ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the structure of contemporary human rights discourse from the Lacanian perspective of human identity and the split subject-of-lack. It outlines Lacan's critique of the ethics of the Real, which is the inspirational underpinnings of the traditions within our contemporary human rights and which gives integrity to the imagery of moral ideal potentia which it animates. Such a Lacanian secret of signification helps us understand how the illusory image of human identity expressed within the spaces of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) reflects the confusion in the ethics of the Real, between the impossibility of the Real and the limits of the Symbolic. The ethics of ideals which inform the contemporary human rights place freedom in the realm of the empty abstract of images and symbols, independent of the actuality of the subject animated by the psychic forces of the unconscious other and linguistic equivocations.
