Date of Submission

Spring 2012

Academic Program

Human Rights

Project Advisor 1

Thomas Keenan

Project Advisor 2

Verity Smith

Abstract/Artist's Statement

I pose the question of whether we are critically responsible in our world, and if we are not, then how can become critically responsible in this day and age. I also pose the question of whether this is an impossible feat through deconstructing deconstruction, and other attempts at listening to the call for critical responsibility. I later develop a critique of instrumentality, our egotistical phenomenological and ontological modes of apprehending and thinking of the world external to “us”, and then I begin to explain how the technical mode of thinking and metaphysics (and thus, subsequently rationality, modernity, and Eurocentric modes of thought) have invaded practical human rights discourse and strategy propelling humanity into a more precarious positions than they deemed possible through their seemingly benevolent human rights projects that only become compelling once metaphysical concepts become our moral calculus to adjudicate human rights claims. Lastly, I concluded by claiming that absolute recourse and attempts at total solvency are problematic because they inhibit us from thinking, acting, and questioning in our world through pondering the question of what it means to think, itself.

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