ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the insight that the term ‘human rights’, with its immense symbolic capital, has been co-opted to a large number of relatively independent discourses, practices, institutions and campaigns. A new ideal has triumphed on the world stage: human rights. After the collapse of communism, human rights have become the ideology after the end of ideologies, at the end of history, the morality of international relations, and a way of conducting politics according to ethical norms. The end of human rights is to resist public and private domination and oppression. Community as communion accepts human rights only to the extent that they help submerge the one person into the other person, all the way till death, the point of ‘absolute communion’ with dead tradition. In this sense, human rights both conceal and affirm the dominant structure of a period and help combat it.
