The Right Not to Use Rights
Human Rights and the Structure of JudgmentsWerner HamacherThe claim that human rights arerightsand that they are the rights of
human beingsmeans two things. First, it means that they apply neither
to the empirical totality of a bio- or zoological species nor to any indi-
viduals as the privileged (because exemplary) instances of such a species
but rather to the human ‘‘as such’’ or ‘‘in truth.’’ Human rights do not
define man in his historically contingent appearance, but rather provide
an explication of human essence as it presents itself in and of itself after
all external attributes have been subtracted. Only human rights present
man in hisrightlight—in the unobstructed, undistorted, and direct
light of his essence, his reason, and his concept. This, at any rate, is
what the concept of human rights implied in the age in which they were
first declared. The voice of the Declaration of Human Rights is therefore
the voice of man himself: the voice of his right to have a voice and at
the same time the voice that recognizes, preserves, and enforces this
right, and therefore his essence. If the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen of 1789 speaks of the ‘‘ignorance, neglect, or con-
tempt of the rights of man,’’ it does so in order to insist, following the
tradition of natural law, that ‘‘man’’ and his ‘‘rights’’ are not a juridical
fiction or an invention of this Declaration made at a particular historical
moment that happens to bear the date 1789. They are, rather, the pri-
mary and foundational data that define man and have been given to
him as ‘‘natural, unalienable, and sacred.’’ Now they only need to be
made accessible to reason, to be recovered from the obscurity of obliv-
ion, and to be restored to universal respect. The declaration of human
rights, by codifying and making public these rights, becomes at the same
time an elucidation of human essence as it has always existed. It pro-
claims nothing new, but only makes explicit and public what implicitly
has determined human nature for as long as the being called man has
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