The Relational Self and Human Rights

This book takes up Paul Ricoeur's relational idea of the self in order to rethink the basis of human rights.

Auteur

Tatiana Hansbury, Birkbeck Law School, University of London.

Texte du rabat

This book takes up Paul Ricoeur's relational idea of the self in order to rethink the basis of human rights.

Contenu

Introduction

• Outline of the problem

• The 'relational turn'

• Challenges to the reconceptualisation of rights

• The approach

• Why Ricur?

• Structure
  I. Conditions and limits of a relational reinterpretation of human rights

• The evolution and critique of liberal subjectivity and rights

• The others of liberalism: communitarianism and relational theory on the rightful place for rights

• Addressing entrenchment and indeterminacy

• The limits of reinvention: human rights as tradition and critique
  II. Configuring a relation: elements of a relational theory of human rights

  Self as relation

  Human rights as relations

• Rights as formal relations

• Rights as 'suprapersonal existences'

  Concluding remarks; rights' discursive existence III. Life unfolding, life recounted relational subject in the first-person perspective

  In search of the self: the structure of a hermeneutical inquiry

  Idem and ipse: the dialectics of selfhood and sameness

  Ipseity as commitment to being: narrative and promise

• Narrative identity and a relational subject of rights

• Promise: ethical self-maintenance

  Capacities, incapacities and rights

• Esteem and respect: the link between capacities and rights

• An incapable subject: a relational corrective

  Attestation and trust: epistemology of subjectivity

  Concluding remarks: relational subject of rights as a 'life'
  IV. Neighbourly dwelling: subjectivity as a dialogue and an institution

  Neighbour as an encounter: you and I

• Alterity, 'othering', reciprocity and likeness

• 'Who is my neighbour?': solicitude and equality

  Neighbour as the institution

• .Neighbour as the institutional other

• The 'problematic role of the state'

• 'In just institutions'

  Concluding remarks: subject of rights as 'neighbour'
  V. Human rights as gifts between strangers

  Rights and gifts: rivals or allies?

  Mutual recognition as reciprocal gift

• Resistance is futile: the 'struggle for recognition' questioned

• Gift as the source of reciprocal obligations

• Gift and the recognition/redistribution divide

  'Ownership is not what matters': human rights as the gifted property of persons

• Questioning the property metaphor

• Rights between givers

  'A rally of the really human things': the priceless objects of rights

• The facets of the priceless

• 'Life' and 'dwelling' as purposive spheres of human rights
  Conclusion