Adikia: On Communism and Rights

1. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, Marx­ist intel­lec­tu­als, shaken by the Gulag rev­el­a­tions and the col­lapse of the com­mun­ist states, star­ted wel­com­ing human rights. Claude Lefort, Jean-​Francois Lyo­tard, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ran­cière¹ amongst oth­ers par­ti­cip­ated in this move. It coin­cided with the ‘end of his­tory’ brag­ging of lib­eral cap­it­al­ists and the revi­sion­ist his­tor­ies of the French Revolu­tion, which emphas­ized its fail­ures, ter­ror and total­it­ari­an­ism. It was a time of defeat and demor­al­iz­a­tion for the left. All that has been solid in rad­ical think­ing star­ted melt­ing in the air.

This period of defeat, intro­spec­tion and pen­ance came to an end with the fin­an­cial and eco­nomic crisis. The return of rad­ical the­ory and polit­ics revived the sus­pi­cion towards the facile mor­al­ism and human­it­ari­an­ism of lib­eral demo­cracy and post­mod­ern culture’s aban­don­ment of uni­ver­sal­ism. Alain Badiou dis­missed the human­ism of rights in Eth­ics,² Sla­voj Zizek ques­tioned the eman­cip­at­ory poten­tial of human rights after some waver­ing,³ while Michael Hardt and Ant­o­nio Negri see human rights as an indis­pens­able tool of empire.⁴ The rejec­tion of the earlier rights revi­sion­ism is almost complete.

Yet, this rejec­tion is some­what prob­lem­atic. Uni­ver­sal­ism is the ral­ly­ing cry of lib­eral human­it­ari­ans. The defence of the sans papi­ers, a major cam­paign of Badiou’s organ­iz­a­tion poli­tique, can­not avoid some ver­sion of rights-​talk. Hardt and Negri’s recipe for turn­ing the claims of empire’s into rad­ical multitude’s expres­sion takes the form of social rights. Jacques Ran­cière finds in human rights a good example of the rad­ical polit­ics he espouses. An embar­rassed flir­ta­tion between the left and rights has been renewed in a dir­ec­tion which com­bines the defence of uni­ver­sal­ism with the rejec­tion of human rights ideo­logy.⁵ This is the time to re-​visit rights his­tory and the­ory in the con­text of late cap­it­al­ism. If com­mun­ist prac­tice was a denial of lib­eral rights, can the philo­soph­ical idea of com­mun­ism save (human) rights?

2. The his­tory of human rights has been char­ac­ter­ized by a con­flict between lib­eral cel­eb­ra­tion and rejec­tion by Marx­ism and com­munit­ari­an­ism. Human rights are Janus-​like, they have only para­doxes to offer. They can eman­cip­ate and dom­in­ate, pro­tect and con­trol.⁶ This ambigu­ous atti­tude per­meated the rad­ical the­ory of rights until recently with the neg­at­ive side more pronounced.

Marx’s writ­ings on rights were part of his wider cri­tique of cap­it­al­ism. In feud­al­ism, polit­ical power, eco­nomic wealth and social status coin­cided. The polit­ical dom­in­ance of the rising bour­geoisie, on the other hand, could be ensured pre­cisely through the appar­ent loss of dir­ect polit­ical power. The rights of man removed polit­ics from soci­ety and ended the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of eco­nomic dom­in­ance with polit­ical lead­er­ship. Polit­ics became con­fined into the sep­ar­ate domain of the state. At the same time, prop­erty and reli­gion, the main safe­guards of class dom­in­ance, were turned into private insti­tu­tions loc­ated in civil soci­ety and pro­tec­ted from state inter­ven­tion through the oper­a­tion of nat­ural rights. This ‘demo­tion’ to the private realm made prop­erty more effect­ive and guar­an­teed its con­tin­ued dom­in­ance. In this dia­lect­ical for­mu­la­tion, the main aim of nat­ural rights was to remove polit­ics from soci­ety and de-​politicise the eco­nomy. After the sep­ar­a­tion, the state is presen­ted as (polit­ic­ally) dom­in­ant, while real (eco­nomic) power lies in cap­it­al­ist soci­ety. The bour­geois aban­don­ment of the dir­ect polit­ical power of feudal lords and kings was the pre­con­di­tion for the ascend­ancy of bour­geois soci­ety and the tri­umph of its cap­it­al­ist principles.

In this bour­geois hall of mir­rors, nat­ural rights sup­port selfish­ness and private profit. Polit­ics and the state, on the other hand, replace reli­gion and the church and become a ter­restrial quasi-​heaven in which social divi­sions are tem­por­ar­ily for­got­ten as the cit­izens par­ti­cip­ate in lim­ited formal demo­cracy. The lib­eral sub­ject lives a double life: a daily life of strife in pur­suit of per­sonal eco­nomic interest and a second which, like a meta­phor­ical Sab­bath, is devoted to polit­ical activ­ity and the ‘com­mon good’. In real­ity, a clear hier­archy sub­or­din­ates the polit­ical rights of the eth­er­eal cit­izen to the con­crete interests of the cap­it­al­ist, presen­ted in the form of nat­ural rights.

Marx’s attack on nat­ural rights inaug­ur­ated the vari­ous strands of ‘ideo­logy cri­tique’. First, equal­ity and liberty are ideo­lo­gical fic­tions eman­at­ing from the state and sus­tain­ing a soci­ety of inequal­ity, oppres­sion and exploit­a­tion. While nat­ural rights (and today human rights) are hailed as sym­bols of uni­ver­sal human­ity, they were at the same time power­ful weapons in the hands of the par­tic­u­lar (bour­geoisie). Ideo­lo­gies, class interests and egot­ist­ical con­cerns appear nat­ural, eternal, in the pub­lic good when glossed in the rights vocabulary.

Second, rights turn real people into abstract ciphers. The abstract man of the declar­a­tions has no his­tory or tra­di­tion, gender or sexu­al­ity, col­our or eth­ni­city, those ele­ments that make people real. All con­tent is sac­ri­ficed at the altar of abstract human­ity. This ges­ture of uni­ver­sal­isa­tion con­ceals how­ever their real sub­ject: an human-​all-​too-​human, wealthy, white, het­ero­sexual, male bour­geois stand­ing in for uni­ver­sal human­ity who com­bines the dig­nity of human­ity with the priv­ileges of the elite. The eman­cip­a­tion of uni­ver­sal man sub­jects real people to a very con­crete rule: ‘the rights of man as dis­tinct from the rights of the cit­izen are noth­ing but the rights of the mem­ber of bour­geois soci­ety, i.e. egot­istic man, man sep­ar­ated from other man and the com­munity.’⁷

A related argu­ment emphas­izes the stat­ism of rights. Effect­ive rights fol­low national belong­ing. While pro­claimed on behalf of uni­ver­sal human­ity bey­ond local or his­tor­ical factors only national cit­izens get their full pro­tec­tion. The gap between uni­ver­sal man and national cit­izen is pop­u­lated by mil­lions of refugees, migrants, state­less, mov­ing and nomadic people, the inhab­it­ants of camps and intern­ment centres, the hom­ines sacri who belong to ‘human­ity’ but have few if any rights because they do not enjoy state protection.

Third, formal equal­ity (the legal enti­tle­ment to have prop­erty) treats unequals equally as a mat­ter of right and fair­ness. This turns equal­ity into an ideo­lo­gical con­struct; it also pro­motes mater­ial inequal­ity, poverty and des­ti­tu­tion and under­mines close human rela­tion­ships. ‘Right by its very nature can con­sist only in the applic­a­tion of an equal stand­ard; but unequal indi­vidu­als (and they would not be dif­fer­ent indi­vidu­als if they were not unequal) are meas­ur­able only by an equal point of view, are taken from one def­in­ite side only…One worker is mar­ried, another not; one has more chil­dren than another and so on and so forth…To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.’⁸

Finally, Marx’s cri­tique of spe­cific rights was scath­ing. They pro­claim a neg­at­ive free­dom based on a soci­ety of isol­ated mon­ads who see each other as threats. The right to own­er­ship is noth­ing more than the pro­tec­tion of private prop­erty on the means of pro­duc­tion. Free­dom of opin­ion and expres­sion is the spir­itual equi­val­ent of private prop­erty, a claim fully val­id­ated in the era of Mur­doch, Turner and Gates. Anti­cip­at­ing the recent bio-​political turn, Marx argues that the right to secur­ity is the only real right. It con­structs arti­fi­cial links between (fear­ful) indi­vidu­als and the state and pro­motes the ulti­mate social value, law and order. Poli­cing, the ‘supreme concept of bour­geois soci­ety, the insur­ance for [bour­geois] ego­ism’,⁹ under­takes to keep social peace and pub­lic order in a con­flic­tual society.

Marx how­ever did not dis­miss rights out of hand. Com­ment­ing on the 1848 Revolu­tion, he spoke of a dif­fer­ent right: ‘The right to work is, in the bour­geois sense, non­sense, a wretched, pious wish. But behind the right to work stands power over cap­ital. The appro­pri­ation of the means of pro­duc­tion, their sub­jec­tion to the asso­ci­ated work­ing class. That is the abol­i­tion of wage labour, cap­ital and the mutual rela­tion­ship.’¹⁰

The com­mun­ist revolu­tion will real­ise the uni­ver­sal prom­ise of rights by neg­at­ing mor­al­istic form and ideal­ist con­tent. Free­dom will stop being neg­at­ive and defens­ive and will become a pos­it­ive power of each in union with oth­ers. Equal­ity will no longer mean the abstract com­par­ison of unequal indi­vidu­als but cath­olic and full par­ti­cip­a­tion in a strong com­munity. Prop­erty will cease being the lim­it­a­tion of each to a por­tion of wealth to the exclu­sion of all oth­ers and will become com­mon. Real free­dom and equal­ity look to the con­crete per­son in com­munity, aban­don the formal defin­i­tions of social dis­tri­bu­tion and inscribe on their ban­ners the prin­ciple ‘from each accord­ing to his abil­ity, to each accord­ing to his needs.’ For this to hap­pen the polit­ical revolu­tion sym­bol­ized by the rights of man must be super­ceded by a social revolu­tion which will lead to the eman­cip­a­tion of humanity.

3. The Marx­ist philo­sopher who mostly emphas­ised the para­dox­ical action of rights is Ernst Bloch.¹¹ Bloch retains the main ele­ments of Marx’s cri­tique of rights but dis­cov­ers in the tra­di­tion of nat­ural law the his­tor­ic­ally vari­able but eternal human trait to res­ist dom­in­a­tion and oppres­sion and to ima­gine, fight and achieve a soci­ety in which ‘man will walk upright’. There can be no real found­a­tion of human rights without an end to exploit­a­tion and no real end to exploit­a­tion without respect for rights.

Bloch’s cri­ti­cisms of the illu­sions of ‘bour­geois nat­ural law’ are dev­ast­at­ing. But human rights hail also from the tra­di­tion of cri­tique of power, con­ven­tion and law and have developed in two dir­ec­tions. Ini­tially, rights were asso­ci­ated with domin­ium, pos­ses­sion and prop­erty, the legal dom­in­ance over things and people and were inven­ted in order to pro­tect cred­it­ors from debt­ors.¹² Human rights emerged from this early right to prop­erty but were ‘adop­ted in a quite dif­fer­ent way by the exploited and oppressed, the humi­li­ated and degraded. It is pre­cisely this that appears in its incom­par­able second sense as the sub­ject­ive catch­word of the revolu­tion­ary struggle and act­ively as the sub­ject­ive factor of this struggle.’¹³ Bloch con­cludes that a his­tor­ic­ally endur­ing sense of res­ist­ance and rebel­lion shows the human ‘inten­tion of free­ing them­selves from oppres­sion and installing human dig­nity, at least since the time of the Greeks. But only this will is immut­able, and not…“man” and his so-​called eternal right.’ ¹⁴

Bloch’s Nat­ural Law and Human Dig­nity is the most advanced Marx­ist read­ing of the his­tory and philo­sophy of human rights. Influ­enced by Ger­man ideal­ism, Marx’s early writ­ings. Penned at the height of the cold war, it adopts an evol­u­tion­ary philo­sophy of his­tory and proph­es­ises the real­iz­a­tion of the humanum in com­mun­ism. Rad­ical human rights con­demn bour­geois leg­al­ity while at the same time real­iz­ing their ker­nel, the prin­ciple of hope of (social­ist) humanism.

This type of Marx­ist his­tor­icism and human­ism came under dev­ast­at­ing attack by Althus­serian and post­struc­tur­al­ist philo­sophy. Yet Bloch’s insist­ence in the will to res­ist and rebel, freed from human­ist ideal­ism, can help res­itu­ate the rad­ical poten­tial of norm­ativ­ity. If pro­gress is no longer guar­an­teed by his­tor­ical neces­sity and the revolu­tion­ary wager has been firmly placed on the long odds of the (com­ing) event, how can val­ues and norms pre­pare the epi­phany and the fidel­ity neces­sary for its real­isa­tion? If rad­ical change is not the lin­ear unfold­ing of the human spirit, but a rare and unpre­dict­able instance of eternal return how does the event link with moral imper­at­ives and psy­cho­lo­gical motiv­a­tions? As Peter Hal­ward puts it, ‘isn’t there a danger that by dis­reg­ard­ing issues of motiv­a­tion and resolve at play in any sub­ject­ive decision, the mil­it­ants of truth will preach only to the con­ver­ted?’¹⁵ Is there a syn­chronic con­stant bey­ond his­tor­icism and finitude that moves people to answer the call of Badiou’s ‘void’ and change the situation?

Rad­ical philo­sophy tends to neg­lect such ques­tions as sec­ond­ary or ‘super-​structural’. Yet Antigone’s defi­ance, Paul’s con­ver­sion and Lenin’s res­ol­ute­ness did not emerge ex nihilo. If ‘the sub­ject is only par­tially the sub­ject inspired by the event…social agents share, at the lever of a situ­ation, val­ues, ideas, beliefs, etc. that the truth…does not put entirely into ques­tion.’¹⁶ The mil­it­ants are partly pre­pared and sup­por­ted by norms and beliefs pre-​existing the dra­matic act and lead­ing to their abid­ing fidel­ity. Fol­low­ing Badiou’s ter­min­o­logy, we can call them the norm­at­ive pull of the void or, with Zizek, the norm­ativ­ity of the real. Where does this pull come from? What pre­pares the mil­it­ant sub­jects? As rights are becom­ing the dom­in­ant lan­guage of polit­ics, with all the prob­lems this entails, we need per­haps a gene­a­logy of rad­ical normativity.

4. The Anax­i­m­ander frag­ment, the old­est extant Greek text reads: ‘but where things have their ori­gin, there too their passing away occurs accord­ing to neces­sity; for they are judged and make repar­a­tion (didonai diken) to one another for their adikia (dis­join­ture, dis­lo­ca­tion, injustice) accord­ing to the ordin­ance of time’.¹⁷ Heide­g­ger uses the frag­ment to con­firm his fun­da­mental onto­logy. The proper pres­ence of beings is ‘linger­ing awhile’. When they present them­selves, they can­not be out of joint (adikia); on the con­trary, they are joined with oth­ers (Heidegger’s trans­lates dike as joint or join­ture). But Being with­draws as it reveals itself in beings, con­ceals itself and keeps to itself. In this pro­cess of unconcealment/​concealment, beings are cast adrift in errancy, and ‘his­tory unfolds…Without errancy there would be no con­nec­tion from des­tiny to des­tiny: there would be no his­tory’.¹⁸ Adikia is the dis­order of Being, its con­ceal­ment accom­pa­ny­ing its unon­ceal­ment or lingering.

Der­rida returns to Heidegger’s read­ing in Spectres for Marx agree­ing with the onto­lo­gical dir­ec­tion. Der­rida objects how­ever to the one-​dimensional inter­pret­a­tion of dike and adikia, which emphas­ise pacific join­ture and care. For Der­rida, the cent­ral­ity of adikia must be re-​instated. There is dis­join­ture and dis­sen­sion in Being, a dis­lo­ca­tion that anim­ates the rela­tion­ship with the other than being, with the other as other and with death.¹⁹

Derrida’s return to Being as dis­sen­sion can help us develop an onto­lo­gical think­ing of dike as the response to endur­ing dis­order and con­flict (adikia). Fol­low­ing this cor­rec­tion, the frag­ment can be para­phrased as fol­lows: ‘An archaic adikia, dis­sen­sion or con­flict, anim­ates the uncon­ceal­ment of Being. It endures in human his­tory which is the unfold­ing (tisis) of adikia’s over­com­ing (dike).’ What cre­ates this dis­lo­ca­tion or injustice? How is the repar­a­tion cal­cu­lated and paid?²⁰

An early answer is given by Sophocles in the Ode on Man, the superb choral song from Anti­gone.

polla ta deina kouden anthro­pou dei­noteron pelei (332).

Num­ber­less won­ders (deina), ter­rible won­ders walk the world

but none more won­der­ful and ter­rible (dei­noteron) than man.

Heidegger’s read­ing of the song places power, viol­ence and con­flict at the centre of his­tory. Deinon, the key word, has two mean­ings: first, it is man’s viol­ent and cre­at­ive power, evid­ent in techne know­ledge, art and law. Secondly, dike is an over­power­ing power, the order and struc­ture human­ity is thrown in and has to struggle with. Techne con­fronts dike and viol­ently tears asun­der the order of Being, using viol­ent poesis against dike’s over­power­ing dis­pens­a­tion. In this con­front­a­tion, man stops being at home and both home and the alien are dis­closed. Human­ity opens paths and sets bound­ar­ies, intro­duces laws and insti­tu­tions, mas­ters earth and sea.²¹ Techne and logos make mani­fest the man­i­fold of beings and humanity’s own his­tor­ical becoming.

But dike, the over­power­ing order, can never be fully over­come. It tosses pan­to­poros man (all resource­ful and everywhere-​going) back to aporos (without pas­sage and resource). Cata­strophe is humanity’s ines­cap­able con­di­tion caught up as it is in the con­flict between power and over­power­ing, the viol­ence of know­ledge, art and deed and the order of the world. Abid­ing dis­aster lurks behind every achieve­ment as its pre­con­di­tion. The frag­ment calls it adikia, dis­lo­ca­tion, dis­join­ture or injustice. Human­ity rises on the breach opened by the exer­cise of over­whelm­ing force on prim­or­dial dike.²²

Adikia is the cause and effect of dike. There is an ‘abori­ginal injustice in which we share, to which we belong. Older than time, than meas­ure and law, it owns no meas­ure of justice of equal­ity or inequal­ity’.²³ The sense of injustice, which pre­pares the mil­it­ants of revolu­tion against the dom­in­ant order, is history’s judg­ment and repar­a­tion for the ori­ginal and endur­ing adikia. This dis­lo­ca­tion is in excess of any pos­sible resti­tu­tion and opens his­tory ‘accord­ing to the ordin­ance of time’. Adikia is both the unend­ing struggle between techne and dike and the limit between them, what keeps free­dom and neces­sity apart.

The struggle between techne as think­ing and dike as doxa led to the birth of philo­sophy and epi­stemic know­ledge. At the same time, the techne/​dike ant­ag­on­ism motiv­ates mil­it­ant sub­jects. Such is the con­flict between Creon’s stub­borness (Hegel greatly respec­ted his achieve­ment and pre­dic­a­ment) and Antigone’s defi­ance or ate:

Nor did that (Dike), dwell­ing with the gods

beneath the earth, ordain such laws (nom­ous) for men.

Nor did I think your edicts had such force

that you a mere man, could override

the great unwrit­ten and cer­tain laws of the gods

(agrapta kas­phale theon nomima) (Anti­gone lines 448 – 453).

Adikia endures as the world-​making struggle between techne and dike. It has polit­ical, the­or­et­ical and sub­ject­ive facets. Its polit­ical form is the epochally spe­cific con­front­a­tion of human action with the order of the world. Its philo­soph­ical, explores the epochal forms of adikia, of order, free­dom and their entan­gle­ment. Such was Plato’s quest for a the­ory of justice against the doxa of his time. Sim­il­arly, Marx’s iden­ti­fic­a­tion of class struggle and inven­tion of com­mun­ism against tri­umphant cap­it­al­ism were the­or­et­ical responses to the adikia or dis­order of capitalism.

Finally, each type of adikia cre­ates its own sub­jectiv­ity by indu­cing sub­jects who res­ist and rad­ic­ally trans­form it. Anti­gone as the cham­pion of dike, Pro­meth­eus of techne give name to rebel­li­ous sub­jectiv­ity. This sub­ject­ive response res­ults from the epochal instan­ti­ation of adikia. When the kairos gets out of joint, an affect­ive or/​and rational sense of dis­lo­ca­tion incites sub­jects of res­ist­ance and revolu­tion. Res­ist­ance and its mil­it­ants take there­fore two inter­linked forms: the­or­et­ical explor­a­tion of the rul­ing dis­lo­ca­tion and polit­ical action to res­ist or redress it. The dis­sid­ents and revolu­tion­ar­ies, from Pro­meth­eus to Michael Kolhaas and Che Guevara answer the sense of dis­order adikia begets. His­tory moves in this com­bin­a­tion of polit­ics, the­ory and rad­ical subjectivity.

We can now under­stand why the the­ory of justice is the old­est fail­ure of human thought. Since Homer, the Bible and Plato, the best minds and fier­i­est hearts have tried to define justice or ima­gine the con­di­tions of a just soci­ety. They have failed; indeed the suc­cess­ive and end­less ‘the­or­ies of justice’ are a serial recog­ni­tion of this miser­able fail­ure. Justice and injustice are not norm­at­ive pre­dic­ates but sub­ject­ive motiv­a­tions. Adikia’s endur­ance gen­er­ates the com­mon feel­ing that we are sur­roun­ded by injustice without know­ing where justice lies. This is the para­dox of justice: while the prin­cipal has been clouded in uncer­tainty and con­tro­versy, injustice has always been felt with clar­ity, con­vic­tion and a sense of urgency. We know injustice when we come across it, its truth is felt. Every time how­ever a the­ory of justice is put into prac­tice, it soon degen­er­ates into another instance of injustice. Justice applied leads to (feel­ings of) injustice. Life starts with injustice and rebels against it. Think­ing follows.

The dia­lectic between justice and injustice does not lead to their syn­thesis. Injustice is not the oppos­ite of justice; the unjust is not the con­trary of the just; suf­fer­ing injustice is not the logical oppos­ite of doing injustice.²⁴ Adikia is both the gap between justice and injustice and the end­less but impossible attempt to bridge it. It is what the sym­bolic order tries to sup­press and the pro­lific the­or­ies of justice (the ima­gin­ary) to legit­im­ize, fail­ing each time. In this sense, the Real is a name for adikia, the con­sti­tut­ing dis­lo­ca­tion of the social bond. As Jean-​Francois Lyo­tard put it, a residue, a ‘non­linked thing’²⁵ or fault­line bey­ond con­trol founds every com­munity and law. It is ana­log­ous to an ‘uncon­scious affect’, encountered in the ‘sharp and vague feel­ing that the civil­ians are not civ­il­ised and that some­thing is ill-​disposed towards civil­ity’ which ‘betrays the recur­rence of the shame­ful sick­ness within what passes for health and betrays the “pres­ence” of the unman­age­able’.²⁶

This unman­age­able adikia has been called suc­cess­ively the unbridge­able gap between God and world, class struggle, self-​other divi­sion, friend/​enemy ant­ag­on­ism or the death drive. In all these nom­in­a­tions, ‘the ker­nel of the real encircled by failed attempts to symbolize-​totalise it is rad­ic­ally non-​historical: his­tory itself is noth­ing but a suc­ces­sion of failed attempts to grasp, con­ceive, spe­cify this strange ker­nel.’²⁷ Its earli­est gen­eric name was adikia.

5. The idea of com­mun­ism is a response to cap­it­al­ism, the mod­ern form of adikia. Do norms and max­ims play a role in pre­par­ing rad­ical change and its mil­it­ant sub­jects? Let us pur­sue this ques­tion in rela­tion to the greatest per­haps mod­ern norm­at­ive maxim: ‘All men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ pro­nounces the French Declar­a­tion of the Rights and Man and Cit­izen rad­ic­ally trans­form­ing the polit­ical and legal universe.

The juridico-​political maxim of the clas­sical world was suum cuique tribuere, give every­one his due. It was both a moral and a legal prin­ciple. The Greek dikaion or the Roman jus was the mor­ally cor­rect and leg­ally right answer to a social dis­pute. In the pre-​modern hier­arch­ical order, social status determ­ined what is due to each, what duties mas­ters had towards slaves, hus­bands to wives, Greeks to bar­bar­i­ans. Right and wrong revolved around the suum, the proper to each accord­ing to his given place. Backed by a tele­ology of nat­ural ends, social stand­ing assigned roles, tasks and duties.

The clas­sical dike was trans­formed by Chris­tian­ity. The first chal­lenge was the idea of uni­ver­sal spir­itual equal­ity exem­pli­fied in St Paul’s state­ment that ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ’ (Gala­tians 3:28). The Fran­cis­can nom­in­al­ists Duns Scotus and Wil­liam of Ock­ham pre­pared the second attack in the four­teenth cen­tury when they argued that the his­tor­ical incarn­a­tion of Christ made indi­vidu­al­ity the supreme expres­sion of cre­ation. Its know­ledge takes pre­ced­ence over that of uni­ver­sal forms. Abstract con­cepts owe their exist­ence to lin­guistic prac­tices and have no onto­lo­gical weight or empir­ical value. For Wil­liam, God has given indi­vidu­als con­trol over their lives and bod­ies sim­ilar to that of domin­ium or prop­erty.²⁸ For Duns, God’s will has pri­or­ity over his reason; the good exists because the omni­po­tent ordained it and not on account of some other inde­pend­ent quality.

The norm­at­ive innov­a­tion of the French Declar­a­tion was to bring together the clas­sical maxim of due deserts and the Chris­tian com­mand of uni­ver­sal equal­ity. It dis­en­gaged the suum from social status and gave it, rhet­or­ic­ally at least, to ‘all men’. The pre-​modern (moral and legal) jus/​right, determ­ined by nat­ural reason in a fixed onto­lo­gical uni­verse, turned into a bunch of indi­vidual rights belong­ing to all.

The con­front­a­tion between hier­arch­ical tele­ology and indi­vidu­al­ist onto­logy was resolved through revolu­tion. Revolu­tion was not just a rad­ical socio-​political change. It became a norm­at­ive prin­ciple, the mod­ern expres­sion of techne. The ‘right to res­ist­ance to oppres­sion’, a key polit­ical maxim of the French Declar­a­tion, became the highest form of free­dom. The rights of man emerged through revolu­tion; res­ist­ance sus­tains their vital­ity. The declar­a­tion, ‘an act of war against tyr­ants’, pro­claimed revolu­tion as modernity’s techne and the right to revolu­tion as freedom’s due.²⁹ The con­sti­tu­tion­al­isa­tion of the right to revolu­tion was as rad­ical a norm­at­ive innov­a­tion as was the pro­clam­a­tion of uni­ver­sal equality.

Ger­man ideal­ism com­men­ded the revolu­tion for incarn­at­ing free­dom into his­tory but rejec­ted the Declaration’s revolu­tion­ary right. Once con­stitu­ent power had been con­sti­tuted, the right to revolu­tion retired. Immanuel Kant typ­ic­ally went to great lengths to dis­miss a right to revolu­tion as a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. The law can­not tol­er­ate its own over­throw: ‘Revolu­tion under an already exist­ing con­sti­tu­tion means the destruc­tion of all rela­tion­ships gov­erned by civil right, and thus of right alto­gether. And this is not a change but a dis­sol­u­tion of the civil con­sti­tu­tion; and a pal­in­gen­esis, for it would require a new social con­tract on which the pre­vi­ous one (which is now dis­solved) could have no influ­ence.’³⁰

Kant’s ethico-​plitical dis­like of the right to revolu­tion was adop­ted by the vic­tori­ous revolu­tion­ar­ies and later by the human rights move­ment. The 1793 Declar­a­tion star­ted weak­en­ing the revolu­tion­ary right by mak­ing it sup­ple­ment­ary to the guar­an­teed rights. Only their viol­a­tion (and no other injustice) could jus­tify res­ist­ance, indic­at­ing that rights had star­ted their long muta­tion from revolu­tion­ary max­ims into legit­im­a­tion myths.

The first epi­gram­matic art­icle of the Uni­ver­sal Declar­a­tion of Human Rights (1948) repeats the French state­ment of equal free­dom. Yet no right to res­ist­ance is found in the much longer epi­gonal recit­a­tion. On the con­trary, the pre­amble states that these rights are given in order to pre­vent revolu­tion and art­icle 30 pro­hib­its rad­ical chal­lenges to the polit­ical and legal sys­tem. Art­icles 15, 16 and 17 of European Con­ven­tion of Human Rights repeat and aug­ment this self-​serving con­ser­vat­ism, by allow­ing states to declare a state of emer­gency and derog­ate rights, out­law­ing attacks on the juridico-​political estab­lished order and pro­hib­it­ing polit­ical activ­it­ies by for­eign­ers. These pro­vi­sions of human rights treat­ies and the asso­ci­ated crim­inal laws had dire con­sequences. Des­pite the lib­eral rhet­oric, com­mun­ist and rad­ical parties and groups were banned Ger­many, Greece, Bri­tain and the United States amongst oth­ers, their mem­bers sent to exile, prison or camps. The reversal of pri­or­it­ies between the right to revolu­tion and sub­stant­ive rights was complete.

For Kant and the legal men­tal­ity, the revolu­tion­ary event leads to a palin-​genesis, a re-​birth of nation, com­munity or class. This is the even­tu­al­ity con­sti­tu­tions and treat­ies mor­ally reject and form­ally neg­ate. As a res­ult, the order ini­ti­ated by revolu­tion leads each time to the repu­di­ation of its found­ing prin­ciple. The rights of man star­ted as norm­at­ive marks of revolu­tion­ary change. Pos­it­ive human rights, their des­cend­ents, have become defence mech­an­isms against the pos­sib­il­ity of res­ist­ance and revolu­tion. The removal of the right to revolu­tion was an attempt to fore­close rad­ical change by mak­ing rights an insur­ance policy for the estab­lished order. In this sense, the order of the world is but a spe­cies of its dis­lo­ca­tion. This unend­ing con­front­a­tion brings back res­ist­ance and revolu­tion through the sense of injustice adikia begets. The con­sec­rated right to revolu­tion, the found­a­tion and guar­antor of the ongo­ing struggle between techne and dike, can­not be wished away. Per­man­ent revolu­tion is the mod­ern con­di­tion in sci­ence and art. In polit­ics, it has turned into a ghostly norm­ativ­ity, the ‘right to the event’ one could call it, which etern­ally returns as per­haps the most import­ant moral com­mand of modernity.

6. In the post-​1989 world, rights have expan­ded and touch almost every part of daily exist­ence. Demo­cracy is presen­ted as the exer­cise of a bunch of rights; policy pri­or­it­ies and decisions take the form of exten­sions or expan­sions of rights; crim­inal law pro­tects the rights of vic­tims, com­mer­cial the rights of cus­tom­ers, pub­lic law upholds the rights of cit­izens. Rights become neg­at­ive pro­tec­tions against state power of all kinds – from tax­a­tion and the pro­vi­sion of health care to immig­ra­tion policy and slum clear­ance; and pos­it­ive pro­jec­tions of indi­vidual will – we all have a human right to prop­erly func­tion­ing kit­chen gad­gets, a Brit­ish min­is­ter recently intoned. Every indi­vidual desire and want can be dressed in the lan­guage of rights: for the afflu­ent middle class, rights are the pub­lic and legal recog­ni­tion of an unlim­ited and insa­ti­able desire. In a soci­ety of free choice, it is for­bid­den to for­bid.³¹

These devel­op­ments mean that rights have become both the site and the stake of polit­ics. Marx argued in the nine­teenth cen­tury that the rights to prop­erty and reli­gious free­dom removed them from state inter­ven­tion, de-​politicising and offer­ing them the strongest pro­tec­tion pos­sible. What is the effect of the con­tem­por­ary pro­lif­er­a­tion of rights-​talk and its col­on­iz­a­tion of major aspects of life? Adjust­ing Marx’s pion­eer­ing work, one could claim that rights attempt to leg­al­ise social struggle: they indi­vidu­al­ise polit­ical claims, turn them into tech­nical dis­putes and remove the pos­sib­il­ity of rad­ical change, in other words, rights de-​politicise polit­ics. In this sense, human rights oper­ate on a dual register: they con­ceal and affirm the dom­in­ant struc­ture but they can also high­light inequal­ity and oppres­sion. Can they help chal­lenge oppression?

This double oper­a­tion recalls the dis­tinc­tion between polit­ics (la poli­tique) and the polit­ical (le poli­tique) and its influ­en­tial recent use by Jacques Ran­cière.³² Ran­cière defines nor­mal polit­ics (or ‘poli­cing’) as the pro­cess of argu­ment­a­tion and nego­ti­ation amongst the vari­ous parts of the social whole.³³ It aims at (re)distributing bene­fits, rewards and pos­i­tions without chal­len­ging the over­all bal­ance. Against this routine poli­cing, polit­ics proper is a form of dis­rup­tion of the estab­lished social order. Badiou sim­il­arly defines polit­ics as ‘col­lect­ive action, organ­ized by cer­tain prin­ciples, that aims to unfold the con­sequences of a new pos­sib­il­ity which is cur­rently repressed by the dom­in­ant order.’³⁴ Polit­ics proper erupts only when an excluded group or class, the ‘part of no part’, demands to be included and must change the rules of inclu­sion and the estab­lished equi­lib­rium. This kind of ant­ag­on­ism or ‘dis­sensus’ ‘is not a con­flict of interests, opin­ions or, val­ues; it is a divi­sion put in the “com­mon sense”: a dis­pute about what is given, about the frame within which se see some­thing as given.’³⁵ A new polit­ical sub­ject is con­sti­tuted, in excess of the hier­arch­ised and vis­ible group of groups, places and func­tions in soci­ety.³⁶ The inclu­sion of the invis­ible part over­throws the rules of the game and inter­rupts the nat­ural order of dom­in­a­tion. This is the political’s oper­a­tion par excel­lence and reminds Alain Badiou’s event.

Based on this ana­lysis, Ran­cière argues, con­tra Arendt and Agam­ben, that rights do not belong exclus­ively to sub­jects or cit­izens. Those without rights can equally invoke them. Human rights move back and forth between abstract state­ments of prin­ciple and denial in prac­tice. This dis­son­ance allows the excluded to put the state­ments of prin­ciple to the test. Free­dom and equal­ity are not qual­it­ies people have; they are polit­ical pre­dic­ates, the mean­ing and scope of which is the object of polit­ical struggles.

Rancière’s attempt to save human rights for rad­ical polit­ics is ingeni­ous but prob­lem­atic. Rights have become the main stake and tool in the routine ‘polit­ics of con­sensus’ Ran­cière denounces. The evol­u­tion of rights from inscrip­tions of con­stitu­ent power to cent­ral expres­sions of the estab­lished juridico-​political order has all but removed their rad­ical edge. They sta­bil­ise inter-​subjective rela­tions by giv­ing min­imum recog­ni­tion to mul­tiple iden­tit­ies; they codify the lib­eral ideo­logy of lim­ited free­dom and formal equal­ity; they express and pro­mote indi­vidual desire turn­ing them into the lit­mus test of free­dom (of choice). Most right claims rein­force the estab­lished social order. First, they accept the estab­lished bal­ance and aim to admit peri­pher­ally new claims or claimants. Secondly, they turn law into the gate­keeper and pro­tector of the social order trans­form­ing the polit­ical claim into a demand for admis­sion to the law. Law trans­forms social and polit­ical con­flict into a set of tech­nical prob­lems reg­u­lated by rules and hands them over to rule experts. In this sense, rights express and pro­mote estab­lished polit­ical arrange­ments and socio-​economic dis­tri­bu­tions and belong to domain of police. The rights claimant is the oppos­ite of Rancière’s polit­ical sub­ject whose task is to trans­form rad­ic­ally the over­all balance.

Suc­cess­ful human rights struggles mar­gin­ally re-​arrange social hier­arch­ies and mildly re-​distribute the social product. Right-​claims bring to the sur­face the exclu­sion, dom­in­a­tion and exploit­a­tion and the ines­cap­able strife that per­meates social life. But at the same time, they con­ceal the deep roots of strife and dom­in­a­tion by fram­ing struggle and res­ist­ance in the terms of legal and indi­vidual rem­ed­ies which, if suc­cess­ful, lead to small improve­ments and mar­ginal re-​arrangements of the social edi­fice. Ran­cière seems to agree that ‘these liber­ties each per­son has are the liber­ties, that is the dom­in­a­tion, of those who pos­sess the imman­ent powers of soci­ety. It is the empire of the law of the accu­mu­la­tion of wealth.’³⁷ Human rights pro­mote ‘choice’ con­tra free­dom, con­form­ism versus ima­gin­a­tion. Chil­dren are given rights against their par­ents, patients, stu­dents and wel­fare recip­i­ents are termed ‘cus­tom­ers’ and are offered con­sumer rights and fake ‘choices.’ In west­ern cap­it­al­ist soci­et­ies, free­dom and choice have become the man­tra of polit­ics. Rights have become rewards for accept­ing the dom­in­ant order but they are of little use to those who chal­lenges it.

Rancière’s ‘excess­ive’ sub­jects, who stand for the uni­ver­sal from a pos­i­tion of exclu­sion, have been replaced by iden­tity and social groups seek­ing recog­ni­tion and lim­ited re-​distribution. The excluded have no access to rights which is fore­closed by polit­ical, legal and mil­it­ary means. Eco­nomic migrants, refugees, pris­on­ers in the war on ter­ror, tor­ture vic­tims, inhab­it­ants of African camps, these ‘one use humans’ attest to the ‘inhu­man’ in the midst of human­ity. They are the indis­pens­able pre­con­di­tion and proof of the impossib­il­ity of human rights. The law not only can­not under­stand the ‘sur­plus sub­ject’, its oper­a­tion pre­vents its emer­gence. At that point we send them abroad ‘along medi­cines and clothes, to people deprived of medi­cine, clothes and rights.’³⁸ As Wendy Brown put it, rights not only ‘mask by depol­it­i­cising the social power of insti­tu­tions such as private prop­erty or the fam­ily, they organ­ise mass pop­u­la­tions for exploit­a­tion and reg­u­la­tion’.³⁹ The dark side of rights leads to the inex­or­able rise in sur­veil­lance, clas­si­fic­a­tion and con­trol of indi­vidu­als and populations.

7. The French Declar­a­tion cre­ated a dual norm­at­ive leg­acy. First, ‘people are born free and equal’; second, there is a (moral and legal) right to res­ist­ance and revolu­tion. The equal­ity maxim can be inter­preted in three ways. Jeremy Bentham, fol­low­ing Edmund Burke, insisted that read as con­stat­ive the Declar­a­tion is hope­lessly mis­lead­ing, a false and ille­git­im­ate pas­sage from a false is to an invalid ought. The human child is not born free but weak, vul­ner­able, utterly depend­ent for sur­vival. Sim­il­arly, the infant is not born equal but inferior, pathetic, sub­jec­ted to oth­ers. Nat­al­ity throws us in a world not of our choos­ing. The acci­dents of class, race, gender etc befall and inscribe us into hier­arch­ies, con­di­tions and determ­in­a­tions. Dike determ­ines being.

Lib­eral legal philo­sophy inter­prets the state­ment as a reg­u­lat­ive prin­ciple with lim­ited illoc­u­tion­ary force. Men are not born but ought to become free and equal. The state of un-​freedom and inequal­ity neces­sit­ates the inter­ven­tion of polit­ical and legal insti­tu­tions. Yet ‘even where it is recog­nized, the equal­ity of ‘men’ and of ‘cit­izens’ only con­cerns their rela­tion to the con­sti­tuted juridico-​political sphere.’⁴⁰ Lib­eral ortho­doxy uses insti­tu­tional (legal, polit­ical, mil­it­ary) means to spread lim­ited free­dom and formal equal­ity. This is the basis of ‘equal­ity’ legis­la­tion with its mar­ginal effects as well as of the war on Iraq. The cri­tique of ideo­logy com­pel­lingly shows why the norm­at­ive read­ing was doomed to fail. Techne acts as dike’s pal­li­at­ive.

Com­mun­ism reads equal­ity in con­junc­tion with the right to res­ist­ance and revolu­tion. The French and the Rus­si­ans placed the idea of equal­ity on the world stage through their self-​authorising revolu­tions. The techne of revolu­tion con­fron­ted the pre-​modern dike of world. But legal equal­ity has repro­duced the gap between rich and poor. Equal­ity of oppor­tun­it­ies means that out­comes on the out­put side will closely fol­low the dif­fer­en­tial inputs. Inequal­ity cre­ated in the name of equal­ity is an extreme symp­tom of con­tem­por­ary adikia; it fuels the sense of injustice, revives the dormant right to res­ist­ance and fer­ments the techne of rebel­lion. Communism’s norm­at­ive call, which edu­cates mil­it­ants, res­ults from the fail­ure of the prom­ise of equal­ity. It turns equal­ity from a con­di­tioned norm into Badiou’s uncon­di­tional axiom: People are free and equal; equal­ity is not an object­ive or effect but the premise of action.⁴¹ Whatever denies this simple truth cre­ates a right and duty of res­ist­ance. Late mod­ern adikia pits the per­form­at­ive of axio­matic equal­ity against its pale reg­u­lat­ive ver­sion. ‘The sub­ject is only par­tially the sub­ject inspired by the event…social agents share, at the lever of a situ­ation, val­ues, ideas, beliefs, etc. that the truth…does not put entirely into ques­tion.’⁴² Axio­matic equal­ity motiv­ates mil­it­ant sub­jects in late modernity.

The law rejects and deletes the right to res­ist­ance and revolu­tion. Yet, it keeps com­ing back like the repressed. Most mod­ern states were foun­ded against the pro­to­cols of con­sti­tu­tional leg­al­ity. They are the res­ult of revolu­tion, vic­tory or defeat in war, colo­nial occu­pa­tion or lib­er­a­tion. Revolu­tion­ary viol­ence sus­pends law and con­sti­tu­tion and jus­ti­fies itself by claim­ing to be found­ing a new state, a bet­ter con­sti­tu­tion and a just law to replace a cor­rupt or immoral sys­tem. It appeals to a right to revolu­tion which, while unco­di­fied, accom­pan­ies like a ghostly shadow every estab­lished order. At the point of its occur­rence, the upris­ing is con­demned as illegal, bru­tal, evil. But when it suc­ceeds, it is ret­ro­spect­ively legit­im­ized as a social pal­in­gen­esis and as expres­sion of the etern­ally return­ing right to rebel against injustice.

The found­ing viol­ence is re-​enacted in dis­tor­ted forms in the great pageants cel­eb­rat­ing nation, state or régime; or, is repressed in acts of enforce­ment of the new law and inter­pret­a­tion of the new con­sti­tu­tion. The French revolu­tion was ret­ro­spect­ively legit­im­ized by its Declar­a­tion des droits de l’homme, the Amer­ican by the Declar­a­tion of Inde­pend­ence and the Bill of Rights. These doc­u­ments carry the con­stitu­ent viol­ence of their found­a­tions, even though they have con­cealed them under the con­sti­tuted rep­res­ent­a­tions and inter­pret­a­tions. Behind every legis­lat­ive and exec­ut­ive act of the state lies a ‘right to law’ based on the con­stitu­ent force that inaug­ur­ated the legal sys­tem. Sim­il­arly, law’s reluct­ant accept­ance of a lim­ited right to protest and strike acknow­ledges that the right to revolu­tion can­not be elim­in­ated even if it is writ­ten out of the constitution.

Pub­lic dis­order and insur­rec­tions are sub­ject­ive responses to the adikia of law and symp­toms of its repressed found­a­tions. They are routinely con­demned by the rul­ing order as undemo­cratic. This happened recently dur­ing the miners strike, the anti-​globalization demon­stra­tions, the Greek cam­paigns against the neo-​liberal reforms. Yet, his­tory is full of insur­rec­tions and riots which, con­demned as they were at the time, changed con­sti­tu­tions, laws and gov­ern­ments. Protests mostly chal­lenge Benjamin’s con­serving viol­ence of law, break­ing pub­lic order reg­u­la­tions in order to high­light greater injustices. As long as the pro­test­ers ask for this or that reform, this or that con­ces­sion how­ever import­ant, the state can accom­mod­ate it. What the state fears is the fun­da­mental chal­lenge to its power by a force that can trans­form the rela­tions of law and present itself as hav­ing a right to law. This ‘right to law’, based on the ret­ro­spect­ive legit­im­a­tion of ori­gins, sup­ports state action; by the same token, it remains vul­ner­able and sub­ject to chal­lenge since it exposes the viol­ent found­a­tions of the state and the repressed and ghostly right to revolu­tion. This right is the impossible and for­bid­den ker­nel of law, the real that sus­tains nor­mal leg­al­ity and rights. It always returns like the repressed.

The same applies to the axiom of equal­ity. The formal equal­ity of rights has con­sist­ently sup­por­ted inequal­ity; axio­matic or arith­metic equal­ity (each counts as one in all rel­ev­ant groups) is the impossible bound­ary of rights cul­ture.⁴³ As Badiou put it, ‘any­one who lives and works here, belongs here.’⁴⁴ It means that health­care is due to every­one who needs it, irre­spect­ive of means; that rights to res­id­ence and work belong to all who find them­selves in a part of the world irre­spect­ive of nation­al­ity; that polit­ical activ­it­ies can be freely engaged by all irre­spect­ive of cit­izen­ship and against the expli­cit pro­hib­i­tions of human rights law.⁴⁵

Para­phras­ing Badiou, we can con­clude that rights are about recog­ni­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion amongst indi­vidu­als and com­munit­ies; except that there is a right to revolu­tion. The right to resistance/​revolution against what denies the axiom of equal­ity forms the norm­at­ive maxim of the com­mun­ist idea. The com­bin­a­tion of equal­ity and res­ist­ance pro­jects a gen­eric human­ity opposed both to uni­ver­sal indi­vidu­al­ism and com­munit­arian clos­ure. The uni­ver­sal­ist claims that cul­tural val­ues and moral norms should pass a test of uni­ver­sal applic­ab­il­ity and logical con­sist­ency and often con­cludes that if there is one moral truth but many errors, it is incum­bent upon its agents to impose it on oth­ers. Com­munit­ari­ans start from the obvi­ous obser­va­tion that val­ues are context-​bound and try to impose them on those who dis­agree with the oppress­ive­ness of tra­di­tion. Both are ver­sions of human­ism which, hav­ing decided what counts as human, fol­low it with a stub­born dis­reg­ard and find everything that res­ists them expendable.

The indi­vidu­al­ism of uni­ver­sal prin­ciples for­gets that every per­son is a world and comes into exist­ence in com­mon with oth­ers, that we are all in com­munity. Being in com­mon is an integ­ral part of being self: self is exposed to the other, it is posed in exter­i­or­ity, the other is part of the intim­acy of self. Being in com­munity with oth­ers is the oppos­ite of com­mon being or of belong­ing to an essen­tial com­munity. Most com­munit­ari­ans, on the other hand, define com­munity through the com­mon­al­ity of tra­di­tion, his­tory and cul­ture, the vari­ous past crys­tal­lisa­tions whose ines­cap­able weight determ­ines present pos­sib­il­it­ies. The essence of the com­munit­arian com­munity is often to com­pel or ‘allow’ people to find their ‘essence’, com­mon ‘human­ity’ now defined as the spirit of the nation or of the people or the leader. We have to fol­low tra­di­tional val­ues and exclude what is alien and other.

From the com­mun­ist per­spect­ive, human­ity has no found­a­tion and no ends, it is the defin­i­tion of ground­less­ness. Its meta­phys­ical func­tion lies not in a philo­soph­ical essence but in its non-​essence, the incess­ant sur­pris­ing of the human con­di­tion and its expos­ure to the event that rad­ic­ally changes the world. Revolu­tion and equal­ity are brought together by the eternal dia­lectic of adikia, the con­front­a­tion of techne and dike. Alain Badiou argues that the idea of com­mun­ism helps pre­pare ourselves, our fam­ily and friends for the sur­prise of the event, for new pos­sib­il­it­ies out of the impossible.⁴⁶ Yet no idea of com­mun­ism and no the­ory of justice can achieve this without the warm grip of injustice. Out­rage at injustice and the decision to con­front it can only develop against the claims to order (dike), which today include rights and (formal) equal­ity. Revolu­tion­ary equal­ity is both the rejec­tion and the sub­la­tion of rights culture.

The neo-​liberal state com­bines the func­tions of cap­it­al­ist enter­prise and muscle­man for the mar­ket. The adikia hypo­thesis and the com­mun­ist response with its cent­ral­ity of the endur­ing struggle between techne and dike, can­not wait for the with­er­ing away of state and law. Com­mun­ism can­not sur­vive if it aban­dons its oppos­i­tion to the cap­it­al­ist state. But gen­eric com­mun­ism exists also in the here and now, when mil­it­ants res­ist in Latin favel­las, French ban­lieus or the Athens streets pro­claim­ing the equal sin­gu­lar­ity of all against the unequal dif­fer­ences sanc­tioned by the state. Its action revives the right to dis­sent and rebel­lion as the highest form of free­dom. In the pro­cess, rights change from indi­vidual enti­tle­ments and pos­ses­sions to a new con­cep­tion of ‘being in the right’ or ‘right-​ing being’:⁴⁷ giv­ing equally to each what is due to all. It may be that only the idea of com­mun­ism can save rights.

Cos­tas Douz­i­nas is Pro­fessor of Law and Dir­ector of the Birk­beck Insti­tute for the Human­it­ies, Uni­ver­sity of London

Tags: Alain Badiou, Law

This entry was posted on 30 November 2010 at 12:34 am and is filed under Critical Legal Theory, Jurisprudence, Political Philosophy, Previously, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.