Wronging Rights?: Philosophical Challenges for Human Rights

This book brings together two of the most powerful and relevant philosophical critiques of human rights: the post-colonialist and the post-Althusserian, its balanced internal structure not just throwing these two critiques together, but actually forcing them to enter into confrontation and dialogue.

The book is organised in three parts: at each end, the post-colonialist and the post-Althusserian critiques are represented by some of their main thinkers (Ratna Kapur, G. C. Spivak, Upendra Baxi; Slavoj ?i?ek, Jacques Ranciere), while in the middle, an American intermezzo (Richard Rorty, Wendy Brown) functions as a genuine Derridian supplement: always already contaminating the purity of the two theoretical schools, preventing their enclosure and, hence, fuelling and complicating further their mutual confrontation. As in any authentic dialogue, the introduction and the conclusion each claim victory for one of the sides by changing the very terms and rules of the dialogue, picturing it as a confrontation between emancipatory universalism and inefficient particularism (from the perspective of the post-Althusserians), or as a split between hypocrisy and truth (from the perspective of the post-colonialists).

Aakash Singh Rathore is Research Professor at the Center for Ethics & Global Politics, Luiss University, Rome. His scholarly interests range from comparative political philosophy to liberation theology. He has authored and edited several books, including a French edition/translation of Maulana Azad's India Wins Freedom (2006); Reading Hegel: The Introductions (2008, co-edited); and Indian Political Thought (2010, co-edited). His B. R. Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma: A Critical Edition is forthcoming.
Alex Cistelecan is a doctoral candidate at the Center for Ethics & Global Politics, Luiss University, Rome. Founder-member of Protokoll, an avant-garde activist political association in Eastern Europe, he is also on the editorial board of the Romanian monthly cultural journal Vatra. His research interests include neo-Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalytic studies and critical theory. He has been Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Literature at Transylvania University, Brasov. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on a Lacanian theory of bureaucracy.