31 May Rights, human rights, and political subjectivity

A week and a half ago, i attended a lecture by Professor Peter Hallward on Alain Badiou’s Ethics at the ICA (as part of the Verso Books Radical Thinkers series). It was the perfect follow on to the Birkbeck conference on Hegel a week and a half previous to that. I have a half-finished post about that conference.

I swallowed all my fears and shyness (under a glass of wine, of course) and actually got to chat with Professor Hallward. I have spent the last week and a half thinking through many of the things we spoke about and rereading a number of books and articles related to rights and human rights and political subjectivity and trying to come around to some way of thinking about the IJDH‘s push toward a human rights claim against the UN in relation to the cholera outbreak in Haiti. There is a thought tickling the back of my brain that i can’t quite grab – somewhere in the construction of political subjectivities. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Foucault’s inversion of the Clausewitz’ian aphorism on war and politics, particularly in relation to the peacekeeping efforts of the UN forces. In fact, in the 1975 lecture, Foucault goes so far as to say that “peace itself is a coded war” (2003, 51) and i’m arguing in my dissertation that no where is that more true than in DPKO’s; and yet the very nature of militarised humanitarian interventions pushes them outside of politics (or above, as some critics have put it).

Whether intentional or not, there seems to be a kind of reversal in the claims – a push for recognition of political subjectivity of Haitians more generally, and of cholera victims more particularly (my main focus is on health citizenship, and so this sticks out particularly for me) – if politics is the continuation of war by other means, and peace is still yet war, then peace, by extension (and more pointedly peacekeeping operations) is a form of politics which, in the face of it, gets denied this recognition. Peacekeeping operations rise to a presumed level of moral compunction which then ends the possibility of critical conversation. If anything, then, Haitians (in the filing of claims and the looming threat of a human rights court case) are re-opening the conversation – not (as i do) as a theoretical exercise but as a truly practical and open process of demanding recognition. This is not just about cholera, per se, but about the entire depolicitization process that has been the peacekeeping mission from day one.

The struggle, then, comes from the recognition that human rights, or the claims to human rights, as Costas Douzinas, as Badiou, as Chandler have all pointed out legally codifies relations, which can, in many ways, effect the evaluative morality. The urge to codify relations is one that i’ve been coming up against lately. There is a peculiar way in which claiming rights, however, is actually something of a privilege in some situations. But more on this later… must keep writing dissertation…