RE: End of Human Rights

RE: THE END OF HUMAN RIGHTS

“It seems to me that in this juxtaposition of texts (ORIGIN/END), the group of ‘Origin’ authors brought boring knifes to a gunfight.”

Well if my favorite aspect about last week’s readings was Mrs. De Gouge’s mix of wit and sarcasm, this week I’ve been delighted again by a few displays of literary Attitude. More poignant and at times cynic, this week’s writings (In particular Deleuze, Agamben, and of course Zizek’s aptly titled piece) where not cheeky critiques but rather full-frontal attacks on the notion of rights.

 Applying some reflexivity, I am beginning to notice that I do enjoy attitude in text. Now: I have not made my mind up with regards to which side of the HR fence I am on. I am still standing on that proverbial picket and letting the course develop. 

However, 

if I was to to take the side of the futility of human rights, I could ask if perhaps the impotence of the concept, discourse and application of human rights might all be somehow rooted in their historical document’s utter lack of passion. Looking back at earlier readings for the course, they all seem sanitized and inhuman, even within a context of supposed reverence to humanity (or a particular portion of it, in the least). It seems to me that in this juxtaposition of texts (ORIGIN/END), the group of “Origin”authors brought boring knifes to a gunfight.

I loved Deleuze’s reduction of human rights into “a party line for...intellectuals without any ideas of their own”. He saves no words and calls those who “recite” human rights “idiots” who have not realized that, events such as the Armenian Genocide had nothing to do with these alleged rights but rather were issues of jurisprudence. For a course on social movements, I was recently reading a piece on “framing” the abortion debate, and the key was that one side built its case on rights, while the other built it’s case on morals. Let’s say any given contentious situation can be interpreted from a different viewpoint, be it rights, morals or jurisprudence. Can we start to think of human rights then as a lens through which to interpret social realities? Now, there is a question that arises from Deleuze, a point at which I feel he takes a jump. While he is successful in conveying the ethereal, unreal nature of the concept of human rights, he implies in his essay is the idea that Law, or the legal system, is a solid-enough, real-enough rock on which to build Justice (for lack of a better word). I wonder then, where the difference emerges between Rights and Law and I have a feeling that one is enforced by threat of punishment in a somewhat consistent manner, while the other has no body to perform such tasks in any swift manner. 

So what am I arguing? I believe that the Law might be as abstract as rights. What is real, as real as cold steel, is Law Enforcement. The Law is broken often, it is also applied selectively many, many times. This makes it not unlike rights. This line of thought left me in disagreement with Deleuze as he concluded. Could, maybe, “the fight to create the right” be not the fight for jurisprudence but rather for the power to enforce law/right/morality?