Critical notes on the discourse of human rights: recognition and vulnerability: reconocimiento y vulnerabilidad

Abstract

This article aims to understand the role of human rights today, their potentialities, but also their structural limits, as well as the place they occupy in the political struggle against institutionally produced suffering. Its main objective is to think about the possibilities that these rights hold and what is the place from which they can be released, beyond what human rights do as legal norms deployed by sovereign states and as moralizing discourses produced by individuals. To this end, we will proceed by means of the reading of four texts, of different authorship (Jorge Alemán, Christoph Menke y Arnd Pollman, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt), in which the question of human rights is directly or indirectly addressed from different perspectives.