untitled

WERNER HAMACHER

is nothing but a decision for the decision itself. Judgingremains: but conclusive judgment
is denied in the judging—and this naked event of judging resists every judgment about
whether it itself constitutes a judgment or not. The fact that it can never be thought of
and named with any certainty as itself, but only as something that it might not be, exposes
the structural irony of this event.
As an infinite judgment it remains irreducible to a propositional content and is the
epoche ̄of judgment in the very act of judging: an abstention from judgment that arises
neither from an intention nor from the particularity of the intentional object to which it
could refer. Being an event, the act of judging precedes every intention and every object
that could constitute itself in it. To the extent that thekrisisevades all critical reflection
directed toward it andremainsas much akrisisas something that is athematical and an
anathema, it also remains free of judgment: something that cannot be unveiled by any
assertion, a secret without content. The unveiling cannot itself be unveiled. While declara-
tions of human rights unveil (explicate and publicize) the hidden (misrecognized, disre-
spected) substantial character of man in order to place it under the protection and control
of the political public at large, and while such declarations therefore pronounce a univer-
sal judgment on the unveiled essence of man as a judging being, the infinitekrisisof the
Platonic court of law removes every ‘‘what,’’ every essence and every essentializing right
as a veil. It judges only once, suddenly,exaiphnes, whether something is good—beyond
being (epekeina tes ousias)—or bad (without being). It judges without the certainty or
even the possibility of knowing whether a judgment has been passed. For thiskrisis, man
is not a being that has to be unveiled and actualized, but rather a singular occurrence
provoking a singular response, without a schema measuring its epistemic merits. The fact
that Plato speaks of the court of the dead as amythos—and a decidedly ‘‘demythologiz-
ing’’ one at that—may imply that one cannot talk about thiskrisisin predicative sentences.
It is not the theme of a reflection, nor is it the reflection of a theme. Legal texts judge
about right and wrong. ‘‘Literature,’’ by contrast, and this includes the fabulations of the
mythos, preserves the right of justice by pronouncing neither a judgment nor even a
judgment on judgment.
But since it is an infinitejudgment, even thekrisisof the court of the dead still
constitutes a judgment. It remains a judgment if for no other reason than that it refers to
the remains, the traces, theichne, of the phenomenal contexts in which somebody acts
and desires. If this judgment is to be concerned with justice, then it must also deal with
the justice of that from which the Platonic court cannot entirely abstain: the justice of
social and genealogical contexts, conceived as their sense and use; the justice of tradition
and its possibilities, and therefore of their appropriate transmission; the justice of appear-
ances, defined as their just use; and the justice of goods, which implies their unlimited
distribution and employment. Plato makes the judgment pass from soul to soul; the traces
that lie between the souls as mediators must therefore be seen not merely as obstructions,
but also as enablers of judgment. These traces are, like thekrisis, instances of the immedi-

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