Human Rights and Secularism: Arendt, Asad, and Milbank as Critics of the Secular Foundations of Human Rights

his chapter seeks to bring attention to the secular and its relationship with human rights. This relationship will also shed light on the particular characteristics of human rights as a dominant ethics. Through the works of Arendt, Asad, and Milbank, this chapter seeks to formulate the secularist presuppositions of human rights in order to present a differing critique of human rights. In acknowledging secular intolerance, this chapter suggests a much more nuanced view of the modern notion of empathy in its relationship to contemporary law and politics. Finally, this chapter addresses how Arendt, Asad, and Milbank develop a different relationship to the secular and its place vis-à-vis religion in an effort to reposition the question concerning the nature of secularism and its place within modernity.