LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS Y EL ESTADO MODERNO. (¿QUÉ HACE MODERNO AL DERECHO MODERNO?)

Abstract

The object of this text is to present human rights as subjective rights, and therefore, as an appropriate form of discourse in modern society. Subjective rights are a discourse strategy through which individuals have lost contact with their companions in civil society, and they find themselves isolated, in a relationship that exists only with a fiction that the law calls "state". Citizens have been stripped of the possibilities of addressing the other members of civil society, and forced in the conflicts with them to go through special civil servants who are in charge of suppressing the conflict by the use of force against some of the litigants. This discourse strategy makes the individual a citizen, and it turns into a linguistic manner of being in the modern or bourgeois world. The strategy of subjective rights is what makes modern law modern. Human rights, for their part, are all the expectations and aspirations of individuals of a capitalist society, that can only be mentioned in terms of "rights," since it is this discourse that makes them into citizens. In this way, all human aspirations are converted -or can be converted- into "rights", which is the peculiar linguistic manner that modernity offers to individuals to talk about their aspirations.