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Abstract
A critical sociology, a sociology which is alive rather than moribund, has only existed as a result of the imagining of an emancipatory project of one form or other. At least from the rationalist project of the Enlightenment which wished to liberate thought from religious dogma, to the critique of capitalism and the imagining of an alternative in the 19th century, to the critique of ‘actually existing socialism’ in May 1968, to the imagining of freedom and development in the Third World, to the struggle for equality between men and women, to the anti-apartheid struggle for a better world; in all these moments sociology was able to rise to a critical analysis of what exists and its structuring by power in order to clear the ground for an alternative. Today the absence of an emancipatory project is reflected in the inability of sociology in most of the world to transcend the descriptive and the given. In South Africa in particular, this is reflected in the mainstream intellectual praise-singing of state power. In order to move beyond this state of affairs, and to renew sociology as critical thought, we need simultaneously to re-imagine an emancipatory project and to re-think its intellectual conditions of existence. This article is concerned with some aspects of this process. In particular it is concerned to critically engage with what has become today the implicit framework for thinking social change and state formation in the interests of the majority: human rights discourse. It argues that this vision forms today part and parcel of the neo-liberal political hegemonic framework and that it can only be understood as enabling neo-liberal thought in all its dimensions. Through drawing a distinction between the complementary and contradictory sides of ‘subjecthood’ and ‘victimhood’ of a discourse of institutionalised ‘human rights’, the article shows that the effect of this discourse is to de-politicise popular politics, and to produce a passive citizenship dependent on power (states, empire, NGOs, etc.) for its existence. For an active citizenship — itself the main condition for the existence of an emancipatory project today — to be enabled, and for the genuine democratisation of the state, human rights discourse must be subjected to a thorough intellectual and practical critique. In this manner sociology can help to re-think political agency for its own renewal as well as for the imagining of a human alternative to the depredations of neo-liberalism.
Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims […] but to be faithful to those events during which victims politically assert themselves (Badiou, 1985: 75, author's translation).
