Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

Abstract

Instead, the language of rights can be used to create 'levers of political articulation' by 'raising a universal claim' against a particular injustice or wrong (p. 91). The point is most often to create forms of life outside the state by finding interstices in the territory and population that it might claim to rule, but without being able to actualize the claim. [...] instead of the direct relations between social forces and political movements, Critchley ends up with a mythical politics of interconnection (the enemy of the state as the bearer of the truth of the state) that is politically unhelpful because its implications are somewhere between confusion and reformism.