Human Rights, State Violence and Political Resistance

Abstract

This article investigates Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s critiques of human rights and argues that the two thinkers share a blind spot with regard to the radical potentials of human rights. The problem is that they do not break with two fixed imaginaries which still haunt liberal democracies: (1) the historical essentialist understanding of human rights and (2) nation-states and individuals as the principal loci for political rights, power, and action. Based on the work of Jacques Rancière, Costas Douzinas, and Étienne Balibar this article argues that human rights can be thought of as a constituent part of a radical political praxis and resistance movement. If human rights are thought of as a praxis of “right-ing” (Douzinas) or a “dissensus” (Rancière), which both contest the current “distribution of the sensible,” a new “cosmopolitics of human rights” can be imagined where human rights are conceived as a borderline concept (Balibar).