Rights Talk: Two Quotes （福柯和米秾教授谈权利理论）
福柯和米秾教授谈权利理论
1. from Two Lectures Power/Knowledge (Foucault):
The essential role of the theory of right, from medieval times onwards, was to fix the legitimacy of power; that is the major problem around which the whole theory of right and sovereignty is organized. When we say that sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies, what we mean basically is that the essential function of the discourse and techniques of right has been to efface the domination intrinsic to power in order to present the latter at the level of appearance under two different aspects: on the one hand, as the legitimate rights of sovereignty, and on the other, as the legal obligation to obey it. The system of right is centered entirely upon the King, and it is therefore designed to eliminate the fact of domination and its consequences.
2.from Martha Minow, Interpreting Rights: An Essay for Robert Cover,
Yale Law Journal 96 (1987): 1860-1915, 1867.
“Rights” can give rise to “rights consciousness” so that individuals and groups may imagine and act in light of rights that have not been formally recognized or enforced. Rights, in this sense, are neither limited to nor-coextensive with precisely those rules formally announced and enforced by public authorities. Instead, rights represent articulations — public or private, formal or informal — of claims that people use to persuade others (and themselves) about how they should be treated and about what they should be granted. I mean, then, to include within the ambit of rights discourse all efforts to claim new rights, to resist and alter official state action that fails to acknowledge such rights, and to construct communities apart from
the state to nurture new conceptions of rights. Rights here encompass even those claims that lose, or have lost in the past, if they continue to represent claims that muster people’s hopes and articulate their continuing efforts to persuade.
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