ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses one of the most influential and totemic documents, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and reads it as a historical-literary text that is infused with, and shaped by, two pervasive rhetorical modes: pathos and mythos. The cultural and political process that led first to the call for a universal declaration of human rights, then the drafting of what became the UDHR, cannot be understood apart from the immediate context of world-historical catastrophe that preceded it. It is difficult in retrospect, to fully capture the prevailing sense of both horror at the then-immediate destruction of the Second World War and the sense of relief that followed immediately upon it. The realization of the myth of universality as a structuring social category that has underpinned the relatively apotheosis of the postwar human rights project – has meant the emergence of what can be described as "values without qualities."
