Foucault and the Politics of Rights

The article aims to offer an assessment of the complex position of Michel Foucault on the political significance of rights-claiming, i.e. the politics of rights. Although the theorist Foucault has reservations regarding rights-claiming and only vaguely gestures at a ‘new form of right’ the intellectual Foucault resorts to the practice of rights-claiming on many occasions. The article argues that in these interventions by the intellectual Foucault indeed such a ‘new form of right’ is discernible that rests on a radical rights constructivism. The article concludes with a number of caveats regarding such an emphatically political practice of rights-claiming.