In the break (of rights and representation): Sociality beyond the non/human subject

Nonhuman interests are today routinely articulated in a register of
‘rights’. ‘Rights of nature’ and ‘animal rights’ have expanded the
vernacular of liberal rights beyond the human subject, thereby
arguably entering the realm of ‘post-human rights’. For such
rights to be enforced, however, they must be recognised within a
legal order and mediated by human subjects speaking on behalf
of nonhuman ‘right-holders’. This article focuses on the modes of
representation and subjectification of nonhumans – whether
natural entities, animals, or ecosystems – that underpin this
reconfiguration. While granting rights to nonhumans de-centres
the human figure at the heart of liberal legal orders, it remains
focused on the category of the subject. Taking on the questions
of the symposium on ‘After Rights? Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics’, I
argue that granting rights to nonhumans might well enable a
move beyond or ‘after human rights’, but not ‘after human rights’.
To think the possibility of an ‘after rights’, I turn to practices of
sociality as articulated in works of critical Black studies that refuse
the category of the subject as such. What emerges are modes of
living in escape from violent subjections to racialised, colonial,
and liberal inscriptions of worlding through ‘rights’, whether
humans or nonhumans.