SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper interrogates some phenomenological and material implications of the dominant liberal human rights discourse within the emergent realm of global law. Liberal rights are analysed here as a ubiquitous fashion of global lawyering, ‘an ethical lingua franca’ (Tasioulas 2007) in its commodified legal form, providing the template for economic and social regulation. This piece posits that it is important to ask what it means to wear human rights in legal lifeworlds: What kind of normative personhood does this peculiar outfit produce? Moreover, what sort of material residue does this worldwide trend leave behind, as the localised artefacts of its manifold impact on human communal experience? To answer these questions, the present piece looks into the various examples from Indonesia, retracing, inter alia, a domestic legal and philosophical concept of the self (aku) which seems to defy the perpetual crisis of subjectivity – predicted and partly described by Marx, Levinas and Foucault – which remains deeply rooted in the solitary model of liberal individualism and its vision of human rights.