Abstract
Recent histories of human rights have shown that the turn to human rights as a form of politics occurred as a placeholder for utopian energies at the end of history, coinciding with a retreat of the organised left, the abandonment of the theme of revolution, and the pluralisation of political struggles. This essay examines the way that radical continental theory has responded to the political hegemony of human rights by focusing on ‘post-Marxist’ thought. Examining the work of four influential critics of human rights—Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière—I argue that post-Marxist thought provides two very different approaches to the political possibilities offered by human rights. The first retains a fidelity to the revolutionary critique of rights by rejecting the language and conceptuality of human rights as too deeply implicated in the liberal political order that needs to be resisted. The second acknowledges the limitations of human rights while arguing that they also offer important tools for democratic political struggle. The essay draws upon these analyses to consider the contemporary political meaning of human rights. It argues that the latter of these strategies is problematic because we now face a radically different political conjuncture to the one in which the politics of human rights first emerged: human rights have played an important role in the project of post-historical reaction; the political space in which the politics of rights once made sense has collapsed; and we have seen substantial political upheavals in the wake of the crisis of capitalism.
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Notes
Laclau and Mouffe are some of the few contemporary political theorists to explicitly describe themselves as Post-Marxists. Badiou, Lefort and Rancière are, however, all ‘Post-Marxists’ in the sense that they once identified as Marxists but broke with its theoretical premises and forms of political organisation in the 1970s. While Agamben has never identified as a Marxist he has long engaged with Marx’s work and is interested in rethinking a number of its theoretical problems in the wake of the crisis of orthodox Marxism. In this essay, then, I use the term Post-Marxist in much the same broad sense as Warren Breckman, who writes, in Adventures of the Symbolic, that ‘Post-Marxism functions in this book as a “period” concept, a self-description, a biographical fact, and a designation of continuity—whether explicit or implicit—in the way in which questions are posed and even judged important’ (Breckman 2013).
Like Lefort and Rancière, Laclau and Mouffe develop a radical democratic account of rights that emphasises the possibility for contesting exclusion through political struggles that exploit the indeterminacy of the ‘human’ of ‘human rights’ by redefining its meaning (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). This analysis (which emerged at around the same time as Badiou and Agamben’s critiques of human rights) has also been particularly influential within post-Marxist theory as well as international human rights theory. I do not deal with their analysis in this essay due to limited space: instead I focus on Lefort as the first to articulate such a politics of rights in response to the specificity of the post-1968 political conjuncture; and Rancière as a recent advocate of this position whose ambivalence about the democratic politics of human rights arises from his attention to the character of contemporary politics. Pairing these two thinkers serves to structure a historical narrative about the radical democratic politics of human rights in light of the development of post-historical politics.
Bernard Henri-Lévy famously argued that ‘apply Marxism in any country you want, you will always find Gulag in the end’. With somewhat more theoretical subtlety, André Glucksmann argued that the theoretical root of totalitarianism lies in the statism of German thinkers from Kant through Marx and Nietzsche: ‘German idealism set forth a program, and our very materialistic century is putting this into practice’ (Glucksmann 1980, in Bourg 2007, p. 289).
Samuel Moyn explicitly locates the thought of the New Philosophers in this broader context, casting as the ‘“self-destructive acme” of leftist appeals to dissidence to indict the Soviet regime and the archaic French Communist Party’ (Moyn 2012a, p. 169).
Technically, he proposes a revolutionary ethics against the dominant ethics.
The destruction of law is, for example, central to Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. While total domination is what defines totalitarianism as such, the destruction of law and rights is essential to this project (Arendt 1968).
While this is certainly the account of human rights that one finds in the new philosophers and much of the human rights movement, it ignores the democratic re-articulation of human rights by thinkers such as Lefort. There is also a more recent liberal re-articulation of rights that claims agnosticism as to metaphysical questions and instead casts human rights as pragmatic rules for the proper functioning of democratic societies in light of the problem of state violence: see Shklar (1998) and Ignatieff (2001).
Samuel Moyn makes a similar point when he argues that modern declarations of rights grounded the sovereignty of the nation-state, which then provided a space within which political claims about justice could be made, while international human rights law provides a legal mechanism that attempts to place limitations on the state (Moyn 2012a). Where Moyn emphasises the difference between the two forms of right for the purpose of criticising histories of human rights that present them as the full and final flourishing of an unbroken history that can be traced back, Agamben argues that the emergence of international human rights needs to be thought in relation to the conceptual architecture of the nation-state.
The accuracy of the critique of Marx that Lefort offers is, for our current purposes, a moot point: what is important is that the kind of reading that Lefort was amongst the first to develop has played a major role in the theoretical landscape of post-Marxist critical theory over the past 30 years.
Interestingly, this time the reason for the radical depoliticisation of rights is not, as in Lefort’s critique of Marx, the attempt to collapse the political into the social, but rather, Agamben’s debt to Arendt’s ‘archipolitical’ attempt to keep the two spheres rigorously distinguished (Rancière 2004, p. 299). Rancière’s attempt to assimilate Agamben in this regard is, however, deeply problematic and has been ably criticised by Whyte (2009).
Badiou with his analysis of the event; Agamben with the ‘non-juridical and non-statal politics and human life’ (Agamben 2000, p. 111) that he variously terms form-of-life, pure means, and destituent power.
This is in stark contrast to the struggles of Italian autonomist Marxism in the 1970s. Where the rights struggles, to which Lefort refers, seek recognition by the state and a right to work, autonomist Marxism developed a politics of exodus through the mass desertion of the terrain of the state and the labour relation and the construction of a new and non-state public sphere (Virno 1996, p. 195). Autonomist Marxism thus offers an alternative response to the crisis of classical Marxism to the radical politics of human rights—one that attempts to rethink the meaning of revolution in light of the political and economic transformations of the 1970s. The most prominent intellectual figures associated with this tradition are Antonio Negri and Paulo Virno, but it has also been an important influence on Agamben’s conception of a non-statist politics (Smith 2016).
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McLoughlin, D. Post-Marxism and the Politics of Human Rights: Lefort, Badiou, Agamben, Rancière. Law Critique 27, 303–321 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9177-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9177-0