WERNER HAMACHERirony—withdraws this ground. It is the separation that precedes every decision, an infinite
and therefore always sudden, an unpredictable and therefore pretheoreticalkrisis.
The Platonic myth of the last judgment by a court of the dead attempts to give an
answer to the question of the structure of a just verdict; the question, in other words, of
what truly constitutes a judging discourse and also the question as to the nature of beings
that relate to one another by way of such a discourse. The answer to this double ques-
tion—the question concerning man and the question concerning language—must be a
single one if it is to characterize a speaking that does justice to man by doing justice to
language. The reformatory process that leads to the answer of the court of the dead is that
of a reduction; not a phenomenological but rather a trans-phenomenological reduction,
which subtracts the inessential attributes of the living in order to arrive at the bare, naked
soul and the traces that are engraved in it. The judgment of the dead is issued in the ever
singular event ofkrisis, and in it determines the individual and its language as the event
of mere separation. The reduction, a laying bare, is a reduction to the act of reducing.
The laying bare does not reveal a substantive something that lies hidden behind a veil—as
later declarations of human rights suppose—but rather lays bare the event of laying bare,
of the separation, thekrisisanddialysis. It is a laying bare of laying bare, ade ́nudation de
la de ́nudation, as Levinas calls it inOtherwise than Being, a work in which he devotes two
important footnotes to the Gorgias myth.^1 This hyperbolickrisisofkrisisis presented by
Plato as a critique of the juridical practices by which the living pass judgment on the
living, and presumably also as a criticism of the Areopagus and the lower courts of ancient
Athens. Stripped of all references to its own time, it can also be read as a critical answer
to all forms that right and judgment have taken since then, up to and including the
declarations of human rights during the French Revolution and after the Second World
War.
Socrates holds judgment over the structure of judgment and corrects what in it—even
today—does not accord with justice either in language or in human affairs. Setting aside
for the moment the complications of the Platonic body-soul distinction, which are solved
in theGorgiasmyth through theichne, the trace, one can isolate three prominent, interre-
lated aspects in which the human rights of modernity are revised by the court of the dead.
All three aspects agree in that they reduce the predicative judgment, the judgment in its
sense of a predication, to a diction without a predicate, a meredicerewithout eidetic
correlate to and from which characteristics might be added or subtracted. The decision
that something is good is not a predicate but a mere correlate to speaking and to the
possibility of speaking at large.
a. The Gorgias myth at no point talks about rights. In the declarations of human
rights, rights have the status of categorical exhibitions of human essence; they characterize
the invariable substance of all human beings across all cultures and times and they are
freed in both the Declaration and the Proclamation from the veil of oblivion and con-
tempt. The explication and publication of these rights disrobes human substance of its
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