Critic of Pure Reason of the Law: Secularization in the Narrative of the Human Rights

Abstract

According to the thesis of Costas Douzinas, the concepts of law and human rights are contradictory categories. Law, in modernity, tries to justify a project of violence to avoid divine wrath. Human rights, on the other hand, seem to settle with an interpretation of the message of compassion and charity written in the gospels. The first is an ideological interpretation of the biblical texts, while the second is an interpretation based in greater measure on the questions of the philosophical anthropology on being, the reason for being, and the search for the truth. This article proposes, in light of the questions proposed by Costas Douzinas and René Girard, among others, a reading that suggests an answer which may pose a risk to this contradiction. The risk is that seeing law as an expression of the modern Rule of Law enters into a crisis. The modern processes of expressing violence will notice this. The protagonist behind the curtain revealed in the stage of law is not law itself, but the victim of the sacrifice. This threatens the sustainability of law as a closed and coherent scientific system.