This is the third part of the tribute to Miguel Cervantes. This post is a summary of an article with the title of, "Quixotic Utopia of Human Rights Introduction," published in 2017 at seer.rdl.org.br/index.php/anamps/article/download/316/pdf_
The gap between theoretical enunciation and actual practice in human rights expresses the need to seek compromised alternatives. This balance can come from a critical and innovative mirage that contains other theoretical possibilities that are especially critical of the role of order in safeguarding human and fundamental rights. Literature emerges as one of these possibilities of analysis in the field of human rights, as emancipation of these in front of the traditional legal rationality. The literary discourse is more diverse, complex, heterodox and imaginative - which allows it greater plasticity, sensitivity and attention to reality. Ingredients that the law needs in order to commit to the reality of those whom it seeks to protect. Literature offers law a vast repertoire of observation of human social relations, as well as bringing freedom to the law by repeatedly dismantling the formalisms of the legal structure. The analysis of literary works, such as Don Quixote de la Mancha offers different perspectives to the interpretation of human rights, especially to those committed to reality. The link between law and literature flourishes in narrative. Norms and rules are worthless without context, without history, without a fact to attribute meaning to it. Thus, the use of literature leads human rights to the real dimension. Literature operates a fundamental refoundation in the legal conception of rights. The possibility of overcoming the practical distance that keeps traditional law through a literary bridge that is able to approximate it to concrete subjects and material justice is what makes it imperative for this simple reflection to deal with the set of ideas above. The aim of this article is to tell the legal discourse of human rights through the emancipatory lens of literature. For that purpose, the work The ingenious nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes was chosen. By analyzing the literary work , the objective is to draw a parallel between Quixote's struggle and the struggle of human rights in today's world, showing the points of convergence based on the salutary dialogue between law and literature. Don Quixote is a complex work by a complex author. Literature, especially those that, like the Cervantine one, assume a critical posture of the real can be a great driving force to propose and problematize the alteration of social and legal directions. Under the aegis of dogmatism, the social and political effects that stem from the transformative dialogue that literature can have in law and rights have for a long time been enclosed in consonance with a closed view of reality and also rights. Literature as a human product, like legal science, undoubtedly reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, the vicissitudes, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of its subjects, as well as the context in which it is inserted. According to Lukács, "there is no composition without conception of the world." The political, critical and liberating dimension of literature is already present in the work of Cervantes, since it was books that disturbed the reason of Alonso Quijano. It is the books that are to blame for the madness of Quixote. On the contrary, it was precisely his readings that opened the possibility of emancipating himself and giving life to Quixote. The criticism of dogma and its transforming sense is in the work represented as madness, which is nothing more than insurgency with the order and the ability to see beyond. It is here that Alonso Quijano and Quixote are set apart. For Saramago (2005), in his reading of the work, Quijano was just tired of the life he led and deciding radically to change his life, he says he is crazy in the purest act of sanity. Madness is characterized as such by subverting the static, dogmatic and normative order of life. If conflicts are part of reality, they become part of the law, not as something to be excised, but as a constituent element of its own core and not an evil in itself. The agonistic and dialogical dimension of human rights allows us to shed light. The political tension in the exercise of democracy in its radicalism is therefore essential to the notion of human rights. The quixotic vocation to combat injustices, the focus on the vulnerable, the dimension of dialogical alterity, all these marked by the real/ideal tension that stood out in the work and is today the great paradox in the dilemma of the realization of rights. The motive of the work and of Quixote is the denunciation of injustices; The knight reports that is his duty and destiny is to repair the injustices of the world. The Cervantine text is very close to the counter-supremacy vocation of human rights. It is human rights produced from the social dynamics, "in defense of new freedoms against old powers" (Bobbio, 2004), fruits of a "rationality of resistance" (Flores, 2009). The tonic of human rights aimed at balacing the asymmetric relations of power as insurrections against despotisms, from the public or private fields. At the same time, these rights are powerful for the struggle to build a more inclusive society in which everyone is subject to equal respect and consideration. By means of this rationality, the law happens to see the subjects no longer as members of an innominate and undifferentiated fiction, the recipient of the abstraction of the legal texts, but as unique singularities. This is because law as literature tells a story, a story told by human rights is the history of the prevention or combat of human suffering. Associated with the defense of injustice, Quixote defends the weakest and fights for the weary and injured, these are the subjects of rights. The contemporary mark of human rights is linked to the ethics of otherness; to see in the other a being worthy of equal consideration and deep respect, guided by the universal affirmation of dignity and the prevention of human suffering. It is, however, insufficient to treat the individual in a generic, general and abstract way. It is necessary to specify the subject of law, who is now seen in its peculiarity and particularity. Thus, alongside the right to equality, the right to difference with respect to diversity also arises as a fundamental right. The important dimension that opens here and that is very explicit in the metaphorof the mill is the struggle of the dream in relation to reality. It remains to be seen whether our contemporary battle for rights is to break against established windmills. We live paradoxically the triumph of the normative discourse of rights with its universal extension, on the one hand, but, on the other, we live an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in terms of the disposability of rights and their subjects. It is precisely this arc between the applicability of the norm in abstract and the result of its effective applicability that must be traced to overcome the abyssal gap between practice and human rights theory. Human rights are, in their contemporary face, the history of perseverance. It was the breaking of the idea of rights that left us rights after the war. From breakage came protection. Rights thus became "the cry of the oppressed, the exploited, the dispossessed, a kind of imaginary or exceptional right for those who have nothing else to lean on" Therefore, it is important to look for alternatives that aim to give them concreteness, even if in a utopian way. Thus, utopia is a project, projecting a proposition: it becomes concrete when there is action directed at willing to change. In the terms advocated by the theory of human rights. The utopia can come to fruition. Rights can be reality. Yet another stance is required before the law and the world for this to happen. From the interlocution with the quixotic literary imaginary and the opening it provides, it is possible to construct a critical theory of human rights based on a critical, peripherical, dialogical and utopian posture. As Antonio Avelas Nunes teaches us: The necessary changes do not just happen because we believe a better world is possible. These changes must come as a result of the laws of motion of human societies, and we all know that voluntarism and good intentions have never been the engine of history. But awareness of this does not have to kill our right to utopia and our right to dream. While maintaining its prospective meaning, the protective order of human rights must land on reality as a tangible utopia to those who need an urgent response. The law can not evade this practical commitment to the observance of human rights, essential to a minimally dignified existence, still unknown to a part of the world's population.
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