The 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 existence

III. 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