Abstract
Recent thinking on human rights, at least among the left, has divided along lines that have become familiar from other contemporary political debates. There are those who ground the discourse of rights in an ethical responsibility to fellow human beings in situations of suffering and oppression; for others, suspicion with respect to just such an ethical stance is their point of departure. They see in the ethical perspective at best a radical depoliticization of the struggle for human rights—its biopolitical reduction to humanitarian aid to suffering others who are thereby accorded the status of ‘bare life’—and at worst a cover for a quasi-imperialist imposition of neo-liberal values according to which what ultimately deserves political protection and preservation is the right to entrepreneurial initiative and aspiration. Yet another form of leftist critique of the ostensibly post-political, ethical inflection of rights discourse takes aim at a line of thought most often linked to a series of mostly French philosophers—above all Emmanuel Levinas, but also Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and more recently Judith Butler—who in various ways have sought to ground (or perhaps better, unground) philosophy in an ‘ethics of the Other’. The essay explores these positions and proposes a new thinking about human rights oriented by what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ‘dark background’ of human life.
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Notes
Lyotard’s essay was first delivered as one of the Oxford Lectures on the Rights of Man in 1993.
Judith Butler offers another good example of this strategy or what she calls the ‘performance of precarity’: ‘Let me offer an example that directly relates this issue of performativity to that of precarity. Some of you may know that illegal immigrants in May of 2006 took to the streets in Los Angeles and started to sing the national anthem of the United States. In fact, they sang the national anthem of the United States in English and in Spanish, and a Spanish version was widely circulated on the web. They also sang the national anthem of Mexico, and sometimes they would sing one anthem right after the other. What kind of public performance was this street singing? Their aim was to petition the government to allow them to become citizens. But what was the way in which they made their petition? Indeed, what kind of performative exercise was this singing? They were exercising the right of free assembly without having that right. That right belongs to citizens. So, they were asserting a right they did not have in order to make the case, publicly, that they should have that very right. But obviously, they did not need to have the right in order to make a case that they should have that right’ (Butler 2009).
Here Rancière is actually repeating Arendt’s criticisms in Origins and elsewhere of the failure of European Jews to politicize their situation when threatened with experiences of exclusion.
Scholem uses the formulation in a famous letter to Benjamin concerning the status of revelation in Kafka’s work: ‘You ask what I understand by the “nothingness of revelation”? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance [in dem sie gilt, aber nicht bedeutet]. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak’ (Scholem 1989, p. 142).
Here I refer the reader to my discussion of Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of the ‘metaethical self’, a dimension of human life that exceeds what is given to us at our biological birth and is, indeed, born to us as a remainder in excess of our talents, our qualities, our predicates. See my On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Santner 2001). One might indeed argue that Rosenzweig’s formula for the metaethical self, B = B (a pure point of self-reference meaning: whatever changes about me, I am still me) is directly connected to Arendt’s ‘discovery’ of the right to have rights.
To cite Freud’s famous characterization of the Ratman, the face of the Other to whom I am answerable is one that in some form or another manifests a ‘horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’ (Freud 1981, pp. 166–67).
It is in this context that Rilke’s characterization of the neighbour becomes so compelling: ‘There exists a creature [ein Wesen] that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished there devastatingly, like the pneumococci in dogs which gain entrance through the nose… This creature is Your Neighbor [Dein Nachbar]’ (Rilke 1990, p. 168).
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Santner, E.L. What’s Left After Rights?. Law Critique 26, 105–115 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9155-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9155-y