°Rights of man
November 24, 2006
Another fragment from Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow’s, “Why Work on Rights? Citizenship, Welfare and Property in Empire and Beyond,” Theory & Event, 8:4, 2005:
Hardt and Negri’s new mode of being is thus universal neither in time nor in space (given that each individual must risk a failure to transform into “humanity squared”). But in any case, as we would argue, any and every grounding of a political program in an ontology is necessarily exclusive. Any such political ontology is a result of a decision about the truth of the world. In particular, Hardt and Negri’s ontology necessarily stops at the limit of the “homo” itself, the category of “Man” or “humanity,” leaving unremarked this ontology’s inevitable construction of a category of the “animal” or the “non-human” that falls beneath this threshold. In order, therefore, for Hardt and Negri to claim the universality of their ontology, they must presume that man or humanity exists coherently and without dispute. But no ontology is capable of securing its border without generating a class of beings excluded from it and committing itself to the endless policing of even those who are included. Hardt and Negri claim that their program of rights achieves universality precisely because it is grounded in a “new” ontology. But in fact, the moment they inaugurate this grand ontological project, they doom their program to failure.
