The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively (...) materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments. (shrink)

The present reflection draws upon a tradition of energetic, world-facing critical legal scholarship to interrogate the anthropos assumed by the terminology of ‘anthropocentrism’ and of the ‘Anthropocene’. The article concludes that any ethically responsible future engagement with ‘anthropocentrism’ and/or with the ‘Anthropocene’ must explicitly engage with the oppressive hierarchical structure of the anthropos itself—and should directly address its apotheosis in the corporate juridical subject that dominates the entire globalised order of the Anthropocene age.