THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTScondemned to judge himself. The era of human rights is the era of judgment. It is the
epoch not so much of philosophy as of philonomy.
The right of man is not only a category—and as such a public exhibition, a statement
indicative of his essence (kat agorein)—it is an apophaticlogosthat arises from a decision,
a conclusion, and a judgment and structurally determines that the essence of man consists
in his right to submit himself and his world, his humaneness and all of humanity, to a
judgment. The declaration of human rights carries out this judgment about the right to
judgment and the jurisdictional essence of man. It posits the scene of a court of law—a
court of law that is as much juridical as it is theological and philosophical—that claims
to be the final arbiter of the structure of right and judgment in man. Whoever appeals to
human rights submits, presumably always with the best of intentions, to the verdict of
this court of law and turns himself, as judge and judged, into a figure of this scene and
into both an agent and an object of this verdict. He not only pronounces judgment—and
one that above all applies to himself—but declares in addition that there is nothing deci-
sive to say about man except in the form of this judgment, this predication, and this
verdict.
The scene is old. Its age is already evident from one of its first descriptions to have
been passed down, which also asserts—no less than the French Declaration and the UN
declaration two thousand years later—that this scene springs from a reform that was
intended to adjust traditional judicial procedures and to fit them better to the structures
both of cognition and of man. This scene of a restitution of judgment to its purity, and
therefore also of a restitution of the juridical nature of philosophy, is told in the form of
a myth at the end of Plato’sGorgias(523a–26d). During the reign of Kronos, Socrates
recounts, the living held judgment over the living (zontes esan zonton) on the day that
someone was supposed to die. Their judgments lead to the complaint that souls were
undeservedly appearing both on the Isles of the Blessed and in Tartarus. Zeus, the ruler
of the new era, agreed with the complaint of Poseidon and Pluto, and gave as a reason
for the wrongful verdicts passed by the living on the living that the people being examined
were judged fully dressed, veiled by ‘‘handsome bodies, good stock, and wealth,’’ which
deceive both the witnesses and the judges, for the judges themselves are, since they are
still alive, ‘‘fully dressed’’ and perceive those who appear before them only through the
screen of their sensual eyes, their ears, and their whole bodies. The sight of the souls is
obstructed by the sight of the judges’ eyes, the hearing of the souls is hindered by physical
ears—their perception and consequently also judgment are led astray by bodies. Zeus’
reform institutes a court without veils. Judge and judged alike are supposed to be
‘‘stripped naked of all these things [gymnos kriteon apanton touton].’’ ‘‘They should be
judged when they are dead. The judge, too, should be naked, and dead, and with his bare
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