CFP: On Human and Rights

Submission deadline: August 30, 2018

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On Human and Rights

Call for Papers  GCSI-Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee  Issue #4, 2018

The most authentic result of modernity is the great Illuministic project of a society capable to grant everyone fundamental and universally compelling rights. Untouched and untouchable by positive law, they answer only to the authority of Reason. However, the present liquid society seems unable to enforce the passage from the gaseous state of pure and simple declaration of human rights to the solid state of their real and effective application. Current debate on the subject is characterized by remarkably differing stances on every aspect, from the ethical to the metaphysical approach: thus, it seems less and less likable to proclaim the logic and rational self-evidence that should distinguish those rights.

Norberto Bobbio stated that the universality, inviolability and inalienability of human rights are merely «formulas of persuasive language» that grant vis retorica to a political argument, but that nonetheless «have no theoretical value». The self-evidence of right would derive then from a certain transparency of the discourse capable to dampen social differences, from a certain virtuous circularity of communicative action that produces consensus only by limiting and reducing dissent.

Together with the presumption of universality and objectivity, the right is endowed also with the presumption of neutrality, thus shaping itself as free from social conditioning or actual relations of power – on which, nonetheless, its concrete possibility of enforcement rests. And these alleged neutrality and universality are the principles that permit the legitimateness and validation of political acts such as the safeguard of the free market, military interventions against terrorism, the sacralisation of the code of “politically correct”. The relation among the field of rights and the political one denounces a gap between the merely formal nature of a normative role and the logic, the interests, the institutions that actually sustain it.

Indeed, human rights are formally granted by the Constitutions of every democratic country; yet, it still seems not possible to grant concrete answers to those whose rights are systematically denied, offended or violated. This means that the mere utterance of rights is simply not sufficient, that we need to go beyond the mere performative function of language and give a body, a tangible existence to rights. Furthermore, this means that the field of a norm-based acknowledgment cannot represent the entirety of the ontology of human rights, for it should always critically question its relationship with the regulation mechanisms of institutions and take into account the various concerted practices and different struggles for one’s own rights.

Yet again the problematic nature of the concept of “human rights” is even more immediate, almost intrinsic, and it appears once they are conceived as “rights of human”: the indispensable enforcement procedure cannot leave a radical change in terms of theoretical approach out of consideration. A thorough clarification is required on how to employ the “human rights” frame in a post-human era, characterised by the deconstruction of subject, the utter critic of anthropocentrism and a thought that questions and weakens the truths of the so-called strong thought. Once again “Quid est homo?” appears to be the most compelling question.

The task of the critical history of ideas is to challenge the “rights of human”, beyond any alleged naturalization or trivialization of the concept. The actual complexity of its object should structure the research on a double level: the reconsideration of the means of rights enforcement and a new epistemology of human.

The GCSI invites researchers and scholars to participate according to the following thematic fields:

1. Rights for which humans? Towards a critical epistemology of human.

This section will gather essay to line out the fundamentals of a critical history of the idea of "human" in the human rights, that is what "human being" has been and is, meant and means, in the texts and history of "humans as a bearer of rights". Likewise, essays about the state of the art of the idea of human will be taken into account, both from a historical and evolutional point of view, and from an ethical-aesthetical one, with particular attention to posthumanism, transhumanism and human/machine hybridizations.

2. Uses of bodies and the economy of rights. Issues of governmentality and biopolitics.

This section intends to study the relationships between the field of human rights and the dispositives of political and economic power. To what extent human rights can be considered autonomous from the mechanisms of power? Is the abstract universality of rights still defendable, without taking into account the apparatus of production and control of human?

3. Human rights and praxes. Antinomies and paradoxes in the enforcement.

This section will focus on contemporary struggles for human rights, for their safeguard as much as for their conquest; on the instruments and actions used for these struggles. We will accept essays about the contemporary fronts of the human rights problem, in their enforcement and in their inefficacy. Possible topics are: the emergency management of migration flows, the post-colonial identities, the right to the city, food sovereignty versus food security.

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Guidelines for the authors

Papers may be written in the following languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Submissions shall be sended exclusively in .doc format (no .pdf, OpenOffice or other formats) and they must be submitted anonymous, giving no indication of author's identity.

For each paper you have to submit two different files:

  • a first one, in .doc format, for the blind referee, containing the essay without the author's name. It must be preceded by an abstract (not more than 250 words) in english, and at least 5 keywords, in english too;
  • a second one, in .doc format, for the editorial board, containing the author's data: name, institution, title of the essay and a valid e-mail address.

Papers should not exceed 50000 characters (including spaces, notes and bibliography)

All papers will be assessed according to the blind review criteria, with the following decisions:

  1. Accepted
  2. Accepted with minor revisions
  3. Accepted only after major revisions
  4. Rejected

Deadline: 31 August 2018

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Contacts: Gianpaolo Cherchi   – [email protected]

                 Antonio Moretti       – [email protected]

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