Ayten Gundogdu – Rightlessness in the Age of Rights

Ghuman’s case, while it is one of the few that received significant attention, is
by no means exceptional; this Kafkaesque world has become home to millions of
migrants in an age that is increasingly defined by extremely restrictive border policies.
Deportation without any possibility of appeal and arbitrary detention have now become
routine practices for states in managing the movement of people across borders.
Ghuman’s case demonstrates the possibility that even foreigners in relatively privileged
positions can be denied fundamental rights. Ghuman’s case is representative of the
pervasive problems encountered by millions of migrants who become vulnerable to
various forms of violence, discrimination, and abuse as they cross borders.

Arendt: The stateless were rightless in the sense that they were deprived of legal
personhood as well as the right to action and speech. Expulsion from their political
communities entailed an expulsion from humanity, as they lost not only their citizenship
rights but also their human rights. Questioning the idea that these are natural rights
inherent in human dignity, her critique highlights how the effective guarantees of
human rights rely on membership in an organized political community. Those who are
deprived of such a community can hardly be recognized as human beings entitled to
equal rights. They might be offered food and shelter as victims deserving compassion.
The stateless find themselves in a condition of rightlessness, Arendt argues, as they are
dispossessed of legal personhood, denied a political community that could render their
actions and speech relevant, and driven away from the company of other human beings.

The term “migrant” seems to be distant from the dispossession implied in

Arendt’s notion of “statelessness,” perhaps because it conveys a misleading sense of
easy, unimpeded mobility across borders. To resist this idea of free flow, it is worth
remembering the long-forgotten associations of migration with expulsion, banishment,
and excommunication, which urge us to attend to the de facto statelessness of many
migrants. Does this mean that human rights are doomed to fail given their perplexities?
The Arendtian framework that I propose refuses to see these perplexities as dead ends
leading nowhere other than rightlessness; instead, it takes them as challenging political
and ethical dilemas that can be navigated differently, including in ways that bring to
view new understandings of the relationships between rights, citizenship, and humanity.
As I closely engage with Arendt’s political theory for the purposes of understanding
contemporary problems and struggles of migrants, my goal is not to dig out theoretical
insights that can then be simply applied to our current problems. There are two reasons
for refusing to engage in such an exercise: First, there have been significant legal,
political, and normative changes since the time Arendt offered her analysis of
statelessness, and these developments must be taken into account. Especially important
in this regard is the international institutionalization of human rights norms. How do we
rethink Arendt’s arguments about the rightlessness of the stateless, for example, given
the international guarantees of legal personhood? Second, the task of understanding the
contemporary struggles of migrants demands not only rethinking them with Arendt but
also reading Arendt against the grain. We can draw crucial insights from Arendt only if
we revise some of her key concepts and arguments in light of these struggles. This
interpretive work involves creating encounters between Arendt’s political theory and the
contemporary situation, encounters that unsettle the oft-criticized distinctions that she
draws between political and social issues, give unanticipated meanings to her well-
known account of labor, work, and action, and take her proposition of a right to have
rights in new directions.

She contends that “the concept of human rights was treated as a sort of stepchild
by nineteenth-century political thought” and was not taken up by any major political
party. Alluding to the international efforts to draft a universal declaration, she suggests
that these “best-intentioned humanitarian attempts” still remain within the confines of a
state-centric international law and fail to provide guarantees for a right to have rights. In
an essay published in 1949, before The Origins of Totalitarianism, she refers to the
declaration adopted by the United Nations and bemoans its “lack of reality.” In that
essay, she seems to catch a glimpse of hope in the emergence of humanity as a political
reality, especially when she suggests that this new development “makes the new
concept of ‘crimes against humanity,’ expressed by Justice Jackson at the Nuremberg
Trials, the first and most important notion of international law.”

With the advent of détente in Cold War, human rights concerns started to occupy
a prominent place in the agendas. The transnational advocacy networks created have
been crucial in providing informal mechanisms of enforcement and putting pressure on
governments to change those policies that are in violation of human rights. In addition,
in the mid-1970s, states also started to incorporate human rights into their foreign
policy, which meant that they could use various forms of sanctions against those states
that refuse to comply with human rights norms. There has been a sea change in our
understanding of human rights since the time Arendt completed her analysis of
statelessness; to use Louis Henkin’s phrase, ours is “the age of rights.”

Se ha dado mucha importancia al derecho de asilo. Unlike several classical and

contemporary criticisms, her critique does not take us to a complete denunciation of
these rights as hypocritical pretenses, ineffective illusions, or ruses of power. In fact,
Arendt ends her critique with a proposal to rethink human rights as a right to have rights
—a proposal that affirms the right of everyone to citizenship and humanity. Resumen
(13). I suggest that if we are going to rethink the politics of human rights along
Arendtian lines, what is required is nothing less than reading Arendt against Arendt.
This reading takes its starting point from the perplexities arising from her multiple,
conflicting uses of the term “social.” Using the revised understanding of the
political/social distinction, I argue that Arendt criticizes the Jacobins not because they
politicized poverty but because they failed to do so. Arendt suggests that the Jacobins
took a profoundly anti-political approach to the Rights of Man, as they dispensed with
the political practices of translation and resorted instead to violence in their attempts to
resolve the problem of poverty. Turning the poor into an undifferentiated mass of
victims, they undermined any possibility of organizing a politics centered on solidarity
and equality. What is perhaps most striking, and overlooked, in Arendt’s account, is the
crucial role that rights play in enabling the public appearance of workers as political
actors. Arendt’s arguments about action, work, and labor in her phenomenological
account of vita activa. Arendt’s analysis is often read as a hierarchical ordering of these
activities, one that privileges action and denigrates labor as the least human, and
perhaps even non-human, activity. Challenging this action-centric reading, I suggest
that each activity makes a distinctive, irreplaceable contribution to living a life that can
be recognized as human. I suggest that one of the fundamental forms of rightlessness
manifests itself today in the speechlessness of migrants. This plight does not indicate the
loss of the faculty of speech altogether; instead, it suggests that one’s speech is rendered
meaningless or not taken into account. This protest method, violently illustrating
speechlessness, demonstrates how one’s exclusion from a political community also
marks one’s expulsión from humanity, or from the common world of speaking beings.
[Pensar: los refugiados son refugiados políticos, pero desde el esquema arendtiano no
son políticos ni tienen logos].

In accordance with Arendt’s account of revolutionary beginnings, I suggest that

her proposition of a right to have rights is also animated by a principle (that appears in
the world with the modern declarations of rights). To capture this principle, I use the
term “equaliberty”. Balibar introduces this term to highlight the intertwined nature of
equality and freedom in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. As different
from ancient isonomia, which was tied to one’s status as a citizen understood as a free
man, equaliberty introduces a politics of the universalization of rights, and it achieves a
universal validity as it is reenacted time and again to make new rights claims.
Reconsidering these arguments in light of Arendt’s discussion of revolution and civil
disobedience, human rights derive their validity not from extra-political sources of
authority but instead from political practices augmenting the principle of equaliberty.

This point guides my analysis of a contemporary rights struggle waged by sans-

papiers in France. Put in an irregular status due to restrictive immigration laws, sans-
papiers articulate demands such as unconditional regularization, and as they do that,
they bring to view new rights claims that cannot be easily accommodated within the
existing legal and normative framework of human rights. To establish themselves as
subjects entitled to rights and to validate their rights claims, sans-papiers have engaged
in inventive political practices such as designating a name for themselves, occupying
politically strategic sites, and perhaps most importantly, articulating their demands in a
manifesto mimicking the eighteenth-century declarations of rights. Such practices are
by no means sufficient to provide relatively durable guarantees of equality and freedom
in the absence of institutions, but they are nonetheless indispensable to make sure that
institutional mechanisms do not become blind to new problems of rightlessness and
keep open the possibility of rethinking human rights in response to these problems.

Consider, for example, Giorgio Agamben’s depiction of the present in terms of a

catastrophe, especially that we should no longer engage in “infinite negotiations” with a
political discourse centered on citizenship and rights. Agamben calls for a radical break
in the name of “a nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life.” The Arendtian
critique I propose, on the other hand, brings to light the possibilities of contesting
rightlessness by navigating and reworking the perplexities of human rights. She offered
an analysis of the perplexities of the Rights of Man, highlighting the challenges posed
by statelessness to the assumptions that have been commonly held about these rights
since the eighteenth century: The Rights of Man were assumed to be natural; individuals
were entitled to them by virtue of being born as human beings. As distinct from
historically inherited rights that changed from one community to the other, these rights
were derived from a universally shared human nature. But these rights, which were
supposed to be independent of political membership, turned out to be unenforceable for
the stateless. If these rights were inalienable, why did the stateless find themselves in a
condition of rightlessness? If these rights were the source of all laws, and as such
“irreducible to and undeducible from other rights or laws,” why did they fail to offer
effective protections to the stateless in the absence of such institutionalized rights and
laws? Arendt’s critique brings to view the connections between human rights and
citizenship, suggesting that it becomes very difficult for those deprived of membership
in a political community to be recognized as human beings entitled to rights (25-26).

Reflexiones de Arendt sobre los derechos humanos son aporéticas. No ofrecen

una solución final. Arendt’s critique of the Rights of Man does not condemn these rights
to failure and inefficacy. In a way that is diferent from recent criticisms of human rights,
especially the one offered by Agamben, Arendt’s analysis alerts us to the manifold,
protean, and indeterminate trajectories of these rights. [The right to asylum, which
Arendt describes as “the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of
Man in the sphere of international relationships,” could not adequately cope with
statelessness as a mass phenomenon either]. The difficult task, for Arendt, is to rethink
human rights by responding to this crisis and render this concept meaningful again.

Marx’s critique in the “On the Jewish Question” operates with a reappropriation
of Hegelian dialectics, whereas Arendt’s aporetic inquiry proceeds in a quite Socratic
mode (38). Whereas in the past a new body politic could legitimate its founding with
reference to divine authority, secularization leaves political actors with the problem of
finding a new authority for the laws, rights, and institutions they establish. This problem
attending the founding of any body politic in the modern era becomes especially
manifest in declarations of rights: “There is no period in history to which the
Declaration of the Rights of Man could have harkened back... [I]nalienable political
rights of all men by virtue of birth would have appeared to all ages prior to our own as
they appeared to Burke—a contradiction in terms.” Precisely because the past cannot
authorize this new conception of rights, there is the urge to find a new foundation.
Grounding rights in nature must be understood then in relation to revolutionary crises
and emergencies that initiated the search for a new “transcendent source of authority” or
“an absolute from which to derive authority for law and power.”

One of the problems with taking nature as the foundation of the Rights of Man
comes to light with the modern tendency to understand this concept mostly in biological
terms. The danger of equalization on the basis of a shared biological nature is that the
Rights of Man will come to stand for the basic necessities of life. But the crisis of
statelessness reveals the problems with this position: There might be cases where people
may be provided basic necessities such as food and shelter but still lack the recognition
as rights-bearing subjects. One of the problems with taking nature as the foundation of
the Rights of Man comes to light with the tendency to understand this concept mostly in
biological terms. The danger of equalization on the basis of a shared biological nature is
that the Rights of Man will come to stand for the basic necessities of life. But the crisis
of statelessness reveals the problems with this position. The most crucial limit of taking
nature as the basis of rights comes to view, according to Arendt, with the plight of the
stateless who are “thrown back into a peculiar state of nature. The Rights of Man are
understood as “primary positive rights, inherent in man’s nature, as distinguished from
his political status.” The problems with this presupposition, implying that human rights
can exist in isolation or in the absence of a political community, become evident as soon
as we encounter those who are stripped of all political qualifications and relationships
(39). “Perhaps this is the most confounding perplexity that confronts us in thinking of
human rights as natural rights: Those who appear in their mere givenness or naked
humanity cannot be recognized as subjects entitled to equal rights. By grappling with
this problem, Arendt aims to show that human rights do not precede and ground politics
and citizenship; it is polítics and citizenship that need to be prioritized for human rights
to have any effective guarantees” (40).

Paradoja: Arendt’s analysis highlights that the Declaration is equivocal on this

score, positing nature as the foundation of the Rights of Man, and at one and the same
time recognizing that these rights are in need of political institutions and practices (41).
[Étienne Balibar makes a similar point when he suggests that the indeterminacy of the
document is both its strength and weakness, rendering its political effects “entirely
dependent on ‘power relations’ and the evolution of the conjuncture in which it will
always be necessary in practice to construct individual and collective referent for
equaliberty.”]. Arendt’s critical inquiry brings out this indeterminacy and urges us to
examine the conditions that continuously shape the political possibilities of navigating
and renegotiating the perplexities of human rights.

Agamben’s appropriation of Arendt has shaped our contemporary interpretations

of her position on human rights, but it is worth restating arrives at different conclusions.
The goal of her critique is not to find out the logical or metaphysical contradictions that
have determined the effects of human rights in some formalistic and atemporal sense
(51). However, it does not suggest that these necessarily lead to the rightlessness of the
stateless or the totalitarian catastrophe. Because of this attentiveness to equivocal and
contingent effects of human rights, Arendt’s concluding call is very different from that
of Agamben: Instead of a politics beyond human rights, sovereignty, and citizenship,
she calls for a right to have rights—a right that demands a radical rethinking of these
key concepts, but not their total refusal or an exodus from the challenging political and
ethical dilemmas of modern politics. Arendt’s proposition points to the impossibility of
unequivocally determining the scope, subject, and ground of human rights in advance
and suggests instead that these are always to be contested and redefined in political
struggles that reconfigure the relations between rights, citizenship, and humanity.

Revisa la relación arendtiana entre lo social y lo político (55s). On Revolution, to

use Pitkin’s description, is a profoundly incoherent book (that at times is overlooked by
Arendt’s critics). This move confronts us in Arendt’s quite ambivalent discussion of
Marx. On the one hand, she criticizes Marx as a theorist whose work embodies “the
transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of Sans-Culottes, the abdication of
freedom before the dictate of necessity.” On the other hand, she praises him for
“interpret[ing] the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising,
not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.” These
statements represent two different understandings of the relationship between politics
and human needs. The first one suggests that problems such as poverty are bound to a
law of necessity because of their origins in human needs and denounces attempts to
politicize them as renunciations of freedom. The second statement contests this view
and suggests that human needs can be understood in political terms if their connection
to freedom can be established. In fact, Arendt applauds Marx as a theorist who shows
that poverty is not a necessary and natural outcome due to a law of scarcity but a
political phenomenon that results from exploitation or expropriation by force.
Understood in these terms, poverty is a problem that violently denies freedom to the
poor and demands to be confronted politically (68).

If Arendt disapproves of the French for being driven by “the social question,” or
poverty, she also criticizes the Americans for their utter neglect of it. Far from justifying
the exclusion of the poor from the political realm, she in fact insists that satisfaction of
basic material needs and provision of negative liberties are not sufficient measures to
tackle poverty (69). Read in this light, the lesson to be drawn from Arendt’s account of
“the social question” is not that the politicization of the Rights of Man necessarily ends
in violence but instead that a moralistic approach to human suffering can easily turn into
an instrumentalist understanding of politics as a means (if necessary, violent means) to
achieve moral goals. This moral economy is neither inevitable nor irresistible in efforts
to address human suffering; but such efforts need to be guarded against the danger of
yielding to the demands of this moral economy, and contemporary practices and
institutions of human rights are not immune to this danger (71). Lo analiza desde
Melville.

“To remember Rancière’s provocative formulation, she renders them “void,” or

reduces them to the rights of “the private, poor, unpoliticized individual.” Arendt’s
understanding of the Rights of Man, which de-politicizes the problems, struggles, and
actors that this modern discourse gives rise to, Rancière argues, is not unlike the recent
humanitarian understanding of human rights as “the rights of those who have no rights,
the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman
conditions of existence.” (Gundogdu suggests) that, far from de-politicizing the Rights
of Man, Arendt’s critique of the social question alert us to what might hinder their
politicization. It is not Arendt who reduces the Rights of Man to “the rights of bare
human beings,” but instead the anti-political approach adopted by the revolutionaries
who mobilized a moral economy that turned the poor into absolute victims; operated
with a rhetoric of compassion that undermined the possibilities of politically
deliberating questions of justice and focused instead on the immediate relief of narrowly
construed suffering; and embraced an instrumentalist position that equated politics with
means and justified violence in the name of a war between elemental goodness and
elemental evil (74-75).
 As Liisa Malkki highlights, there is a humanitarian tendency to depict refugees
as helpless, speechless victims who can be lumped together in an “imagined sea of
humanity,” which makes it impossible for the spectators of suffering to recognize the
singularity of each refugee. [El refugiado como “otro generalizado”, tanto para el bien
como para el mal]. Advierte los peligros del compassionate humanitarianism (77) [Se
enmudece al otro]. “Such a compassionate humanitarianism can end up reproducing the
very condition of rightlessness that it aims to redress, especially when it undermines
refugees’ efforts to create spaces where they can appear in their singularity and
articulate their needs and demands” (78).

Después de criticar la Labor Arendt hace esta afirmación: “From the revolutions
of 1848 to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the European working class, by virtue of
being the only organized and hence the leading section of the people, has written one of
the most glorious and probably the most promising chapter of recent history” (82). [La
cuestión es: excluir la labor no es lo mismo que excluir a los laborantes: también se
podria buscar la frase en alemán]. [La gran sorpresa de los movimientos laboristas es
que convierte a los laborantes en actores políticos]. [Lo inesperado de la acción es que
tambén puede surgir de los laborantes o los refugiados: de los excluidos: pensar en
Sabbatai Zevi]. To point out the importance of political emancipation, Arendt
underscores the difference between slave labor and modern, free labor. The difference is
not simply that the slave lacks “personal freedom,” she argues, but that the modern
worker “is admitted to the political realm and fully emancipated as a citizen.” (84).

Habla mucho de la personhood (94ss). Joel Feinberg desarrolla nowheresville

como un lugar sin derechos. As narratives of persecution have become suspect, the
human body has become a crucial site for claiming rights, giving rise to what Didier
Fassin calls “biolegitimacy.” Estudia un caso concreto. States, courts, and refugee
advocates have increasingly turned to the suffering bodies of asylum seekers and other
migrants to locate more irrefutable truths. As states, courts, and rights advocates turn to
compassion to make decisions about suffering, they risk unmaking the equal
personhood of migrants, rendering their rights dependent on a capricious moral
sentiment. As a result, we are not too far away from Arendt’s argument that the stateless
find themselves in a fundamental condition of rightlessness because of their dependence
on the goodwill or generosity of others: “The prolongation of their lives is due to charity
and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them” (113).
 “Challenging the action-centric reading, I suggest that The Human Condition is
an attempt to illuminate vita activa (and not simply action) in its full dignity” (131).
Señala que Arendt no desdeña verdaderamente el concepto de labor (133). Life,
necessity, and animality are definitely part of Arendt’s account of labor, but they do not
by any means exhaust the meaning of labor. Labor is crucial for instilling in human
beings a sense of being “earth-bound creatures” connected to other living organisms.
“Arendt diverges from the ancient Greek assumptions about labor by pointing out how
this activity connects human beings with what is sensorily given in their earthly
environment and endows them with the immediate sensation of being alive” (136).

Arendt’s understanding of political freedom in spatial terms underscores that the

loss of a political community entails the loss of the very space in which one can
actualize the capacity for freedom: “Whoever leaves his polis or is banished from it
loses not just his hometown or his fatherland; he also loses the only space in which he
can be free—and he loses the society of his equals.” (154). [Rancière: “Politics exists
because the logos is never simply speech, because it is always indissolubly the account
that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as
speech, capable of enunciating what is just, whereas some other emission is merely
perceived as a noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt” (159)].

Arendt’s invocation of a right to have rights continues to puzzle her readers, and
scholarly debates have centered on the qüestions related to the status and source of this
right that is not legally codified: If this new right cannot derive its validity from any
existing legal framework, what is its foundation? And can Arendt’s political theory
offer a normative framework? Benhabib, for example, argues that Arendt’s political
theory provides no such foundation: Scholars such as Peg Birmingham and Serena
Parekh respond by locating foundations for human rights in Arendt’s political theory.
Far from being a theorist opposed to the philosophical projects of normative
justification, they argue, one of Arendt’s “primary concerns” is “the working out of a
theoretical foundation for a reformulation of the modern notion of human rights.” (165).

Su postura: “A right to have rights, in its striking groundlessness, urges us to

understand new rights claims such as the ones raised by undocumented immigrants as
declarations that do not have prior authorization for the new propositions of equality
and freedom that they introduce. Human rights owe their origins and continuous
reinvention to such inaugural acts that involve the invention and disclosure of a new
political and normative world—a point that I make by rethinking Arendt’s argument in
light of Claude Lefort’s and Étienne Balibar’s reflections on human rights” (166).
Arendt’s discussion of a right to have rights continues to baffle her readers. Particularly
confounding is the fact that she underscores the impossibility of grounding this new
right in the eighteenth-century notions of “nature” and “history” without clearly
articulating what, if anything, might take their place (168). Se debe reconocer su
irreparable groundlessness (170). [En The Burden of our time añade: “The Rights of
Man can be implemented only if they become the prepolitical foundation of a new
polity, the prelegal basis of a new legal structure, the, so to speak, prehistorical
fundament from which the history of mankind will derive its essential meaning in much
the same way Western civilization did from its own fundamental origin myths” (170).
For the purposes of developing this alternative interpretive strategy, Butler’s brief but
evocative suggestion to read Arendt’s call for a right to have rights as a declaration
provides important insights. Butler argues that Arendt’s analysis of statelessness,
characterized mostly by disillusionment about human rights, enters into “a declarative
mode” as she introduces this new right (171).

“Accordingly, Arendt’s call for a right to have rights can be taken as a new
beginning, which brings forth a right that was not known or given in the existing
configuration of rights and citizenship in an International order organized around the
principle of nationality. Understood in these terms, it invites us to rethink human rights
in terms of practices of political founding and draws attention to the vital importance of
declarin rights in this regard” (171). [With the 18th revolutions, what we are confronted
with is a new form of articulating and instituting rights. In Lefort’s terms: a declaration
by which human beings, speaking through their representatives, revealed themselves to
be both the subject and the object of the utterance in which they named the human
elements in one another, ‘spoke to’ one another, appeared before one another, and
therefore erected themselves into their own judges, their own witnesses (172).

Reading Arendt’s call for a right to have rights as an invitation to rethink human
rights in terms of political practices of founding (especially declaratory practices) has
three main implications. First and foremost, this reading draws attention to the crucial
role of action, especially speech, in the continuous reinvention of human rights (172).
Second, a right to have rights marks a new beginning radically interrupting the existing
regime of human rights and introducing “a hiatus between the end of the old order and
the beginning of the new,” or “between a no-longer and a not-yet” (173). Human rights
are not simply normative constraints regulating an existing political and legal order but
also political inventions that can constitute a new order. Understood in these terms,
human rights have an “insurrectional” dimension, to use Balibar’s term, because they
can turn against the constituted political and normative order for the purposes of
founding a new one. Finally, this reading allows a different understanding of the
perplexities arising from Arendt’s call for a right to have rights; instead of seeing them
as representative of the normative deficiencies of her political thought, it takes them as
illuminating starting points for wrestling with the perplexities of new beginnings that
break with the existing order (173). [“Arendt’s argument about the American
Revolution draws attention to her unique understanding of authority. Insisting on the
etymological connection between authority (auctoritas) and augmentation (augere),
Arendt renders authority dependent on the ongoing practices of augmentation, which
involve not simply conservation but also strengthening and amendment. Accordingly,
laws and rights do not have an irresistible and incontrovertible authority derived from
an extra-political source; they are in need of an ongoing authorization in and through
political practices that reenact and augment the principle manifested in the founding”
(182)]. [Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience” further clarifies her Montesquieuan notion
of principle and dispels the doubt that her understanding of authority in terms of
practices of augmentation entails “a unitary and consensual” picture overlooking the
conflicts, disagreements, and exclusions that characterize political acts of founding].

Here, we can think of how the Haitian Revolution appropriated the terms of the
1789 Declaration, which had sidestepped the issue of slavery, in unpredictable and
imaginative ways to question slavery. [This last point shares similarities with
Benhabib’s proposal to understand human rights in terms of “democratic iterations” that
involve practices of contesting and redefining existing inscriptions of rights. Drawing
on and reinterpreting Jacques Derrida’s work, Benhabib suggests that such iterations do
not simply reproduce what they repeat; each iteration “transforms meaning, adds to it,
enriches it in ever-so-subtle ways]. Human rights owe their origins, guarantees, and
reinvention to political practices of declaring and enacting rights in ways that are not
fully authorized by the prevailing institutional and normative frameworks (188).
 These connections become palpable in the public demonstrations of sans-
papiers. For example, in May and June 2010, hundreds camped in front of the opera
house at the Place de la Bastille in Paris. By choosing this symbolic site, sans-papiers
“claimed a place for themselves in the revolutionary and republican history in France”
(196). Sans-papiers started their demonstrations at the Church of St. Ambroise on
March 18, 1996, and that it was on March 18 of 1871 that the Paris Commune seized
power in the city. As Vincenzo Ruggiero notes, one of the slogans that sans-papiers
used at the time was “March 18, 1996, on c’est levé (we have risen).” Several scholars
proposed rethinking sans-papiers’political practices as a new form of citizenship: Sans-
papiers do lack the legal status of citizenship, but they act as if they were citizens (198).
Is the lack of prior authorization for these acts of citizenship. Sans-papiers’ struggles
reveal that human rights understood as a right to have rights ultimately depend on a type
of citizenship enacted by those who do not have a legitimate standing and yet who
thrust themselves into the public spaces from which they are excluded. From an
Arendtian perspective, these practices reenact and augment the principle of equaliberty
manifest in the eighteenth-century declarations, and they are indispensable to the
continuous reinvention of human rights. Sans-papiers’ words and deeds affirm this
principle in many respects: They demonstrate that equality and freedom are to be
understood not as inherent human attributes, but instead as political achievements that
are in need of each other. In addition, sans-papiers’ protests highlight that the subjects
of rights are not passive beneficiaries but political actors capable of declaring and
vindicating rights in struggles affirming their political and human standing (198). [It is
quite puzzling that Arendt describes The Castle as “the one novel in which Kafka
discusses the Jewish problem” or “the only one in which the hero is plainly a Jew,”
given that K. is not described as Jewish in the novel. What renders K. Jewish, according
to Arendt, is not “any typically Jewish trait,” but instead that “he is involved in
situations and perplexities distinctive of Jewish life].