WERNER HAMACHERsoul he should contemplate only the bare soul of each person [aute te psyche auten ten
psychen theorunta] suddenly [exaiphnes] upon that person’s death, when he’s isolated
from all his kinsmen and has left behind on earth all that adornment, so that the judgment
may be a just one [dikaia e krisis e]’’ (523e). Thekrisis—the decision, the judgment, the
sentence—thus finds its model in death, insofar as death is ‘‘the separation [dialysis]of
two things from one another, the soul and the body’’ (524b). Death is the first, the archi-
crisis, which severs the merely accidental and contingent from the true nature of a being—
and among these external, merely sensory and therefore misleading qualities Plato counts
‘‘handsome bodies, good stock, and wealth,’’ just as the Declaration of Human Rights
two thousand years later lists ‘‘race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opin-
ion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’’ (Article 2 of the UN declara-
tion of December 10, 1948). The soul is undressed of all these phenomenal particularities
by death, and naked it presents its own relation to the sensory disfigurations that it still
bears as traces to the gaze oftheoria, which is in turn naked and nonphenomenological:
‘‘All that’s in the soul is evident [enthela]’’ (524d). The judgment—krisis—that is passed
on the souls by the souls refers not to their sensory appearance but rather to theirphysis
and theirichne, the traces of their ambitions and sufferings (pathemata). But if this judg-
ment does not rest on phenomena, then it does not rest in phenomenal consciousness,
either, for after the reform instituted by Zeus, mortals are no longer able to know their
death ahead of the time of judgment. Death is not the theme of judgment, but rather the
pure structure of judging, an aphenomenal and anepistemic separation, the ablation of
the soul’s essence itself, which does not enter into the horizon of a noetic act, but rather
determines the horizon by which the judgment takes its course as apathos,apassioand a
passivity preceding any distinction between bodily passivity and psychic activity. The Pla-
tonic myth of the court of the dead therefore reaches its decisive point in the fleeting
moment indicated by the wordexaiphnes—‘‘suddenly.’’ Once the reign of Kronos, in
which chronological time passes as a succession of phenomena and acts of consciousness
and in which one can know the moment of one’s death, is over, the judgment can no
longer be anchored in the time of the thematizing consciousness. Even the time of objec-
tive consciousness needs to be put aside as a veil and obstacle to cognition in order to
admit the time ofpsychein its nakedness, its suddenness and bare proximity, not as a
passing of discrete now-points but rather as the sheer moment beyond continuity and
discontinuity, as the happening of discretion itself. Only in this ana-chronical temporality
without before and after, without pre-sence or re-pre-sentation, without ideas and ob-
jects, can thepsycheitself judge and at once be judged. It cannot, in other words, be
judged fairly as an object to and from which certain characteristics could be added or
subtracted, nor as a theme of predication.
The judgment passed by the court of the dead on the dead is therefore a very peculiar
judgment. It does not judge phenomena, objects of knowledge, or intentional objects, and
the judgment isn’t passed by any subjects, whether empirical or transcendental. Since
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