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The an-archic event of natality and the "right to have rights".

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DOES ARENDT'S THOUGHT, WHICH SHE SELF-DESCRIBES AS "post-metaphysical" and therefore without substantive ground, provide any normative basis for the "fight to have rights"--that is, for a universal fight to belong to a political space? * In other words, while it is the case that rights are granted de facto on the basis of mutual recognition of the claim to right, by what right does Arendt make this claim? Still further, while it is the case that human rights claims need intersubjective confirmation and validation, on what basis does this confirmation and validation occur?. To raise the Kantian question: "questiae juris--by what right?" Does Arendt's thought permit us to move from the de facto claim of right to the de jure universal basis for such a claim?

To begin to answer the question "questiae juris--by what right?" it is important to look at the task Arendt sets for herself in the preface to the first edition of Origins of Totalitarianism. At the conclusion of the preface, Arendt writes that "anti-Semitism (and not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)--one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities" (Arendt, 1951: xi). (1) At the very beginning of her seminal work, Arendt calls for a universal principle of humanity that will provide a new guarantee of human dignity. The reason Arendt gives for the need for such a principle is given at the conclusion of Origins in her analysis of totalitarianism and the unprecedented reality of the death camps. In a passage in which she provides a kind of genealogy that proceeds from the mass manufacture of corpses to the historical and political preparation of living corpses, to the political disintegration that made hundreds of thousands of human beings homeless, stateless, and outlawed, she concludes by stating: "This ... could only happen because the Rights of Man, which had never been philosophically established but merely formulated, which had never been politically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in their traditional form, lost all validity (Arendt, 1951: 446).

It is clear that Arendt places the responsibility of the death camps squarely at the feet of a philosophically invalid and politically impotent notion of human rights. Her preface indicates that to establish philosophically and secure politically human rights requires a new principle of humanity. The question is whether Arendt herself is able to provide such a principle given that her own thinking is self-described as "post-metaphysical." I submit that Arendt does not flinch from the task. In a passage immediately following her discussion of the "right to have rights," she writes: "Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have become equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of man can no longer be comprehended in terms of either category. On the other hand, humanity, which for the eighteenth century, in Kantian terminology was no more than a regulative idea, has today become an inescapable fact. This new situation in which 'humanity' has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history would mean in this context that the right to have fights or the right of every individual to belong to humanity should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether it is possible" (Arendt, 1951: 298). The hands of God are closed. The rationality of nature, the self-evidence of reason and the progress of history have given way to the death camps and holes of oblivion, leaving us facing nothing but ourselves. For Arendt, humanity itself must guarantee the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity.

While Arendt appeals to humanity to guarantee the right to have rights, she is by no means idolatrous when making this appeal. Here I am responding especially to Michael Ignatieff's claim that any attempt to ground human rights in a universal notion of humanity is to fall into...