Human Rights and Constituent Power: Without Model or Warranty

Human Rights and Constituent Power: Without Model or Warranty reworks the ordinary conception of human rights, by replacing their possessive individualism with the radically different ontology of ‘being-together’ in constituent struggle. Engaging the current political and jurisprudential thought on constituent power with a radical political re-thinking of human rights, Ilan Rua Wall develops the idea that human rights must be considered as a non-metaphysical process of ‘right-ing’. The first part of this argument discusses both the classical theory of constituent power and its contemporary conceptualization, in order to elaborate the conception of an ‘open’ constituent power, not tied to a the closure of a constituted order. This conception is then further developed through the re-imagination of community, and of the political, as a ruptural force. The consequence is a more radical form of human rights: now understood, not just a moralistic cover for biopolitical subordination, but as a constituent potentia; the coming to presence of a radical sense of being-with, and a very different human right-ing.