Included but not Belonging Badiou and Rancière on Human Rights

In this article the standpoints on Human Rights by twocontemporary French philosophers, Alain Badiou and JacquesRancière are explored. Their critical reading of the projectof Human Rights moves away from the reading that we can see in thework of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. Instead both Badiou andRancière offer a critical version of Human Rights that canbe subsumed under the phrase ‘included but not belonging'.Their interventions on Human Rights reveal, besides importantsimilarities, significant differences. For Badiou, notions likehuman rights, and democracy, should be rejected altogether, whereasRancière still sees critical potential for both the projectof human rights and democracy. This difference can be attributed tothe divergent notions of truth that the two philosophers apply. Thearticle ends with a sketch of the critical and militant potentialof the work of these two theorists.