Constituent Human Rights: A Spinozan study of the radical within human rights theories and the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest

Abstract: The global human rights regime can only recognise rights that are already known and given, what I’m calling constituted human rights. This mantra poses some immediate obstacles: it effectively invisibilises issues of the productivity and antagonism of human rights movements, the unknown and indeterminate future, and human rights that don’t yet exist. This thesis is an effort to disclose, through critical hermeneutics and ontology, a radical form of human rights. From Spinoza’s idea that right is co-extensive with power, I logically extend Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power to produce the concept of constituent human rights as an ontological and inalienable way of expressing human rights. My purpose is to explore what constituent human rights can say about human rights theory and praxis, and vice versa. I’m therefore traversing radical human rights theories and the human rights movement of Capitol Hill Occupied Protest in Seattle. In an open-ended and continuous hermeneutical understanding, I’m then building and producing the concept of constituent human rights throughout. Constituent human rights, I find, are produced as inalienable to our being. Human rights are expressed as temporally indeterminate, exploding any contingent boundaries in going far beyond the fabric of the known and the present. In this way, constituent human rights are independent of the global human rights regime, its conventions, and the already-given. Instead, constituent human rights unfold from everything we do, and everything we express. By virtue of our existence, we produce human rights as our immediate nature.