in Arendt’s ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM she provides a very interesting analysis: how the League of Nations was built on human rights, where because the laws were linked to an abstract notion (humanity) this crucial intervention, overriding the traditional guarantees of statehood (nation, religion, …), made it possible for the phenomenon of the stateless person to appear – in essence she proposes that the introduction of human rights was the collapse of the Law of the Father. (Lacan’s teaching here is often compared to the legal system) She further makes an ominous prediction, that this would enable the existence of a future totalitarian state that would be able to amputate one of its members at will.

Now Bible Thumpers seem to be using statements like this for their own crazy agenda, but nevertheless, the idea does conjure up interesting questions in the context of humanitarian military interventions. Conspicuously enough international law and the UN conventions will be discarded completely without consequence for the perpetrator.

I remember Zizek was writing a lot about human rights, but given his convoluted and confusing train of thought I can’t tell for sure whether he was extrapolating from Arendt or saying something original on the subject.

However this thought from ORIGINS is haunting me after many years (and that book is good in general as well).