Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights
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Human rights are in crisis today. Everywhere one looks, there is violence, deprivation, and oppression, which human rights norms seem powerless to prevent. This book investigates the roots of the current crisis through the thought of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Human rights theory and practice must come to grips with key problems identified by Agamben – the violence of the sovereign state of exception and the reduction of humanity to ‘bare’ life. Any renewal of human rights today must involve breaking decisively with the traditional coordinates of Western political thought and instead affirm a new understanding of life and political action.
John Lechte is Emeritus Professor in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is best know for his writing on French philosophers, Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille and for his best selling Key Contemporary Thinkers (Routledge, 2006). He is co-editor of Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights: Statelessness, Images, Violence (EUP, 2015) and The Kristeva Critical Reader (EUP, 2003). His most recent book is The Human (Bloomsbury, 2020). Saul Newman is Professor in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is in continental and poststructuralist political and social theory, and contemporary radical politics. He is the author of: From Bakunin to Lacan (2001); Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought (2005); Unstable Universalities (2007); Politics Most Unusual (2008); The Politics of Postanarchism (2010); and Max Stirner (2011).