Human Rights and an Ethic of truths: Pragmatic Dilemmas and Discursive Interventions

Abstract

This paper begins with a critique of the concept of “rights” as that term is discursively deployed in the service of conventional human rights interventions. Four aporias of human rights discourse are foregrounded and serve as the basis on which six post-humanist claims are advanced. These claims are made to reimagine the concept of “rights” and rights-based discourse along the philosophical pathways mapped by Alain Badiou. Those pathways lead to spaces where the global and the local can be rethought as, in large measure, scale invariant; substantively, the local and the global differ dramatically; processually, the positions along the arc articulating substance to process function as immanent analogues. Multicultural immigration circumstances in Copenhagen preceding the “cartoon controversies” are discussed in discursive terms more or less unrelated to the discursive figures of “human rights,” demonstrating the possibility of realizing immanent human rights objectives without resorting to transcendent human rights discourse.