“Come Almost Home”: Human Rights and the Return of Minor Subjects

Abstract

This article seeks to reconceptualize the conventional distinction between the moral responsibilities of humanitarianism and the juridical claims of human rights by describing a more radical understanding of ethical responsibility, what Emmanuel Levinas describes as a “being for the Other.” This ethical perspective can revitalize a human rights politics that prepares us for the arrival of the subject of human rights (in contrast to the administered object of victimhood) and the articulation of her demand for the right to rights. Distinguishing notions of charitable humanitarianism from the ethical responsibility that a human rights politics might entail, the article outlines the difficult relations and necessary risks involved in granting personhood to desiring others. Moreover, it demonstrates that minor literatures can offer a crucial staging of the form and meaning of such responsibility and protection within a transnational frame of vulnerability, violence, and justice, by serving as countersite to national memory.