Jacques Rancière

Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?

As we know, the question raised by my title

took on a new cogency during the last ten years
of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or
Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the
seventies and eighties by the dissident move-
ments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—
a rejuvenation that was all the more significant
as the ‘‘formalism’’ of those rights had been one
of the first targets of the young Marx, so that
the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear
as their revenge. After this collapse, they would
appear as the charter of the irresistible move-
ment leading to a peaceful posthistorical world
where global democracy would match the global
market of liberal economy.
As is well known, things did not exactly go that
way. In the following years, the new landscape
of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism,
became the stage of new outbursts of ethnic con-
flicts and slaughters, religious fundamentalisms,
or racial and xenophobic movements. The ter-
ritory of ‘‘posthistorical’’ and peaceful humanity
proved to be the territory of new figures of the
Inhuman. And the Rights of Man turned out to
be the rights of the rightless, of the populations
hunted out of their homes and land and threat-

The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.

Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.
298 Jacques Rancière

ened by ethnic slaughter. They appeared more and more as the rights of
the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any rights or even
any claim in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld
by others, at the cost of shattering the edifice of International Rights, in
the name of a new right to ‘‘humanitarian interference’’—which ultimately
boiled down to the right to invasion.
A new suspicion thus arose: What lies behind this strange shift from Man
to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian? The actual subject
of these Rights of Man became Human Rights. Is there not a bias in the
statement of such rights? It was obviously impossible to revive the Marx-
ist critique. But another form of suspicion could be revived: the suspicion
that the ‘‘man’’ of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the
only real rights were the rights of citizens, the rights attached to a national
community as such.
That polemical statement had first been made by Edmund Burke against
the French Revolution.1 And it had been revived in a significant way by
Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism included a chapter devoted
to the ‘‘Perplexities of the Rights of Man.’’ In that chapter, Arendt equated
the ‘‘abstractedness’’ of ‘‘Men’s Rights’’ with the concrete situation of those
populations of refugees that had flown all over Europe after the First World
War. These populations have been deprived of their rights by the very fact
that they were only ‘‘men,’’ that they had no national community to ensure
those rights. Arendt found there the ‘‘body’’ fitting the abstractedness of the
rights and she stated the paradox as follows: the Rights of Man are the rights
of those who are only human beings, who have no more property left than
the property of being human. Put another way, they are the rights of those
who have no rights, the mere derision of right.2
The equation itself was made possible by Arendt’s view of the political
sphere as a specific sphere, separated from the realm of necessity. Abstract
life meant ‘‘deprived life.’’ It meant ‘‘private life,’’ a life entrapped in its
‘‘idiocy,’’ as opposed to the life of public action, speech, and appearance. This
critique of ‘‘abstract’’ rights actually was a critique of democracy. It rested
on the assumption that modern democracy had been wasted from the very
beginning by the ‘‘pity’’ of the revolutionaries for the poor people, by the
confusion of two freedoms: political freedom, opposed to domination, and
social freedom, opposed to necessity. In her view, the Rights of Man were
not an ideal fantasy of revolutionary dreamers, as Burke had put it. They
were the paradoxical rights of the private, poor, unpoliticized individual.
 Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 299

This analysis, articulated more than fifty years ago, seems tailor-made,
fifty years later, to fit the new ‘‘perplexities’’ of the Rights of Man on the
‘‘humanitarian’’ stage. Now we must pay close attention to what allows it to
fit. It is the conceptualization by Hannah Arendt of a certain state of excep-
tion. In a striking passage from the chapter on the perplexities of the Rights
of Man, she writes the following about the rightless: ‘‘Their plight is not that
they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that
they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them.’’ 3
There is something extraordinary in the statement ‘‘nobody wants to
oppress them’’ and in its plainly contemptuous tone. It is as if these people
were guilty of not even being able to be oppressed, not even worthy of being
oppressed. I think that we must be aware of what is at stake in this state-
ment of a situation and status that would be ‘‘beyond oppression,’’ beyond
any account in terms of conflict and repression, or law and violence. As a
matter of fact, there were people who wanted to oppress them and laws to
do this. The conceptualization of a ‘‘state beyond oppression’’ is much more
a consequence of Arendt’s rigid opposition between the realm of the politi-
cal and the realm of private life—what she calls in the same chapter ‘‘the
dark background of mere givenness.’’ 4 It is in keeping with her archipolitical
position. But paradoxically this position did provide a frame of description
and a line of argumentation that later would prove quite effective for depo-
liticizing matters of power and repression and setting them in a sphere of
exceptionality that is no longer political, in an anthropological sphere of
sacrality situated beyond the reach of political dissensus.
This overturning of an archipolitical statement into a depoliticizing ap-
proach is, in my view, one of the most significant features of thought that
was brought to the fore in the contemporary discussion about the Rights
of Man, the Inhuman, and the crimes against humanity. The overturn is
most clearly illustrated by Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of biopolitics,
notably in Homo Sacer.5 Agamben transforms Arendt’s equation—or para-
dox—through a series of substitutions that equate it, first, with Foucault’s
theory of biopower, and, second, with Carl Schmitt’s theory of the state of
exception.
In a first step, his argument relies on the Arendtian opposition of two
lives, an opposition predicated on the distinction between two Greek words:
zoe, which means ‘‘bare physiological life,’’ and bios, which means ‘‘form
of life,’’ and notably the bios politikos: ‘‘the life of great actions and noble
words.’’ In her view, the Rights of Man and modern democracy rested on
300 Jacques Rancière

the confusion of those two lifes—which ultimately meant the reduction of

bios to sheer zoe. Agamben equated her critique with Foucault’s polemics on
‘‘sexual liberation.’’ In The Will to Know and Society Must Be Defended, Fou-
cault argues that the so-called sexual liberation and free speech about sex
are in fact effects of a power machine that urges people to speak about sex.
They are effects of a new form of power that is no longer the old sovereign
power of Life and Death over the subjects, but a positive power of control
over biological life. According to Foucault, even ethnic cleansing and the
Holocaust are part of a ‘‘positive’’ biopolitical program more than revivals
of the sovereign right to kill.6
Through the biopolitical conceptualization, what, in Arendt, was the
flaw of modern democracy becomes in Agamben the positivity of a form
of power. It becomes the complicity of democracy, viewed as the mass-
individualistic concern with individual life, with technologies of power
holding sway over biological life as such.
From this point on, Agamben takes things a step further. While Foucault
opposed modern biopower to old sovereignty, Agamben matches them by
equating Foucault’s ‘‘control over life’’ with Carl Schmitt’s state of excep-
tion.7 Schmitt had posited the state of exception as the principle of politi-
cal authority. The sovereign power is the power that decides on the state
of exception in which normal legality is suspended. This ultimately means
that law hinges on a power of decision that is itself out of law. Agamben
identifies the state of exception with the power of decision over life. What
is correlated with the exceptionality of sovereign power is the exception of
life. It is life as bare or naked life, which, according to Agamben, means life
captured in a zone of indiscernibility, of indistinction between zoe and bios,
between natural and human life.
In such a way, there is no more opposition between sovereign power and
biopower. Sovereign power is the same as biopower. Nor is there any oppo-
sition between absolute state power and the Rights of Man. The Rights of
Man make natural life appear as the source and the bearer of rights. They
make birth appear as the principle of sovereignty. The equation would still
have been hidden at that time by the identification of birth—or nativity—
with nationality, that is, with the figure of the citizen. The flow of refugees
in the twentieth century would have split up that identity and made the
nakedness of bare life, stripped of the veil of nationality, appear as the secret
of the Rights of Man. The programs of ethnic cleansing and extermination
would then appear as a radical attempt to draw the full consequences of
 Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 301

this splitting. This means that the secret of democracy—the secret of mod-
ern power—can now show up at the foreground. Now state power has con-
cretely to do with bare life. Bare life is no longer the life of the subject that
it would repress. Nor is it the life of the enemy that it would have to kill. It
is, Agamben says, a ‘‘sacred’’ life—a life taken within a state of exception,
a life ‘‘beyond oppression.’’ 8 It is a life between life and death that can be
identified with the life of the condemned man or the life of a person in a
state of coma.
In his analysis of the Holocaust, Agamben emphasizes the continuity
between two things: scientific experimentation on life ‘‘unworthy to being
lived,’’ that is, on abnormal, mentally handicapped, or condemned persons,
and the planned extermination of the Jews, posited as a population experi-
mentally reduced to the condition of bare life.9 Therefore the Nazi laws sus-
pending the constitutional articles guaranteeing freedom of association and
expression can be thought as the plain manifestation of the state of excep-
tion, which is the hidden secret of modern power. Correspondingly, the
Holocaust appears as the hidden truth of the Rights of Man—that is, the
status of bare, undifferentiated life, which is the correlate of biopower. The
camp can be put as the ‘‘nomos’’ of modernity and subsume under one and
the same notion the camps of refugees, the zones where illegal migrants
are parked by national authorities, or the Nazi death camps.
In such a way, the correlation of sovereign power and bare life takes place
where political conflicts can be located. The camp is the space of the ‘‘abso-
lute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application,
exception and rule.’’ 10 In this space, the executioner and the victim, the
German body and the Jewish body, appear as two parts of the same ‘‘bio-
political’’ body. Any kind of claim to rights or any struggle enacting rights
is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life and
state of exception. That polarity appears as a sort of ontological destiny: each
of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference
grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political prac-
tice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap.
Agamben’s view of the camp as the ‘‘nomos of modernity’’ may seem very
far from Arendt’s view of political action. Nevertheless, I would assume that
the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is the ulti-
mate consequence of Arendt’s archipolitical position, of her attempt to pre-
serve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life.
This attempt depopulates the political stage by sweeping aside its always-
302 Jacques Rancière

ambiguous actors. As a result, the political exception is ultimately incorpo-

rated in state power, standing in front of bare life—an opposition that the
next step forward turns into a complementarity. The will to preserve the
realm of pure politics ultimately makes it vanish in the sheer relation of
state power and individual life. Politics thus is equated with power, a power
that is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny
from which only a God is likely to save us.
If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to reset the question
of the Rights of Man—more precisely, the question of their subject—which
is the subject of politics as well. This means setting the question of what
politics is on a different footing. In order to do this, let us have a closer look
at the Arendtian argument about the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, an
argument that Agamben basically endorses. She makes them a quandary,
which can be put as follows: either the rights of the citizen are the rights of
man—but the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they
are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts to nothing—or
the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the fact
of being a citizen of such or such constitutional state. This means that they
are the rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology.11
Either the rights of those who have no rights or the rights of those who
have rights. Either a void or a tautology, and, in both cases, a deceptive trick,
such is the lock that she builds. It works out only at the cost of sweeping
aside the third assumption that would escape the quandary. There is indeed
a third assumption, which I would put as follows: the Rights of Man are the
rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights
that they have not.
Let us to try to make sense of the sentence—or develop the equation. It is
clear that the equation cannot be resolved by the identification of a single x.
The Rights of Man are not the rights of a single subject that would be at
once the source and the bearer of the rights and would only use the rights
that she or he possesses. If this was the case, indeed, it would be easy to
prove, as Arendt does, that such a subject does not exist. But the relation of
the subject to his or her rights is a little more complicated and entangled.
It is enacted through a double negation. The subject of rights is the subject,
or more accurately the process of subjectivization, that bridges the interval
between two forms of the existence of those rights.
Two forms of existence. First, they are written rights. They are inscrip-
tions of the community as free and equal. As such, they are not only the
 Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 303

predicates of a nonexisting being. Even though actual situations of right-

lessness may give them the lie, they are not only an abstract ideal, situated
far from the givens of the situation. They are also part of the configuration
of the given. What is given is not only a situation of inequality. It is also an
inscription, a form of visibility of equality.
Second, the Rights of Man are the rights of those who make something of
that inscription, who decide not only to ‘‘use’’ their rights but also to build
such and such a case for the verification of the power of the inscription. It
is not only a matter of checking whether the reality confirms or denies the
rights. The point is about what confirmation or denial means. Man and citi-
zen do not designate collections of individuals. Man and citizen are politi-
cal subjects. Political subjects are not definite collectivities. They are sur-
plus names, names that set out a question or a dispute (litige) about who is
included in their count. Correspondingly, freedom and equality are not predi-
cates belonging to definite subjects. Political predicates are open predicates:
they open up a dispute about what they exactly entail and whom they con-
cern in which cases.
The Declaration of Rights states that all men are born free and equal. Now
the question arises: What is the sphere of implementation of these predi-
cates? If you answer, as Arendt does, that it is the sphere of citizenship, the
sphere of political life, separated from the sphere of private life, you sort
out the problem in advance. The point is, precisely, where do you draw the
line separating one life from the other? Politics is about that border. It is the
activity that brings it back into question. This point was clearly made dur-
ing the French Revolution by a revolutionary woman, Olympe de Gouges,
in her famous statement that if women are entitled to go to the scaffold,
they are entitled to go to the assembly.
The point was precisely that equal-born women were not equal citizens.
They could neither vote nor be elected. The reason for the prescription was,
as usual, that they could not fit the purity of political life. They allegedly
belonged to private, domestic life. And the common good of the community
had to be kept apart from the activities, feelings, and interests of private life.
Olympe de Gouge’s argumentation precisely showed that the border sepa-
rating bare life and political life could not be so clearly drawn. There was at
least one point where ‘‘bare life’’ proved to be ‘‘political’’: there were women
sentenced to death, as enemies of the revolution. If they could lose their
‘‘bare life’’ out of a public judgment based on political reasons, this meant
that even their bare life—their life doomed to death—was political. If, under
304 Jacques Rancière

the guillotine, they were as equal, so to speak, ‘‘as men,’’ they had the right
to the whole of equality, including equal participation to political life.
Of course the deduction could not be endorsed—it could not even be
heard—by the lawmakers. Nevertheless, it could be enacted in the process
of a wrong, in the construction of a dissensus. A dissensus is not a conflict
of interests, opinions, or values; it is a division put in the ‘‘common sense’’:
a dispute about what is given, about the frame within which we see some-
thing as given. Women could make a twofold demonstration. They could
demonstrate that they were deprived of the rights that they had, thanks to
the Declaration of Rights. And they could demonstrate, through their pub-
lic action, that they had the rights that the constitution denied to them, that
they could enact those rights. So they could act as subjects of the Rights of
Man in the precise sense that I have mentioned. They acted as subjects that
did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they had not.
This is what I call a dissensus: putting two worlds in one and the same
world. A political subject, as I understand it, is a capacity for staging such
scenes of dissensus. It appears thus that man is not the void term opposed to
the actual rights of the citizen. It has a positive content that is the dismissal
of any difference between those who ‘‘live’’ in such or such sphere of exis-
tence, between those who are or are not qualified for political life. The very
difference between man and citizen is not a sign of disjunction proving that
the rights are either void or tautological. It is the opening of an interval for
political subjectivization. Political names are litigious names, names whose
extension and comprehension are uncertain and which open for that reason
the space of a test or verification. Political subjects build such cases of veri-
fication. They put to test the power of political names, their extension and
comprehension. They not only confront the inscriptions of rights to situa-
tions of denial; they put together the world where those rights are valid and
the world where they are not. They put together a relation of inclusion and
a relation of exclusion.
The generic name of the subjects who stage such cases of verification is
the name of the demos, the name of the people. At the end of Homo Sacer,
Agamben emphasizes what he calls the ‘‘constant ambiguity’’ of the people
that is at once the name of the political body and the name of the lower
classes. He sees in this ambiguity the mark of the correlation between bare
life and sovereignty.12 But the demos—or the people—does not mean the
lower classes. Nor does it mean bare life. Democracy is not the power of the
poor. It is the power of those who have no qualification for exercising power.
 Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 305

In the third book of Laws, Plato lists all the qualifications that are or claim
to be sources of legitimate authority.13 Such are the powers of the masters
over the slaves, of the old over the young, of the learned people over the
ignorant people, and so on. But, at the end of the list, there is an anomaly,
a ‘‘qualification’’ for power that he calls ironically God’s choice, meaning by
that mere chance: the power gained by drawing lots, the name of which is
democracy. Democracy is the power of those who have no specific qualifi-
cation for ruling, except the fact of having no qualification. As I interpret
it, the demos—the political subject as such—has to be identified with the
totality made by those who have no ‘‘qualification.’’ I called it the count of
the uncounted—or the part of those who have no part. It does not mean
the population of the poor; it means a supplementary part, an empty part
that separates the political community from the count of the parts of the
population.
Agamben’ s argument is in line with the classical opposition between the
illusion of sovereignty and its real content. As a result, he misses the logic
of political subjectivization. Political subjects are surplus subjects. They
inscribe the count of the uncounted as a supplement. Politics does not sepa-
rate a specific sphere of political life from the other spheres. It separates
the whole of the community from itself. It opposes two counts of count-
ing it. You can count the community as the sum of its parts—of its groups
and of the qualifications that each of them bears. I call this way of counting
police. You can count a supplement to the sum, a part of those who have no
part, which separates the community from its parts, places, functions, and
qualifications. This is politics, which is not a sphere but a process.
The Rights of Man are the rights of the demos, conceived as the generic
name of the political subjects who enact—in specific scenes of dissensus—
the paradoxical qualification of this supplement. This process disappears
when you assign those rights to one and the same subject. There is no man
of the Rights of Man, but there is no need for such a man. The strength of
those rights lies in the back-and-forth movement between the first inscrip-
tion of the right and the dissensual stage on which it is put to test. This
is why the subjects of the Soviet constitution could make reference to the
Rights of Man against the laws that denied their effectivity. This is also why
today the citizens of states ruled by a religious law or by the mere arbi-
trariness of their governments, and even the clandestine immigrants in the
zones of transit of our countries or the populations in the camps of refu-
gees, can invoke them. These rights are theirs when they can do something
306 Jacques Rancière

with them to construct a dissensus against the denial of rights they suffer.
And there are always people among them who do it. It is only if you pre-
suppose that the rights belong to definite or permanent subjects that you
must state, as Arendt did, that the only real rights are the rights given to
the citizens of a nation by their belonging to that nation, and guaranteed
by the protection of their state. If you do this, of course, you must deny
the reality of the struggles led outside of the frame of the national consti-
tutional state and assume that the situation of the ‘‘merely’’ human person
deprived of national rights is the implementation of the abstractedness of
those rights. The conclusion is in fact a vicious circle. It merely reasserts
the division between those who are worthy or not worthy of doing politics
that was presupposed at the very beginning.
But the identification of the subject of the Rights of Man with the sub-
ject deprived of any right is not only the vicious circle of a theory; it is also
the result of an effective reconfiguration of the political field, of an actual
process of depoliticization. This process is what is known by the name of
consensus. Consensus means much more than the reasonable idea and prac-
tice of settling political conflicts by forms of negotiation and agreement,
and by allotting to each party the best share compatible with the interests
of other parties. It means the attempt to get rid of politics by ousting the
surplus subjects and replacing them with real partners, social groups, iden-
tity groups, and so on. Correspondingly, conflicts are turned into problems
that have to be sorted out by learned expertise and a negotiated adjustment
of interests. Consensus means closing the spaces of dissensus by plugging
the intervals and patching over the possible gaps between appearance and
reality or law and fact.
In this way, the ‘‘abstract’’ and litigious Rights of Man and of the citizen
are tentatively turned into real rights, belonging to real groups, attached to
their identity and to the recognition of their place in the global population.
Therefore the political dissensus about the part-taking in the common of the
community is boiled down to a distribution within which each part of the
social body would obtain the best share that it can obtain. In this logic, posi-
tive laws and rights must cling increasingly to the diversity of social groups
and to the speed of the changes in social life and individual ways of being.
The aim of consensual practice is the identity of law and fact. The law has
to become identical to the natural life of society. To put it in other terms,
consensus is the reduction of democracy to the way of life of a society, to its
ethos—meaning by this word both the abode of a group and its lifestyle.
 Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 307

As a consequence, the political space, which was shaped in the very gap
between the abstract literalness of the rights and the polemic about their
verification, turns out to diminish more and more every day. Ultimately,
those rights appear actually empty. They seem to be of no use. And when
they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old
clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless
in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people
deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of
this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no
rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression
and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights,
the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial
of right. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places
never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something
else. The Rights of Man do not become void by becoming the rights of those
who cannot actualize them. If they are not truly ‘‘their’’ rights, they can
become the rights of others.
‘‘The Rights of the Other’’ is the title of an essay written by Jean-François
Lyotard, originally a paper given within the auspices of the Oxford Lectures
on the Rights of Man, organized in 1993 by Amnesty International.14 The
theme of the rights of the other has to be understood as an answer to the
question, What do Human Rights mean in the context of the humanitarian
situation? It is part of an attempt to rethink rights by first rethinking Wrong.
The issue of rethinking Wrong increasingly took the floor after the collapse
of the Soviet Empire and the disappointing outcomes of what was supposed
to be the last step to universal democracy. In the context of the new out-
bursts of racial or religious hatred and violence, it was no longer possible to
assign crimes against humanity to specific ideologies. The crimes of dead
totalitarian regimes had to be rethought: they were said to be not so much
the specific effects of perverse ideologies and outlaw regimes as the mani-
festations of an infinite wrong—a wrong that could no longer be conceptu-
alized within the opposition of democracy and antidemocracy, of legitimate
state or lawless state, but which appeared as an absolute evil, an unthinkable
and unredeemable evil.
Lyotard’s conceptualization of the Inhuman is one of the most signifi-
cant examples of that absolutization. Lyotard did in fact split the idea of the
inhuman. In his view, the forms of repression and cruelty, or the situations
of distress that we call ‘‘inhuman,’’ are the consequences of our betrayal of
308 Jacques Rancière

another Inhuman, what we could call a ‘‘good’’ Inhuman. That Inhuman is

Otherness as such. It is the part in us that we do not control. It may be
birth and infancy. It may be the Unconscious. It may be the Law. It may
be God. The Inhuman is the irreducible otherness, the part of the Untam-
able of which the human being is, as Lyotard says, the hostage or the slave.
Absolute evil begins with the attempt to tame the Untamable, to deny the
situation of the hostage, to dismiss our dependency on the power of the
Inhuman, in order to build a world that we could master entirely.15
Such a dream of absolute freedom would have been the dream of the
Enlightenment and of Revolutionary emancipation. It would still be at work
in contemporary dreams of perfect communication and transparency. But
only the Nazi Holocaust would have fully revealed and achieved the core
of the dream: exterminating the people whose very mission is to bear wit-
ness to the situation of hostage, to obey the law of Otherness, the law of an
invisible and unnamable God. ‘‘Crimes against humanity’’ appear then as
crimes of humanity, the crimes resulting from the affirmation of a human
freedom denying its dependency upon the Untamable. The rights that must
be held as a response to the ‘‘humanitarian’’ lack of rights are the rights
of the Other, the rights of the Inhuman. For instance, in Lyotard’s view,
the right to speak must be identified with the duty of ‘‘announcing some-
thing new.’’ 16 But the ‘‘new’’ that must be announced is nothing but the
immemorial power of the Other and our own incapacity to fulfill the duty
of announcing it. The obedience to the rights of the Other sweeps aside the
heterogeneity of political dissensus to the benefit of a more radical hetero-
geneity. As in Agamben, this means infinitizing the wrong, substituting for
the processing of a political wrong a sort of ontological destiny that allows
only ‘‘resistance.’’ Now this resistance is no manifestation of freedom. On
the contrary, resistance means faithfulness to the law of Otherness, which
rules out any dream of ‘‘human emancipation.’’
This is the philosophical way of understanding the rights of the Other.
But there is a less sophisticated and more trivial understanding of them: if
those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact the Human Rights
that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights
in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the ‘‘right to
humanitarian interference’’—a right that some nations assume to the sup-
posed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice
of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The ‘‘right to humanitarian
interference’’ might be described as a sort of ‘‘return to sender’’: the disused
 Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 309

rights that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders. But
this back and forth movement is not a null transaction. It gives a new use to
the ‘‘disused’’ rights—a new use that achieves on the world stage what con-
sensus achieves on national stages: the erasure of the boundary between
law and fact, law and lawlessness. The human rights that are sent back are
now the rights of the absolute victim. The absolute victim is the victim of
an absolute evil. Therefore the rights that come back to the sender—who
is now the avenger—are akin to a power of infinite justice against the Axis
of Evil.
The expression ‘‘infinite justice’’ was dismissed by the U.S. government
a few days after having been put forward as an inappropriate term. But I
think that it was fairly appropriate. An infinite justice is not only a justice
that dismisses the principles of International Law, prohibiting interference
in the ‘‘internal affairs’’ of another state; it is a justice which erases all the
distinctions that used to define the field of justice in general: the distinc-
tions between law and fact, legal punishment and private retaliation, jus-
tice, police, and war. All those distinctions are boiled down to a sheer ethical
conflict between Good and Evil.
Ethics is indeed on our agendas. Some people see it as a return to some
founding spirit of the community, sustaining positive laws and political
agency. I take a fairly different view of this new reign of ethics. It means to
me the erasure of all legal distinctions and the closure of all political inter-
vals of dissensus. Both are erased in the infinite conflict of Good and Evil.
The ‘‘ethical’’ trend is in fact the ‘‘state of exception.’’ But this state of excep-
tion is no completion of any essence of the political, as it is in Agamben.
Instead it is the result of the erasure of the political in the couple of con-
sensual policy and humanitarian police. The theory of the state of excep-
tion, just as the theory of the ‘‘rights of the other,’’ turns this result into an
anthropological or ontological destiny. They trace it back to the inescapable
prematuration of the human animal. I think that we had rather leave the
ontological destiny of the human animal aside if we want to understand who
is the subject of the Rights of Man and to rethink politics today, even if out
of its very lack.

Notes
1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis:
Hacket, 1987).
2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 297–98.
310 Jacques Rancière

3 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 293.

4 Ibid., 297.
5 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
6 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction [The Will to Know], trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and Society Must Be Defended, trans. David
Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
7 Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1922).
8 Agamben, Homo Sacer.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 294.
12 Agamben, Homo Sacer.
13 Plato, Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Middlesex: Penguin, 1970), bk. 3, 137–39.
14 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘‘The Other’s Rights,’’ in On Human Rights, ed. S. Shute and S. Hur-
ley (New York: Basic Books, 1994). This essay was originally presented as a paper within
the auspices of the Oxford Lectures on the Rights of Man, organized in 1993 by Amnesty
International.
15 Lyotard, ‘‘The Other’s Rights,’’ 136.
16 Ibid.