The non-perplexity of human rights

What do we (think we) speak about when we speak of Human Rights? Mostly we think that we speak of the fate of the vulnerable Human-being in her beingness in the world. Given this assumption, three recurring perplexities- of territoriality, parochiality-imperiality and coloniality – appear to preoccupy much critical thinking on the subject. I suggest a different reason underpins the invention and operation of Human Rights. I argue that Human Rights, as a (post)colonial technology of subjectification, operates in perverse coherence, to rationalize and regulate the global (b)ordering of differentiated subject-beingness: of license, containment and abandonment. As such efforts that aim to rescue Human Rights for the human-subject merely reinforce the adaptive operations of global governmentality to norm-alise and resettle the World. Against this I suggest a return to an anti-colonial philosophical orientation of desubjectification

Returning the anti-colonial to philosophy

This essay presents a view of thinking – of the doing of philosophy - as a praxis of anti-colonial encounter. Through this perspective of encounter we bring to view the opposition between the two locations of being-thinking corresponding to the two actualities described above: 1) the (post)colonial location from which are (re)presented and enforced (b)orders of subjectification; 2) the anti-colonial locations from which are confronted frontlines of desubjectification. This counterposing of the (post)colonial border and the anti-colonial frontline serves to demarcate the (post)colonial and anti-colonial as incommensurable philosophical orientations as they stand in enunciative and interpretive confrontation; what this reveals is the function of the “post-colonial” as a discursive category which operates to normalise the (b)orders of contemporary global coloniality. As such, to think from anti-colonial frontlines is to repudiate the assumptions of author-ity inherent in colonial philosophies that continue to organise and narrate the post-colonial World as a (b)ordered totality. From this re-appropriation of philosophical author-ity we might affirm the many insurgent struggles for the material transformation of worlds as indeed continuing the legacy of anti-colonial hope and imagination – to ‘be-otherwise’ – in the face of (post)colonial closure

The philosopher’s elusive subject : on the problem of the 'present' in the 'political'

Much Eurocentric critical political-legal philosophy begins with a disappointment with the present, with totality-as-is and with the subject of the ‘political’. The philosophical burden thus understood is to reclaim the ‘excess’ of totality for the possibility of the ‘political’ as the ‘real’ of ruptural subjectivity, as a Becoming out of the closures of present Being/Non-Being; Alan Norrie and Alain Badiou are, respectively, representative of the ‘immanentist’ and transcendental versions of this critical project of reclaiming the subject of philosophy from the closures of the present. In this essay, adopting a lens of coloniality, I suggest that underpinning this ontologic-epistemology of post-Enlightenment Eurocentric thinking is an assumption of Nothingness that defines the originary-abject which requires the invention of the philosophical problem, which requires the becoming-subject-in-the-political. I argue instead that the present is defined not by absence/inexistence, not by NonBeing/Nothingness outside of the political, but by Other/Different-Being whose Exteriority is that which continues to be negated in theory-practice. Such a perspectival shift points to the decolonial necessity of the negation of the ‘political’ itself, of the struggle for desubjectificatio

Thinking from the ban? Rebellious Third Worlds & theory

Peoples of the ‘Third World’, from the origins of the colonial encounter to the present, have too long been the objects of theory; thought about, thought against, thought for, as the ‘Other’. But who is this Other? To whom is s/he Other? Implicit in Eurocentric thinking about the Other is a particular assumption of the sovereignty of location. This essay begins from the position that the Other is only Other-ed by theory. A different location of rebellious thought is present and possible; one that does not obsess with the inclusion of the Other into theory, but rather, begins with and from the Ban (adapting Agamben), as ‘border thinking’. From this beginning, the essay traces the historic and contemporary contexts of Bans, from the pasts of colonialism to the presents of global totalitarianism. A reconfigured ‘Three Worlds’ under the contemporary contexts of global totalitarianism is presented, comprising First Worlds of ‘sovereign-citizens, Second Worlds of subject-citizens, and Third Worlds of rightsless citizens; they represent radically demarcated locations of theory not inviting of easy resolution. The essay then follows to suggest the implications of ‘thinking from the Ban’, of thinking from locations of rightslessness, on the three pillars of Eurocentric theory - History, Justice, and Legality - arguing instead for their abandonment for memories, judgements and illegalities

The politics of hope and the other-in-the-world : thinking exteriority

The paper offers a critical interrogation of the politics of hope in relation to suffering in the world. It begins with a critique of the assumptions and aspirations of ‘philosophies of hope’ that assume a Levinasian responsibility for the suffering-Other. Such approaches to thinking hope reveal an underlying coloniality of ontology, of totality/exteriority, which defines Being and Non-Being, presence and absence, in totality. Consistent with past colonial rationalities, the logics of salvation and rescue define, still, these contemporary envisionings of the ‘white man’s burden’ in relation to the suffering Other. A decolonial ontology of Exteriority, of an incommensurable radical Other-Being against Totality, is instead presented. The focus here shifts from the passive suffering-Other that is the object of rescue, to the Radical Other that is the author of encounter. By returning Exteriority (the Radical Other-in-the-World) to theory and by opening up theory’s locations of enunciation, the implications of responsibility, in thinking hope, become open also to interrogation and vulnerable to unsatisfactory conclusions

Peoples' Law : decolonising legal imagination

The simple and radical truth is that there is nothing inevitable or natural, let alone good, about the present ‘order(ing)’ of human societies within the scheme of the totality of global political-legal cultural imagination; there is nothing good in the militaristic, corporate control over the political-legal space that represents the landscape of governance today is an indictment that few would contest; that few being the public voices of domination that remain our (enforced) ‘leaders’; there is nothing natural about this imposed order is something most of us would believe, much to the chagrin of the imperial voices which repeat time and again the evolutionary logic of their violence. With this in mind, this work critically evaluates contemporary dominant World Order(ings), exploring the colonising and violent claims of Power and its attendant Law, seeking to decolonise the latter through a Peoples’ Law created by peoples’ action that reclaims lost, hidden or repressed histories and emancipatory futures and reignites political action with the radical re-appropriation by peoples groups to initiate what might be termed ‘grassroots democratic action’ of and for law