"A Comment on the Question of Human Rights"
Alain Badiou
[During August and September, Christoph Cox and Molly
Whalen interviewed the French philosopher Alain Badiou
for Cabinet magazine. Shortly before the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cox and
Whalen asked Badiou to clarify his conception of human
rights. Shortly after the attacks, Badiou offered the
following response.]
Take the nearest example: the terrible criminal attack
in New York, with its thousands of casualties. If you
reason in terms of the morality of human rights, you
say, with President Bush: "These are terrorist
criminals. This is a struggle of Good against Evil."
But are Bush's policies, in Palestine or Iraq for
example, really Good? And, in saying that these people
are Evil, or that they don't respect human rights, do
we understand anything about the mindset of those who
killed themselves with their bombs? Isn't there a lot
of despair and violence in the world caused by the
fact that the politics of western powers, and of the
American government in particular, are utterly
destitute of ingenuity and value? In the face of
crimes, terrible crimes, we should think and act
according to concrete political truths, rather than be
guided by the stereotypes of any sort of morality.
