Against the violence of borders: the politics of human rights and the international right to hospitality in Étienne Balibar

The essay examines some of Étienne Balibar’s recent work in which he establishes a critique of human rights theory. In dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Balibar focuses on the conditions of possibility for a “new politics of human rights” in the context of what he calls “absolute capitalism”. Against the current violence of borders within absolute capitalism, and against its phantasmatic neo-racist corollary, Balibar theorizes an “international right to hospitality”: a kind of “counter-right” which, through a confrontation with the Marxian theory of “relative overpopulation” and beyond the platitudes of liberal juridical universalism, can reconfigure the fundamental lineaments of a politics of human rights that is capable of responding to the present.