Table of Contents
Introduction
- Outline of the problem
- The ‘relational turn’
- Challenges to the reconceptualisation of rights
- The approach
- Why Ricœur?
- 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