I reject the ultrapostmodern position (like that taken by Richard Rorty while shadowboxing with some vague thing he refers to contemptuously as “the academic Left”), which holds, when confronting ethnic cleansing or genocide as was occurring in Iraq under the sanctions-regime or any of the evils of torture, censorship, famine, and ignorance (most of them constructed by humans, but by acts of God), that human rights are cultural or grammatical things, and when they are violated, they do not really have the status accorded them by crude foundationalists, such as myself, for whom they are as real as anything we can encounter.

Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York, 2004, p. 136