untitled

HENT DE VRIES

A further thesis propounded by Hamacher is that, whereas human rights and their
declaration are essentially ‘‘a judgment,’’ indeed, a judgment ‘‘about man,’’ this seemingly
trivial observation is in fact revelatory of a much larger linguistico-ontological truth,
which is not without a historical index, giving it unique articulation. The universal decla-
ration of the rights of man, Hamacher asserts, ‘‘establishes the paradigm for every predica-
tive judgment that men can make about men, and defines the human being as the one
who is essentially judging, equally essentially judged and inescapably condemned to judge
himself. The era of human rights is the era of judgment’’ (pp. 674–75).
Hamacher analyzes the fact that the classic texts codifying 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’’ (p. 671). This is not a modern formalism—as Hamacher will demonstrate,
one can lead it back historically to a myth in Plato’sGorgias—nor is it an abstract philoso-
pheme; indeed, he concludes with a telling literary narrative that encapsulates this essence.
What interests him is the insight that, according to the classic declarations of human
rights, the essence of man is not so much invented as rediscovered as ‘‘natural, unalien-
able, and sacred,’’ and placed ‘‘under the auspices of the Supreme Being.’’ This means, he
writes, that ‘‘they only need to be made accessible to reason, to be recovered from the
obscurity of oblivion, 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 elucida-
tion of human essence as it has always existed. It proclaims nothing new, but only makes
explicit and public what implicitly has determined human nature for as long as the being
called man has existed’’ (pp. 671–72).
Precisely the openness of rights to the meta-juridical before and beyond of law—its
central historicity, eventhood, and futurity—is crucial here, not least in its striking resem-
blance to (as well as distinction from) any notion of messianic expectation, inherited
from traditional religion and transformed in modern literary expressions or philosophical
parables, as in Kafka and Benjamin. Yet openness, Hamacher explains, although it draws
upon and contrasts with the messianic—if only by lamenting that the Messiah has not
come—is not therefore messianic (or even theologico-political) itself. It isammessianic,
which is to say, ‘‘both amessianic (without a messianic referent) and admessianic (relating
to the possibility of a messianic event)’’ (p. 689). In other words, in the speech acts of
juridical judgment we can discern the contours of an ‘‘advocatorial language’’ whose
‘‘testimony’’ is characterized by ‘‘grief,’’ ‘‘complaint,’’ ‘‘outrage,’’ and ‘‘revolt,’’ and which
therefore remains ‘‘impracticable.’’
Hamacher makes much of the auto-proclamatory nature and hence, as he calls it, the
onto-tautology of the existing declarations of human rights. These concern both their
form and their content. In their form, they reveal themselves ‘‘in 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.

PAGE 86

86

.................16224$ INTR 10-13-06 12:34:35 PS