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  • The Rights of the Infinite
  • Alastair Hunt (bio)

One can never be critical enough.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 281

the census figures come out wrongthere's an extra in our midst

Silver Jews, "The Ballad of Reverend War Character"

The Right to Have Rights

Readers of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism have long hailed it as a ground-breaking analysis of modern mass atrocity. However, we are only recently beginning to plumb the depths of its critical account of human rights. According to the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which appeared just three years prior to Arendt's book, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."1 For Arendt the problem with this proposition is that its emphasis on birth assumes that rights are hard-wired into one's natural existence as a human being, when in fact politics takes form as the artifice of speaking and acting as a member of an organized community, for example, as a citizen of a nation-state, something quite different from being a member of a biological species. This biologistic assumption not only removes human beings from the concrete, artificial circumstances [End Page 223] that give reality to political communities; it abandons them to an animal ontology in principle disarticulated from the conditions of ethical responsibility and political action. On this account the subject who is said to bear rights is, then, not a human being at all, but rather an animal. Hence the tough wit of Arendt's observation about the similarities between human rights advocacy groups and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals: while human rights advocates think they are fighting practices in which human beings are treated like animals, they are themselves actually engaged in a campaign for the rights of animals, a campaign, moreover, with little chance of practical success.2 Animal advocates, such as Peter Singer, might often characterize the call for a radical transformation of humanist speciesism as an extension of campaigns for the rights of ethnic minorities, gay and lesbian minorities, women, and so on. For Arendt, human rights are already a form of animal rights.

At the same time, she is quick to clarify that the biopolitical reading does not exhaustively describe the real-world work that rights can perform. In fact, her critique of human rights is simultaneously an affirmation of what she calls "the right to have rights." This suggestive phrase has in recent years served as the common jumping-off point for some of the most inventive scholarly efforts to recover the important role that rights have played and still can play in our attempts to address urgent political problems.3 The right to have rights is not one imputed to inhere in the biological existence of human beings, and yet it is not itself one of the rights already possessed by citizens. It is the right to become a citizen, the right to a position in a society in which one can effectively exercise one's rights. "Its loss entails the loss of the relevance of speech (and man, since Aristotle, was defined as the being commanding the power of speech and thought), and the loss of all human relationship (and man, since Aristotle, has been thought of as the 'political animal,' that is one who by definition lives in a community), the loss, in other words, of some of the most essential characteristics of human life" (OT, 297). Insofar as it can be deduced from the ontological human capacity for speech and action—the distinctively human activities in which politics materializes—the [End Page 224] right to have rights would seem to be, as Arendt puts it, "the one human right."4

The negative form of Arendt's formulations of the right to have rights, however, already hints at an interesting gap opened up between this right and human rights as such. She dilates on this gap in her very first mention of the right to have rights, where she times its emergence into cognition to correspond with the appearance of those who have lost this and all other rights: "We became aware of...

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