2018FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1/2): 1–5

IN MEMORIAM

Humanism*
Saba M A H M O O D , University of California, Berkeley

This essay offers a brief reflection on the problem of death as it has been elaborated within certain strands of humanist thought. In
their attempts to come to grips with the scale of slaughter produced during World War I, European thinkers turned to a reex-
amination of the meaning of death within human life. The essay addresses two opposing viewpoints that emerged from this en-
deavor, an ontological conception, developed primarily in Heidegger, and a relational conception, explored here in the work of
Levinas. In conclusion, I highlight the ongoing relevance of this debate for our contemporary moment.
Keywords: humanism, death, war, Heidegger, Levinas

I would like to start by acknowledging that there is no
singular definition one can offer of humanism: its mean-
ing and scope have changed over time, and even within a
given period, contrary definitions of humanism can co-
exist, and indeed have done so. For example, in the sev-
enteenth century, humanism was voiced as a critique of
religion in general and Christianity in particular. During
the same period, however, there also prevailed a Chris-
tian humanism that was anticlerical while at the same
time theocentric in character. In the nineteenth century,
one strand of humanism was antagonistic toward science
while another celebrated it as the pinnacle of knowledge
and unexplored human possibility. Similarly, a variety
of philosophical traditions (Marxism, existentialism, per-
sonalism), the tensions between them notwithstanding,
have adopted a range of humanistic values.
Given this diversity, I would like to focus my remarks
on a particular formulation of humanism, one that is com-
monly evoked today. This version goes something like
* From The Annual Debate on Anthropological Keywords
(ADAK): Meeting of the American Anthropological Asso-
ciation, Washington 2017. Organized by HAU, the Amer-
ican Ethnological Society and L’Homme.
AAA Roundtable on Anthropological Keywords—Decem-
ber 1, 2017.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 8, number 1/2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698355
© The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2018/0812-0001$10.00
this: Man is the author of his own actions and represen-
tations (not fate, God, or some other force or entity); that
through the exercise of his will and reason, he establishes
his own norms and laws. Furthermore, not only is man
the author but he is also the ultimate end of his actions
(not suprahuman entities like gods or abstract values or
principles). In one important version of this tradition,
human flourishing is the ultimate goal that one should
strive for, without reference to something higher or other
than one’s own well-being. It’s important to point out that
this is not an individualist notion but one that can easily
incorporate collective conceptions of human flourishing.
Charles Taylor calls this formulation “self-sufficient hu-
manism,” which emerged historically with the coming
of the secular age, wherein it became possible for masses
of ordinary people to embrace this goal for the first time
(Taylor 2007: 19–20). In A secular age, Taylor spends
considerable time criticizing this limited conception of
human flourishing in relation to secularity.
As anthropologists, we know of course that this is
one among many conceptions of human flourishing, that
there are people in a variety of societies who live by val-
ues not embraced by this conception. Yet it seems to me
that Taylor has captured something important in giving
voice to a powerful and normative discourse that struc-
tures a crucial aspect of secularity, extant in various as-
pects of our intimate and public lives.

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 Saba MAHMOOD and Danilyn RUTHERFORD
Death, of course, poses a particular problem to this
conception of humanism in that it marks the end of what
is the ultimate, and perhaps only, measure of life and
well-being, namely, the human itself. The power of the
human is humbled when faced with death. Death marks
the end of meaning, one might say, indeed of represen-
tation itself, and, consequently, is either incomprehensi-
ble in the immanent frame of this humanist tradition or
something to be warded off at all cost and until the last
possible moment. We do not need to think very hard
to find evidence of this attitude toward death in a range
of modern societies: whether in today’s endless celebra-
tion of life and youth; or in the banishment of death from
bourgeois society as described by Philippe Ariès, and ev-
ident today in the sequestering of the aged within the
confines of hospitals and senior centers; or in the waning
of the many rituals of mourning and the public disquisi-
tions on death.
Yet it seems to me that despite this modern attitude
toward the banishment of ordinary death, we are sur-
rounded by mass catastrophic death. One cannot open
a newspaper or turn on the television without encoun-
tering the death of masses of people, whether by famine,
genocide, or war. So how is it possible for modern soci-
eties, with their celebration of life, their neglect of hu-
man mortality and celebration of human flourishing, to
tolerate mass catastrophic death so easily?
This is a question that was asked at the termination of
the two world wars when human beings engaged so wan-
tonly in the mass killings of fellow humans, visiting un-
imaginable suffering and horror on each other. A range of
humanist philosophers of the twentieth century—Freud,
Sartre, Levinas, Ricoeur—do not simply ask how such un-
restrained murder was possible at a point in European
history when civilization was said to have reached its ze-
nith, but also thought extensively about what this teaches
us about our attitude toward death as such. In a remark-
able book, The thought of death and the memory of war
(2013), French theorist Marc Crépon argues that these
philosophers’ rumination on the experience of the two
world wars taken together represented a crucial reassess-
ment of what death by murder means in relation to our-
selves and in regard to our attitude about our own and
others’ demise. As Rodolphe Gasché explains in his fore-
word to Crépon’s book, much of this discussion took
place through an engagement with Heidegger’s regnant
assertion that death should be understood “as annihila-
tion . . . as the return [of Being] to nothingness” (2013:
xiv). For Heidegger, Dasein’s Being-toward-death is an
ontological conception, stripped of the relational bonds
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2
with community/others that the Dasein as Being-in-the-
world is oriented toward. Inasmuch as one dies alone,
death constitutes “the privation of Being” (xiv), for which
others are irrelevant.
Levinas, among others, took exception to this onto-
logical conception of death. In his view, if we started
with death as the murder of another human as our point
of departure (rather than one’s own death), then it would
no longer be possible to conceive of death as ontological,
but, rather, as always and already in the sphere of “being
with others” (Crépon 2013: xv). There is a double imper-
ative that binds one to the other even as the other moves
to extinguish my life: as long as my death is the result
of another’s action, then my death is no longer simply
mine. On the other hand, my recognition that my life
is vulnerable to the other’s will to kill makes me recog-
nize the interdiction against murder and attunes me to
the ultimate ethical responsibility I face, namely, respond-
ing to the other’s cry for life. As Crépon puts it, in the
dual pincer of this realization, the other’s vulnerability
takes “priority over the concern with my own death”
(xv).
This reflection on the reversal of my care for myself in
the face of the other’s annihilation has been enormously
productive for a range of ethicists and theorists. But here
one might ask: Does mass murder and catastrophic death
continue to occur in this world because of the lack of
empathy for the other? Or does it prosper for political
reasons that have little to do with a lack of concern for
the other? When I look around at the inaction of world
powers to stop mass starvation, rampant in Yemen to-
day, for example, or the genocide conducted in Aleppo
and Raqqa recently, I doubt that these failures of ac-
tion resulted from a lack of a proper ethical orientation.
While some may have not been moved by the images the
media projected to the world, there is no lack of empathy
among most of the world’s inhabitants for these catas-
trophes. These events unfolded owing to political rea-
sons that require a different analytic than one focused
on our lack of care for the other. One might also note
that members of ISIS frequently claim that it is precisely
their empathy for the victims of Western-supported vi-
olence in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen that justifies their vis-
itation of murder and mayhem on what they charge are
the perpetrators of this originary violence. Empathy, in
other words, is no guarantee of interdiction against mur-
der but may well serve as an impetus to it.
Levinas’ attempt to temper and tame what Freud, at
the end of World War I, diagnosed as the death drive in
the human psyche within the ethical realm cries out for a
3 HUMANISM

rethinking of the relationship between the ethical and
the political. It also requires an unpacking of the chang-
ing conceptions of death (ours and others) engendered
by transformations in conditions of mass death. Anthro-
pology in some ways is better suited to think about this
than other disciplines, not only because it brings a certain
demand of the particular to bear on the universality of
the philosophical, but, more importantly, because it of-
fers us a way to think outside of the self-certain claims
of humanism in all their variety. The recent turn in an-
thropology to theorizing about ontology in relation to
the Anthropocene is one attempt at trying to address hu-
manism’s conceits. Yet, for the reasons already elaborated
earlier, it seems to me that the ontological turn is not
quite adequate for the task of rethinking humanism’s re-
lation to death. If there is one thing that the efforts of
twentieth-century philosophy have taught us, it is that
the question of death cannot be contained within the
problematic of ontology. We live and die socially, and
the meaning of death cannot be fixed a priori, without re-
gard for the relationships that give it shape. Death un-
folds within the distinct social context wherein it occurs.
So my invitation here, to ourselves as anthropologists, is
to think through the emergent meanings death is now
acquiring in the context of the mass catastrophic death
that surrounds us.

Saba MAHMOOD was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She died on March 10,
2018. This essay was her last written work.

Saba Mahmood’s words

Danilyn R U T H E R F O R D , Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

On December 1, 2017, from her home in Berkeley, Cal-
ifornia, Saba Mahmood presented this concise, provoc-
ative essay in a roundtable discussion on humanism at
the American Anthropological Association Annual Meet-
ings in Washington, DC. Every seat in the large room
was filled, all eyes fixed on the screen above the table
set up for the rest of the panelists. You could have heard
a pin drop. That silence was the sound of Saba’s listeners
being called upon to reconsider what they believed to be
is true, beautiful, and right. There has always been a
weight to Saba Mahmood’s words—a weight that slows
us down, makes us linger, and keeps us from boarding
those habitual trains of thought that lead us to comfort-
able conclusions. Saba’s words give us pause. In these
times, when our leaders’ words seem so light, so un-
tethered from facts and concerns for consequences, this
is a particularly precious gift.
This essay gives us pause when it comes to thinking
about the meaning of death and the changing relation-
ship between the ethical and the political in these trou-
bled times. Saba intervenes into the debate over human-
ism by slowing us down to consider the complicated
genealogy and lasting grip of the term. The term has in-
spired a mess of label slapping and mudslinging. In some
quarters, it’s used as a curse. Humanism, critics say, is a
technology of exclusion, which denies agency and value
to nonhuman things. Right-thinking scholars have moved
beyond it, extending their care and consideration to an-
imals, plants, roads, rocks, microbes, and chemicals, and
all those other things that populate what we once took to
be exclusively human worlds.
Beyond academia, Saba reminds us, humanism isn’t
dead—it’s alive and kicking in the idea that human flour-
ishing is the ultimate value and that humans are the au-
thors of their representations and their own fate. Death,
Saba notes, poses a challenge to this view, not least for the
reason that it is inevitable. The thought of the death of
the other, and the possibility this could happen at one’s
own hands, brings the damage to the self-sufficient hu-
man into even sharper relief. If we all owe ourselves to
one another, the loss of the other is the loss of the self.
The possibility of murder brings into sharp focus our
deep connection to the other and compels us to respond
to the other’s ethical demand. This is because humans are
not self-sufficient. When the other dies, so do we.
As Saba shows us, mass death poses a challenge to this
ethics. Political interests, not a lack of empathy, enable
people to accept famine in Yemen and slaughter in Syria
and Iraq. But although she’s a bit evasive on this point,
I don’t think Saba is suggesting we ditch this line of hu-
manist thought. One question to ask is how mass mur-
der is made possible in the face of the demand of the
other—through what practices, institutions, technolo-
gies, and forms of talk. Another question, which Saba
leaves us with, is how exposure to mass death is chang-
ing how people view their own. When Saba tells us we

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 Saba MAHMOOD and Danilyn RUTHERFORD
need to find a place for the political in the ethical, she is
calling on us to begin a conversation, not end it. Instead
of slinging mud and slapping labels, we should figure out
what we mean when we talk about humanism, or hu-
manity, for that matter. What would it take to tame
these terms’ conceits?
Saba isn’t here to help us take up this challenge or to tell
us when we are getting her wrong. Nonetheless, I want
to venture a few suggestions on how to proceed. On
the one hand, we could begin by thinking deeply about
what Saba means by the political. In this essay, the term
seems to refer to historically sedimented ways of orga-
nizing power, which bear the veneer of collective as-
sent. This version of the political is not the opposite of
the ethical. Foucault’s (1979) account of the panopti-
con shows power to be built out of that capacity to share
the perspective of the other that thinkers from Emman-
uel Levinas ([1961] 1991) to Webb Keane (2015) have
placed at the center of ethical life. Discipline works be-
cause the inmate imagines him- or herself being seen
from the tower. On the other hand, as some of the same
theorists have made clear, the ethical is no stranger to
violence. Jacques Derrida’s (1995) reflections on Kier-
kegaard ([1843] 1985) capture this best: to respond to
the other is to do violence to the other others (see also
Derrida 1996). There is no program to follow in the face
of this aporia, which demands a certain leap of faith. The
best we can do, Saba suggests, is to act politically in order
to change the conditions under which mass death oc-
curs. To be ethical, thought rigorously, is to be political.
It is to act on the basis of our collective responsibility for
the suffering that confronts us, but also for the suffering
we don’t perceive.
Which takes me back to the debate over humanism.
In attending to the appeal of the other, and the otherness
in the self, Saba opens the way to an understanding of
how the nonhuman inhabits human things. She also
opens the way to an expanded understanding of the eth-
ical. To pay heed to the other others is to pay heed to the
animals, plants, roads, rocks, microbes, chemicals, and
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4
all those other things that cry out to us. To be ethical
is to recognize that there is no avoiding tough choices,
and that empathy is not enough. The ethical demands
the political in this context as well: unrelenting analysis
and an unwavering commitment to change the histori-
cally sedimented ways of organizing power that have
led us and all these others to the predicaments we face
today.
Saba’s death was our death: it was an event in the lives
of everyone whose thought was touched by hers. In a
world where the truth is cheap and answers come easily,
she was unrelenting and unwavering to the end. The best
way to remember her is to slow down in our thinking.
It is to shoulder the weight of her words.
References
Crépon, Marc. 2013. The thought of death and the memory of
war. Translated by Michael Loriaux. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The gift of death. Translated by David
Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1996. “Force of law: The ‘mystical foundations of
authority.’” In Deconstruction and the possibility of justice,
edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David
Gray Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the
prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin.
Keane, Webb. 2015. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren. (1843) 1985. Fear and trembling: Dialec-
tical lyric by Johannes de Silentio. Translated by Alastair
Hannay. London: Penguin.
Levinas, Emmanuel. (1961) 1991. Totality and infinity: An
essay on exteriority. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
5 HUMANISM

Danilyn RUTHERFORD is the President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Before joining
Wenner-Gren, she was on the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Chicago. She
is the author of three books: Raiding the land of the foreigners: The limits of the nation on an Indonesian frontier (Prince-
ton University Press, 2003); Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and audience in West Papua (University of Chicago
Press, 2012); and Living in the stone age: The origins of a colonial fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 2018). She is
currently working on an ethnographic memoir on disability, subjectivity, and sign use in the United States.
Danilyn Rutherford
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
470 Park Avenue South, 8th Floor; New York, NY 10016; USA
drutherford@wennergren.org

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