Etienne Balibar’s Reading of Arendt’s “Politics of Human Rights”

"We need to go one step further, in order to bring to light the extreme radicality of Arendt’s thesis: following the dialectical model of the coincidentia oppositorum, she does not limit herself to making the institution the source of positive right, but she sees in it a construction of the human as such, and she pushes the idea of a politics of human rights to the point of making dissidence—in the specifically modern form of ‘civil disobedience’—the touchstone of the founding reciprocity of rights."

Étienne Balibar

This quote is from French philosopher Étienne Balibar’s interpretation of Arendt’s work in an article titled, “Arendt, le droit aux droits et la désobéissance civique” [Arendt, the right to rights, and civil disobedience], one of the essays in La proposition de l’égaliberté, which is about to appear in translation from Duke University Press. A shorter version of this essay appeared in Social Research as “(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt’s Practical Philosophy.” The quotes in this blog post are my translations of the French text; where possible I have made use of the English text in the Social Research article.

Balibar’s interpretation of Arendt in this essay is systematic rather than historical. Although he observes that Arendt is a thinker who “never wrote the same book twice” and that her work is a “continuous, unfinished experiment of thought,” he nevertheless finds a recurrence of certain questions obsédantes, questions that don’t leave her alone, and he attempts to reconstruct what in his view may be Arendt’s central philosophical problem: that of “the politics of human rights and its ‘foundation,’ or rather its absence of foundation, its ‘un-founded’ character.” He discusses this problem by connecting Arendt’s critique (and redefinition) of human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism  with her essay on “Civil Disobedience” published in Crises of the Republic.

Balibar presents Arendt’s critique of human rights as a “(…) direct refutation of the ideological foundation of the nation-state itself, which presented the ‘rights of the citizen’ (in this case the national citizen) as a secondary construction, an institution of previously existing ‘human rights’ that, in turn, provides the citizen’s rights and the political institutions—that is, the state—with a universalistic principle of legitimacy.” Arendt’s critique, which Balibar refers to as Arendt’s “theorem,” is that in fact, it works the other way around: human rights are a “secondary” construction of civil rights in the nation state, as is demonstrated by the fact that when citizens’ civil rights are destroyed , their human rights are destroyed as well (cf. oppressed minorities, stateless people, refugees, etc.). Thus, human rights are based on civil rights, not vice versa. However, Balibar argues, it is important to realize that Arendt does not argue that only political institutions create rights, whereas human beings outside institutions do not have rights. Instead, her idea is that “(…) outside the institution of the community (…), there are no human beings.” The importance of this realization is that Arendt does not relativize or seek to abolish the association of the idea of humanity with the idea of rights in general, but that she, on the contrary, reinforces this association. The point is to make the idea of rights “indissociable and indiscernible from a construction of the human that is the internal effect immanent in the historical invention of political institutions.” It is for this reason that the “primary” right is neither human rights (cf. natural right theory) nor civil rights (cf. a historicist institutionalism/legal positivism), but the right to have rights.

Arendt’s right to have rights, which she also defines as “the right of every individual to belong to humanity,” is the right to appear, speak, and act in a “common world” as equals. Like Rousseau, Arendt argues that human beings are not “naturally” equal but only become equal within an “artificially” constituted political community. As she puts it in chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism: “We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.” Balibar’s interest is in exploring how this “becoming equal” entails a permanent politics of dissidence, of challenging and redefining who counts as equal and who belongs to what common world. Balibar calls this Arendt’s “politics of human rights,” which he considers to have an “antinomic character.”

What, then, does Balibar mean when he writes that Arendt makes dissidence the “touchstone of the founding reciprocity of rights”? Balibar finds this idea primarily in Arendt’s essay on “Civil Disobedience,” which is an intervention in debates about protests against the Vietnam War in the United States. Arendt argues in this essay that civil disobedience is not a matter of the conscience of individuals, but of acting “in the name and for the sake of a group,” an “organized minority” of dissent. For Arendt, Balibar argues, civil disobedience is “(…) a collective movement that, in a given situation and with a given, limited aim, suppresses the ‘vertical’ form of authority and creates a ‘horizontal’ form of association in order to recreate the conditions of a ‘free consent’ to the law.” Balibar emphasizes Arendt’s insistence on the idea of risk involved in civil disobedience, which is not the legal risk of being punished, but, as Balibar puts it, the political risk of “misjudging the situation and the forces that make up the situation, so that the intention to recreate the continuity of the politeia or the conditions of existence of the ‘active’ citizen might well change into its opposite, by a ‘ruse of reason’ or rather of history, symmetrical to that of Hegel, and end in their definitive destruction.” If this sentence of Balibar’s sounds much more dramatic than the general tone of Arendt’s essay on “Civil Disobedience,” this is because according to Balibar’s interpretation, the stakes of Arendt’s “politics of human rights” are so incredibly high: what is at stake is the political construction of the human as such, or the violent rejection of people as non-human.

Since the late 1990s, Balibar has repeatedly invoked Arendt’s concept of the right to have rights to think what he calls a “politics of civility.” By a politics of civility, Balibar means “the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible, or at least is not made absolutely impossible.” In “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in an Era of Global Violence,” Balibar presents this idea of a politics of civility as an antidote to what he calls the “cruelty” or “extreme violence” directed against what might perhaps be called “dehumanized people.” And according to Balibar, “It is not only the state and the economy that needs to be ‘civilized’ or to become ‘civil,’ but also revolution itself.” What Balibar seems to be advocating here is that all politics, including revolutionary politics, orient itself towards the possibility of politics at every step, that is, towards the possibility of a common world in which people can appear, speak, and act as equal human beings.

I am unable to go further into Balibar’s interpretation and use of Arendt within this short blog post, but I hope to have sparked a curiosity among readers of Arendt about what I see as a productive engagement with her work by an important contemporary French political thinker of the left. For further reading, I recommend, in addition to the articles and books mentioned in this blog post, Balibar’s article, “Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance for Citizenship” (Rethinking Marxism 20:4), and, on the politics of civility, Violence et civilité, which is forthcoming in English translation from Columbia University Press.

-Michiel Bot