Rade Pantić: The Limits of Intellectual Engagement in the Form of the Struggle for Human Rights
Today, the political engagement of intellectuals predominantly takes place within the framework of the struggle for the defence of human rights. Nevertheless, the use of the defense of human rights as an excuse for military interventions and the increasing appropriation of slogans, which in the past were perceived as leftist, by the conservatives, caused an increase in skepticism towards human rights. In this lecture, we will go back to the early 1980s, when the French philosopher Claude Lefort, with his reinterpretation of human rights, opened the door to an optimistic acceptance of human rights as a cornerstone for left-wing political engagement. Namely, Lefort defended human rights against the critique of Karl Marx by demarcating them from the “bourgeois ideology of human rights”. According to this distinction, human rights present as an extra-ideological surplus which different ideologies can appropriate, but they are inherently progressive. In this lecture, I wish to demonstrate that the struggle to realize human rights represents an ideological mechanism of capitalist social domination, not because inherently progressive human rights are appropriated by conservative forces, but precisely because human rights can absorb in themselves different ideologies, progressive or conservative ones, and adapt them in a way that they do not challenge the dominance of capital.
Rade Pantić is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade (2008). He received his Ph.D. in Theory of Arts and Media from the University of Arts in Belgrade, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies. He is co-editor of the book Contemporary Marxist Theory of Art (Orion art/Fakultet za medije i komunikacije, Belgrade, 2015) and the author of Art through Theory: Historical-Materialistic Analyses (Založba /*cf., Ljubljana, 2019). His main areas of research include political economy, capitalist world system analysis, theory of ideology and theory of art and cinema.
The lecture will take place at 19.00 at Participativna ljubljanska avtonomna cona (PLAC). The footage of the lecture will be published later on the IDŠ YouTube channel. The event is organized in cooperation with Transform! europe. Transform! europe is partially financed through a subsidy from the European Parliament. Sole liability rests with the author(s) and the European Parliament is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.