THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTSacy of mere mediations. The remains of the phenomenal, which are also gates to the
phenomenal, first necessitate judgments and thereby determine their structure. As athem-
atical as thekrisismay remain in its performance, it still remains a response—and there-
fore also the beginning of a reflection, a thematization and substantialization—of that to
which it refers. And for this reason it is the ground of predicative statements and judg-
ments, the inception of rights and of the juridification and institutionalization of the
‘‘human.’’ Infinite judging is finite, and therefore—just like theexaiphnes—conceivable
only outside of the opposition between the infinite and the finite.
The judgment thus always contains two traits that touch one another, accompany or
cross each other: on the one hand, a bare event without ground or rest, without object or
satisfaction, sheer transcendence; on the other, the fixation of a theme, the positing of a
substance, the determination of an object, even if it be an ideal that serves as a frame of
orientation. These two traits, which structure every language and which can be discerned
in the Platonic myth, move to the foreground in the difference between the judgment
of the dead and the judgment of human rights declarations. The judgment of juridical
propositions presents the human being as belonging to a species governed by universal
law; the judgment ofkrisisbetween good and bad testifies,suddenly(exaiphnes), for an
individual, suspending all concepts and ideas that could be formed of him. The judgment
of human rights identifies a substance; the judgment of infinitekrisisdissolves all substan-
tial determinations as phenomena in favor of their transessential movement. As conceived
by human rights, man is the subject of his self-declaration, one who encounters all others
only as a limit. Man as the court of the dead encounters him is, by contrast, the result of
akrisis, from which both the one and the other emerge as from the event of their alter-
ation.Krisisis the infinite critique of a predicating judgment; this predicating judgment
is the resistance thatkrisisturns against itself. If the Platonickrisisintroduces an adjust-
ment of human rights as they have determined the practice of the ancient Aeropagus, and
of all the other courts and institutions of declaration that have followed after, even unto
the present, then it continues to demand (and demands ad infinitum) adjustments that
would go beyond mere modifications, rectifications, and corrections of human rights. It
demands adjustments that might release ‘‘the’’ human from the juridical obsession that
its being be determined through rights as an object and subject of judgments, and it
demands adjustments that correspond to the structural irony of any such adjustment. It
does not demand them for any time in the near or far future, but rathernow,exaiphnes.
Among the necessary adjustments to human rights—among those, in other words, that
stem from thestructure of judgments as such and from the form of right that is grounded in
themrather than from a spontaneous emotion or from the juristic proof of the insuffi-
ciencies of human rights (already carried out in 1950 by Hans Kelsen in hisThe Law of
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