In defence of rights

Reading the three articles one after the other makes it really hard to make the case in favor of human rights. Not only because the arguments put forward are extremely compelling, but also because they point to specific failures of the both the discourse and enactment of rights. However, it seems that the simple abandonment, or displacement of political categories will not solve the issue of human rights, but recast them on a new light.

For instance, it is undeniable that as Agamben quotes Arendt in saying: when people were seen in the mere humanity in which human rights were to reside, the paradigm of the self-evidence and universality of human rights crumbled. Perhaps because the grandiose declarations have tended to lack mechanism of enforcement that could legally guarantee what was promised in paper, perhaps because the declarations of rights of the people did not really meant the people as a whole, but people as Agamben agrees as “always a minority”, a certain type of social class that is involved economically and politically. The latter could be argued by the distance in the title that seems to be in the French declaration between the rights of the man and the citizen, or the ‘ignorance’ of women and minorities as subjects of rights as the declaration of the rights of women clearly points out.

Regarding Deleuze and his insistence that human rights are fictions I think that together with Hannah Arendt I will agree that human rights are legal fictions created in order to sustain equality at a political level. Therefore, human rights are based not so much on natural rights assumptions, but on artificial politics, which are meant to grant equality not on a pre-political feature that is shared by all humanity, but on an attribute of democratic political associations.

On Agamben’s position there seems to be a little bit of the free choice injunction, which Zizek refers to when he talks about the “freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the ‘psychological’ subject”. For, if “the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the very insecurities caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as the opportunity for new freedoms” one has difficulties to see that to a certain extent that is similar to what Agamben is proposing with the refugee as the central political figure of our political history. It is true that there is a gap between what was promised and what has been attained, but rather than continuing the opening of spaces that guarantee exercises of liberty and equality a la Balibar, he invites as to enthrone the refugee as the new political figure that will resolve the contradictions that are inherent in nationhood and citizenship. Regarding the refugees that he mentions, those who preferred to be refugees rather than returning to their countries, they did so, not because they willy-nilly preferred to be refugees, but because there were not possibilities of a safe return to their homeland and they had not been accepted by either France or Germany. It is true that they were not stateless, for they still were part to the State from which they were escaping, but fear of persecution did not allow them to return.

The purpose is not to argue that all the ignominies that have been committed in the name of human rights are simply the accidents of their enactment, but that eventually the promise of those grandiose declarations will prove itself to be true. If anything has been proven on the ground is that universal rights are a promised to be attained and not necessarily a conquered reality. Perhaps the key to solve the issue lies with Ranciere’s dissensus understood as “the putting of two worlds into one and the same world” for the distance that exists between man and citizen is not so much a sign of contradiction but the space of the struggle, “the opening of an interval for political subjectivation.”