From the “Right to Have Rights” to the “Critique of Humanitarian Reason”

This chapter explores Jacques Rancière's trenchant critique of Hannah Arendt, after briefly recalling Arendt's discussion of the right to have rights. It shows how Rancière not only misreads Arendt, but much of what he defends as the necessary enactment of rights is quite compatible with an Arendtian understanding of political agency. The chapter then turns to the quandaries of “humanitarian reason,” in Didier Fassin's felicitous phrase. To address them, the chapter calls for a new conceptualization of the relationship between international law and emancipatory politics; a new way of understanding how to negotiate the facticity and the validity of the law, including international humanitarian law, such as to create new vistas for the political.