MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MOBILITIES

Sinkwan Cheng
Visiting Fellow, Wesleyan University

This lecture examines Yuan Dehui’s “mistranslation” (and Lin Zexu’s Confucian “misunderstanding”) of the Swiss philosopher Vattel’s foundational use of the term “rights” as an intervention into the history of that very concept. Cheng uses the Confucian understanding to draw out a pre-16th century, pre-expansionist, and pre-capitalist meaning of “rights” in the Western tradition. In doing so, Cheng joins the East with the West in a search for a “right” (dikaion in the original sense of being “right” and just) that is at the service of the concrete human being—in contradistinction to human rights discourse in the global age which tends to abstract and objectify the human in ways parallel to how money and the market abstracts quality into quantity. Through this East-West comparative conceptual historical approach to “right,” Cheng hopes to reverse the historical flight of rights from the genre of romance to tragedy.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2014  |  6 P.M.
DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS  |  USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER