Human rights between precariousness and naked life: dialogue between Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to engage in a dialogue about the perspectives of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben on the human condition based on the concepts of precarity and bare life. Firstly, Butler's perspective develops the subjectivity of precariousness represented through lives that are or are not subject to mourning and based on the unequal distribution of precariousness on certain bodies. Subsequently, relying on Agamben, the paradigm of exception is revealed in the exclusion of bare life from the legal-political sphere, as well as the presence of the homo sacer in the exception, and consequently, as a body separated from the legal order. From the intersection between the two authors, the non-incorporation of the categories of bodies presented in the framework of current Law and human rights is questioned, highlighting the need to rethink these same paradigms. To achieve the proposed objectives, the dialectical approach method, the comparative procedure method and the bibliographic research technique are used. The possible answers to the questions raised by the research reveal the urgency of public mourning in the constitution of an ethic of interdependence in the field of human rights, based on the proposed dialogue and deconstructing the dynamics of sacralization and sacrificialization of certain subjects to the detriment of others.

Key words: biopolitic; human rights; homo sacer; precariousness; bare life.