« para-digm | Main | difference without apologies »
A right to existence?
My very post-structuralist (foucauldian, derridean, gramscian) partner and I got into a 'discussion' yesterday evening, one of those 'discussions' that quickly deviates from its initial setting to become something else. We had started talking about Hamas and the quick retreat of many commentators and officials from a pro-democracy position. For such commentators, democratic election was insufficient for legitimacy. Of course, one of the interesting puzzles in democratic theory is how to think the limits of democracy, but that's not where our 'discussion' led.
Instead, we went from the right of Hamas to govern to the right of Israel to exist to a right to exist per se. And, I found myself taking the position that there is no right to exist; that nothing has a right to exist.
Why? It seems to me that the fact of existence is morally neutral, that it is a matter of ontology. And, to say that existence is a right is to make a kind of category mistake (one that I think Hobbes makes): one takes the fact of persistence, that what exists may strive to keep existing, to mean a right of persistence.
Well, my partner was none to happy about this. He thought that it ended up permitting murder.
I disagreed. There isn't a right to exist or not to exist. That entities will struggle against one another is, again, an ontological condition, not a moral one. My partner then accused me of being a neo-darwinian spinozaist with deleuzian tendencies (things went downhill, as it were).
I tried a different, foucauldian tack that I thought he'dl like (or get more riled up over since I'd be using his work against him). So, I say that the language of rights doesn't work here at all. Rights are instruments of political struggle (so one doesn't claim rights absolutely but within conditions, in contexts, citationally; a right to govern, then, may be contingent upon various factors, etc). At this point, my partner (who writes on these matters), says, of course, and it has been a matter of political struggle to recognize rights to life.
And, I think here that we reach a kind of impasse. Because I want to say that such a right tells us nothing and that the assertion of such a right instead gives voices to a fundamental (ontological) gap, lack, or absence that cannot be filled in or covered over by the right. Or, one might say that life exceeds rights, cannot be captured within them and that the very attempt to do is what has enabled the modern form of sovereignty (I take this to be a version of arguments raised by Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben).
By Jodi | January 27, 2006 in (Post)Analytic Philosophy | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/361357/4140930
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A right to existence?:
Comments
Very provocative Jodi. I can only imagine the sparks flying! Seriously, I think you make an interesting point regarding the "right to exist." Clearly such a right, or any right, is one that only makes sense within the context of a political space (however defined). To say Israel has a right to exist already presupposes certain issues are beyond political dispute - those who assert this right assume that Israel's "right to exist" means it should continue to exist as a "Jewish State" and not as a secular one that would include the Palestinians as equal citizens.
But your comments seem to suggest a certain notion of "Bare Life", if you will. That Life as such is not a right but it is a given, and the political ordering is something somehow separate from this basic element. Perhaps I am misreading you but I wonder what this way of articulating the issue means politically? Does it mean politics needs to start with some basic notion of Life - prepoliticized (or prelinguistic)? I am totally speculating so please forgive me. I have to run but I will check in later. Thanks.
Posted by: Alain | Jan 27, 2006 5:50:12 PM
"I want to say that such a right [to life] tells us nothing and that the assertion of such a right instead gives voices to a fundamental (ontological) gap, lack, or absence that cannot be filled in or covered over by the right."
And a Levinasian would say, I think, that that "fundamental (ontological) gap, lack, or absence that cannot be filled in" is the trace of the Other's precedence to one's own existence -- which is also to say that there can be no "right to existence" except a "right" that arises from and for a pre-existent pledge to the Other. Existence, that is, isn't a right but always already a debt, and it is therefore not the case that "the fact of existence is morally neutral, that it is a matter of ontology." Contra Hobbes, however, it doesn't follow from this that "the fact of persistence, that what exists may strive to keep existing" (what Levinas, following Spinoza, called the conatus) entails a "right of persistence," but that the "the fact of persistence" gives rise to -- in fact, is, in the most fundamental sense of that word -- nothing other than the obligation toward the Other.
On this view "life" would in fact "exceed rights," as you put it, but in an entirely different sense than the Foucault-Deleuze-Agamben lineage would have it, and with a very different meaning of the political popping out at the other end of the analysis.
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jan 27, 2006 10:42:43 PM
It seems to me that the fact of existence is morally neutral, that it is a matter of ontology. And, to say that existence is a right is to make a kind of category mistake (one that I think Hobbes makes): one takes the fact of persistence, that what exists may strive to keep existing, to mean a right of persistence...Rights are instruments of political struggle (so one doesn't claim rights absolutely but within conditions, in contexts, citationally; a right to govern, then, may be contingent upon various factors, etc).
OK—but when one speaks of a “right to exist” isn't that merely a phrase meaning a group's right to political self-determination and therefore something already within the realm of political struggle? I think it's possible to use the phrase “right to exist” without trangressing the fact-value distinction (if one thinks it legitimate, that is).
Posted by: et alia | Jan 27, 2006 11:06:05 PM
Right, doesn't the phrase itself make claims to exist only within the realm of law, or the language of law (language which is philosophically circumscribed--and necessarily so, for this is what gives law its efficacy, but also its adaptability and perfectability!--when it comes to the matter of existence)?
Posted by: Matt | Jan 28, 2006 12:08:42 AM
Adam I really appreciate your reference to Levinas. Clearly, our very existence is a testament to the fact that we find ourselves always already in debt to the Other. But I have always been troubled by Levinas' own political views (particularly with regards to Israel). And I have never been clear as to what sort of politics follows from the Levinasian priority of ethics? Be that as it may, it is an interesting contrast.
Posted by: alain | Jan 28, 2006 10:17:01 AM
Alain, I confess that I don't know enough about Levinas's politics vis a vis Israel to comment on them, although what I've heard I certainly haven't liked. Derrida, if I recall correctly, argues in Adieu to Levinas that the fundamental import of his ethico-politics is separable from the specific content of his personal views. In fact, that is precisely the point of Derrida's politicization of the Levinasian ethical stance; for Derrida, there is a necessary disconnect between the "ethico-political impulse" (he doesn't call it that, the phrase and scare quotes are mine), as distinguished from the (currently ideologically dominant) "ego-political impulse"), and the specific content of any political program. I.e., IMHO the Derridian-Levinasian contribution to the debates around the political is not any particular political program -- socialist, liberal, welfarist, what have you -- but occurs at an entirely different level, what I think of (inadequately) as something like the transcendental condition for political motivation in general. That is, what the Derridian take on Levinas (which is obviously where I'm coming from) supplies first and foremost is a theoretical warrant for getting out of bed in the morning to pursue any political program, of any kind. (Secondarily, although of course that's the wrong word, there remains a "leakage" (again my words and my scare quotes) between this transcendental level and the concrete programming -- how could there not be, when you're talking about Derrida? -- but I want to leave that aside for now so that the primary import of this idea stays clear.) Again IMHO, in our current political epoch, a theoretical warrant for getting out of bed in the morning to attempt to act on an ethico-political program (as against the theoretical warrant for acting on an ego-political program, which is everywhere you look, as rational choice theory colonizes more and more of social and academic life) is a significant contribution.
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jan 28, 2006 1:44:54 PM
The name of the concept in question might read better as droit d'exister.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Jan 28, 2006 11:50:36 PM
Wouldn't it be better to opt for the idiom though, and say simply raison d'etre? You might accuse me of making an inexact translation, for, in what sense is a reason a right? A reason would at first seem to be something of an ex post facto justification, whereas a right (and clearly, we are speaking here of a "natural right," whether or not one wants to collapse this into the common law as many commenters here have done) appears as more primordial... indeed by nature. But, I ask you, is this first appearance not in fact ass backwards? To insist upon the primordiality of reasons is not only to point out the fact that a right always demands a prior guarantor (in the words of Jeremy Bentham "a natural right is a son which never had a father"), it is to suggest that before the fact of existence can be decided upon, it is presented to us first, reasonably, as a fact. This would also be my translation of Jodi's formula "life exceeds rights": life is given to us in its factical reasons for being, before and after it ever encounters the right for such reasons (which, from this view can be seen ONLY as a product of decision). Moreover, I would go so far as to assert that when one says raison d'etre, in addition to referring to the factical particularities of a given form of life, one also asserts the general priority of reasons (as opposed to rights) for all forms of life under consideration. If we are to further torture the phrase, this last dimension may be said to be the raison d'etre an sich.
Posted by: Marc Lombardo | Jan 29, 2006 12:35:15 PM
hi Jodi,
I'm not totally convinced. I think many people use a language of rights as basically a moral vocabulary. This would imply a political space etc if people were using the term as part of a consistent theoretical position, but few people do that. I think oftentimes when people say "right to" it's a synonym for somewhere between "morally good" and "not morally objectionable". In that regard, your starting assumption of existence as morally neutral seems of a piece with this (since you don't say "politically neutral" or "juridically neutral" or any non-moral sense of "right to"). That's also definitely not an uncontroversial postulate, the moral neutrality of existence/persistence. I was just talking with a friend about this the other day, about suicide. I'm open to the idea that one may well arrive via a process of reasoning at the idea that one is better off dead. But I think that process of reasoning and its results may be incommensurable with equally valid processes/results of reasoning which conclude that people are not better off dead. In that case, rival incommensurable rational schema have no option but to treat each other as political opponents (ie, I would fight a friend before I'd let him or her commit suicide) and as irrational. But it's in no way clear to me that any of these perspectives are based on anything but relative and contingent values, such that there's not likely to be productive 'rational' conversations across disagreements over questions of the (non)moral nature of existence. Which is to say, this stuff is probably more based on decisions and temperment than argument and reasoning. Ramble ramble...
take care,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Jan 30, 2006 1:31:31 AM
Adam (drawing from Levinas) says that the fact of persistence gives rise to a debt to the other. I'm not well-versed in Levinas, but my choice against Levinas (made years ago) was rooted in the sense that this way of thinking was not helpful for women or for any groups who have lived/been produced under conditions of servitude, giving, sacrifice, duty.
Nevertheless, there seems to be kind of fundamental connectedness that makes the idea of persistence involving a relation to the other that strikes me as right and as much better than the mere assertion of one right against another right to exist. So here even self-determination needs more elaboration and qualification: what kinds of selves (states) are being determined? and, is it really a self-determination or something else? isn't it really a call for recognition and acknowledgement under a different set of terms?
Alain's comments make me nervous (and feel rather stupid and confused) because I'm not sure which way answers will leave me. I'm wary of affirming some outside of the political. And, this wariness leads me to appreciate Zizek's use of Lacan's feminine formulation of non-all: there is no life outside of politics but politics is not all of life. And, perhaps it is then that the assertion of a right to exist is a problem insofar as it collapses life into politics so that politics becomes the all or basis or constitutive dimension of life.
Posted by: Jodi | Jan 30, 2006 2:08:33 PM
Jodi, I apologize since I completely misunderstood you. But I wonder, given the current discussion, if we are not than left with something like the Arendtian formulation of a "Right to have Rights," or better put the "Right to assert Rights," within a political context?
Posted by: Alain | Jan 30, 2006 2:25:55 PM
Jodi, I understand your feelings about Levinas, but I think that they're based on a common misperception of what he's really saying (a misperception that my sense is he himself, particularly in his earlier stuff, contributed to). The Levinas that I like is the one that arises from Derrida's readings of him (and his own, post-Derridian commentary writings). For that Derridian Levinas, the "debt to the Other," etc., isn't a normative injunction of the type that (I think) you fear -- "turn the other cheek," etc. etc. Instead, it's an ontological (or I should probably say quasi-ontological) precondition of "existence" in general. Of course, it also is (or entails) an injunction, but not a normative one -- it has no content, it's an entirely abstract (in fact, formal in something like the Kantian sense, I think) orientation of the being toward the ethical stance as, again, a precondition of its existence. Thus, for me, what (Derrida's) Levinas is all about, ultimately, is a different resolution of the is/ought split, one that doesn't rejoin them through the self-interest of the egoistic self in self-persistence, but in a (pre-originary) incline toward the other. That's one of the things that Derrida was doing, it seems to me, in confronting Levinas with the unavoidability of Heideggerian ontology in "Violence and Metaphysics," and also (from the other side) what he was doing when he drew out of Heidegger's later writings the "pledge," Zusage, as more original than the question, and so on. That's the sense that I mean this type of analysis allows one to understand a kind of (quasi-)transcendental condition of ethico-political motivation in general, which, I think, doesn't (necessarily) issue in the kind of political submission that (rightly) worries you.
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jan 31, 2006 10:16:24 AM
Alain--my stars, no apologies necessary! And, you didn't misunderstand me--I think you were pushing me in directions I hadn't forseen and need to think about.
On right to have rights--I think of the article by Ranciere I recently posted/linked to on I cite and that Zizek draws on. The right to have rights seems a kind of leftover, what is thrown to those who have nothing, like a scrap. Well, you have no right to speak, not really, not if you expect to be heard, but that's ok since you have a right to have rights. It makes me think again of the general problem of granting, bestowing, recognizing rights that seems to reinstall/fail to break through a hegemonic power structure.
Adam--(I'm reading Anti Oedipus right now so that's informing this question): would you also say that the Derridized Levinas account that you give would be as quasis immanent as it is quasi transcendental? Whichever way you answer, what I like about the reading you give is a primary inteconnectedness that is the precondition for everything else. I don't know the discussion of the pledge as more original than the question--maybe you could say more about that? or post it on your blog?
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 1, 2006 12:51:07 PM
I can't really understand why Zizek doesn't like Levinas more. Sure all of this "ethics of the other" is trite shit, but I don't think people realize just how perverse Levinas' philosophical theology was. The Other is just a means! I wouldn't give a shit for the Other if he/she wasn't my access to the holy of holies (or the prohibition of that access, which amounts to the same thing). Correctly understood, the face-to-face is a phenomenological instant of instrumentality. I use the Other, wholly, shamelessly and unendingly for my very being!
Posted by: Marc Lombardo | Feb 1, 2006 1:15:51 PM
Jodi, thanks. I read the Ranciere piece but it has been a while. My recollection is that he still is willing to use the language of rights, but he looks at politics as a process, not a separate sphere of activity. In this sense, rights only mean something when a subject "exercises" or asserts a right against a legal community - one only has a right when they do something to create a "dissensus." I have to admit that I did not really get what a dissensus means but it does not sound all that different from the idea of a political subject (whether individual or collective) only possessing a right when they challenge those who would exclude or suppress them. If this is true, than it would seem that he advocates a right to assert rights, if that makes any sense?
Posted by: Alain | Feb 1, 2006 3:27:45 PM
Alain, my question would be what sort of status does this larger or encompassing right have? can it even be denied? so, it makes sense to me to think of rights tactically, as what might be claimed and fought for, but to say that folks have a right to make claims and fight for things seems odd to me, again, like a kind of right of existence that then doesn't seem to mean or accomplish anything. So, human rights then become a problem as a category.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 1, 2006 4:18:34 PM
Jodi, the original cite for the Zusage -- "pledge" (in the translations of Derrida's commentary on Heidegger), "grant" (in the translations of the original Heidegger) -- being more original than the question comes from "The Nature of Language":
"What do we discover when we give sufficient thought to the matter? This, that the authentic attitude of thinking is not a putting of questions -- rather, it is a listening to the grant, promise of what is to be put in question." (On the Way to Language 71.)
I got there by way of Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 129 n.5 (a famous 7 page endnote); and on more or less the same subject (this time Derrida calls it the "yes," or "arche-originary yes"), see also the under-read "A Number of Yes"; there's also a useful interview in which he puts together and explains the "yes," Zusage and "perhaps") in PLI-Warwick Journal of Philosophy -- can get you the cites if interested -- Adam
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Feb 1, 2006 5:28:34 PM
Jodi, I see your point. A "right to assert rights" is rather meaningless in this context. Rights only exists at the point of intersection, and not in any prior sense. The only difficulty I see (and perhaps Ranciere or Zizek address this)is how do we talk about injustice in situations where the victims are not able to assert resistance, to demand that their rights be recognized? Perhaps this sounds like some lame old liberal idea but what do those who have no voice and no efficacy do with the Ranciere description of rights, if that makes sense?
Posted by: Alain | Feb 1, 2006 7:05:15 PM
Adam, thanks so much. I'm not sure I know what to make of the originary listening. I perhaps too quickly translate it into Donald Davidson's principle of charity. Or, I would say that for the hysteric to say am I who you say I am presupposes a prior saying, but this still is very far away from a grant or promise.
Alain, I doubt that I have very good responses, but here goes. On one side, I might ask whether there are victims who are not able to assert resistance. This kind of question, I think, challenges us to think about various kinds of resistance and agency and see how resistance is already enacted. When I go in this direction, then, it isn't for me to acknowledge their rights or to grant them rights or to urge others to recognize some rights but rather to find ways to facilitate struggles that I support. So, on the other side, one might demand all sorts of things that are not rights: say, one might demand that arms stop being supplied all over the world; one might demand that companies stop enslaving people; one might even demand that troops be sent into places to stop physical violence. And I think these demands do not have to be made in the name of rights or on behalf of another but in the name of stopping a kind of violence made in one's own name.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 1, 2006 8:56:58 PM
Here, I have to agree with Jodi.
To the list of Agamben et al, I'll add Marx, and note that the possession of rights (or claims to do so) is accompanied by the emergence of possessive individualism (or a certain kind of subjectivation) - this, and not any particular limits on 'arbitrary power' or violence, is what the processes of rights puts into motion.
Here's Werner Hamacher and Wendy Brown, more or less reading Marx.
In any case, I don't think rights guarantee life so much as ensure that the decision over life will be ceded. Rights merely provide the criteria for rationalising the non-existence of rights - as in, x has no rights because x is not human, or b has no rights because they are crazy, a child, too infirm or too old - and so on.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Feb 1, 2006 9:12:47 PM
Thank you Angela and Jodi. I appreciate the thoughtful responses (and the links). The issue that Wendy Brown raises is particularly urgent today: Is it possible to disentangle the rhetoric of human rights from the justifications used by the Bush Junta (or the Clinton group for that matter) for its robust neo-imperialism. It is in the context of this usage that the rather abstract, hallow nature of rights discourse comes clearly into view.
Thanks again.
Posted by: Alain | Feb 1, 2006 11:32:51 PM
that the possession of rights (or claims to do so) is accompanied by the emergence of possessive individualism (or a certain kind of subjectivation)
no doubt
Rights merely provide the criteria for rationalising the non-existence of rights - as in, x has no rights because x is not human, or b has no rights because they are crazy, a child, too infirm or too old - and so on.
hm...but is this this really all that rights are ever capable of? Would it be overly pedantic to point out that the concept itself (of "human rights" for exmaple) is in fact ever-changing, that it has been broadened to include women and children, for instance, and only very recently at that?...
Posted by: Matt | Feb 1, 2006 11:55:06 PM
But the change here is hardly that of any linear development - more and better, as it were. 'Children's rights' seem more proximate to those of pets than they are suggestive of 'the rights of man'.
I guess the question I have is what precisely do you lose if, in any given struggle, you do not conduct this as a claim for rights? Does one become thereby politically incapacitated?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Feb 2, 2006 7:30:37 AM
Ha. Hardly incapacitated, no. Or rather: not as a claim for rights exclusively, or as any end in itself, for sure (the obvious example of MLK does become a bit more messy when one factors in everything else that eventually made his bid--in the eyes of "The Man"--the entirely preferable, lesser of two evils...more easily sacralized, monumentalized and trivializd away, among other things.) But still--some might say--let's be careful not to throw the hard-earned gains associated with an emancipatory ideal (more broadly, then) away with the bathwater, yeah?
But I suspect we mostly agree here, Angela. The point in pointing out how the concept of "human rights" is not something permanent and fixed is only then to argue for a more nuanced kind of vigilance, or stronger affirmation, one whose concern for 'justice' extends beyond the (somewhat inevitably othering) language of "rights." Still, without the initial, more limited affirmation, one might argue that this more important project--for lack of a better word--is sort of doomed to the fishbowl, no?
I think there is a case to be made, for instance, that (a popular reading of) Agamben (and others) may risk doing just this..
Posted by: Matt | Feb 2, 2006 12:56:51 PM
while i very much appreciate the philosophical discussion raised here.. clearly the topic at hand was whether or not a particular state or states had / have the "right to exist".
the use of this particular language is purely political and obviously follows the doctrine of "might makes right" in any interpretation of it's logic.
a state is not a person or persons, though it is most certainly advertized that way. it is a political institution. and while the political is personal - many if not most contemporary democracies do not support the representation of all (if even most) of it's citizens. therefore even the democratic nation state is not representative of it's "people" and cannot be equated as such.
the right to exist, in most of the above terms discussed, is irrelevant to the acknowledgement of or legitimization of a state beyond the symbolism of equality of nations in their access to participation and representation in the political-economical sphere.
my two cents... though i'll likely return to re-read this.. very interesting.. thanx
Posted by: ricia | Feb 2, 2006 1:15:39 PM
A brief, half-thought suggestion: the "right to have rights," as Arendt calls it, follows from the devestation of the second World War, and the population exchanges, displaced persons and refugees. Her account, found in the Part 2, Imperialism of Origins of Totalitarianism (the last few chapters of which should be read as a propaedeutic to Agamben's Homo Sacer) -- her account is not so much an argument as an assertion that this point must not be crossed again.
For Arendt, the right to have rights is normatively grounded in the assertion (without much argument) of human dignity. This value seems rooted only in the horror that awaits a world that forsakes it. But then isn't this sort of normative argument precisely that of Zizek[!]? Normative claims can only be grounded in the actions of people that create their own justifications ("the Act par excellence"). The only way to transcend the exclusionary binary of national-legal rights, Arendt argues, is through international organizations. (Although, I suspect she was unconcerned with the rights of animals or Half-animal/half-man clones -- so I can't be sure that if pushed that far, Arendt could answer Angela's reservations. But her point is suggestive: perhaps for Arendt as well rights were nothing but the reification into concept of the power of individuals working together. This at least is one answer I could see her giving.)
Posted by: Luke | Feb 2, 2006 5:20:07 PM
I'm not really a fan of the mysticism of rights, but you can't seriously say that children's rights are like those of pets. There is a pretty glaring error here, Angela, which leads you away from the actual problem with these things.
Children, the insane, the infirm, even brain dead persons do not lose their rights and become de facto non humans (much less noncitizens). Rather what happens is that such persons cannot exercise, or guard their own rights, the responsibility for which is thus given to another person, a guardian. In some cases, in fact surprisingly rare, the state acts as the guardian.
It is the existence of this unequal relation that underpins the rights of the incapacitated. The rights accorded to children are rights *beyond* the rights of the UN Charter, and do not overide these, precisely because their intent is to control, assure and enable the management of these people's human rights.
There is no doubt a sense in which this is all about fucking people over. Guardianship is often used to control people who are slightly odd, in a humiliating fashion.
But there is simply no sense in which a person who is put under a Guardianship Order, or who is a child, ceases to be human. Unless, bizarrely enough, you assumed that being a citizen of mens sana, were the criterion of being human. The whole point is that this is not the state's criterion; maybe some evil fucker rationalist would think that, but not our good friend, Mr. State.
These rights of the incapacitated are really in a very different situation as compared with civil rights, or even 'humanitarian rights' - meaning, the right to be tended to by some nefarious NGO scam, and the right to be pictured alongside some condescending BBC journalist. The rights of the incapacitated are rights governing the relation between two people who are conceived of by law as being unequal; it is entirely different from the rights of a citizen against a state, or between two equal persons.
The determination of who is, in fact, incapacitated is problematic and a means for the assertion of state power, but it is rather obvious that while this is related to questions of rights, the question of incapacitation arises even in the absence of a legal or moral framework of rights. So, if Angela's friend got so drunk he fell in a filthy ditch in a delirious state, she would probably not wait until morning to let him decide whether or not to go home. Maybe she would pick the guy up, take him home and maybe give him some coffee and a shower. To see what the rights of the incapacitated mean, one would have to imagine a situation in which the police then shows up and charges her with kidnapping, indecent conduct and attempted poisoning by criminally ill prepared instant coffee.
As for a right to existence, it is a transparent farce cooked up once it became impossible to say that PLO did not recognise Israel. Once that happened, Israeli rejectionists started to demand something beyond recognition of the factual situation (ok, so you guys stole our land. Fine, let's move on) to a demand that the victims concede the justice of their persecution (sure, it was your right to steal our land).
Posted by: TCO | Feb 2, 2006 8:03:36 PM
Interesting discussion of rights in the latter half of this review article by Malcolm Bull: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/bull01_.html
Posted by: YH | Feb 3, 2006 3:23:41 AM
Luke, the Act doesn't ground a new norm and isn't itself defended as a norm. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you?
TCO--in what sense do children, the infirm, or anyone have rights? I get a sense in your comment of rights somehow attaching to people in a semi-mystical way. If rights were political tools then of course it would be possible for the incapacitated to lose their rights--and to give them away in advance. It would be possible for children to have no rights of their own. Etc.
Posted by: Jodi | Feb 3, 2006 9:45:19 AM
Matt, does the "fishbowl" remark mean that you think not having recourse to a rights discourse risks marginalising one? If so, I'm not so sure that's the case. In my experiences around migration issues, rights talk falls on deaf ears among those who believe that 'migrants steal our jobs'. The form of address, the 'we' that is elicited by rights claims, are much more limited than is usually assumed to be the case.
Thiago/TCO, no doubt my errors are many, and that your remarks seem contradictory to me is probably one of them. In any case, all rights function as a form of delegation and/or alienation. In rights, recognition trumps theology, and revocation shadows recognition.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Feb 3, 2006 9:18:22 PM
I thought I explained quite clearly how it is that the rights of the incapacitated work. The idea is that people have rights, but cannot exercise them, thus another person must be put in a position of power over them. The rights of the incapacitated govern the behaviour of this person.
Do I believe this? That's not the point. The point is that this is how the state, and the discourse of rights work.
And the whole point of that is that this isn't about nullifying someone's rights. It is about controlling the interactions of certain kinds of persons who are recognised to be in positions of responsibility over others. If you miss this, and imagine the situation resembles that of a man and his dog, you've missed the whole point (and problem) of this class of rights.
There is nothing particularly mystical about a person continuing to have rights that they cannot defend, or that they delegate to someone else. For the liberalist, you still own your property whilst asleep, or drunk. If you sleep for ever, or are permanently drunk, a person will then be appointed to take care of your property on your behalf - precisely because you still own it. These are concrete, legal structures, with precise meaning and often devasting effects for people. I know, because I used to work for the Protective Commissioner of NSW. Long story, but suffice it to say that my position here is very much hostile to this kind of talk.
You could argue they are mystical in the sense that all law is founded upon mysticism, like Pascal might have it, and there is something to that. But that is far too blunt an instrument to understand, let alone react to, what is happening to us. The alternative, or rather completementary reading is that rights of this sort a just social facts no less real, and no less metaphysical, than marriages or promises. I think that is a more promising way of tackling the issue. I don't see this as contradicting the Pascalian point, btw, precisely because I would also see mysticism as a concrete human activity we can look into.
As for what Angela said, I have no idea what that could mean. It seems to me an absurd level of abstraction to say that all rights are a form of delegation. If that is true, which I think it isn't (not because I like rights, I just think it is the wrong way of describing the trap we're in), it isn't very helpful. The first problem being - what is it that gets delegated or alienated? I'd like to see that spelled out in a language that is not in fact just the language of rights with hidden apostrophes...
Posted by: TCO | Feb 4, 2006 2:40:46 AM
Post a comment
Please note: comments are published at the discretion of the post's author and will not appear immediately. Do not submit comments more than once.
