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WERNER HAMACHER

in the declaration of his rights as a being that is, precisely, unveiling, declarative, and
conclusive. These characters make up the juridical essence of man.
The structure of human rights proclamations shows that in them man shows himself
to be self-showing and self-unveiling. All of these proclamations are essentially phenome-
nological and present themselves as procedures of fundamental phenomenologyin actu:
as speech acts and actualizations of concepts that do what they say and politically realize
what they claim—even though at first only in the mode of an explication, publication,
and instruction. They assert themselves as the performance of a grounding and install
themselves—and stall—through this very assertion. The essence of man as it is explicated
in the declaration, his dignity in freedom, is arrested into a right through the very process
by which this explication proclaims this dignity and this essence as an object and an
intentional correlate of its assertion. Freedom can be a ‘‘right’’ only because it is the theme
of a declaration, and only for this reason does it have the status of acategory: to be the
public and publicizing manifestation of the essence of man. And this means not merely
the status of any regional category whatsoever, but rather that of a practical foundational
category: to be the ground of all ethical and political relationships between human beings.
Right is a categorical declaration and a categorical thematization of man—and for this
reason already a judgment and aconclusionabout his humanity, anexclusionof all human
possibilities that are not susceptible to juridical thematization and cannot be perceived by
categorical thinking, and, in principle, theocclusionof all further deliberations that might
be carried out or even just demanded by ‘‘human beings.’’
The declarations of human rights declare the trial about the essence of man to be, in
principle, over.
The fact that human beingsashuman beings have arighttobehuman beings; that
they must be made the theme of juridical statutes, orders, assessments and decrees, the
object of legislative, judicial, and executive measures; that they are supposed to be funda-
mentally juridical beings—this scandal, this infinite and infinitely ambiguous scandal,
which governs the movements of the process (and the movementasprocess) not only of
effective politics and its respective propaganda but also of the ancient and constantly
renewed alliance of jurisprudence, theology, and ontology, this restriction of the essence
of man—of his freedom—to a legal entitlement, the amputation of man to an object of
rights—is the foundational operation carried out by the declaration of human rights. In
it, the rights of man are unveiled, proclaimed, and presented to the public; in it, they
are brought, conjoined with their presentation, to recognition and their at least virtual
realization; but this act of laying open is in no case a legislative act without being at the
same time a juridical and potentially executive one, an act that is instructive, educative,
or imperative.
The declaration of human rights is a judgment about man. It establishes the paradigm
for every predicative judgment that men can make about men, and defines the human
being as the one who is essentially judging, equally essentially judged and inescapably

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