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This book explores how the notion of human identity informs the ethical goal of justice in human rights. Within the modern discourse of human rights, the issue of identity has been largely neglected. However, within this discourse lies a conceptualisation of identity that was derived from a particular liberal philosophy about the 'true nature' of the isolated, self-determining and rational individual. Rights are thus conceived as something that are owned by each independent self, and that guarantee the exercise of its autonomy. Critically engaging this subject of rights, this book considers ho

This paper explores the structure of justice as the condition of ethical, inter-subjective responsibility. Taking a Levinasian perspective, this is a responsibility borne by the individual subject in a pre-foundational, proto-social proximity with the other human subject, which takes precedence over the interests of the self. From this specific post-humanist perspective, human rights are not the restrictive rights of individual self-will, as expressed in our contemporary legal human rights discourse. Rights do not amount to the prioritisation of the so-called politico-legal equality of the individual citizen-subject animated by the universality of the dignity of autonomous, reasoned intentionality. Rather, rights enlivened by proximity invert this discourse and signify, first and foremost, rights for the other, with the ethical burden of responsibility towards the other.

This thesis explores the impact of the conceptualisation of human identity upon our understanding and animation of human rights and how the notion of human identity informs the ethical goals of human justice in such rights. Beginning from the position that our contemporary human rights' discourse emerges from the epistemological shift in Western history from pre-modernity to modernity, our contemporary understanding and articulations of modern rights stem from the liberal philosophy of Western humanism and the rights of man thesis. With these influences there is the philosophical and political focus in modern human rights on the individual subject and the ontological signification of its (potential) presence of being and autonomous powers of being, expressed and exercised through the so-called universal traits of human identity — the individual's independent conscious capacities of reasoned intentionality and self-will. Yet since the mid-twentieth century, post discourses (such a poststructuralism, postmodernism and more generally, post-humanism) have challenged such liberal notions of human identity, with its prioritisation of the presence-of-self in a commune of the Same. Such post discourses focus on the radical quality of alterity within human identity — the very trait of distinction and otherness. In this thesis I argue that with alterity, rather than promote the atomised individual of autonomous powers of being and its ontological presence of self, postmodern ethics brings human identity under the subjugation of the "beyondness of the other." It is the distinction of the other, rather than its reduced Sameness to the self, which animates a potential post-humanist ethical inter-subjectivity. Two such post-humanist thinkers of ethical alterity which I explore in this thesis are Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas. Lacan focuses on the other of unconscious desire and the loss of human fulfilment, while Levinas explores the face of the other human subject. In both cases, it is the alterity of the other which ...