Identities, Politics, and Rights

Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the "Jewish Question"

Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the "Jewish Question" Wendy Brown For the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity: rights imply a respect that places one in the referential range of self and others, that elevates one's status from human body to social being.... -Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights [I]t is not through recourse to sovereignty against discipline that the effects of disciplinary power can be limited, because sovereignty and disciplinary mechanisms are two absolutely integral constituents of the general mechanism of power in our society. If one wants to ... struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one should turn, but towards the possibility of a new form of right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time liberated from the principle of sovereignty. -Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge Minority people committed themselves to these struggles [for rights], not to attain some hegemonically functioning reification leading to false consciousness, but a seat in the front of the bus, repatriation of treaty-guaranteed sacred lands, or a union card to carry into the grape vineyards. -Robert A. Williams, Jr., "Taking Rights Aggressively" What is the emancipatory force of rights claims on behalf of politicized identities in late-twentieth-century North American political life? If, historically, rights have been claimed to secure formal emancipation 86 IDENTITIES, POLITICS, AND RIGHTS for individuals stigmatized, traumatized, and subordinated by particular social identities, to secure a place for such individuals in a humanist discourse of universal personhood, what does it mean to deploy rights on behalf of identities that aim to confound the humanist conceit ? What are the consequences of installing politicized identity in the universal discourse of liberal jurisprudence? And what does it mean to use a discourse of generic personhood-the discourse of rightsagainst the privileges that discourse has traditionally secured? In pursuing these kinds of questions about the contemporary deployment of rights, I am not asking whether rights as such are emancipatory. Nor am I concerned with the theoretical question of whether the sovereign subject of rights can be squared with contemporary deconstruction of such subjects.1 Rather, I want to begin by recognizing rights as protean and irresolute signifiers, varying not only across time and culture, but across the other vectors of power whose crossing they are sometimes deployed to effect-class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, wealth, education.2 I want to acknowledge the diverse, inconstant, even contradictory ways that rights operate across various histories, cultures, and social strata.3 But an inquiry into the relationship between identity formation and rights claims in late-twentieth-century politics requires registering more than the indeterminacy and contingency of rights. Those concerned with emancipatory political practices in our time confront as well a set of paradoxes about rights, perhaps the central one of which is this: The question of the liberatory or egalitarian force of rights is always historically and culturally circumscribed; rights have no inherent political semiotic, they carry no innate capacity either to advance or impede radical democratic ideals. Yet, rights necessarily operate in and as an ahistorical, acultural, acontextual idiom: they 1. Drucilla Cornell offers one of the most interesting speculations on this topic in "Bodily Integrity and the Right to Abortion," in this volume. 2. See, on a related but somewhat different point, LacIau and Mouffe, who argue that "the meaning of liberal discourse on individual rights is not definitively fIXed." Ernesto LacIau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 11}85),176. 3. Consider: rights as boundary, and as access; rights as markers of power, and as masking lack; rights as claims, and as protection; rights as organization of social space, and as defense against incursion; rights as articulation, and as mystification; rights as diSciplinary, and as antidisciplinary; rights as a mark of one's humanity, and as a reduction of one's humanity; rights as expression of desire, and as foreclosure of desire. RIGHTS AND IDENTITY IN LATE MODERNITY claim distance from specific political context and historical vicissitudes , and they necessarily participate in a discourse of enduring universality rather than provisionality or partiality. Thus, while the measure of their political efficacy requires a high degree of historical and social specificity, rights operate as a political discourse of the general, the generic and universal.4 This paradox...