Lockdown musings from a little hut overlooking a lake on a mountain where the EU and non-EU Balkans meet: North Macedonia and Greece. Albania is across the lake. I am geographically situating myself in Europe, but my message and its addressees cannot be but global.
In times when it is difficult to defend ‘human rights’, when we have deconstructed them to the level of rendering them meaningless; when we have exposed them as the “essentialist discourse” they are, usurped by “imperialist neoliberalism,” how are we to find, rediscover or invent a language that will adequately defend the right to a human life that’s worth living? How are we to defend or claim our right to freely move, to enjoy ourselves physically as well as socially, all the while demanding that sociality is embodied, material? How are we to formulate these rights beyond a discourse that has lost its sense, its credibility, and rightfully so?
Apart from having been unpacked as a set of historical contingencies usurping the status of universality, in the past century “human rights” have been frequently abused to justify imperial wars, and the ravaging of the so called “third world” by the self-proclaimed “first world.” Therefore, we must ask, what language do we have at our disposal when we demand the freedom – the right and the reality of – movement, and sovereignty over our bodies, the touch and closeness of our fellow human animals? How are we to defend “freedom” when it has lost meaning beyond the vocabulary of liberalism? Poststructuralism has exposed the myth of the “autonomous subject”— the illusion of free choice; and it has been stuck there ever since, in a state of a compulsive repetition and reaffirmation of the same realization all over again – the state of palilalia of a once controversial academia, based on the poststructuralist episteme, that turned mainstream.
