Human rights, humanism and desire

Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 183-206

  Douzinas, Costas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 34247738945     PISSN: 0969725X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09697250120088021     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Amongst many, see the following theoretically informed introductions to the history and philosophy of human rights: Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia UP, 1990)
2. Norberto Bobbio, The Age of Rights (Cambridge: Polity, 1996); Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000)
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest, 1979) 299
4. Leo Pasvolsky in Committee on Foreign Relations, The Charter of the United Nations Hearings, quoted in Norman Lewis, "Human Rights, Law and Democracy in an Unfree World" in Human Rights Fifty Years On: A Reappraisal, ed. Tony Evans (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988) 88
5. Norman Lewis, 89. For the relationship between domestic policies and international attitudes, see P.G. Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Westview, 1996)
6. Henry Steiner and Philip Alston, International Human Rights in Context (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Chapter 15 reviews the debate leading to the establishment of the Court
7. "US Troops Will Quit, Allies Warned," Guardian 10 July 1998: 3
8. "Self-Interest Brings Court into Contempt," Guardian 14 July 1999: 15
9. Jean Vartier, Les procès des animaux du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1970); Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992) ix-xvi
10. "At common law, it used to be the case that prisoners, at any rate if convicted of felonies, lost all their civil rights and liberties. They even lost the right to bring legal proceedings, so that they became, in legal terms, non-people": David Feldman, Civil Liberties and Human Rights in England and Wales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 276
11. The Great Ape project, a group of scientists, philosophers and lawyers which includes among others Douglas Adams (now dead), Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall and Peter Singer, has drawn up a list of rights for large primates and argues that chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas should be given rights to life, liberty and freedom from torture. Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri (eds.), The Great Ape Project: Equality before Humanity (London: Fourth Estate, 1993)
12. Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects," Southern California Law Review 12.553 (1972)
13. Marie-Angèle Hermitte, "Le concept de diversité biologique et la création d'un status de la nature" in L'homme, la nature, le droit (Paris: Bourgeois, 1988)
14. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961) 189-94
15. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John Thompson, trans. John Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1986) 240
16. If the essence of man is to be a universal attribute, it is essential that concrete subjects exist as absolute givens; this implies an empiricism of the subject. If these empirical individuals are to be men, it is essential that each carries in himself the whole human essence, if not in fact, at least in principle; this implies an idealism of the essence. So empiricism of the subject implies idealism of the essence and vice versa. (Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969) 228)
17. Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995) 90
18. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991) xxxviii
19. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism", trans. Frank Capuzzi, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977) 221
20. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 197
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), sect. 765, 401
22. Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (London: Penguin, 1980) is the best introduction to the topic
23. C.H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal (London: Allen, 1960) 187
24. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. G. Van den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989) xi
25. Alison des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999) 172-77
26. Linda Melvern, "How the System Failed to Save Rwanda," Guardian 7 Dec. 1998: 10
27. Alison des Forges, "Ignoring Genocide," op. cit. 595-635, 607
28. In order not to let them become rooted and set in this isolation, thereby breaking up the whole and letting the community spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to their core by war. By this means the government upsets their established order, and violates their right to independence, while the individuals who, absorbed in their way of life, break loose from the whole and strive after the inviolable independence and security of the person, are made to feel by government in the task laid on them their lord and master, death. (G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 272-73) Jacques Derrida, in Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986), comments: "So war would prevent people from rotting; war preserves 'the ethical health of peoples,' as the wind agitating the seas purifies them, keeps them from decomposing, from the corruption, from the putrefaction with which a 'continual calm' and a 'perpetual peace' would infect health" (101, 131-49)
29. Observer 16 May 1999: 15
30. Quoted in Stephen Marks, "From the 'Single Confused Page' to the 'Decalogue for Six Billion Persons': The Roots of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the French Revolution," Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998): 461, 490
31. Kate Green and Hillary Lim, "What Is This Thing about Female Circumcision," Social and Legal Studies 7.3 (1998): 365-87
32. Costas Douzinas, "Human Rights at the End of History," Angelaki 4.1 (1999): 99-114
33. For a use of the psychoanalytical concept of " overdetermination" in political theory, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985)
34. Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1995) 126
35. Renata Salecl in The Spoils of Freedom and "Rights in Psychoanalytical and Feminist Perspective," Cardozo Law Review 16.3-4 (1994): 1121-38 argued ingeniously that a "social symbolic castration" similar to the Oedipal scene takes place in modern democratic societies and derived the function of rights from that. This important use of psychoanalysis to theorise rights failed, however, because of its uncritical adoption of liberal political philosophy which, translated into Lacanese, presented democracies as offering the subject a "forced choice" between accepting fully the social contract or falling into psychosis. For a critique, see Douzinas, The End of Human Rights 312-18
36. Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom 127
37. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Reflections on Racism," Thesis Eleven 32 (1992): 9
38. William MacNeil, "Law's Corpus Delicti: The Fantasmatic Body of Rights Discourse" (unpublished) 11
39. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York: Routledge, 1995) 38
40. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson (New York: Random House, 1964) 388
41. Legendre refers to a Canadian case and one in the European Court of Human Rights, in "The Other Dimension of Law," Cardozo Law Review 16.3-4 (1995): 943-62
42. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977) 66-67
43. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. D. Brick (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 129
44. Lacan, op. cit. 311
45. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995) 99
46. Costas Douzinas, Introduction and "Prosopon and Antiprosopon: Prolegomena for a Legal Iconology" in Law and the Image, eds. C. Douzinas and L. Nead (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999); Costas Douzinas, "Law's Fear of the Image: Whistler v. Ruskin," Art History 19.3 (1996): 353-69. It is arguable that a strictly defined and applied right to intellectual property, which would turn into theft the incorporation in a work of art of stylistic influences and innovations introduced by others, would increase the income of some artists but would undermine the creativity of everyone else