Against the Violence of Borders: The Politics of Human Rights and the International Right to Hospitality in Étienne Balibar
by Alessandro Simoncini
pp. 189-205 Issue 19 (10,1) – January-June 2023 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2023.10.1.11
Abstract
The essay examines some of Étienne Balibar’s recent work in which he establishes a critique of human rights theory. In dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Balibar focuses on the conditions of possibility for a “new politics of human rights” in the context of what he calls “absolute capitalism”. Against the current violence of borders within absolute capitalism, and against its phantasmatic neo-racist corollary, Balibar theorizes an “international right to hospitality”: a kind of “counter-right” which, through a confrontation with the Marxian theory of “relative overpopulation”Alessandro Simoncini and beyond the platitudes of liberal juridical universalism, can reconfigure the fundamental lineaments of a politics of human rights that is capable of responding to the present.