The Anthropocene prompts renewed critical reflection on some of the central tenets of modern thought including narratives of ‘progress’, the privileging of the nation state, and the universalist rendering of the human. In this context it is striking that ‘rights’, a quintessentially modern mode of articulating normativity, are often presumed to have an enduring relevance in the contemporary moment, exemplified in renewed recourse to rights in their attribution to parts of the nonhuman world. Our intervention contemplates ways in which the apparent disorientations of the Anthropocene might allow for a generative reorientation of some of these presuppositions. We critically consider the institutional and discursive limitations of rights and the ambivalence of rights language, and argue that the monism that rights so often implies limits the capacity to foster generative encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal traditions. We develop a critical discourse of obligation, understood here to both precede and exceed the rights-duty correlate so central to modern law. An attentiveness to the priority of obligation, we argue, might allow us to foreground an ethics of encounter between traditions, to examine the limits of modernity’s legal and political imaginary, and to pursue a ‘radical re-storying’ of laws for the Anthropocene.

中文翻译：

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重新讲述人类世的法律：权利、义务和遭遇伦理

人类世促使人们重新对现代思想的一些核心原则进行批判性反思，包括“进步”的叙述、民族国家的特权以及人类的普遍主义渲染。在这种情况下，令人震惊的是，“权利”是表达规范性的典型现代模式，通常被认为在当代具有持久的相关性，例如重新诉诸权利以将其归因于非人类世界的某些部分。我们的干预考虑了人类世明显的迷失方向可能允许对这些预设中的一些进行生成性重新定位的方式。我们批判性地考虑了权利的制度和话语限制以及权利语言的矛盾性，并争辩说，权利常常隐含的一元论限制了在土著和非土著法律传统之间促进生成性相遇的能力。我们发展了一种关于义务的批判性话语，在这里被理解为先于并超越与现代法律如此相关的权利-义务。我们认为，关注义务的优先性可能使我们能够突出传统之间相遇的伦理，检查现代性的法律和政治想象的局限性，并为人类世追求法律的“激进的重新叙述”。