The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality

Abstract

As one of the primary rationales enabling contemporary international rights law, human replaces both the absolutist organicism of natural law and the possessive and positivist individualism of liberal economic materialism; but the act of substitution effectively cleaves human personality, causing it to serve simultaneously as the foundation and aim of rights. Thus human personality, as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has it, is both antecedent to rights and is also (con)sequent to rights, establishing a sort of tautological construction in which the human to be achieved through the codification and observance of rights must be posited as prior to rights, as an innate and inhering feature of pre-juridical personality. As articulated, rights aspire to enable a developmental sequence that follows a posited originary personality through a teleology that will arrive at some expressive civil manifestation of this personality. This teleology-in-tautology of rights re-naturalizes personality by describing it narratively as a structure of development in which the personality achieves its fullest expression through its emergence as a (self-) narrating international citizen-subject, a narrative vision of the that the law shares with the traditional literary generic conventions of the Bildungsroman (the story of the socialization of the individual). Rather, then, than institutionalizing a static, singular subject, rights animate the contemporary rights subject as an aspirational project and a narrative process by which the individual is to be incorporated internationally through the regulation of the enfolding of the citizen-subject as a juridical person who will narrate such enfolding as the unfolding of innate and inhering qualities, as a narrative act of volition.