“1793: The Neglected Legacy of Insurgent Universality,” History of the Present. A Journal of Critical History, Vol. 5, n. 2 (2015), pp. 109-136.

History of the present, 2015

Insurgent universality refers to the excess of equality and freedom over the juridical frame of universal human rights. It announces a politics beyond the state. While the histories of human rights usually give ample consideration to the proto-Declaration of 1789, they do not pay enough attention to the Declaration of 1793. However, the neglected Declaration of 1793 allows us to consider the forgotten history of active struggles-most notably, that of women, the poor, and slaves-a set of struggles that, in their concrete configurations, helped to shape the Declaration's radical claims. Comparing these two declarations by examining their respective contexts and contents, this paper delineates the limits of rights declarations as juridical texts and presents a critique of their universal aspirations. At the same time, however, the paper outlines an alternative conception of universality that the 1793 Declaration brings into view in the very tension between the concepts of citizen and man that it deploys. In contrast to the juridical universalism of 1789, the insurgent universality of 1793 is one that both opens up the political form of the state and introduces possibilities for radical social and political change. From the Liberal Frame to Politics Beyond the State Human rights, wrote Bruno Bauer, were "only discovered by the Christian world during the last century," and this idea "is not innate to man, but is rather achieved in struggle against the historical traditions. " 1 Indeed, human rights are neither a gift bestowed by the state nor the consequence of the progressive development of right. Neither the revolutionary statement of the first Declaration of 1789-"men are born and remain free and equal in rights"-nor the assertion of the Declaration of 1793-"all men are equal by nature and before the law"-define a metahistorical content but rather one that is political and historical. 2 Affirming that men are equal by nature means reinventing nature in two different ways. On the one side, ancient privileges cannot be justified by nature or birth; on the other side, the declaration that

2016

The paper highlights clashes between different conceptions of right, law and justice crystalizing in the French Declaration of Human and Civic Rights from 1789 and the criticisms it aroused. Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) are discussed as important predecessors. The philosophical conceptions of law, justice and right stated by Hobbes and Rousseau and in the Declaration will be discussed in connection with two seminal criticisms. By excluding women from politics, Olympe de Gouge objected, the Declaration contradicted the universal understanding of human rights. Jeremy Bentham protested against the Declaration’s core idea of inalienable human rights.

2015

This paper engages with notions of racial slavery, equality, liberty and universality, to illustrate the complexity, dynamics and inter-dependencies of processes and events of the 18th Century. Without an engagement with the context, experiences and contributions of the Haitian Revolution to the creation and legacy of freedom, equality and universality, the history of these political ideals is incomplete. Indeed, the political struggle of revolutionary enslaved men and women not only abolished slavery and established the independence of Saint Domingue as Haiti, but it also substituted the particularistic and colonial ‘universality’ invoked by the French revolutionaries with a new, open ontology of the ‘human’ who no longer could be regarded as property. Hence, the historian of political thought ought to reconfigure dominant narratives, to think differently outside of hierarchy, and to acknowledge the revolutionary events which contributed to the creation of possibilities for new futures, directions and politics.

SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly

Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte, 2015

Historians teach that the political origins of human rights are to be found in the great revolutions of the modern age, but this insight seldom finds its way into reflection onto the nature of human rights, and especially of their politics. In this paper I discuss a series of thinkers (Arendt, Lefort, Balibar, Rancière et al.) who take these revolutionary roots to be central to the history, politics, and practice of hu- man rights, not only in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Age of Revolution, but also today. Understanding the politics of human rights as revolutionary can help us understand them from „bottom-up”, and thus as democratic and emancipatory.

2014

This article investigates Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s critiques of human rights and argues that the two thinkers share a blind spot with regard to the radical potentials of human rights. The problem is that they do not break with two fixed imaginaries which still haunt liberal democracies: (1) the historical essentialist understanding of human rights and (2) nation-states and individuals as the principal loci for political rights, power, and action. Based on the work of Jacques Rancière, Costas Douzinas, and Étienne Balibar this article argues that human rights can be thought of as a constituent part of a radical political praxis and resistance movement. If human rights are thought of as a praxis of “right-ing” (Douzinas) or a “dissensus” (Rancière), which both contest the current “distribution of the sensible,” a new “cosmopolitics of human rights” can be imagined where human rights are conceived as a borderline concept (Balibar).

This paper aims to examine and analyse from the perspective of Critical Legal Studies whether, and to what extent, the concept of law relates to the economic structure of society. Furthermore, the aim is to shed light on the potential problem of the perception and generation of legitimacy derived from economic interests. More precisely, this paper will investigate the relationship between the economic structure of the French society in 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Transmodernity, 2020

It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical energy around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today. Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s

Douzinas and Geatry, Cambridge Companion to the Idea of Human Rights