Human Rights and the Limits of a Politics of Process

The paper examines the right to have rights in terms of the politics of human rights—of the rightless taking up, claiming, and enacting denied rights. The subject of rights is the limitless subject of politics. This is a performative understanding of the right to have rights in that the excluded confer a ‘place in the world’ on themselves. In this paper I examine Jacques Rancière’s response to Arendt’s account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancière, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoë) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoë and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancière ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. These writings on rights and the subject illustrate Rancière’s conception of politics as a process, which emphasises a dynamic staging of conflicts and the impossibility of stepping outside that discussion and conflict. I show how Rancière’s distinction between politics and the police envisions a subject which is created through ‘dissensual’ acts. These acts of ‘dissensus’ are the very divisions, the strife or the conflict which constitutes the stage on which politics occurs. Rancière’s subject does not need to act politically in an existing public sphere where individuals recognise each other as equal and distinct. Rather, the acts they commit help contest the very meaning of rights and politics; a politics which always entails the verification of equality as such. This in turn highlights the key issue for me in relation to Rancière’s thought. How can we distinguish between the quality of actors who act politically, without falling back on a presumed political sphere (as in Arendt) or modern liberal political philosophy? I conclude that a stronger questioning of the types of judgment needed to differentiate between political acts is required to avoid Rancière’s thought being used to justify forms of action the reader finds sympathetic.