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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.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank John Nguyet Erni, Greg Wise, and an anonymous reviewer for their assistance and helpful suggestions for revision.
Notes
1. The Doors, “The Soft Parade” (Elektra Records, 1969).
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2000).
3. We leave aside the question of the postmodern subject as delineated in Deleuze's essay on “control societies” as a variation of discipline that exceeds the juridical and the discourse on rights related to law which we are engaging in this essay. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
4. Étienne Balibar, “Citizen Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 38, emphasis in original.
5. Étienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjectivation,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 8; emphasis in original.
6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 188.
7. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 122.
8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
9. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
10. OED Online, s.v. “Law,” http://dictionary.oed.com (accessed January 16, 2009).
11. OED Online, s.v. “Law,” http://dictionary.oed.com (accessed January 16, 2009).
12. Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1976).
13. Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990.
14. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 192.
15. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 192.
16. Anthony J. Langlois, “The Elusive Ontology of Human Rights,” Global Society 18 (2004): 244.
17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
18. Robin Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics, and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
19. See Dieter Misgeld and David W. Jardine, “Hermeneutics as the Undisciplined Child: Hermeneutics and Technical Images of Education,’ in Entering the Circle: Hermeneutic Investigation in Psychology, ed. Martin. J. Packer and Richard B. Addison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
20. Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics, and Human Rights, 4.
21. Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993).
22. Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, trans. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
23. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act.
24. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 22; emphasis in original.
25. Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, 153.
26. Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” 16.
27. Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” 16.
28. Claudia Lopez, “Cochabamba's Water Wars: The Start of Other Struggles,” Upside Down World, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/300-cochabambas-water-war-the-start-of-other-struggles (accessed May 19, 2010).
29. See Hearing Voices Network (http://www.hearing-voices.org/) and Neurodiversity (http://www.neurodiversity.com/main.html). The Hearing Voices Network (HVN) emerged as an alternative to traditional psychiatric approaches which consider voice hearing simply as form of auditory hallucination. The HVN aims to raise awareness of this phenomenon, offering other explanations for voice hearing (e.g., extreme stress or trauma) and providing help, support, and understanding to people who experience hearing voices. Neurodiversity is a self-advocacy movement which asserts that non-normative (neurodivergent) neurological development is simply difference that should be acknowledged and respected on its own terms.
30. Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
31. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 21.
32. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 23.
33. Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, 100.
34. Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
35. Hardt and Negri, Empire.
36. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 270.
37. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 139.
38. Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
39. Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.