Discourse within modern day liberal democracies is increasingly imbued with rhetoric and discussion concerning rights. While the incentive for the acquisition of certain rights may be understood or interpreted in various ways from differing perspectives across the political spectrum, as demonstrated by Samuel A. Chambers in the early pages of his essay, “Ghostly Rights”, a fundamental quality influencing the nature of rights is ultimately excluded from the rights dialogue: the spectralquality of rights themselves. However, as Chambers illustrates, rights dialogues are indeed inextricably linked to a ghostly presence, to a hauntology which renders rights themselves as unreal.Staging the argument around the issue of same-sex marriage and the broader issue of queer rights, Chambers claims that, when made in the language of rights, certain particular struggles by disenfranchised groups, such as the struggle for the right to gay marriage, can serve as hegemonic articulations which point and aim ultimately to a larger universal political goals towards equal distribution of constitutional privileges. It is the rights dialogue which initiates the hegemonic articulation; it serves as the conductor from the particular to the broader universal. In this case, the particular or local struggle for gay marriage takes on the role of the “empty signifier”, or a term which has the potential to be impregnated with signified content that points towards a broader universal, here being the extension of the financial, medical, and other social benefits tied to the institution of marriage. This very breaching of the particular/universal divide, and the contamination of the universal by the particular, shows us that the universal is always haunted.In order to justify this breach, Chambers challenges the ideas of traditional Kantian formalism, a philosophical logic that separates the universal (transcendental) and the concrete or local (empirical) into two separate, non-convergent planes. This ethical dualism sets the groundwork for a basis of moral action which is founded entirely on the formal, entirely on reason, and excludes the historical and concrete from the equation. Implicit to this rationale is an element of timelessness, an idea that the universal is always already determined. It is this ‘timeless misconception’ which posits the notion of rights in the universal realm, out of reach of any influence from the particular, and therefore into stagnancy. Chambers proposes a new understanding of rights as existing in a space between the universal and particular in a way which recognizes time as being “out-of-joint”, in other words spectral. “The spectrality of the universal/particular removes any trace of formalism, but it does so precisely by leaving ghostly traces of the particular within the always haunted universal.” (162)Because of this realization of the ghostly relationship between local struggles and the broader discourse of universal rights, we are able to integrate a conception of rights themselves as being both ghosts and ghostly, as both haunting and being haunted. In terms of Chambers’ example, the right to marry is haunted because of its connection to many social benefits granted to married couples, and the spectral remainders of those rights (i.e. those who are excluded from the right to marry) create a ghost which is to haunt the right to marry itself.Pronouncing this ghostly presence further, Chambers goes on to invoke the Derridian notion of rights as existing uniquely in the spectral plane between the actual and the inactual, as not being real, as being universal statements of ‘what ought to be, always’, while simultaneously remaining subject to historical events which pose the threat to revoke them, and therefore holding no irrefutable empirical validity or transcendental guarantee. This can be seen, he says, by recognizing the failure of rights which we expect to emerge to ever concretely manifest themselves, and by the disappearance of certain rights which once had been already granted. “Rights are always already untimely [ghostly] because they can never be guaranteed in advance.” (164)Chambers illustrates various viewpoints concerning the right to gay marriage through the lens of the ghost. Refuting the mainstream liberal idea that attainment of rights is always a good thing, he proposes that, because of its legal ties to a large host of subsidiary rights which haunt it, (such as tax breaks, adoption rights, inheritance rights and health care benefits) marriage actually becomes a disciplinary institution not only for those invested in a marital bond but also for those who choose not to marry.
Successfully achieving the right to marriage will effectively bar lesbians, gays, certain single persons, and non-married straights from access to a long list of other rights, since all those rights bundled into the institution of marriage will now be ‘open to all’ [who choose to or are able to marry]. (167)
In other words, the legitimization of gay marriage would serve as the drawing of a new border, the making of a decision which excludes yet another ‘other’, the creation of a right which, while expanding inclusion of a constitutional right (and other rights subsumed within it), would simultaneously invoke the creation of a ghost, of that certain other who is excluded from this selective inclusion. In this way, all rights and extensions of privilege prove to be haunted.Additionally, the notion of gay marriage and indeed of rights in general, is one that emboldens the power of the state by recognizing it as a legitimating force that controls the norms of sexuality. The initiative of the queer community to be normalized into mainstream society proves regressive, states Chambers, to a furthering of any form of radical democracy.Concluding, Chambers advocates not an extension of marital rights to gays and lesbians, but a de-linking of marriage to other subsequent rights, a revocation of marriage as being a precondition to subsumed legal entitlements, as the right to gay marriage will not resolve the spectral remainder that it itself creates. We must challenge the very notion of marriage, he says, along with its normalizing power and its hegemony as a disciplinary institution, in order to avoid the ghostly implications of rights themselves. “Only an insistence on the spectrality of rights can keep alive the possibility of affirming the rights of the specter.” (169)
