Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a defiant practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future.

中文翻译：

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反抗权利

反对权利的批判性拒绝，越来越多的文献在争斗民主的传统中主张它们在社会变革斗争中的解放作用。然而，激进的理论家们在民主创新的理念中投入了大量精力，认为民主创新是对现有规则、制度和实践的逐渐“增强”的过程，他们未能解释权利的破坏能力，因此也无法解释权利的全部激进潜力。使用表演的方法，我发展了一种权利主张的概念，作为一种反抗的实践来表达某些形式的权利政治的破裂维度。我通过宣布推定的义务承担者机构和政府由于结构性限制而无法维护所主张的权利，来展示抗拒的权利主张如何表达内在的批评，从而在现存秩序中产生不可避免的矛盾，并创造出替代秩序的必要性。此外，为了充分捕捉权利的解放潜力和创造能力，本文主张将某些形式的权利政治理解为增强和断裂，将两者视为同一激进民主实践的不同维度。我展示了巴西无地工人运动和跨国土地运动网络 La Via Campesina 对权利话语的创造性运用，正是这种扩大和反抗要求的结合，导致了食物权和土地权变成食物主权权，