A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERSorder of man—of man among men, in being-there—as the right to being-there or to
live, and hence as the right to satisfy the needs that sustain life.^15Given the multiplicity of potentially conflicting holders of rights, Levinas believes that the
Kantian idea of a common rationality of wills, whereby we are led by practical reason to
the universal, cannot guarantee that human rights discourse will moderate the infinite
demands of ethics through justice. Rather, what enables the convergence of rights in a
polity that upholds ‘‘the Rights of Man’’ is the primacy of a will rooted in ‘‘An attachment
to the other in his alterity to the point of granting him a priority over oneself.... That
the Rights of Man are originally the rights of the other man, and that they express, beyond
the burgeoning of identities in their own identity and their instinct for free perseverance,
the for-the-other of the social, of the for-the-stranger—such appears to me to be the
meaning of their novelty.’’^16
The tension between universality and particularity in certain debates about human
rights is sometimes linked to the idea of this ever-possible gap between the realm of ethics,
which may not be (entirely) regulated by various forms ofratio, and that of politics, where
the possibility of relying on certain sources of (legal, political, economic, and even moral)
ratioremains generally dominant, despite trauma discourses and also despite what Der-
rida regards as a tension with regard to the ‘‘uncountable’’ in certain political forms,
notably democracy. Given the frequent overlap between human rights and humanitarian
discourses in contemporary international politics, the tension between universality and
particularity is often the object of critique, especially where the language of human rights
is assimilated to psycho-social discourses (e.g., in some postconflict interventions). Be-
yond these settings, the rhetoric of human rights is sometimes called into question be-
cause of the violent policies it can be used to justify, since its apparent ‘‘neutrality’’ makes
it particularly appealing as political currency. Finally, ‘‘universalistic’’ human rights dis-
course has been challenged about the compatibility of its claims with non-Western or
nonliberal cultures. This challenge has emerged, for instance, in the work of authors who
question the idea that codified human rights are a ‘‘second-level theory,’’ that is, one that
has universal validity because it does not engage interests, values, or beliefs but rather
‘‘places itself outside and above the arena of doctrinal disagreement and seeks only to
regulate people’s relations with one another,’’ based on universal consensus concerning
‘‘what people are owed merely by virtue of being human.’’^17
As already noted, the view that human rights discourse constitutes a ‘‘second-level
theory’’ has been challenged by different authors (e.g., Nietzschean, Foucauldian, Marxist,
feminist, and psychoanalytic theorists, among others). In addition, some have attempted
to ground this discourse in different substantive moral and religious theories instead of
merely exposing its filiation with certain Western liberal premises. In so doing, these
authors have generally defied liberal warnings that cultural traditions strongly committed
to certain notions of the ‘‘good’’ tend to be inhospitable to human rights. Religious tradi-
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