Immanent Law and the Juridical: Toward a Liberative Ontology of Human Rights

Abstract

This article elaborates an ontology of human rights as immanent potential produced outside of modernist frameworks. We begin with a consideration of the political and juridical subject of human rights, the subjectus, whose relation to sovereign law is one of submission and supplication. We then examine three registers of “the law” that bear on the question of the subject, with a view to highlighting the distinction between law as a meditative, autopoietically sustained sovereign force, and as immanent production. Building on this conception of law as pure productivity, we propose an ontology of the subjectum for whom human rights are idiosyncratically produced acts of becoming or, in Spinozist terms, expressions of creative life force. While state and juridical forms may, through codification and re-presentation, attempt to contain and turn such open-ended possibility to their own ends, the material force of the subjectum, through its immanent expression of rights, carries the liberative potential to collapse sovereign force into its own expressive capacities. It is proposed, accordingly, that rights neither require nor depend on the ability to petition the state for legal status, but rather are produced within the forms of daily life of the multitude, that internally diversified social subject whose constitution and political action is premised neither on identity nor on appeals to sovereign power, but rather on what its singularities have in common.