A Scene of Contention at the Limits of Sovereignty: Derrida, Rancière, and the Deconstructive Politics of Human Rights

ABSTRACT

This article develops a critical account of human rights through an encounter between Jacques Derrida and Jacques Rancière. Rather than treating their approaches as complementary components of a single theory, I argue that their disagreement reveals two irreducible dimensions of the politics of rights: the situated enactment of equality and the temporal non‐closure of every such enactment. Rancière shows how rights become political when those excluded from an existing distribution invoke their egalitarian inscriptions to stage a dissensus and enact themselves as political subjects. Derrida, through the distinction between law and justice and the temporality of the à venir, shows why no institutional or political articulation of equality can determine in advance the subjects and forms through which future claims may emerge. This reading rejects both the interpretation of deconstruction as an indefinite deferral of political action and the claim that Rancière fails to recognize the recurrence of exclusion through the politics/police distinction and le tort. Bringing these positions into tension, I argue that human rights require determinate legal and political forms while remaining contestable by claims those forms cannot anticipate. A deconstructive politics of human rights thus emerges in the interval between enactment and non‐closure: Equality must take political form without any particular form becoming its final horizon.