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The Legitimacy of Humanitarian Actions and their Media Representation: The Case of France
Luc Boltanski coles des Hautes tudes 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 `Mdecins sans frontires' 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, Libration, and the journals Le dbat 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 `Mdecins sans frontires'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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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 Grard 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,

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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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 Rgis Debray in his book L'tat sducteur3. One can look at things differently, however, and

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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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

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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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

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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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

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

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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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

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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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

by Chateaubriand in Les mmoires 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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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.

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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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

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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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 suspicion12 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. 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.

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.

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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.

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.Mdecins sans frontires, 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: Mdecins du monde. 2.Cf. B. BINOCHE, Critique des droits de l'homme. Paris, PUF, 1989. 3.R. DEBRAY, L'tat sducteur. Les rvolutions mdiologiques du pouvoir. Paris, Gallimard, 1993. 4.TERTULLIAN, Les spectacles. Paris, Cerf (Sources chrtiennes), 1986. 5.H. ARENDT, Essai sur la rvolution. 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 blasphme l'poque de Lumires. Paris, Honor Champion, 1998.

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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 priv, 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 interprtations. Essais d'hermneutique. 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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