Performing Defiance with Rights
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Performing Defiance with Rights Konstantine Eristavi1 Accepted: 6 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a defiant practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future. Keywords Agonism · Food sovereignty · Performativity · Radical democracy · Rights
* Konstantine Eristavi [email protected] 1
Institute of Social and Cultural Studies Ilia State University, Tbilisi 0162, Georgia
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K. Eristavi
Introduction The Marxist tradition and critical theory have long been, to say the least, suspicious of rights politics, examining the different ways in which it is, at best, incapable of challenging the existing configurations of power and imagining radical alternatives, or at worst, rights politics is itself complicit in the reproduction and perpetuation of the extant order (Marx, 1975; Pashukanis 1978; Mutua 2002; Brown 2004; Agamben, 2005; Kennedy 2004; Moyn 2010; Douzinas 2000; Zizek 2005; Cheah 2007; Badiou 2001). However, there is a growing literature, which, while taking heed of certain aspects of those critiques, advances a positive case for the radical potential of rights (Ingram 2008; Stammers 2009; Baxi 2008; Chambers 2004; Perugini and Gordon 2015; O’Connell 2018; McNeilly 2016; Wall 2012; Hoover 2016; Zivi 2012; Gündoğdu 2015; Rancière 2004a, b). Much of this literature can be locate
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