BETTINA PRATOlimited, practical resistance to the ‘‘ontological closures’’ of political Zionism. On the
other hand, RHR’s theoretical and practical engagement with Jewish trauma narratives
may also be a starting point for a new, peace-oriented approach to the implications of
such narratives for Israeli-Palestinian relations. While far from representing an ideal of
justice, RHR’s work shows how Judaism and human rights can at least provisionally turn
the privileges of state sovereignty into a sort of Levinasian ‘‘dwelling’’ for some Jewish
Israelis, that is, a home that is visited by (and vulnerable to) ‘‘strangers’’ but that nonethe-
less offers concrete possibilities for taking on ethical responsibility and negotiating one’s
interpellation by discourses of collective trauma. The result is a multiplicity of small acts
that engage people as bearers of relative power ‘‘to do,’’ pushing the limits of ethno-
national, trauma-laden identity fromwithin, rather than frombeyondthe discourse and
institutions of ethno-national ontology, toward a politics neither of recognition nor of
love,^12 but rather of cautious togetherness, occasional friendship, and respectful distance.
Human Rights, Politics, and Religion: The ‘‘Compatibility’’ Debate
The ethical and political ambiguities of a universalistic human rights discourse in a world
organized not only around civic and ascriptive singularities but also around power ine-
qualities have not gone unnoticed in political and ethical philosophy. While the universal
promise of this discourse makes it emblematic of the emancipating potential of the En-
lightenment for many theorists of democracy (notably those who follow in Kant’s steps,
like Habermas), or at least of a positive limit to violence beyond theratioof sovereign
legitimacy in the liberal tradition, Marxist critiques have emphasized the active disregard
of socio-economic inequalities by a politics based on ‘‘the Rights of Man.’’^13 Moreover,
postfoundationalist authors writing in the footsteps of Nietzsche or Foucault, postcolonial
theorists, and theorists of the politics of gender, race, or sexual identities have all critiqued
some of the presuppositions of liberal human rights discourse, notably the naturalization’’
of a certain notion of individuality, humanness, and subjectivity associated with the
‘‘bearer of human rights.’’
Levinas approached the question of the ‘‘Rights of Man’’ understood as ‘‘human
rights’’ from a particularly original critical standpoint. His critique suggests that human
rights discourse cannot provide a ‘‘just’’ratiofor politics, thereby moderating the unlim-
ited demands of ethical responsibility,^14 so long as these rights are not understood as the
‘‘rights of theother.’’ In his words:
The formal characteristics of the Rights of Man, such as they are conceived of since
the Renaissance, consists in their being attached to every human person indepen-
dently from any prior granting by any authority or tradition.... But the right of
man, signifying the right to a free will, is exercised in the concreteness of the empiricalPAGE 562562.................16224$ CH28 10-13-06 12:37:00 PS