Suchergebnisse

This article takes Peter Fitzpatrick's writings on the modern death penalty, published over roughly a decade from the late 1990s, as a point of departure for considering wider themes in his scholarship, and reflecting on its significance and particular qualities. In these texts we see Fitzpatrick, as a legal theorist, engaging with a pressing political issue of, literally, life, death and the law. I take this textual archive and show how it illustrates Fitzpatrick's mode of critique, his form of poststructural legal normativity, and the kinds of resistant and responsiveness-generating legal subjects he encourages us to be.

Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth — as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of the late 1970s and early 1980s — his perhaps less celebrated concern with ethics and with technologies of the self — as tacitly re-introducing a liberal humanist notion of subjectivity and, with that, an embrace of orthodox rights discourse. Beginning from this curious disjunction between the rejectionist Foucault and the liberal Foucault, this article attempts to articulate a Foucauldian politics of human rights along the lines of a critical affirmation. Neither a full embrace nor a total rejection of human rights, the Foucauldian politics of human rights developed here elaborates (and attempts to connect) several disparate figures in his thought: rights as ungrounded and illimitable, rights as the strategic instrument-effect of political struggle, and rights as a performative mechanism of community.