Balibar conceptualizes politics as three dimensions, which are emancipation,
transformation, and civilité. They have their own limits, and condition each
other. This thesis aims at elucidating the politics of emancipation focusing on
the concept of Balibar’s ‘universal right to politics’. The concept of universal
right to politics is the result of studying on Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’.
Arendt criticizes the abstractness of human rights after witnessing the refugees
recognized as no right people during interwar period. Arendt proves human
rights isn’t a foundation from which other rights are deduced. On the contrary,
human rights is deduced from another right which is right to have rights. Right
to have rights is the right to be belonged to political communities, moreover, to
establish political communities. Balibar develops her idea and conceptualizes
universal right to politics. Both Arendt and Balibar regard the right of the
citizen as the basic right, and which is the right to conduct politics, to
establish political communities, to be belonged to political communities. That is
to say, rights is fundamentally achieved by ‘revolts’, and the foundation of
rights is not humanity given, but revolts and struggles by who demands it, as
well as reciprocal actions that confer rights on one another in the process of
instituting a common world. This being so, a man is a citizen without
reservation and all people must have citizenship. In this absolute equality,
Balibar formulates right of the citizen is basically right to revolt, to make one’s
opinion with responsibility in public sphere, and droit de Cite.