INTRODUCTIONThey assert themselves as the performance of a grounding and install themselves—and
stall—through this very assertion’’ (p. 674). In their content, they claim nothing but this:
the right to proclaim rights, the right to have rights, which, for Hamacher, also implies
the right to refrain from (either having or using) rights: a ‘‘stoppage’’ of all appeal to
‘‘judicial power’’ whose foundation is ultimately given with the linguistico-ontological
fact that language ‘‘is its own stoppage.’’
Not only do declarations of human rights abstract from ‘‘race, color, sex, language,
religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other
status,’’ they also gesture in the direction of possibilities that exceed the very concept and
order of law. But more important than any speculation concerning what these might one
day be is the insight that the very implication of judgment and rights is that the latter are
best served where ‘‘political, anthropological, and theological authorities who claim to be
the advocates of human rights would serve the justice, freedom, and dignity of man best
by expanding the zones of their indecision and by bringing about circumstances in which
none of their rights need ever be appealed to—circumstances in which the right not to
need and not to use rights could be exercised without any limits’’ (p. 690). Yet such a
perspective on the law’s stoppage or suspension comes into view only after the notion of
rights has taken hold and is, as Hamacher says, ‘‘internally developed to be as just as
possible.’’ Until then, there is no other responsible (if not yet ‘‘just’’) politics other than
to operate negatively, by removing ‘‘degrading, incapacitating and impoverishing ele-
ments from human rights or to render them harmless by transforming them’’ (p. 690).
Not a critique of ‘‘juridification’’ (as in Habermas), of relegating laws to their proper
sphere, is at issue, then, but an at once negative and affirmative Benjaminian-Adornian
strategy of paradoxically overcoming lawin toto, not in a single stroke, but in the logic of
its own consequence and by, as it were, playing its own tune. Such is the fate of the
theologico-political and the key concepts that cement—and undermine—it. Where it de-
fines and codifies the ‘‘form of the human’’ (albeit in humanistic and otherwise human
terms), it betrays the human whose rights, it says, it protects.
In Conclusion
Perhaps there is no better way to sum up this all too lengthy introduction than to return
briefly to the guiding question from which we set out. Can we say that the contributions
to this volume, in painting a rich panorama of concepts that govern the theologico-
political in all its diversity and, as we have said,pluralization, point to a certain ‘‘return’’
or ‘‘permanence’’ of its guiding idea(s)? Moreover, do the historical legacy and contempo-
rary formations of political theologies have practical and juridical relevance for quotidian
aspects of policies and decision making,^181 as well as for public cultures and private lives?
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