Ethico-Aesthetic Regime of Human Rights: Limits of representation

Abstract This chapter aims to offer a perspective for the structure of moral economy in the neoliberal times. To this aim, the chapter looks at “human rights cinema” and starts with an observation; lack of definition and clear boundaries, allows “human rights movies” to crystallise a particular ethico-aesthetic regime that is characteristic to neoliberal era that peaks with fall of the Soviets. In this era, number of human rights films focus on the limits of human rights discourses to address issues of race, class, gender, or colonialism and actively question the inadequacy of rights language, while not being able to propose an alternative. An overlapping set of films identifies a past trauma as the source of a traumatic event that leads to different forms of abuse, and is not able to propose a closure but only victimhood. A third set of representation of human rights abuse aims to warn us about future possibility of the past Evil, which is ready to reoccur if we are not in constant alert and keep the current consensus intact. The Evil is simultaneously a threat to the entirety of the society and an individual misfortune, and life and Evil are in an antagonistic relation rather than an entangled one. These tropes demonstrate the ethico-aesthetical regime of neoliberal era, and conditions of visibility.