Постмодерні «сліди» в праві: погляд через призму концепції прав людини

The article examines how postmodern thought transforms the understanding and function of human rights, treating them less as a universal transcendental foundation of law and more as one of the “traces” or simulacra of a decomposed modern metanarrative of the nation-state. Using a postmodern discourse perspective, where language and legal situation are seen as a unity including unspoken intentions and constraints, the author argues that any statement about rights is always actor‑positioned and value‑laden, and that the postmodern slogan “be yourself” captures the core of the human rights discourse as radical individual self‑construction. Within this framework, every participant in legal interaction constructs a personal system of norms and values, thereby voluntarily narrowing their own freedom. Yet effective legal communication still requires a shared code; in modern national orders, this role was played by the “idea of the code” as a metanarrative expression of the nation-state. Postmodernity, conceived historically from Panwitz and Toynbee as a shift from nation‑state thinking to global politics, is presented as a deconstruction of that metanarrative and a move toward certain global values that elude full rational grasp but must be consensually accepted as a precondition of global legal communication. Globalization, especially after 1917 and through milestones such as the Helsinki Final Act with its “human dimension,” is described as integrating actors into multi‑level global communication systems and simultaneously producing an “information explosion” that generates “postmodern trauma.” In response, actors increasingly accept simulacra and traces instead of underlying meaning, and human rights are often perceived not as a transcendent starting point of the legal system but as one such trace of a global metanarrative, selectively invoked rather than deeply internalized. Local legal orders, seeking to preserve autonomy, attempt to escape the universalist idea of human rights by constructing alternative coordinate systems that reframe or relativize rights while still formally referencing them. The author concludes that postmodern “traces” in law manifest in this tension between the global human‑rights metanarrative and plural, locally constructed normative worlds, and that understanding rights today requires analyzing how actors negotiate this tension within conditions of communicative overload, fragmentation of grand narratives, and persistent demands for a shared code of legal communication.