WERNER HAMACHERthermore as man-against-man-himself, they are structurally (insofar as they are rights,
rights of states and supra-national rights) not human rights but rather the rights of ob-
jects: nonhuman institutions not only of reciprocal limitation but also of reciprocal elimi-
nation. Right is right-against-right, and therefore,ex definitione, unjust. It is a category
not of humanity but rather of self-reification and self-destruction. Every judgment that is
also a predication is a judgment-against-judgment, a self-judgment, a de-predication and
erasure of itself and its language. It does not open any prospects but closes itself against
them and against its own future possibilities. Predication is, in every sense, aconclusion
and an end. If it is to be abeginning, theprincipleof human rights must stop being a
conclusion; it must take its distance from predicative judgments, become mere diction
without predication and thereby introduce the possibility of justice both in human affairs
and in those of language.
b. As for the second important aspect in which the justice dispensed by the Platonic
court of the dead differs from human rights, rights are entitlements that one member of
a society can claim vis-a`-vis the other members of that society. In each case, a constituted
society legitimates the individual claims and issues the ‘‘general’’ law that presides as
sovereign over the rights of all members. But this sovereignty of the ‘‘general’’ law is only
the sovereignty of a compromise reached through the mathematical criterion of majority
and through a rationale by which this majority can hope to maximize its power and
impact. That which is sovereign is always a foreseeable, calculable totality, combined with
the equally calculable power of the conditions of preservation and expansion contained
therein. (Only for this reason can a definition like that of Carl Schmitt be valid: ‘‘sovereign
is he who decides on the state of exception’’—for the decision on the state of exception
takes placewith sole regardto the rule of the maximization of power of a given or foresee-
able totality, and therefore also the maximization of a majority and its privileges). Even
in democracies a group of individuals therefore decides on the legislative totalitiesagainst
orbeforeother individuals. And this group decides—judges—according to the measure
ofits ownwill and the expansion of power of this will: not according to the measure of
the incalculable singularity of individuals, taking into consideration their past and their
futures, which cannot in all cases be defined by the will and the calculation of power.
The sovereign community and its law submit that which is incompatible and resists all
comparison to a measure that is only seemingly equal for everyone—the measure of
numbers, of quantified will, ability, and power. But this makes the will—even if it may
aspire to be a will to the good—a will to power and to the overpowering of others, and
therefore a principle not of society or socialization but rather of selection, exclusion, and
conflict. The human right that is founded upon it, regardless of whether it is the right to
property, to security, or to formal-juridical equality, is always also the right of execution-
ers and of calculators. Human rights are calculations with humans. The freedom that they
grant to individuals, being the freedom established by the ‘‘universal’’ law of subjectivity,
is only the freedom to expand and universalize the reign of individual wills: it is a freedom
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