This book explores how the notion of human identity informs the ethical goal of justice in human rights. Within the modern discourse of human rights the issue of identity has been largely neglected. However within this discourse lies a conceptualisation of identity that was derived from a particular liberal philosophy about the âtrue natureâ of the isolated self-determining and rational individual. Rights are thus conceived as something that are owned by each independent self and that guarantee the exercise of its autonomy. Critically engaging this subject of rights this book considers how recent shifts in the concept of identity and more specifically the critical humanist notion of âthe otherâ provides a basis for re-imagining the foundation of contemporary human rights. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas an inter-subjectivity between self and other âalways alreadyâ marks human identity with an ethical openness. And this book argues it is in the shift away from the human self as a âsovereign individualâ that human rights have come to reflect a self-identity that is grounded in the potential of an irreducible concern for the other. . Language: English