THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTSnot of alterity but of assimilation; not of transformation but of conformity; not of dignity
but of calculable value. The community established by this freedom is the community of
rivalry and conflict, in which to be regarded as ‘‘human’’ means to figure as an item in a
juridical calculation. Freedom isn’t free so long at it finds its limit or its origin in the ego,
even if it be the ego of another. Only the liberation of freedom from the principle of the
majority of number, ability, and power could lead to its liberationto anotherother, and
another‘‘I’’; only the invention of innumerably many liberated freedoms could bring
about a human community. Only this community would indeed be ‘‘human’’ in its irre-
ducible and thus nonformalizable plurality, in a sociality that cannot be monopolized or
calculated by any state of right. It would be the ‘‘human’’ that has theright not to need
rights, not to use rights or be used and used up by them.
c. The Platonic court of the dead at no point refers to rights, at no point to property,
community, appearance, and the securities that may be guaranteed by them. These are,
in fact, exactly the things that have to be discarded as a hindering and misleading veil
before the judgment of the dead: gender, tradition, convention, community, ability, and
appearance—and therefore the entire phenomenal apparatus that natural law and the
American and French declarations define ashuman rights, including the freedom that is
characterized as an exclusivepropriumof the ‘‘I’’ as its person. That which remains as the
praxis of this singular court of the dead is sheer judgment without predication, without a
pregiven right, without corresponding duties that could be fulfilled or neglected; a judg-
ment that corresponds neither to anything that has been said nor to a theme or an object
of cognition or declaration, and therefore also not to a declared law. Instead, it lies this
side of all manifestations and institutions, solely in the happening ofkrisis, and pertains
only to another such happening. What, then, remains when only the act of judging as
archi-distribution remains? Levinas asks this question in the two footnotes inOtherwise
than Beingin which he discusses the Gorgias myth. In one of them he insists that the
judgment ‘‘remains judgment [demeure jugement].’’ In the preceding one, he emphasizes
the question itself: ‘‘But one is right to ask what such a judgment consists in, a judgment
that is not a priori and is not a judgment put on a given, is not ajudgment of experience.’’
His answer to this not entirely rhetorical question confines itself to the reminder that the
judgment of the dead is not, at first, ajugement de justicebut, even before that, a responsi-
bility for the single Other. It would thus be, even as an answer out of responsibility, a
judgment: a judgment that comesbeforethe judgment of the court, but nevertheless a
judgment. One can put another answer beside the one given by Levinas as a response to
his question about the judgment of Plato’s court: thekrisisof the anaphenomenal—of
psycheandichne—since it is bare saying, which refers neither to an object nor to a thema-
tizable ground but only to itself in its alterity, can be nothing else than infinite, and, since
it is an infinite judging without conclusion, it is withdrawn from all formalization and
juridification. Being an event before any positing of laws, thekrisisis an event without
content, an event merely of the event, akrisisofkrisis, in which the decision of judgment
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