The Deconstruction of Personhood and the Rights-holder/Rights-object Binomial

Abstract

A long-lasting tradition of Western thinking has considered that human nature and the individual are non-historical and self-identical; both represent a fixed and immutable reality, either because they are an expression of transcendence (scholastics) or because they are an end on their own (enlightened). This notion of the human person leads to a concept of dignity that is equally self-identical and expressed in the intrinsic value of a reality whose endpoints are perfectly delineated in a dialectical binary opposition concerning non-personal realities. As a counterpart, the thesis that declares a metaphysical closure denounces the end of that trend, as the former would lay the basis to reshape the personality, replacing the logic of the opposites with the logic of supplement, whose properly deconstructive element lies in the denial of the possibility of foundation. This implies a double destructuring movement: (a) to affirm that some nonhuman reality of the corporeal world is also personal, and (b) to deny that human reality is always and, in any case, personal. This paper aims to explain how this reconfiguration of the notions of “person” and “thing” occurs in current thinking.