untitled

THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTS

these are not a priori judgments, but rather ones that read the ambitions and sufferings
of every soul from their traces, and since they judge each case only for itself, without
subsuming its singularity under a general concept, a norm, an expectation, or a habit, all
general models that the verdicts of the court of the dead could use as an orientation fall
away. They are judgments of extreme singularity, even of ultra-singularity, since no
‘‘who’’ is being judged, but merely the question whether it is a ‘‘good one’’ or a ‘‘bad
one’’—in both cases, something supra-general and ultra-essential is being decided. When
a judge of the dead, himself one of the dead, presides over someone’s case, ‘‘he doesn’t
know a thing about him, neither who he is nor who his people are, except that he’s
somebody bad’’ or good (526b). The judgment of ultra-singularity is at the same time
one of ultra-universality: thesingulare tantumto which it applies is its own rule that
surpasses every rule. The judgment does not refer to thistantumas a phenomenal or
intentional object, but rather implements it as something supra-singular and supra-
general; it does not estimate it according to its qualities but merely assigns and imparts it
to the a-topian locus of these qualities. The relationship between the judge and the judged
follows from the indication that the former receives from the latter; it is both a singular
and a more than singular, both a universal and a more than universalanswerto a corre-
spondingchallenge. But this answer cannot have the character of a performative act, which
presupposes the minimal consensus of a community on the conventions of speaking, for
such a consensus belongs to the phenomenal stock that alone is able to constitute a ‘‘who’’
and from which both the judge and the judged are severed in death. The only communi-
ties that Plato admits to his last court are the one between the Asian judge Rhadamanthus
and the Asiatic people whom he judges, and the one between the European judge Aiakos
and the European people of whom he, in turn, is the judge. But Minos presides over
both of these, and he belongs to no community, ethnic or otherwise, suspending every
community between the judge and the judged. The judgment of supra-singularity and
supra-universality is therefore a judgment ofalterity: of the separation between the one
and everything else. This judgment is the creation of every singular being, the bringing
about of its alterity and therefore the event ofalteration. And since it is a final and there-
fore also a first and irreducible judgment, it is an initial separation [Ur-teilung], an archi-
distribution very much like the one attributed to Minos in the eponymous pseudo-
Platonic dialogue dedicated to thenomos. This original parting doesn’t say something
about something; it is no predicative identification of a theme or a thesis. It rests, rather,
in the unthematic and athetic saying as a happening ofkrisis. The judgment passed by the
dead on the dead is the event of mere saying—of alogos, as Socrates stresses—which must
precede everything that is said, a judging that precedes the content of any judgment and
therefore gives to every object and every being, every knowledge and every act of con-
science, the very ground of its possibility. But as the event of mere saying, it cannot
itself be something that is said or an object of knowledge; it instead—with structural

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