ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up such ethics of alterity, as explored by Lacan and Levinas, and their possible impact on our contemporary human rights discourse. It highlights some of the key historical shifts in the conceptualisation of human identity the formation of the modern philosophy of being and the notion of rights invoked by the changing conceptualisation, which have led to current understanding, knowledge and language of human rights. Human rights have become legitimising devices of the law, devoid of or at the very least, limiting issues of inter-subjective ethics and justice, in favour of politico-legal rights and duties amongst individual avatars of equal potentia of self-fulfilment. Most significantly, it conceptualises a human identity in which the individual-self gains ethics, justice and rights and its very freedom through an uncertain and open detour with the prioritised other in the sociality of the inter-human relationship.
