Human Rights and New Horizons? Thoughts toward a New Juridical Ontology (original) (raw)

'Human Rights do not exist': thinking about and beyond the existence of human rights

Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2023

This article examines the critical positions taken by two prominent figures of the twentieth-century philosophical tradition, Panajotis Kondylis and Gilles Deleuze, regarding the existence of human rights. In their ways, both thinkers identify a problem with the (non)existence of human rights, particularly with human rights' invocation of universal or eternal values. According to Deleuze, this all-encompassing, universalist language of human rights promotes a problematic way of thinking that 'thinks' in abstraction. For Kondylis, human rights do not exist, as their universalist claims are a matter of political exploitation and/or conceptual confusion. By focusing on the interplay between nonexistence and 'sham' or 'abstract existence', this article aims to critically examine our ways of thinking, in terms of human rights or beyond them, and how such a problematisation may pave the way for further discussions regarding the (non)place of human rights in our contemporary and future state of affairs.

Taking rights less seriously: Postmodernism and human rights

Res Publica, 1999

This article aims to analyse the nature of postmodern discourse on human rights. The principal argument is that postmodernism appears to be incompatible with the idea of rights because of its hostility to the conceptions of autonomous subject and universality. On the other hand, the postmodern discourse does not underestimate the "modern" ethical issues like human rights. This brings about two controversial conclusions: the adoption of an unreflective pragmatism by postmodernists towards human rights, and the abandonment of foundationalist approach to rights adopted by some rights theorists.

THE MODERN HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE: A construction that jeopardizes its own values and effectiveness

ANAIS SOCIOLOGY OF LAW 2017: Perspectivas das relações entre direito e sociedade em um sistema Social Global, 2017

In a world of political and economic instabilities, the role of human rights discourse should be seen as neutral, solid and coherent towards the preservation of the individuals' life and dignity. However, this article aims to promote a debate about the modern interpretation of what emerged as the man's natural law, and today is the foundation of a transnational and highly complex structure: the international humanitarian system. Through a critical literature review, this work combined arguments proposed by Habermas and Arendt, with the morphological structures of the state, rights of the man and sovereignty, and the Kantian view of cosmopolitanism. This article's main objective is to highlight discrepancies between the theory and practice of human rights discourse, demonstrating the dilemma of duality that abases this system's effectiveness. Yet, the present work found and sustains that human rights discourse may fail where it aims to universalise and promote civil rights as inherently human rights, which ultimately disregard sovereignty, people's self-determination and, in numerous cases, contributes to the destabilisation of institutions and international relations.

Whither the Human in Human Rights? On Misrecognition, Ontology, and Archives

Archivaria, 2020

Out of an interest in generating a dialogue at the intersections of archives, human rights, and ontology, this article explores the questions of being and agency through human rights archives. Committed to an interdisciplinary approach that locates an interrogation of the constitutively human at the heart of the formation of human rights archives, this article moreover foregrounds the categorical contingency of subjectivity even in ostensibly liberated and communal archival spaces. Focused on the excesses of the "human" or "inhuman" as a necessary disruption in the normative and delimited nature of definitions of being, it aims also to challenge presumptions of belonging and to highlight the visceral impact of violence on material and discursive conceptualizations of the self both within and outside human rights archives.

Reconstructing Human Rights: A Pragmatic and Pluralist Inquiry in Global Ethics

2016

'Now architect, now archaeologist, now a man whose hand is in the past. Somebody is made to face the changes; somebody is built to last. What do you know, still living so young? Tomorrow is no burden; time can be overcome.' -The Constantines, "Time Can Be Overcome" I am a human being. You are a human being. We are human. These simple propositions have become ethical claims of the highest order. They express expectations of recognition, concern and equality. Those expectations take social form as rights: rights that protect us from torture, from arbitrary imprisonment, from hunger and deprivation, which entitle us to standing within our communities, participation in politics, productive work, engagement in cultural life, privacy sufficient to live without undue interference and many other protections and privileges. In promising these protections and privileges human rights redefine political relationships by altering how we see ourselves and how we share our lives with others. Human rights are a transformative political idea, although one that many of us now take for granted. Yet, if we take the ethical value of human rights seriously then we need to recognise the profound claims they make along with the radical social changes they demand. Human rights assert that everyone (whether alone or in community with others) counts for something; that we are owed respect and voice whomever we are, irrespective of existing hierarchies of protection and privilege; and they assert that political authority is only legitimate when everyone counts. These profound claims force us to reconsider the known coordinates of social justice and in doing so upsets the given order. Human rights are disruptive.

Human Rights as Subjectivity: The Age of Rights and the Politics of Culture

Millennium - Journal of International Studies

This article seeks to open up the question of the foundation of human rights by reference not to their philosophical origins but their political function. I argue that attempts to ground human rights in objective fact (such as 'human nature') or in pure reason (as 'self-evident') are futile, but more importantly are unhelpful in the broader project of protecting those rights that are recognised as 'universal'. A more useful approach is to conceptualise human rights as a discourse in which the human being is constituted and reconstituted as the subject of rights. Allied with this theoretical analysis is the political project of establishing the conditions for meaningful conversation about human rights. More than any philosophical insight, this is the ultimate precondition for their recognition.