Against an Ideology of Human Rights

Abstract

Abstract The critique of the notion of universal human rights usually invokes two arguments. The first is based on the well-known Marxist symptomal reading which endeavours to render visible the particular content which gives the specific ‘bourgeois’ ideological spin to the notion of human rights: ‘universal human rights are effectively the right of the white male private owners to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers and women, as well as exert political domination …’ Tendentially, at least, this approach considers the hidden ‘pathological’ spin as constitutive of the very form of the Universal.