Foucault and the Politics of Rights by Ben Golder (review)

The period since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was open for signature in 2006 has witnessed a surge in engagement by disability scholars and activists with the instrumental possibilities of human rights, as well as the grounding of political claims in the language of and specific legal texts of human rights (Meekosha and Soldatic 1384). In response to these developments (and broader geopolitical shifts toward increased use of humanitarianism to justify a variety of state interventions) the past decade has also seen the growth of critical disability scholarship questioning and critiquing the limits and negative effects of human rights and humanitarianism more broadly. This critical scholarship interrogates how human rights represent disability and disabled bodies, and situates this interrogation in broader analyses of concepts such as human, injustice, sovereignty, suffering, violence, and state; and in political dynamics of neoliberalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and globalization (Gill and Schlund-Vials; Howell; Meekosha and Soldatic; Soldatic and Grech; Titchkosky; Wadiwel). This critical scholarship suggests that human rights might risk affirming or re-forming medicalized subjectivities and material practices of biopolitical rule over people with disabilities.

Foucault and the Politics of Rights by Ben Golder is a vital and insightful read because it speaks to many of the concerns voiced in contemporary critical disability scholarship and moves beyond these concerns to provide a theoretically informed approach to the instrumental use of human rights that is mindful of the risks and possibilities. The entry point into Golder’s analysis of human rights is Michel Foucault’s writings and specifically what have been identified by other scholars as his two conflicting approaches: an earlier theorization of rights, liberalism, and the subject suggestive of human rights as biopolitical rule; and a later positive deployment of human rights in relation to diverse political interventions. Golder sets out to provide an interpretation of Foucault’s work that cuts across and traces a continuity between these approaches and, having done this, to question the possibilities and limits of such an interpretation for the instrumental use of human rights.

The book argues that, as in the view that everything is “dangerous,” Foucault has an ambivalence toward rights—they simultaneously present possibilities for disrupting and redefining power relations and subjectivity at the same time that they can reinscribe or re-form the biopolitical dimensions (155). Yet, Golder argues that for Foucault this “ambivalence” is productive—it is something to “negotiate” and “work with” (91). Golder interprets Foucault’s engagement with human rights as “critical counter-conduct”: the tactical use of human rights in a particular “game” (i.e. political context) in such a way that does not affirm the “rules” of the game (i.e. the broader power relations or subjectivities that shape the political context) but instead subverts or challenges the very rules themselves. As such, it is not politically necessary nor desirable to absolutely reject human rights but instead it is vital to see human rights as but one of many political tools from which one can choose in a particular political context, and in choosing one must give careful consideration on a case-by-case basis to the extent to which their use can disrupt rather than fold back into biopolitical rule.

Foucault and the Politics of Rights is structured in six chapters. In the introductory chapter Golder sets out the “problem” identified in existing scholarship on Foucault’s contradictory approaches to rights and explains how the book will go about proposing a reinterpretation. Chapter 1 draws on Foucault’s methodologies (e.g. archaeology and genealogy) to describe his approach to critique more broadly, which then sets up the concept of “counter-conduct” proposed in Chapter 4 as a “lens” (26) through which to view his approach to rights. Chapter 2 then shifts to examine Foucault’s writing on the liberal subject, highlighting his perspective of the non-normative quality of rights which thus opens up the possibility in later...