HR Alain Baiduo

As per Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil critique of the western liberal conception of ‘human rights’  

Alain Badiou argues that human rights only serves to justify and reinforce the ideology of the status quo  

Alain Badiou's Ethics says that human rights cannot coherently account for the concept of evil.

From this interview: "My personal position is the following: It is necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary theory of evil, the ideology of human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in the direction of the real emancipation of humanity. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everyday life as in politics, of truth and of the good.

We have to seek a ‘new political logic’, Badiou argues that we can only retrieve the political sense of concrete negation (the word negation is what Afro pessimism posits as the way to destroy Anti blackness and to finally emancipate blacks, here it is used similarly but for Queer people) through its subordination to a prior field of affirmation: i.e. the opening of a new possibility inside a given historical situation, or ‘the event’, that may be politically realised through the creation of a ‘new subjective body’ consisting in the social affirmation of those new possibilities. Revolutionary politics is therefore said to rest on a synthesis of, on the one hand, democracy in the sense of spontaneous mass-political irruption, and, on the other, a prescriptive elaboration of the ramifications of the event. The discussion then turns to the question of strategy – outside and against the politically moribund State-form – and his reconfiguration of political universality vis-à-vis the formulations of classical Marxism."

Badiou counterposes capitalist ideology’s implicit anthropology of self-interested animals to his own of subjects embodied in a generic truth-procedure and its concomitant model of political rights, where what is ultimately at stake is ‘the complete transformation of the form of . . . difference, of the way the difference exists’ rather than a materialist dialectics of antagonistic contradiction. The interview concludes with Badiou clarifying his relationship to Lacanian psychoanalysis as an essential but by no means exhaustive conceptual armoury for understanding the relation between subject and event."