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A
Contribution to the Critique of Human Rights My
contribution focuses on the crisis of human rights as a crisis that only
becomes manifest in the recent states of emergency which interrupt the “normal”
course of the liberal-democratic state. Starting from the conceptual history of
the concept of human rights in their specific constellation that includes the
nature of the “power” that has to protect them and the “subject of rights” as
their bearer, I stress the specific modern-european origin of human
rights. Therefore they share the same aporetic horizon with the modern concept
of state: not only the power that has the task to guarantee human rights may
always suspend or even abolish them, but the individual subjects do not have
any legitimate qualification to resist against the same power. The logical
presuppositions of human rights qua the conceptual basis of the modern state
make impossible resistance against the power that violates them. Insofar as the
concepts of the individual liberty and equality have been raised to metahistorical
values, they have strengthened the european claim to be the only possible
modernity. Yet, other modernities were and are possible. The condition of “bare
life” that human rights have come to be associated is not suprahistorical but
the result of the process of de-juridification of the subject of rights.
Instead of pursuing an analysis of the increasing of the juridification of
human rights on a worldwide scale, I suggest the necessity to shift our
perspective: to examine critically the consolidated concepts of our
representation of european political modernity, particularly of rights and law.
In order to open a field of possibilities of rethinking modernity, this
articles suggests a new perspective on human rights that allows us to
reconsider the question of justice in a political constellation that forclosed
it, and moving beyond that constellation, to re-situate human rights in a
horizon of the “just life” beyond “bare life.”
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