted
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by Chateaubriand in Les mémoires d'outre-tombe:
“this executioner who speaks with tenderness of
God, of misfortune, tyranny, gallows — so as to
persuade people that he only kills the guilty, and
then by an effect of virtue”.
One response to this criticism has been to move
from a personal accusation to a systemic
accusation, directed not at persons but at anonymous systems. This generalization also has the
advantage of being able to extend the causal chains
necessary for connecting the suffering of a victim
in a specific situation with a far-off persecutor who
has done no personal harm to the victim, as is the
case for instance when one establishes a causal
relationship between a starving child in a slum and
the transactions carried out by a Wall Street trader.
The Critique of Sentiment
Criticism of sentiment has taken another path. It
rests on two main arguments.
a) Firstly, on the fact that the description of the
spectator's feelings — what I have called here his
relationship with interiority — easily tends to
overshadow the description of the victim's suffering
— the relationship with exteriority. It is almost as if
we no longer know anything about the victim, who
fades into the background, but we know everything
about the feelings the victim provokes in the
spectator. What was originally presented as
disinterested attention, directed toward the other, is
now denounced as attention to oneself, interest in
oneself and one's own feelings: a kind of
complacency.
b) Secondly, in the feelings that surround the
formation of the topic of sentiment, the moment of
emotion when confronted with the other's suffering
is the very moment when one's humanity and most
profound goodness is revealed. The feelings
aroused by the other's suffering can thus lead to a
deliberate search for the spectacle of suffering, not
in order to reduce it but to arrive at that precious
moment of emotion and happiness that, according
to this logic, it incites. As Mrs. Riccoboni wrote to
the actor Garrick in 1769, “one would willingly
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 11
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make people suffer just for the pleasure of pitying
them”. It was also in this same period that Sade's
ironic figure of the “lover of suffering” made its
appearance.
The Aesthetic Topic
One could show that the development of these two
critiques contributed to the formation, around the
middle of the 19th century, of a third topic of
suffering, one which I will call the aesthetic. This
topic finds perhaps its first formulation in
Baudelaire, specifically in his intimate writings and
his writings on art. A third position is outlined in
addition to that of the persecutor or the benefactor:
that of the artist capable of showing how the
victim's suffering possesses something sublime.
The spectator's sympathy can then be described as a
movement of sympathy with the one who suffers
insofar as he is being considered by an artist
capable of finding the beauty in the ugliness, the
sublime in the horror and, in so doing, to give rise
to a kind of morose meditation on the human
condition. One could provide numerous examples
of this topic nowadays, for instance in the photos
taken by Salgado during the famine in Ethiopia.
The Current Crisis of Pity
To conclude, I would like to put forward the
following argument. The politics of pity are not
some relic of the 18th century that would be foreign
to the contemporary world. Modern democratic
societies are immersed in this form of politics. It is
today, to an extent unequalled in the past, that
arguments from pity for the victims or for the
sufferers are utilized mainly as political arguments
to justify and legitimate government actions,
whether
domestic
decisions
or
foreign
interventions. Indeed, this extreme sensitivity of
public opinion to pity can explain the popularity of
humanitarian action during the 1980s and even the
1990s. As many polls have shown, humanitarian
aid workers are still regarded as the last heroes of
our time by a large part of the public.
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And yet, political actions inspired by pity have
never before come in for so much criticism, and
this makes their legitimacy uncertain. I would like
to try and show that this loss of legitimacy is partly
the result of a de-legitimation of the topics we have
just examined, in particular the topic of
denunciation and the topic of sentiment. The
combination of this reinforcement of pity as a
political argument with the de-legitimation of the
topics that frame the relationship to suffering at a
distance has led to what can certainly be called a
crisis of pity, marked by very rapid cycles of
adherence and suspicion, engagement and deception, a bit like the cycles of involvement in public
life and retreat into private life that Albert
Hirschman analyzed10, though with a more rapid
rhythm. I would now like to examine why it is so
difficult nowadays to become indignant and to
make accusations or, in another sense, to become
emotional and feel sympathy — or at least to
believe for any length of time, without falling into
uncertainty, in the validity of one's own indignation
or one's own sympathy.
First Uncertainty:
Who are the Victims that Matter?
The first uncertainty bears on an element that plays
a very important role in relation to a politics of pity:
the selection of the victims who matter and —
secondarily — the selection of the true persecutors,
for the topic of denunciation, and the identification
of the authentic benefactors for the topic of
sentiment. This uncertainty is a result, in the first
place, of the intense criticisms which had the effect
of unmasking, underneath each of the positions
adopted in the face of suffering, a hidden mode of
accusation and a hidden mode of exclusion in
opposition to their claims to universality and to the
good. This critical unmasking has accompanied the
political use of the different topics and, in
particular, their immersion in a space that is
polarized along the lines of the opposition between
the left and the right. Each of the topics has been
associated with a different way of selecting and
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 12
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retaining the victims that really matter from out of
the entire pool of victims in the world — which is
to say the victims for whom aid is appropriate.
This is a very significant conflict since the
central problem that a politics of pity must address
is the problem of the excess of victims. There are
too many of them, not just in the order of action,
which requires the construction of a hierarchy and a
setting of priorities, but also in the order of representation. The space of the media is not unlimited
and cannot be entirely devoted to the exposition of
suffering.
In the case of the topic of denunciation identified on the left, the critique consisted not only in
unmasking the partisan accusation underlying the
impartial defence of a victim, but also in unmasking the partiality in the choice of victims. Far from
being available to any suffering, denunciation is
accused of having a preference for victims who
protest, who make claims, or even who invent false
persecutions in order to be able, in good
conscience, to accuse and persecute innocent
people.
In the case of the topic of sentiment, an inverse
and symmetric accusation has emanated from the
left. The positions adopted have been accused of
partiality in the sense that they exhibit a preference
for a particular category of victim: those who make
no accusations themselves and who are already,
before any benefactor, oriented towards gratitude.
According to this criticism, the victims selected by
the topic of sentiment are the “deserving poor”. By
thus excluding the victims who protest, the
exploiters can don the mask of the benefactor.
Second Uncertainty:
The Denunciation Accused
The second uncertainty specifically concerns the
topic of denunciation. Why is it so difficult today
— more difficult than in the 60s or 70s — to accept
the commitment proposals formulated in a topic of
denunciation? It is clearly not because we have lost
our capacity for indignation. It seems rather that
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this capacity is still present, but has become more
and more uncertain, difficult to orient, channel and
fix on a precise object. This touches, once again, on
the problem of the selection of victims and the
selection of their persecutors. Uncertainty regarding
the identity of the victims and their offenders is
largely the result of the crisis of the left that
accompanied the collapse of the communist
countries and the loss of Marxism's credibility.
The moment of Marxism in France — from
1950 to 1970 — was the supreme moment of
denunciation. During these years, Marxism constituted a vast system of accusation allowing a
selection of victims and persecutors. In the 1950s,
for example, Marxism was able to establish long
chains and systems of opposition and homology
between states (USA vs. USSR), classes (bourgeois
vs. proletariat), etc. This even went to the extreme
of singular situations: this or that worker or militant
treated unjustly, with the persecutor equally
identified in a singular manner as this or that boss
or government official. And at any moment, the
entire system of pre-established chains could be
mobilized to fill the system with places in a
particular situation (this was referred to, at the time,
as “determining the historical meaning of the
situation”).
One could sustain the hypothesis that the
attachment to communism, and the blindness to the
monstrosities committed by Stalinism, were due, at
least in part, to the facilities procured by this
system of accusation. How can one open one's eyes
to the Stalinist terror without at the same time
casting serious doubt on the identity of those who
occupy the place of victim and persecutor in
Western capitalist societies? As Merleau-Ponty
wrote in 195011, without the support of Marxism,
how can we avoid falling into the “pragmatism” of
“American intellectuals” for whom “the facts of
exploitation around the world only pose dispersed
problems, which must be examined and resolved
one by one. They no longer have an idea of
politics”.
The fall of communism and the dissolution of
Marxism have given rise to an enormous prolifer-
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 13
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ation of sufferers, among whom it is no longer
possible to make a choice, since each one might
occupy, in an unstable way, the place of victim,
persecutor or benefactor. This person suffers; he is
a victim. But then this other person must be
responsible for his suffering, and this other provides aid. But it could be otherwise. One could also
provide miserable representations of the persecutor.
And doesn't the benefactor actually create the
suffering he claims to be helping? And the
unmasker — isn't he also motivated by his own
interests in using the suffering of others to highlight
his ability to represent suffering in a novel way? As
for the victim — try and find out if, behind the
suffering, there might not lurk a violence even
worse than the one he currently seems to be
subjected to.
Third Uncertainty:
Suspicion Cast on Sentiment
The third uncertainty concerns the topic of sentiment. This topic has contributed to casting suspicion on the position of the benefactor and on those
who get emotional about their good deeds. We
have encountered this suspicion practically from
the very birth of the topic of sentiment, but
psychoanalysis and what Paul Ricoeur calls the
“hermeneutics of suspicion”12 have given it new
life in the past 30 years or so by providing it with
instruments for uncovering, behind altruistic
motives, egoist desires or frustrations and repressions. In the seventies in France, for instance, this
interpretation was employed extensively in the case
of the social workers, where the avant-garde of the
profession set out to unmask the appetite for power,
said to result from sexual frustration, hidden behind
altruistic pretentions to aid the destitute.
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If it is ultimately the criterion of action that allows
us to draw a distinction between a fictional emotion
(one that might be experienced at the movies, with
simulated suffering) and a real emotion (one that
might be experienced watching television, with a
portrayal of sufferings really felt by living human
beings), then this uncertainty tends to make the
media spectator into a voyeur who sinks into a pit
of shame.
In order for the action of speech to be considered a real, efficacious action, one capable of
generating collective causes, the individual words
must find contact points — such as political parties
or movements — that are able to collect and
transmit them so as to bring pressure to bear on
governments.
Yet France in the second half of the eighties and
the first half of the nineties was marked by a deep
sense of political impotence and fatalism, largely
sustained by governments that never stopped
displaying their own inaction by invoking the
argument about the increasing power of the
economy and the financial markets: “confronted
with globalization, there is nothing we can do”.
Such was the political credo often expressed in
the media by political actors of the first rank,
whether on the left or the right. In this context,
humanitarian action itself has easily been interpreted as distraction designed to hide inaction, as
was the case with the war in Bosnia.
Fourth Uncertainty: The Spectacle
of Suffering and Political Impotence
The fourth uncertainty, one that is particularly
threatening, concerns the very possibility of moving from the position of a spectator to that of actor.
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 14
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Conclusion
The re-legitimation of humanitarian action and its
representation are going through a process of repoliticization. By this I mean a movement that
would give back to simple citizens some kind of
grasp of political events, including those that are
situated far from them and which they have no
possibility of acting upon directly. This grasp, with
its concomitant awareness of acting, can only
derive from a reconstitution of the mediations
interposed between isolated persons and states —
something like the way Durkheim appealed for a
reconstitution of the intermediate bodies in marketdominated democracies13. At present, the
representation of humanitarian action is governed
by the state and the media. Only if it succeeds in
making itself felt in the everyday lives of people,
and not just in the words of their leaders or on their
television screens, will humanitarian action find a
new legitimacy.
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This legitimacy passes by way of collective
movements distinct from political parties, examples
of which are groups such as Amnesty International
or, more recently, ATTAC, a movement in France
based on promoting the idea of a Tobin tax. It is in
movements such as these that action can be
diversified and graduated. Attending a meeting or a
demonstration, paying one's membership fees —
this already breaks the inaction of the passive
spectator faced with a heroic benefactor engaged in
far-away causes. At the same time, it gives back a
political dimension to the word that utters its
indignation or emotion when confronted with the
other's suffering. It returns to the word its dignity in
linking it with a collective action.
Notes
1.Médecins sans frontières, or `Doctors without Borders', was established in 1971 by Bernard Kouchner and Xavier
Emmanuelli. Their association came apart at the end of the 1970s due to a conflict over the operation of a project to help
the Vietnamese `boat people'. Kouchner went on to create a new organization in 1980: Médecins du monde.
2.Cf. B. BINOCHE, Critique des droits de l'homme. Paris, PUF, 1989.
3.R. DEBRAY, L'État séducteur. Les révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir. Paris, Gallimard, 1993.
4.TERTULLIAN, Les spectacles. Paris, Cerf (Sources chrétiennes), 1986.
5.H. ARENDT, Essai sur la révolution. Paris, Gallimard, 1967.
6.L. DASTON, `Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective' in Social Studies of Science 22(1992), p. 597-618.
7.I am referring to a famous photograph taken during the Vietnam war, published with comments in V. GOLDBERG, The
Power of Photography: How Photographs Change our Lives. New York, Abbeville Press, 1991.
8.E. CLAVERIE, `La naissance d'une forme politique: l'affaire du chevalier de la Barre', in P. ROUSSIN (ed.), Critique et
affaires de blasphème à l'époque de Lumières. Paris, Honoré Champion, 1998.
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 15
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9.Cf., for instance, J. CURRAN and J. SEATON, Power without Responsibility. London, Routledge, 1985; and D. Morley,
The Nationwide Audience. London, British Film Institute, 1980.
10.A. HIRSCHMAN, Bonheur privé, action publique. Paris, Fayard, 1983, translation of Shifting Involvements: Private
Interest and Public Action, 1982.
11.MERLEAU-PONTY, `L'U.R.S.S. et les camps' in Signes. Paris, Gallimard, 1960, pp. 330-343.
12.P. RICOEUR, Le conflit des interprétations. Essais d'herméneutique. Paris, Seuil, 1969.
13.Cf. the preface to the second edition of De la division du travail social, Paris, PUF, 1960.
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Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)1, p. 16