Inhuman Rights

Michel Foucault - by Paul Loboda (2015)

Someone writes and asks:

"How can you posit a notion of rights when you subscribe to an anti-humanist philosophy?" 

It's a perfectly valid and legitimate question. And it's one which can best be addressed with reference to the work of Michel Foucault. For Foucault is, on the one hand, famous for his aggressive anti-humanism (influenced by Nietzsche), whilst, on the other hand, a great defender of the rights of various marginalised groups (prisoners, refugees, homosexuals, et al).     

Without falling back on the ideal of a universal human subject who possesses innate and inalienable rights in their capacity as such, Foucault argues that all people are governed within a network of power relations and that they do, at least, have this in common.

In other words, we are all citizens and this fact alone might provide a basis for solidarity. We have the right - and the duty - as citizens to question those who govern us and to call out flagrant abuses of power, the failure to act, or the failure to exercise due care when acting and thereby causing unnecessary suffering or hardship.

What's more, argues Foucault, individual citizens have the right to come together and collectively confront governments and take direct action themselves. We don't have to - and shouldn't expect to or want to - leave only governments free to act. Private citizens, says Foucault, have the right to intervene in the political order (thus his support for groups such as Amnesty International).

Rather than fantasise about human rights and the Great Family of Man, the key is to focus on civil rights and liberties, considered in their historical reality. As one commentator notes, Foucault articulates a conception of rights "that is open, contingent and revisable - and that does not rely for its moral or normative legitimacy on the idea of a universal human essence beyond power or politics".

In other words, Foucault's work opens up the playful possibility of "a tactical and strategic usage of rights that draws on the available resources of the law and liberal institutions in order to creatively and radically contest them".

Notes

Michel Foucault, 'The rights and duties of international citizenship', trans. by Colin Gordon (2015). Click here to read online at opendemocracy.net 

The above text was a statement read by Foucault at a press conference on 19 June, 1981, organised in association with Médecins du monde and Terre des hommes. It first appeared in print (with the rather unfortunate title) as 'Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme', in Liberation, 967, (30 June/1 July 1984), p. 22. Click here to read in the original French. 

Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politcs of Rights, (Stanford University Press, 2015). 

See too Golder's post on the SUP blog entitled 'Human Rights Without Humanism', from which I quote above: click here.