Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885110386004 |
| Published date | 01 January 2011 |
| Author | Andrew Schaap |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
10(1) 22–45
!The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885110386004
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EJPT
Article
Enacting the right to have
rights: Jacques Rancie
`re’s
critique of Hannah Arendt
Andrew Schaap
University of Exeter
Abstract
In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the
‘right to have rights’ as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia.
If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life
deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim
the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancie
`re’s response to Arendt’s
aporetic account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of
Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancie
`re, Arendt depoliticizes
human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoe¨) and the citizen with the
good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoe¨and the
bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how
that distinction is drawn. For Rancie
`re ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a
life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the
distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who
are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancie
`re’s approach enables us to recognize contests
over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles
that are the core of political life.
Keywords
Arendt, bare life, bios politikos, citizenship, human rights, Rancie
`re, right to have rights,
sans papiers stateless persons, undocumented migrants, zoe¨
In a moving and much-cited passage of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah
Arendt observes that the ‘rights of man’ proved to be illusory when, in the inter-
war period, European states were forced to deal with refugees who had been
deprived of their citizenship en masse. The idea of human rights, which ‘assumed
the existence of a human being as such’, came apart precisely when the world was
Corresponding author:
Andrew Schaap, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, The Queen’s Drive, UK
Email: a.w.schaap@ex.ac.uk
confronted by ‘people who had lost all other qualities and specific relationships
except that they were still human’.
1
Arendt argues that the plight of stateless people
revealed the modern conception of human dignity to be a mere abstraction. In fact,
to live as a human outside of political community amounted to a deprived form of
existence in which individuals were thrown back on the givenness of their natural
condition. In this exceptional situation in which stateless people had nothing left to
appeal to but their rights as human beings, they were barely recognizable as
human. As a consequence of this experience, Arendt says, we became aware of a
primordial human right, a right more fundamental than the rights of justice and
freedom: the right to belong to a political community, the right to politics itself.
Arendt’s analysis of the perplexities of the rights of man is compelling and has
provoked a wide debate in contemporary political theory.
2
However, the problem-
atic she establishes has been rigorously criticized by Jacques Rancie
`re. He argues
that Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life and
the citizen with the good life. Outwith the polity the subject of human rights is, by
definition, without politics. Deprived of the rights of citizenship, she has no means
of redress, no basis on which she might claim the ‘right to have rights’. For
Rancie
`re, however, the aporia of human rights that Arendt diagnoses is more a
product of the ontological presuppositions on which her analysis relies than it is a
defining aspect of the experience of statelessness. Against Aristotle (and Arendt’s
appropriation of him), Rancie
`re insists that it is a political mistake to deduce a
conception of what it means to lead a fully human life from an understanding of
the human as a speaking animal. For what counts as (human) speech articulating
an injustice and what counts as (animal) voice expressing pain is a political ques-
tion from the outset.
This leads Rancie
`re to reject Arendt’s conception of the political as world-
disclosing public action through which individuals reveal their humanness
(as singularity) in the presence of equals. Instead, he conceives the political in
terms of the staging of a dissensus in which those who are deemed to lack
speech make themselves heard as political animals. Consequently, for Rancie
`re,
the human in human rights does not necessarily correspond to a form of life, bare
or otherwise. Rather, the human is a litigious name that can be invoked to assert a
fundamental equality. Arendt understands (ordinary) rights as a precondition for
politics since they institutionalize an artificial equality that is constitutive of the
public sphere. This is why the right to have rights amounts to the right to politics.
For Rancie
`re, in contrast, politics is fundamentally about contesting political
exclusion by enacting equality. Thus, whereas Arendt views ‘the human’ in
human rights ontologically as a life deprived of politics, Rancie
`re views
‘the human’ polemically as the dismissal of any difference between those who are
qualified to participate in politics and those who are not.
In the first section of the paper, I explain how Aristotle’s understanding of the
relation between the human and the political informs Arendt’s discussion of the
aporia of human rights. In the second section I examine Rancie
`re’s criticism
that Arendt depoliticizes human rights due to her Aristotelian presuppositions.
Schaap 23
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