Is humanity enough? The secular theology of human rights

Abstract

The paper settles around three perspectives drawn from the report by Nietzsche's madman of the death of God. The first perspective responds to one of the madman's piercing questions: 'What sacred games will we have to invent for ourselves?' Or, in Zarathustra's terms, what are the 'new idols' we now live by? What, in and as modernity, can effect the neo-deific combination of determinate position with the illimitable possibility of being? Humanity, the human of human rights, is then taken as one such answer. The second perspective from Nietzsche involves the impossibility of an immanent conception of humanity or the human. That impossibility is then set against the arrogated conception of the human in and as modernity. Much of the paper explores current imperial and 'globalized' manifestations of such arrogation. Finally, there is Nietzsche's third response. With the 'tremendous event' of the death of God there is an exalted openness to the possibility it makes possible. The perhaps surprising carrier of this possibility in and as human rights is found to be the quality such rights have as law. It is in the recognition of this that human rights are incipiently liberative.