If There Is No Subject, Who Has Human Rights?

I. What Do We Mean by “Subject”?

Questioning the subject became one of the central concerns of twentieth-century philosophy. But there seems to be an obvious problem with this move when we turn to human rights.

Modern ideas of freedom, responsibility, and human rights seem to require someone who possesses them. Rights belong to people; people act, choose, suffer, speak, and take responsibility for what they do. Behind these actions, we tend to imagine a stable individual: the human being as the subject of experience, activity, responsibility, and freedom.

So what happens if philosophy begins to question the subject itself?

The question can sound almost absurd. If there is no stable subject, who is left to have rights? If there is no fixed human essence, on what basis can we speak of universal human rights at all?

This is essentially the problem put to Jacques Derrida in an interview devoted to the “deconstruction of the subject.” The interviewer asks whether the subject whose freedom organizations such as Amnesty International seek to defend still exists. And if it does not, what sense can we make of the freedom we are so concerned to protect?

The interview, conducted by Alan Montefiore, appears in Derrida & Education under the title “Talking Liberties.”

Derrida's first response is strikingly simple:

“Deconstruction doesn't mean dissolution.”

That sentence is worth pausing over.

Deconstruction does not mean destroying what is being examined, cancelling its legitimacy, or declaring that it does not exist. To deconstruct the subject is not to make human beings disappear. It is to examine what we mean when we call someone a subject.

That distinction changes the problem.

The question is no longer simply whether the subject exists. It becomes a question about the history and construction of the concept itself.

II. The Subject as a Center

Derrida begins by taking us back to a much older philosophical conception.

In the Aristotelian tradition, he explains, what we call a subject was understood as something underneath its properties: something that remains identical to itself while qualities and events come and go. A subject has attributes, experiences events, and undergoes changes, but these do not constitute the subject itself. They happen to it. The subject is conceived as something “underneath,” something that remains one and identical to itself.

The underlying entity remains one.

This gives us a familiar picture of the self. I may change my opinions, acquire new experiences, lose memories, develop new abilities, or occupy different social roles, but beneath these changes there is presumed to be a single “I” that remains fundamentally the same.

The traditional subject is therefore imagined as a kind of center:

experience → action → change → responsibility

all belong to the subject while the subject itself remains the stable point around which they are organized.

This stability is easy to overlook because it feels so natural. We ordinarily speak as though the person who acted yesterday is simply the same person who acts today. Law, ethics, and politics also depend on forms of continuity: someone can be held responsible for an action because we recognize that person as the one who performed it.

But Derrida asks us to examine the assumptions contained in this apparently obvious picture.

Why should the subject be understood as something self-identical underneath its properties? Why should it be considered a unified “one”? Why should it remain intact beneath everything that happens to it? And why should this particular conception provide the foundation for our ideas of responsibility, freedom, and rights?

The point is not to replace the stable subject with its opposite, as though we simply needed a new doctrine saying that the self is fragmented, fictional, or nonexistent.

The more interesting move is to question the demand for a center that can stabilize everything else without itself needing explanation.

This is one of the recurring questions in Derrida's philosophy: what happens when something that appears to occupy the center turns out to depend upon what we had assumed was secondary or outside it?

The subject seems to be the point from which experience, action, and responsibility originate. Deconstruction asks us to look more closely at how that position has been established.

III. The Word Is Not Alone: Subject, Language, Translation

That investigation cannot be separated from language.

Before discussing the philosophical history of the subject, Derrida introduces what might seem like a preliminary problem: language.

He says, “we face first the problem of language.”

This is more than a remark about vocabulary. The word subject does not carry exactly the same history in every philosophical tradition. Derrida points out that the term is not used in precisely the same way in English, German, and French traditions. What appears to be a single concept may therefore arrive with different philosophical histories attached to it.

Translation, then, is not simply a matter of finding the corresponding word in another language.

We can translate subject as sujet. But have we thereby transported the concept itself? Have we carried across the philosophical assumptions that gave the term its particular meaning? And what happens when the concept moves beyond the linguistic and intellectual traditions in which its history was formed?

This becomes especially important when Derrida connects the question of language to human rights.

If human rights are genuinely universal, they must be accessible and intelligible to people regardless of the language they speak. As Derrida puts it, universally valid human rights should be “accessible, understandable to everyone, whatever language they understand or they speak.”

Yet universality immediately encounters the difficulty of translation. A concept formed within one intellectual tradition cannot simply be assumed to be transparent everywhere else.

The problem is not that another language necessarily lacks an equivalent word. It is that a word can belong to a whole network of concepts, distinctions, histories, and assumptions that are not automatically reproduced by translation.

We might therefore distinguish between translating a word and translating the conceptual world in which that word makes sense.

The implication is important. The deconstruction of the subject does not begin by announcing that the subject is unreal. It begins by asking us to investigate the word and the concept we have been treating as self-evident.

And once we do that, another question appears. If the concept of the subject has a history, then the supposedly universal human subject may have a history as well.

Before asking whether everyone possesses human rights, we may therefore have to ask a more difficult question: Who, historically, has been recognized as the human subject?

IV. Deconstructing the Subject Means Opening It Up

That question brings us to what deconstruction actually does.

Derrida describes the task as analyzing “historically, in a genealogical way, the formation and the different layers” that have built the concept of the subject. He immediately adds that “every concept has its own history” and that the concept of the subject has a “very, very long, heavy, and complex history.”

To deconstruct something, then, is to examine the assumptions—especially the hidden ones—that accompany its philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political use.

The point is not to discover that a concept is simply false. It is to discover what has been placed inside it. A concept can look unified while containing several historical layers. It can look universal while depending on a particular definition of who belongs within it. It can look neutral while carrying assumptions that determine who can occupy the position it names.

The subject is a good example.

We may use the word as though it referred to a self-evident human condition. But once its history is examined, the apparently simple category becomes more complicated. What kind of being qualifies as a subject? Is the child a subject? Is a woman a subject? Is a non-European individual a subject?

These are not merely semantic questions. They concern who can be recognized as an autonomous person, a responsible agent, a bearer of rights, or a participant in political life.

This is why Derrida insists that deconstruction is not a threat to human rights. If the category is treated as complete and self-evident, its exclusions can remain invisible. Examining it makes those boundaries available for scrutiny.

The result is not the disappearance of the subject but a more demanding question about the conditions under which someone is recognized as one.

V. The Paradox: Deconstruction Can Strengthen Human Rights

We can now return to the problem with which the interview began.

If there is no fixed, self-identical subject, what happens to human rights?

Derrida does not answer by abandoning them. Instead, he points to their own history.

Human rights were not simply given once and for all. Derrida describes them as a set of concepts, laws, and requirements that were “not given in nature, from the beginning.” Their formulation has developed through successive declarations that have progressively determined and reshaped their content.

This history matters because it reveals something about the word universal.

A declaration can call rights universal while the category of the human remains more restricted in practice. The history of human rights is therefore also a history of asking who belongs within the supposedly universal category.

The initial objection was: If there is no fixed subject, what grounds human rights?

Derrida allows us to turn the question around: What happens if we refuse to question the supposedly universal subject?

We may then mistake a particular historical definition for a universal truth. We may fail to see whom that definition excludes, what assumptions sustain it, or how its boundaries might be challenged.

This does not make human rights less universal, it makes the claim to universality harder to satisfy.

The Method Beyond the Subject

The same logic can be extended beyond the question of the subject itself.

When Derrida deconstructs a concept, he is not simply replacing it with its opposite. He is not saying that there is no truth, no meaning, or no freedom. He is asking us to examine how such concepts have been defined, stabilized, and treated as though their meaning were self-evident.

Truth, for example, can be investigated as a concept with a philosophical history rather than assumed to be a timeless and completely transparent entity. Meaning can likewise be examined without concluding that words mean nothing. The question becomes: What makes meaning possible? What assumptions allow something to count as true? What has to be excluded or suppressed for a concept to appear complete and stable?

This is perhaps the most useful lesson to take from the discussion of the subject. Deconstruction is less a doctrine about what does or does not exist than a way of challenging what we tend to take for granted.

The Paradox Revisited

Questioning the stability of the subject need not weaken our commitment to human freedom. It can prevent us from turning a historically limited definition of the human into an unquestionable one. The subject does not have to disappear for its boundaries to be questioned.

And perhaps that is the political promise contained in Derrida's seemingly unsettling gesture: deconstructing the subject may be one way of refusing to let our present idea of the human become the final word on who counts as human.

References

Derrida, J. (2001). Talking liberties: Jacques Derrida's interview with Alan Montefiore. In G. J. J. Biesta & D. Egéa-Kuehne (Eds.), Derrida & education (pp. 176–185). Routledge.

Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.