Coils of the Serpent 1 (2017): 30-41 30 Martinsen: Powerlessness vs. Empowerment Powerlessnes vs. Empowerment: Aporia of Human Rights and Political Subjectivation FRANZISKA MARTINSEN Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany Introduction Within the critical discourse of postcolonialism on human rights, there is an argument shared by a number of theorists, according to which human rights cannot not be wanted (cf. Kapur 2006: 682). An ambivalence of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, it is said, is inherent in human rights. Their origins in the European tradition of natural law, the corresponding Eurocentric and hegemonic bias of their conceptual foundations in the form of an abstract individual and a moral universalism, as well as the liberalistic dominance of the notion of property make them appear suspect to postcolonialist theorists. At the same time, human rights, not least with a historical view on the French Revolution, contain a profoundly emancipatory core. In their joint text Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari share the postcolonialist skepticism of the present conception of human rights (cf. 1991). In their opinion, human rights are a central part of the capitalist system, rather than actually questioning its domination. All the more problematic, they argue, is the fact that human rights elude any questioning: “Human rights are axioms. They can exist on the market with many other axioms, notably those concerning the security of property, which are unaware of or suspend them even more than they contradict them” (1991: 107). In my essay, I want to reflect on and somewhat weaken precisely this (pre-)judgment on human rights, by disclosing within them exactly that potential for resistance that Deleuze and Guattari find so painfully lacking in the present epoch of capitalism when they write: “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present” (1991: 108). It must be shown that genuine resistance to present-day human rights can be developed from the very idea of human rights itself. The prerequisite for this, however, is a certain modification of the current understanding of human rights, which has to be carried out both discursively and in practice within the framework of political processes of subjectivation (cf. Rancière 1995; Martinsen 2017: ch. 6): human rights must be conceived as political rights rather than moral universal truths (cf. e.g. Peter 2013; Kreide 2015).