Wendy Brown
As I read Wendy Brown’s essay “The Most We Can Hope For…..” Human Right and the politics of Fatalism. Wendy has an interesting point of view about Human Rights and mentions about Michel Ignatieff publication “Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry”
Humans Rights have been created to stop physical cruelty as well as any kind of abuse.However Wendy Brown believed that Human Rights are not created directly to a single individual, and I think her main idea is that Human Rights are being use more by people who are in politics, people using for demand of government, corporations or practically any political figure.
She also mention Ignatieff’s idea of how Human rights protect against violence and abuse, on page 452 she writes about Ignatieff commentaries published “That I take to be the elementary priority of all human rights activism: to stop torture, beating……as best we can, the security of ordinary people” I think this quote is saying that we have the power to keep fighting to get our rights and not only certain group of people.
“Human rights activism is amoral political project and if it displaces, compete with refuses, or rejects other political projects including those also aimed at producing justice” pg. 453, just like I mention before Brown still has a debate on what kind of rights recognizes each situation are political, historical, social or economic context. Brown has point out that to protect a certain vulnerable group, this rights have to be identify and reinforce the perception of that weak group.
On page 459 she also write about what are we have learned in the last century ” if rights secure the possibility of living without fear of express state coercion……the state nor do they enhance the collective power of the citizenry to determinate” Her idea about how rights work to articulate a need or a condition of fault or damage that can not be complete repaired or transformed by rights. These rights of systematic subordinates tent to rewrite, inequalities and impediments to freedom that are consequent to social stratification as issues of individual violations and is rare for these violation to be articulated under the condition of such violation.
Wendy Brown thinks that although human rights have been created to defend any individual, after fifty years these rights remain only a symbol in which human rights activism which we have to argue in taking. Therefore we have to work within the prevailing discourse of human rights, but we have to be aware of the limits of these actions and remain centered on the idea that nothing is impossible.
