1. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, Marxist intellectuals,
shaken by the Gulag revelations and the collapse of the
communist states, started welcoming human rights. Claude Lefort,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière1
amongst others participated in this move. It coincided with the
‘end of history’ bragging of liberal capitalists and the
revisionist histories of the French Revolution, which emphasized
its failures, terror and totalitarianism. It was a time of
defeat and demoralization for the left. All that has been solid
in radical thinking started melting in the air. This period of
defeat, introspection and penance came to an end with the
financial and economic crisis. The return of radical theory and
politics revived the suspicion towards the facile moralism and
humanitarianism of liberal democracy and postmodern culture’s
abandonment of universalism. Alain Badiou dismissed the humanism
of rights in Ethics,2 Slavoj Zizek questioned the emancipatory
potential of human rights after so