In his article, Rancière starts off with describing the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A new “landscape of humanity” emerged, characterized by violence. “The Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless,” of people being forced out of their homeland, fleeing from horrors like ethnic slaughter. This resulted in a shift from “Man to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian,” as humanitarian intervention became a new phenomenon to act in the name of those who were unable to enact their rights.
Because of this shift and the new state of the world, the suspicion grew that the Rights of Man was only an outline, an idea inasmuch as the only real rights were those of citizens who were part of a community. Rancière links this idea to Hannah Arendt and her chapter Perplexities of the Rights of Man. In this chapter, Arendt describes the problem of statelessness after World War II. She fundamentally criticizes human rights and calls for “radical rethinking in terms of a right to have rights.” The common idea of the Rights of Man was that they were natural, universal and inalienable; individuals were entitled to them by simply being human beings. However, stateless refugees were unable to enact basic Human Rights in a political community, being deprived of their citizenship, and were offered inadequate protection. Arendt critically asks why they are rightless when the Rights of Man were not supposed to be linked to political membership.
Thus, Arendt equalizes the “abstractedness” of Human Rights to “those who have no rights,” referring to those individuals whose only feature is being human, without a national community to ensure the rights that they are deprived of. This “abstract life” that Arendt is talking about relates to the private sphere, a life deprived of public or political acts. She criticizes these abstract rights, which is actually a critique of democracy. For her, the problems of modern democracy have been caused by revolutionaries who mixed up two freedoms: political freedom and social freedom. To Arendt, the concept of revolution is crucial to modern democratic politics.
Rancière critiques the Arendtian argument that Human Rights are the rights of those who have no rights. He shows the paradox of her reasoning in linking the Rights of Man to citizenship which, according to him, leads to a dead end with two options that are both unappealing. Either the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have no rights (i.e., unpoliticized or stateless persons), or they are the rights of those who are political beings and fully participate in society and therefore already have rights (i.e., citizens). The first option constitutes a ‘void,’ whereas the second option constitutes a ‘tautology.’ He then reformulates her reasoning to 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.”
Rancière and Arendt share the view that politics is a form of action, performed by individuals. As established before, Arendt separates the political from the social, whereas Rancière clearly disagrees with “Arendt’s rigid opposition between the realm of the political and the realm of private life.” For Rancière, political action is a demonstration of dissensus: “putting two worlds in one and the same world.” He is of the opinion that this distinction that Arendt makes creates an exclusive world of private and social matters, freestanding from the world of politics. Hereby, she depoliticizes politics. Rancière does not match the ‘human’ in Human Rights with a life deprived of political acts, like Arendt, but describes the ‘human’ as a political subject that politicizes the distinction between “those who are or are not qualified for political life.” He illustrates this political subjectivization by giving the example of Olympe de Gouge, which also reflects the concept of dissensus. During the French Revolution, women were seen as part of private life and therefore lacked speech. Nonetheless, Olympe made herself heard with a political voice, fighting for equality, and thereby moved beyond the distinction between private and public life. Hence, democratic action is key in the process of guaranteeing human rights. It can be concluded that for Rancière, the Rights of Man are the rights of those who actualize them.
How Arendt depoliticizes politics stands in direct opposition to what determines politics for Rancière, namely dissensus. He calls this process of depoliticization the practice of consensus. Consensus is much more than practices of compromise and negotiation. It means the “attempt to get rid of politics by ousting the surplus subjects and replacing them with real partners, social groups, identity groups, and so on.” Put in other words, it is the manifestation of a society of control. In this way, the Rights of Man are no longer abstract but turned into “real rights” affiliated with the identity of real citizens or groups and their meaning within the community. The aim of this practice of consensus is therefore the “identity of law and fact.” The law should become indistinguishable from the natural life of society. Thus, consensus can be seen as a practice that diminishes democracy. By extracting enclosed structures, acts of protest or citizens taking action are less common, which is in essence politics.
Thus, as an outcome of the practice of consensus, the political space is declining more and more every day. The depoliticization of society is effective in removing the content of the Rights of Man. In the end, they will be of no use; they become “the rights of those who have no rights.” This is where the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ comes in. The rights of those who cannot enact them will become the rights of others, individuals or groups that can actually actualize them for those who cannot. These rights are therefore not void, for a void will always be filled by somebody or something. So, ultimately, the Rights of Man have become Humanitarian Rights.
In summary, Rancière and Arendt have different views on who is the subject of the Rights of Man. For Arendt, this equals to “those who have no rights;” the rightless. She especially refers to those individuals that do not have citizenship and are therefore not part of a political community, hence the stateless. According to Rancière, on the other hand, the subject of the Rights of Man comes forth out of political action and speech. Those that question the verification of the rights that are inscribed within a community; those that claim their human rights are doing so as a consequence of the practice of political subjectification. Thus, the subject of the Rights of Man are those individuals who can make these rights a reality.