Human rights and postmodern utopia

Law and Critique

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 219-240

  Douzinas, Costas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Dignity; Ernst Bloch; Human rights; Imaginary domain; Natural law; Psychoanalysis; So long Peter; Utopia

Indexed keywords

EID: 22544434866     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: 15728617     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008972026787     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Fayed v. U.K. (1994) 18 EHRR 393; Saunders v. U.K. (1997) 23 EHRR 242; The Former King Constantine of Greece v. Greece Appl. 25701/94. Declared admissible 21 April 1998.
2. Despite the enormous amount of books on human rights, the jurisprudence of rights is dominated by neo-Kantian liberals. There are a few notable exceptions: Michel Villey, Le Droit et les droits de l'homme (Paris: P.U.F., 1983);
3. Bernard Bourgeois, Philosophie et droits de l'homme: de Kant à Marx (Paris: P.U.F., 1990);
4. Rolando Gaete, Human Rights and the Limits of Critical Reason (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1993);
5. and Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000).
6. Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity, R. Rosthal trans. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1964),
7. Jacques Derrida, Spectres for Marx, P. Kamuf trans. (London: Routledge, 1994), 85.
8. P. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (London: Verso, 1988), 5.
9. Gaete, supra, n. 2, at 172.
10. Bloch's combination of utopianism, interest in natural law and qualified support for the socialist regimes meant that he did not feature in the pantheon of western Marxists, despite his great interest and affinity with Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. The only offerings in English are, Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch (London: Routledge, 1996)
11. and J. O. Daniel and T. Moylan, eds., Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso, 1997).
12. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Dennis Schmidt trans. (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988), 192.
13. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Ibid., 65.
14. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Ibid., 177.
15. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Ibid., 162.
16. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Ibid., 163.
17. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Ibid., 167.
18. E. Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, Ibid., 191.
19. Geoghegan, supra, n. 7, 145-146.
20. Bloch, supra n. 8, 208.
21. Ibid., xxix.
22. David Kaufmann, "Thanks for the Memory: Bloch, Benjamin, and the Philosophy of History", in Daniel and Moylan, supra, n. 7, 41.
23. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", in Illuminations, H. Zohn trans. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.
24. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, N. and S. Plaice and P. Knight trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 547.
25. Bloch, supra n. 8, 174.
26. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 46-47. One of the most baffling assertions by Peter Goodrich in his rather indulgent and often inaccurate "The Critic's Love of the Law", Law & Critique 10/3 (1999), 343-360 is that British critical scholars have adopted the 'abstract and convoluted' style of psychoanalytical, and in particular Lacanian, theory but have shunned the analyst's couch and, as a result, the benefits of psychoanalysis have been lost to them. This is a rather strange accusation coming from someone who largely based his academic inspiration, scholarship and deserved success on the translation and importation of the key themes of the Lacanian legal historian Pierre Legendre. Peter, despite his recent discomfort with psychoanalytical theory, still peppers his writings with 'juicy' psychoanalytical epigrams and insights, like the rather bemusing 'we are dead or are in love or in analysis', a remark that Kristeva made 'somewhere' (ibid., 359); this claim applied outside Los Angeles and parts of Manhattan would mean that the larger part of humanity is dead. If this is not a disguised renunciation by Peter of most of his earlier oeuvre and certainly of what made him justly famous, it is one more confirmation that in America all politics turns into a star system and all critique becomes therapy. According to an apocryphal story, American Law Schools bear the cost for the therapy of their Faculty. We are not that rich (or naive) in this country so we will have to continue the judicious and critical use of psychoanalytical theory, which Peter helped us understand, while keeping whatever little extra money we have for drinking good wine with friends. If British critical scholars suffer from 'emotional aphasia' and 'political autism', one only hopes that Peter's therapy will help him overcome the amour propre, rhetorical excess and renunciation of the friends, themes and institutions of his pre-American life that characterise this essay. If ours are 'damaged lives and critique isn't helping' (358) because of the absence of analysis, Peter's therapy does not seem to be very effective judging from the self-justificatory tone of the attack. But then as Woody Allen said 'I've been in therapy for twenty years only and it is early days yet'.
27. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Reflections on Racism", Thesis Eleven 32 (1992), 9.
28. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, J. Wilkinson trans. (New York: Random House, 1964), 388.
29. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 193.
30. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics Ibid., 391.
31. William MacNeil, "Law's Corpus Delicti: The Fantasmatic Body of Rights Discourse", Law & Critique IX/2, 37-57, 45-46. While freedom of movement and security of the person are treated as crucial civil liberties, no major human rights convention, including the European, creates a general right of residence. Some include no such right at all, others restrict it to state nationals.
32. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York: Routledge, 1995), 38.
33. Douzinas, supra, n. 2, Chapter 11.
34. Pierre Legendre, Le Crime de Corporal Lortie (Paris: Fayard 1989);
35. L'Amour du Censeur (Paris: Seuil, 1974);
36. "The Other Dimension of Law", Cardozo Law Review 16/3-4 (1995), 943-962.
37. Costas Douzinas, "Prolegomena to a Legal Iconology", in Douzinas and Nead, eds., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago University Press, 1999), 58-67.
38. Cornell, supra, n. 28, Chapter 1.
39. Ibid., 8.
40. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), passim.
41. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Ibid., 41.
42. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1993), 46.
43. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10.
44. Jacques Derrida, supra, n. 4, 85.
45. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, E. Jephcott trans. (London: Verso, 1991), 247.
46. Thomas Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23.
47. Jacques Derrida, 'Plato's Pharmacy' in Disseminations, B. Johnson trans. (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 61-171.