ABSTRACT
This chapter provides human corporeality into a more intimate engagement with materiality in order to explore embracing vulnerability as one way to reimagine human rights for a more-than-human world. It seeks, in line with the affective nuances of critical posthumanism, to offer a reflection on human rights and vulnerability in an ultimately affirmative register. The chapter offers an unapologetically theoretical experiment – a setting off without final arrival. It presents an account of the relationship between vulnerability and human rights before introducing ‘the vulnerability thesis’ and human rights, and reflecting briefly on the relationship between vulnerability and dignity. Indeed, at first glance it might seem that the relationship between vulnerability and human rights is somewhat self-evident. Human rights, according to their own dominant self-presentation in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in related treaties, emerged as a response to the pathogenic imposition of suffering, expressing an ‘unprecedented international consensus on substantive norms with high moral voltage’.
