Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Ranciere's critique of Hannah Arendt

In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the 'right to have rights' as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Ranciere's response to Arendt's aporetic account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt's conception of the political. According to Ranciere, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoe) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoe and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Ranciere 'the human' in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancie` re's approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life.