Relational Self and Human Rights

Tatiana Hansbury, Birkbeck Law School, University of London.

• Introduction Outline of the problem The ‘relational turn’ Challenges to the reconceptualisation of rights The approach Why Ricœur? Structure I. Conditions and limits of a relational reinterpretation of human rights The evolution and critique of liberal subjectivity and rights The others of liberalism: communitarianism and relational theory on the rightful place for rights Addressing entrenchment and indeterminacy The limits of reinvention: human rights as tradition and critique II. Configuring a relation: elements of a relational theory of human rights Self as relation Human rights as relations Rights as formal relations Rights as ‘suprapersonal existences’ Concluding remarks; rights’ discursive existenceIII. Life unfolding, life recounted relational subject in the first-person perspective In search of the self: the structure of a hermeneutical inquiry Idem and ipse: the dialectics of selfhood and sameness Ipseity as commitment to being: narrative and promise Narrative identity and a relational subject of rights Promise: ethical self-maintenance Capacities, incapacities and rights Esteem and respect: the link between capacities and rights An incapable subject: a relational corrective Attestation and trust: epistemology of subjectivity Concluding remarks: relational subject of rights as a ‘life’ IV. Neighbourly dwelling: subjectivity as a dialogue and an institution Neighbour as an encounter: you and I Alterity, ‘othering’, reciprocity and likeness ‘Who is my neighbour?’: solicitude and equality Neighbour as the institution .Neighbour as the institutional other The ‘problematic role of the state’ ‘In just institutions’ Concluding remarks: subject of rights as ‘neighbour’ V. Human rights as gifts between strangers Rights and gifts: rivals or allies? Mutual recognition as reciprocal gift Resistance is futile: the ‘struggle for recognition’ questioned Gift as the source of reciprocal obligations Gift and the recognition/redistribution divide ‘Ownership is not what matters’: human rights as the gifted property of persons Questioning the property metaphor Rights between givers ‘A rally of the really human things’: the priceless objects of rights The facets of the priceless ‘Life’ and ‘dwelling’ as purposive spheres of human rights Conclusion