Stefania Maffeis

This paper proposes a political understanding of human rights which allows not to dissolve the contradiction between the positive and the normative aspect entailed in the idea and the institution of human rights, but rather to keep them together dialectically. I discuss the relationality of human rights through Hannah Arendt’s idea of the right to have rights and I develop it further through Jacques Rancière’s concept of subjectivity. This allows me to explain the dialectic of the human rights as a conflict between existing positive rights, which assign specific subjects or groups to specific territories and legal spheres, and a universal claim of human equality and freedom, which is challenged from excluded, unclassified social groups and which is performed in situations of protests. I further explain the radical democratic potential of human rights on the paradigmatic case of struggles for a right to global movement and to political belonging. In order to grasp the complexity of those subjectivity practices, I distinguish four different dimensions of subjectivity: a legal and political one, an affective one, an epistemic one and finally an ethical transcultural one.