Human rights discourse produces the saving subject it presumes

Evidence

Then, as today, the content of human rights was a product of political struggle. Human rights are not given by nature, and there has never been a single human rights movement capable of securing general agreement about a list of rights and their order of priority, let alone realising these rights for all. But to stop at pointing out that ‘human rights’ lacks a unitary meaning, as Susan Marks notes in a related context, is ‘silently to signal that these phenomena are isolated problems, unrelated to wider processes, tendencies and dynamics at work in the world’. By leaving unexamined the tendencies and dynamics that bring such transformations about, as Marks notes, we occlude an understanding of what would be necessary to achieve genuine change. Such ‘false contingency’ neglects the ways in which political possibilities are framed by systemic constraints. Specifically, the belief that human rights are endlessly polyvalent treats them as free-floating, disconnected form the structures of contemporary capitalism, unmoored from the historical conditions and defeats that brought them into being. It obscures the fact that not all figures of the human and of community are equally capable of ‘signifying within the text of human rights’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 62 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Unstable capitalist work undermines self-narratives that human rights discourse then redeems — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 748; Human rights become market-dependent floating signifiers of personhood — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 765; Treating human rights as endlessly polyvalent masks the systemic constraints shaping them. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 62 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Treating human rights as endlessly polyvalent masks the systemic constraints shaping them. #complicates (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 62