The Trauma of Vulnerability: Human Rights and the Real

Abstract

The history of human rights is ambiguous and uncertain. Appeals to rights have been used to secure the privileges of the powerful and to legitimate the status quo. Appeals to rights have been used to expose the evils of cruelty and oppression. Given this muddied history we cannot assume that calls for human rights will operate in the name of justice. Cognizant of this history, I argue that human rights discourses can be a force for justice if: (1) we read human rights demands as an attempt to respond to the experience of the destabilizing, destructive and incomprehensible forces that Lacan calls the Real and that Adriana Cavero calls horrorism; and (2) if we use human rights discourses to respond to the trauma of encountering this horror by defining the human dignity and bodily integrity that human rights claims are intended to protect in terms of the dignity and integrity of the vulnerable body. I argue that if we persist in fleeing our vulnerability by using human rights discourse to insist on our autonomous sovereignty we will perpetuate the cycle of violence endemic to human history.