new left review 34 july aug 2005 115
slavoj žižek
AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS
Contemporary appeals to human rights within our liberal-
capitalist societies generally rest upon three assumptions.
First, that such appeals function in opposition to modes of
fundamentalism that would naturalize or essentialize con-
tingent, historically conditioned traits. Second, that the two most basic
rights are freedom of choice, and the right to dedicate one’s life to the
pursuit of pleasure (rather than to sacrifice it for some higher ideological
cause). And third, that an appeal to human rights may form the basis for
a defence against the ‘excess of power’.
Let us begin with fundamentalism. Here, the evil (to paraphrase Hegel)
often dwells in the gaze that perceives it. Take the Balkans during the
1990s, the site of widespread human-rights violations. At what point did
the Balkans—a geographical region of South-Eastern Europe—become
‘Balkan’, with all that designates for the European ideological imaginary
today? The answer is: the mid-19th century, just as the Balkans were
being fully exposed to the effects of European modernization. The gap
between earlier Western European perceptions and the ‘modern’ image
is striking. Already in the 16th century the French naturalist Pierre Belon
could note that ‘the Turks force no one to live like a Turk’. Small surprise,
then, that so many Jews found asylum and religious freedom in Turkey
and other Muslim countries after Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled
them from Spain in 1492—with the result that, in a supreme twist of
irony, Western travellers were disturbed by the public presence of Jews
in big Turkish cities. Here, from a long series of examples, is a report
from N. Bisani, an Italian who visited Istanbul in 1788:
A stranger, who has beheld the intolerance of London and Paris, must be
much surprised to see a church here between a mosque and a synagogue,
and a dervish by the side of a Capuchin friar. I know not how this govern-
ment can have admitted into its bosom religions so opposite to its own. It
116 nlr 34
must be from degeneracy of Mahommedanism, that this happy contrast
can be produced. What is still more astonishing is to find that this spirit of
toleration is generally prevalent among the people; for here you see Turks,
Jews, Catholics, Armenians, Greeks and Protestants conversing together on
subjects of business or pleasure with as much harmony and goodwill as if
they were of the same country and religion.1
The very feature that the West today celebrates as the sign of its cultural
superiority—the spirit and practice of multicultural tolerance—is thus
dismissed as an effect of Islamic ‘degeneracy’. The strange fate of the
Trappist monks of Etoile Marie is equally telling. Expelled from France
by the Napoleonic regime, they settled in Germany, but were driven out
in 1868. Since no other Christian state would take them, they asked the
Sultan’s permission to buy land near Banja Luka, in the Serb part of
today’s Bosnia, where they lived happily ever after—until they got caught
in the Balkan conflicts between Christians.
Where, then, did the fundamentalist features—religious intolerance,
ethnic violence, fixation upon historical trauma—which the West now
associates with ‘the Balkan’, originate? Clearly, from the West itself.
In a neat instance of Hegel’s ‘reflexive determination’, what Western
Europeans observe and deplore in the Balkans is what they themselves
introduced there; what they combat is their own historical legacy run
amok. Let us not forget that the two great ethnic crimes imputed to the
Turks in the 20th century—the Armenian genocide and the persecu-
tion of the Kurds—were not committed by traditionalist Muslim political
forces, but by the military modernizers who sought to cut Turkey loose
from its old-world ballast and turn it into a European nation-state. Mladen
Dolar’s old quip, based on a detailed reading of Freud’s references to the
region, that the European unconscious is structured like the Balkans, is
thus literally true: in the guise of the Otherness of ‘Balkan’, Europe takes
cognizance of the ‘stranger in itself’, of its own repressed.
But we might also examine the ways in which the ‘fundamentalist’
essentialization of contingent traits is itself a feature of liberal-capitalist
democracy. It is fashionable to complain that private life is threatened
or even disappearing, in face of the media’s ability to expose one’s most
1 Quoted in Bozidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western
Travellers, London 2004, p. 233.
žižek: Human Rights 117
intimate personal details to the public. True, on condition that we turn
things around: what is effectively disappearing here is public life itself, the
public sphere proper, in which one operates as a symbolic agent who can-
not be reduced to a private individual, to a bundle of personal attributes,
desires, traumas and idiosyncrasies. The ‘risk society’ commonplace—
according to which the contemporary individual experiences himself as
thoroughly ‘denaturalized’, regarding even his most ‘natural’ traits, from
ethnic identity to sexual preference, as being chosen, historically contin-
gent, learned—is thus profoundly deceiving. What we are witnessing
today is the opposite process: an unprecedented re-naturalization. All big
‘public issues’ are now translated into attitudes towards the regulation of
‘natural’ or ‘personal’ idiosyncrasies.
This explains why, at a more general level, pseudo-naturalized ethno-
religious conflicts are the form of struggle which best suits global
capitalism. In the age of ‘post-politics’, when politics proper is pro-
gressively replaced by expert social administration, the sole remaining
legitimate sources of conflict are cultural (religious) or natural (ethnic)
tensions. And ‘evaluation’ is precisely the regulation of social promotion
that fits with this re-naturalization. Perhaps the time has come to reas-
sert, as the truth of evaluation, the perverted logic to which Marx refers
ironically in his description of commodity fetishism, quoting Dogberry’s
advice to Seacoal at the end of Capital’s Chapter 1: ‘To be a well-favoured
man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.’ To be
a computer expert or a successful manager is a gift of nature today, but
lovely lips or eyes are a fact of culture.
Unfreedom of choice
As to freedom of choice: I have written elsewhere of the pseudo-choice
offered to the adolescents of Amish communities who, after the strictest
of upbringings, are invited at the age of seventeen to plunge themselves
into every excess of contemporary capitalist culture—a whirl of fast cars,
wild sex, drugs, drink and so forth.2 After a couple of years, they are
allowed to choose whether they want to return to the Amish way. Since
they have been brought up in virtual ignorance of American society,
the youngsters are quite unprepared to cope with such permissiveness,
which in most cases generates a backlash of unbearable anxiety. The
2 ‘The constitution is dead. Long live proper politics’, Guardian, 4 June 2005.
118 nlr 34
vast majority vote to return to the seclusion of their communities. This
is a perfect case of the difficulties that invariably accompany ‘freedom of
choice’: while Amish children are formally given a free choice, the condi-
tions in which they must make it render the choice unfree.
The problem of pseudo-choice also demonstrates the limitations of the
standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women who wear the veil:
acceptable if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them
by husbands or family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil
as the result of personal choice, its meaning changes completely: it is
no longer a sign of belonging to the Muslim community, but an expres-
sion of idiosyncratic individuality. In other words, a choice is always
a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself: it is only
the woman who does not choose to wear a veil that effectively chooses
a choice. This is why, in our secular liberal democracies, people who
maintain a substantial religious allegiance are in a subordinate position:
their faith is ‘tolerated’ as their own personal choice, but the moment
they present it publicly as what it is for them—a matter of substantial
belonging—they stand accused of ‘fundamentalism’. Plainly, the ‘sub-
ject of free choice’, in the ‘tolerant’, multicultural sense, can only emerge
as the result of an extremely violent process of being uprooted from
one’s particular life-world.
The material force of the ideological notion of ‘free choice’ within
capitalist democracy was well illustrated by the fate of the Clinton
Administration’s ultra-modest health reform programme. The medi-
cal lobby (twice as strong as the infamous defence lobby) succeeded in
imposing on the public the idea that universal healthcare would some-
how threaten freedom of choice in that domain. Against this conviction,
all enumeration of ‘hard facts’ proved ineffective. We are here at the
very nerve-centre of liberal ideology: freedom of choice, grounded in the
notion of the ‘psychological’ subject, endowed with propensities which
he or she strives to realize. And this especially holds today, in the era
of a ‘risk society’ in which the ruling ideology endeavours to sell us the
very insecurities caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as the
opportunity for new freedoms. If labour flexibilization means you have
to change jobs every year, why not see it as a liberation from the const-
raints of a permanent career, a chance to reinvent yourself and realize
the hidden potential of your personality? If there is a shortfall on your
standard health insurance and retirement plan, meaning you have to
žižek: Human Rights 119
opt for extra coverage, why not perceive it as an additional opportunity
to choose: either a better lifestyle now or long-term security? Should
this predicament cause you anxiety, the ‘second modernity’ ideologist
will diagnose you as desiring to ‘escape from freedom’, of an immature
sticking to old stable forms. Even better, when this is inscribed into
the ideology of the subject as the ‘psychological’ individual, pregnant
with natural abilities, you will automatically tend to interpret all these
changes as the outcome of your personality, not as the result of being
thrown around by market forces.
Politics of jouissance
What of the basic right to the pursuit of pleasure? Today’s politics is ever
more concerned with ways of soliciting or controlling jouissance. The
opposition between the liberal-tolerant West and fundamentalist Islam
is most often condensed as that between, on the one side, a woman’s
right to free sexuality, including the freedom to display or expose herself
and to provoke or disturb men; and, on the other side, desperate male
attempts to suppress or control this threat. (The Taliban forbade metal-
tipped heels for women, as the tapping sounds coming from beneath an
all-concealing burka might have an overpowering erotic appeal.)
Both sides, of course, mystify their position ideologically and morally.
For the West, women’s right to expose themselves provocatively to male
desire is legitimized as their right to enjoy their bodies as they please.
For Islam, the control of female sexuality is legitimized as the defence of
women’s dignity against their being reduced to objects of male exploita-
tion. So when the French state prohibits Muslim girls from wearing the
veil in school, one can claim that they are thus enabled to dispose of
their bodies as they wish. But one can also argue that the true traumatic
point for critics of Muslim ‘fundamentalism’ was that there were women
who did not participate in the game of making their bodies available
for sexual seduction, or for the social exchange and circulation involved
in this. In one way or another, all the other issues—gay marriage and
adoption, abortion, divorce—relate to this. What the two poles share is a
strict disciplinary approach, differently directed: ‘fundamentalists’ regu-
late female self-presentation to forestall sexual provocation; pc feminist
liberals impose a no-less-severe regulation of behaviour aimed at con-
taining forms of harassment.
120 nlr 34
Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for
otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short,
the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar
as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite.
My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should
not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short,
that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This
is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capi-
talist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe
distance from others. The same goes for the emergent logic of humani-
tarian or pacifist militarism. War is acceptable insofar as it seeks to bring
about peace, or democracy, or the conditions for distributing humani-
tarian aid. And does the same not hold even more for democracy and
human rights themselves? Human rights are ok if they are ‘rethought’
to include torture and a permanent emergency state. Democracy is ok
if it is cleansed of its populist excesses and limited to those mature
enough to practise it.
Caught in the vicious cycle of the imperative of jouissance, the temptation
is to opt for what appears its ‘natural’ opposite, the violent renuncia-
tion of jouissance. This is perhaps the underlying motif of all so-called
fundamentalisms—the endeavour to contain (what they perceive as) the
excessive ‘narcissistic hedonism’ of contemporary secular culture with
a call to reintroduce the spirit of sacrifice. A psychoanalytic perspec-
tive immediately enables us to see why such an endeavour goes wrong.
The very gesture of casting away enjoyment—‘Enough of decadent self-
indulgence! Renounce and purify!’—produces a surplus-enjoyment of
its own. Do not all ‘totalitarian’ universes which demand of their subjects
a violent (self-)sacrifice to the cause exude the bad smell of a fascina-
tion with a lethal-obscene jouissance? Conversely, a life oriented towards
the pursuit of pleasure will entail the harsh discipline of a ‘healthy
lifestyle’—jogging, dieting, mental relaxation—if it is to be enjoyed to
the maximum. The superego injunction to enjoy oneself is immanently
intertwined with the logic of sacrifice. The two form a vicious cycle, each
extreme supporting the other. The choice is never simply between doing
one’s duty or striving for pleasure and satisfaction. This elementary
choice is always redoubled by a further one, between elevating one’s striv-
ing for pleasure into one’s supreme duty, and doing one’s duty not for
duty’s sake but for the gratification it brings. In the first case, pleasures
are my duty, and the ‘pathological’ striving for pleasure is located in the
žižek: Human Rights 121
formal space of duty. In the second case, duty is my pleasure, and doing
my duty is located in the formal space of ‘pathological’ satisfactions.
Defence against power?
But if human rights as opposition to fundamentalism and as pursuit of
happiness lead us into intractable contradictions, are they not after all a
defence against the excess of power? Marx formulated the strange logic
of power as ‘in excess’ by its very nature in his analyses of 1848. In The
Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France, he ‘complicated’
in a properly dialectical way the logic of social representation (political
agents representing economic classes and forces). In doing so, he went
much further than the usual notion of these ‘complications’, according to
which political representation never directly mirrors social structure—a
single political agent can represent different social groups, for instance;
or a class can renounce its direct representation and leave to another the
job of securing the politico-juridical conditions of its rule, as the English
capitalist class did by leaving to the aristocracy the exercise of political
power. Marx’s analyses pointed towards what Lacan would articulate,
more than a century later, as the ‘logic of the signifier’. Apropos the Party
of Order, formed after the defeat of the June insurrection, Marx wrote
that only after Louis-Napoleon’s December 10 election victory allowed it
to ‘cast off’ its coterie of bourgeois republicans
was the secret of its existence, the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists
into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions
which alternately—the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy
and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July
Monarchy—had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal
name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction,
Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of
the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in
which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class
interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.3
This, then, is the first complication. When we are dealing with two
or more socio-economic groups, their common interest can only be
represented in the guise of the negation of their shared premise: the
common denominator of the two royalist factions is not royalism, but
3 Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. i, Moscow 1969, p. 83.
122 nlr 34
republicanism. (Just as today, the only political agent that consistently
represents the interests of capital as such, in its universality, above partic-
ular factions, is the ‘social liberal’ Third Way.) Then, in The Eighteenth
Brumaire, Marx dissected the makeup of the Society of December 10,
Louis-Napoleon’s private army of thugs:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubi-
ous origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie,
were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley
slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gambl-
ers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders,
rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefi-
nite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call
la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the
Society of December 10 . . . This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief
of the lumpen proletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the
interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal,
refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself uncondi-
tionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrases.4
The logic of the Party of Order is here brought to its radical conclusion.
In the same way that the only common denominator of all royalist fact-
ions is republicanism, the only common denominator of all classes is the
excremental excess, the refuse, the remainder, of all classes. That is to
say, insofar as the leader perceives himself as standing above class inter-
ests, his immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of
all classes, the rejected non-class of each class. And, as Marx develops in
another passage, it is this support from the ‘social abject’ which enables
Bonaparte to shift his position as required, representing in turn each
class against the others.
As the executive authority which has made itself independent, Bonaparte
feels it to be his task to safeguard ‘bourgeois order’. But the strength of this
bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He poses, therefore, as the repre-
sentative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless,
he is somebody solely because he has broken the power of that middle class,
and keeps on breaking it daily. He poses, therefore, as the opponent of the
political and literary power of the middle class.5
But there is more. In order for this system to function—that is, for the
leader to stand above classes and not to act as a direct representative of
4 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, Moscow 1975, p. 149.
5 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, p. 194.
žižek: Human Rights 123
any one class—he also has to act as the representative of one particular
class: of the class which, precisely, is not sufficiently constituted to act
as a united agent demanding active representation. This class of people
who cannot represent themselves and can thus only be represented is, of
course, the class of small-holding peasants, who
form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but
without entering into manifold relations with one other. Their mode of
production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into
mutual intercourse . . . They are consequently incapable of enforcing their
class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through
a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.
Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an
authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects
them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from
above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds
its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.6
These three features together form the paradoxical structure of populist-
Bonapartist representation: standing above all classes, shifting among
them, involves a direct reliance on the abject/remainder of all classes,
plus the ultimate reference to the class of those who are unable to act
as a collective agent demanding political representation. This para-
dox is grounded in the constitutive excess of representation over the
represented. At the level of the law, the state power merely represents
the interests of its subjects; it serves them, is responsible to them, and
is itself subject to their control. However, at the level of the superego
underside, the public message of responsibility is supplemented by the
obscene message of the unconditional exercise of power: ‘Laws do not
really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty
if I decide to do so, I can destroy you on a whim’. This obscene excess is a
necessary constituent of the notion of sovereignty. The asymmetry here
is structural: the law can only sustain its authority if subjects hear in it
the echo of the obscene, unconditional self-assertion of power.
This excess of power brings us to the ultimate argument against ‘big’
political interventions which aim at global transformation: the terrifying
experiences of the 20th century, a series of catastrophes which precipi-
tated disastrous violence on an unprecedented scale. There are three
6 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, pp. 187–8.
124 nlr 34
main theorizations of these catastrophes. First, the view epitomized by
the name of Habermas: Enlightenment is in itself a positive, emancipa-
tory process with no inherent ‘totalitarian’ potential; the catastrophes that
have occurred merely indicate that it remains an unfinished project, and
our task should be to bring this project to completion. Second, the view
associated with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and,
today, with Agamben. The ‘totalitarian’ bent of Enlightenment is inher-
ent and definitive, the ‘administered world’ is its true consequence, and
concentration camps and genocides are a kind of negative-teleological
endpoint of the entire history of the West. Third, the view developed in
the works of Etienne Balibar, among others: modernity opens up a field
of new freedoms, but at the same time of new dangers, and there is
no ultimate teleological guarantee of the outcome. The contest remains
open and undecided.
The starting point of Balibar’s text on violence is the insufficiency of the
standard Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘converting’ violence into an instru-
ment of historical Reason, a force which begets a new social formation.7
The ‘irrational’ brutality of violence is thus aufgehoben, ‘sublated’ in the
strict Hegelian sense, reduced to a particular ‘stain’ that contributes
to the overall harmony of historical progress. The 20th century con-
fronted us with catastrophes—some directed against Marxist political
forces, others generated by Marxist engagement itself—which cannot be
‘rationalized’ in this way. Their instrumentalization into the tools of the
Cunning of Reason is not only ethically unacceptable but also theoreti-
cally wrong, ideological in the strongest sense of the term. In his close
reading of Marx, Balibar nonetheless discerns an oscillation between this
teleological ‘conversion-theory’ of violence, and a much more interesting
notion of history as an open-ended process of antagonistic struggles,
whose final ‘positive’ outcome is not guaranteed by any encompassing
historical necessity.
Balibar argues that, for necessary structural reasons, Marxism is unable
to think the excess of violence that cannot be integrated into the narrat-
ive of historical Progress. More specifically, it cannot provide an adequate
theory of fascism and Stalinism and their ‘extreme’ outcomes, Shoah
and Gulag. Our task is therefore twofold: to deploy a theory of historical
violence as something which cannot be instrumentalized by any politi-
7 Etienne Balibar, ‘Gewalt’: entry for Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus,
vol. 5, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Hamburg 2002.
žižek: Human Rights 125
cal agent, which threatens to engulf this agent itself in a self-destructive
vicious cycle; and also to pose the question of how to turn the revolution-
ary process itself into a civilizing force. As a counter-example, take the
process that led to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Catherine de
Medici’s goal was limited and precise: hers was a Machiavellian plot to
assassinate Admiral de Coligny—a powerful Protestant pushing for war
with Spain in the Netherlands—and let the blame fall on the over-mighty
Catholic family of de Guise. Thus Catherine sought to engineer the fall
of both the houses that posed a menace to the unity of the French state.
But the bid to play her enemies off against each other degenerated into
an uncontrolled frenzy of blood. In her ruthless pragmatism, Catherine
was blind to the passion with which men clung to their beliefs.
Hannah Arendt’s insights are crucial here, emphasizing the distinction
between political power and the mere exercise of violence. Organizations
run by direct non-political authority—Army, Church, school—represent
examples of violence (Gewalt), not of political power in the strict sense
of the term.8 At this point, however, we need to recall the distinction
between the public, symbolic law and its obscene supplement. The
notion of the obscene double-supplement of power implies that there
is no power without violence. Political space is never ‘pure’ but always
involves some kind of reliance on pre-political violence. Of course, the
relationship between political power and pre-political violence is one of
mutual implication. Not only is violence the necessary supplement of
power, but power itself is always-already at the root of every apparently
‘non-political’ relationship of violence. The accepted violence and direct
relationship of subordination within the Army, Church, family and other
‘non-political’ social forms is in itself the reification of a certain ethico-
political struggle. The task of critical analysis is to discern the hidden
political process that sustains all these ‘non’ or ‘pre’-political relation-
ships. In human society, the political is the encompassing structuring
principle, so that every neutralization of some partial content as ‘non-
political’ is a political gesture par excellence.
Humanitarian purity
It is within this context that we can situate the most salient human rights
issue: the rights of those who are starving or exposed to murderous
8 Hannah Arendt, On Violence, New York 1970.
126 nlr 34
violence. Rony Brauman, who co-ordinated aid to Sarajevo, has demon-
strated how the very presentation of the crisis there as ‘humanitarian’,
the very recasting of a political-military conflict into humanitarian terms,
was sustained by an eminently political choice—basically, to take the
Serb side in the conflict. The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’
in Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, Brauman argues,
thus disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate.9
From this particular insight we may problematize, at a general level, the
ostensibly depoliticized politics of human rights as the ideology of mili-
tary interventionism serving specific economico-political ends. As Wendy
Brown has suggested apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism
presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the inno-
cent and the powerless against power, a pure defence of the individual
against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture,
state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or
instantiations of collective power against individuals.10
However, the question is: what kind of politicization do those who inter-
vene on behalf of human rights set in motion against the powers they
oppose? Do they stand for a different formulation of justice, or do they
stand in opposition to collective justice projects? For example, it is clear
that the us-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in terms
of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only motivated by
hard-headed politico-economic interests but also relied on a determinate
idea of the political and economic conditions under which ‘freedom’
was to be delivered to the Iraqi people: liberal-democratic capitalism,
insertion into the global market economy, etc. The purely humanitar-
ian, anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering thus amounts
to an implicit prohibition on elaborating a positive collective project of
socio-political transformation.
At an even more general level, we might problematize the opposition
between the universal (pre-political) human rights possessed by every
human being ‘as such’ and the specific political rights of a citizen, or
member of a particular political community. In this sense, Balibar
9 Rony Brauman, ‘From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, Spring–Summer 2004, pp. 398–9 and 416.
10 Wendy Brown, ‘Human Rights as the Politics of Fatalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly,
vol. 103, no. 2–3, p. 453.
žižek: Human Rights 127
argues for the ‘reversal of the historical and theoretical relationship
between “man” and “citizen”’ that proceeds by ‘explaining how man is
made by citizenship and not citizenship by man.’11 Balibar alludes here
to Arendt’s insight on the condition of refugees:
The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a
human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who
professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who
had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they
were still human.12
This line, of course, leads straight to Agamben’s notion of homo sacer
as a human being reduced to ‘bare life’. In a properly Hegelian dialec-
tics of universal and particular, it is precisely when a human being is
deprived of the particular socio-political identity that accounts for his
determinate citizenship that—in one and the same move—he ceases
to be recognized or treated as human.13 Paradoxically, I am deprived of
human rights at the very moment at which I am reduced to a human
being ‘in general’, and thus become the ideal bearer of those ‘universal
human rights’ which belong to me independently of my profession, sex,
citizenship, religion, ethnic identity, etc.
What, then, happens to human rights when they are the rights of homo
sacer, of those excluded from the political community; that is, when they
are of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no
rights, and are treated as inhuman? Jacques Rancière proposes a sali-
ent dialectical reversal: ‘When they are of no use, one does the same as
charitable persons do with their old clothes. One gives them to the poor.
Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad,
along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes
and rights.’ Nevertheless, they do not become void, for ‘political names
and political places never become merely void’. Instead the void is filled
by somebody or something else:
if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact the human
rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their
rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the ‘right to
11 Etienne Balibar, ‘Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, pp. 320–1.
12 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1958, p. 297.
13 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Stanford 1998.
128 nlr 34
humanitarian interference’—a right that some nations assume to the sup-
posed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice
of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The ‘right to humanitarian
interference’ might be described as a sort of ‘return to sender’: the disused
rights that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders.14
So, to put it in the Leninist way: what the ‘human rights of Third World
suffering victims’ effectively means today, in the predominant discourse,
is the right of Western powers themselves to intervene politically, eco-
nomically, culturally and militarily in the Third World countries of their
choice, in the name of defending human rights. The reference to Lacan’s
formula of communication (in which the sender gets his own message
back from the receiver-addressee in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is very
much to the point here. In the reigning discourse of humanitarian
interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the
victimized Third World its own message in its true form.
The moment human rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing
with them has to change: the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil
must be mobilized anew. Today’s ‘new reign of ethics’, clearly invoked
in, say, Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depolitici-
zation, depriving the victimized other of any political subjectivization.
And, as Rancière points out, liberal humanitarianism à la Ignatieff unex-
pectedly meets the ‘radical’ position of Foucault or Agamben with regard
to this depoliticization: their notion of ‘biopolitics’ as the culmination of
Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of ‘ontological trap’,
in which concentration camps appear as ontological destiny: ‘each of us
would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows
faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice
proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap’.15
We thus arrive at a standard ‘anti-essentialist’ position, a kind of political
version of Foucault’s notion of sex as generated by the multitude of the
practices of sexuality. ‘Man’, the bearer of human rights, is generated by
a set of political practices which materialize citizenship; ‘human rights’
are, as such, a false ideological universality, which masks and legitimizes
14 Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, pp. 307–9.
15 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 301.
žižek: Human Rights 129
a concrete politics of Western imperialism, military interventions and
neo-colonialism. Is this, however, enough?
Universality’s return
The Marxist symptomal reading can convincingly demonstrate the
content that gives the notion of human rights its specific bourgeois ideo-
logical spin: universal human rights are effectively the right of white,
male property-owners to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers
and women, and exert political domination. This identification of the
particular content that hegemonizes the universal form is, however, only
half the story. Its crucial other half consists in asking a more difficult,
supplementary question: that of the emergence of the form of univer-
sality itself. How—in what specific historical conditions—does abstract
universality become a ‘fact of (social) life’? In what conditions do indi-
viduals experience themselves as subjects of universal human rights?
Therein resides the point of Marx’s analysis of ‘commodity fetishism’:
in a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals in
their daily lives relate to themselves, and to the objects they encounter,
as to contingent embodiments of abstract-universal notions. What I am,
in terms of my concrete social or cultural background, is experienced
as contingent, since what ultimately defines me is the ‘abstract’ uni-
versal capacity to think or to work. Likewise, any object that can satisfy
my desire is experienced as contingent, since my desire is conceived as
an ‘abstract’ formal capacity, indifferent to the multitude of particular
objects that may, but never fully do, satisfy it.
Or take the example of ‘profession’: the modern notion of profession
implies that I experience myself as an individual who is not directly
‘born into’ his social role. What I will become depends on the inter-
play between contingent social circumstances and my free choice. In
this sense, today’s individual has a profession, as electrician, waiter or
lecturer, while it is meaningless to claim that the medieval serf was a
peasant by profession. In the specific social conditions of commodity
exchange and the global market economy, ‘abstraction’ becomes a direct
feature of actual social life, the way concrete individuals behave and
relate to their fate and to their social surroundings. In this regard Marx
shares Hegel’s insight, that universality becomes ‘for itself’ only when
individuals no longer fully identify the kernel of their being with their
particular social situation; only insofar as they experience themselves
130 nlr 34
as forever ‘out of joint’ with it. The concrete existence of universality is,
therefore, the individual without a proper place in the social edifice. The
mode of appearance of universality, its entering into actual existence, is
thus an extremely violent act of disrupting the preceding organic poise.
It is not enough to make the well-worn Marxist point about the gap
between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the
particular interests that effectively sustain it. At this level the counter-
argument (made, among others, by Lefort and Rancière), that the form
is never ‘mere’ form but involves a dynamics of its own, which leaves
traces in the materiality of social life, is fully valid. It was bourgeois ‘for-
mal freedom’ that set in motion the very ‘material’ political demands
and practices of feminism or trade unionism. Rancière’s basic emphasis
is on the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the ‘gap’ between
formal democracy—the Rights of Man, political freedoms—and the eco-
nomic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap can be read in
the standard ‘symptomatic’ way: formal democracy is a necessary but
illusory expression of a concrete social reality of exploitation and class
domination. But it can also be read in the more subversive sense of a
tension in which the ‘appearance’ of égaliberté is not a ‘mere appearance’
but contains an efficacy of its own, which allows it to set in motion the
rearticulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progres-
sive ‘politicization’. Why shouldn’t women also be allowed to vote? Why
shouldn’t workplace conditions be a matter of public concern as well?
We might perhaps apply here the old Lévi-Straussian term of ‘symbolic
efficiency’: the appearance of égaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as
such, possesses actual efficiency of its own; the properly cynical tempta-
tion of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality
should be resisted. It is not enough merely to posit an authentic articu-
lation of a life-world experience which is then reappropriated by those
in power to serve their particular interests or to render their subjects
docile cogs in the social machine. Much more interesting is the opposite
process, in which something that was originally an ideological edifice
imposed by colonizers is all of a sudden taken over by their subjects as
a means to articulate their ‘authentic’ grievances. A classic case would
be the Virgin of Guadalupe in newly colonized Mexico: with her appear-
ance to a humble Indian, Christianity—which until then served as the
imposed ideology of the Spanish colonizers—was appropriated by the
indigenous population as a means to symbolize their terrible plight.
žižek: Human Rights 131
Rancière has proposed a very elegant solution to the antinomy between
human rights, belonging to ‘man as such’, and the politicization of
citizens. While human rights cannot be posited as an unhistorical ‘essen-
tialist’ Beyond with regard to the contingent sphere of political struggles,
as universal ‘natural rights of man’ exempted from history, neither
should they be dismissed as a reified fetish, the product of concrete
historical processes of the politicization of citizens. The gap between
the universality of human rights and the political rights of citizens is
thus not a gap between the universality of man and a specific political
sphere. Rather, it ‘separates the whole of the community from itself’.16
Far from being pre-political, ‘universal human rights’ designate the pre-
cise space of politicization proper; what they amount to is the right to
universality as such—the right of a political agent to assert its radical
non-coincidence with itself (in its particular identity), to posit itself as
the ‘supernumerary’, the one with no proper place in the social edifice;
and thus as an agent of universality of the social itself. The paradox is
therefore a very precise one, and symmetrical to the paradox of universal
human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity. At the very
moment when we try to conceive the political rights of citizens without
reference to a universal ‘meta-political’ human rights, we lose politics
itself; that is to say, we reduce politics to a ‘post-political’ play of negotia-
tion of particular interests.
16 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 305.