| Observers of contemporary politics frequently remark that even as human rights have triumphed as ideals, they have failed as facts. This study argues that beyond the inadequacies of the technical means for practically implementing and enforcing human rights, the deep problem is paradoxically the very idea of the human species upon which human rights ostensibly depend. Combining the resources of rhetorical criticism and a robust ecocritical alertness to the living in general, I read a constellation of texts, from late eighteenth-century British and German romanticism through political philosopher Hannah Arendt to contemporary political theory, which critically interrogate the ideological assumption of conventional models of human rights that specifically human beings naturally and exclusively possess rights as human beings by virtue of being human. Romantic critical theory, I argue, understands human rights on the far side of biopolitics as a critical project whose rhetorical acts disorganize any ideological confusion of natural phenomenon with linguistic-political action.;Chapter one traces the figure of "nakedness" from contemporary biopolitical theory through Arendt to late eighteenth-century critiques of human rights by Edmund Burke and Thomas Taylor in order to argue that a biologistic conception of human rights renders rights unbearable by dissolving the human into the brute. Chapters two to four explore various intersecting iterations of what Arendt has called "the right to have rights." In the second chapter Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lyric declaration of the rights of an infra-human animal is shown to radicalize the originary disarticulation of being human and bearing rights already legible in a famous instance of human rights advocacy by Thomas Paine. In the third chapter Friedrich Schlegel is read as accounting for an infinite moment in the declaration of rights that cannot be classified according to the taxon of species. The fourth chapter explains how William Wordsworth's claim to invent a new "species of poetry" capable of vindicating the specifically human figures the infra-human ape as the exemplary bearer of the right to poetry. A final coda reflects on how critical human rights theory might most effectively contribute to our collective efforts to revitalize and radicalize rights. |
