untitled

THE RIGHT NOT TO USE RIGHTS

as the event of the juridical—and toward the end the no longer juridical—fight for justice,
a fight that must be abandoned before the judgment is reached so as not to abandon
justice itself. Justice would thus be not a cognitive category that refers to substantial
determinations but an ethical—a messianic—event that invalidates all pretensions of
substantiality.
Yet the experience that a judgment about the Messiah is impossible could mean that
he may never come. The grievance about his remaining absent testifies to the fact that he
isn’t there; the testimony of the artists indicates, however, that he will come. Cognitive
and juridical judgments refer to present objects, whether they be empirical or ideal. Where
they refer to future objects, they do so only insofar as they will be present in the future.
The Messiah, justice, and man, however, would remain absentintheir very coming; they
would arrive only in their failure to arrive, not in any present. Irresolvably aporetic events,
they would remain unpredictable. What remains only by remaining absent is inaccessible
to judgment, since it itself is the future that might make possible a judgment it neverthe-
less withholds. What may come doesn’t allow itself to be judged, since the very possibility
of its coming may at any moment turn out to be impossible. Every possibility of a future
event is accompanied by the possibility of its impossibility; every prognosis about the
future can be canceled by its remaining absent. The deactivation of judgment is a function
of the future: for so long as there is historical time there will also be the possibility of a
future and therefore the possibility of a Messiah. But so long as there is the possibility of
his coming, there will also be the possibility of his not coming. Therefore, no conclusive
judgment exists either about him or about the world in which he could possibly intervene.
The Messiah—the justice to come—suspends with the judgment about him the entire
sphere of right that is grounded in judgment.
That no judgment is pronounced about the Messiah—and this is the third explica-
tion—means neither that he will come nor that he won’t come. It means neither that
history is a messianic event nor that it is not. The inconclusiveness and flight of the court
deactivate the form of judgment. The enduring dispute between the plaintiff and the
witnesses devalorizes the illocutionary force of language—of the complaint and of
the testimony—which might allow a decision about whether messianic judgment will
arrive or remain absent, about whether history is messianic or not. If plaintiff and wit-
nesses are the only ones to ‘‘remain’’ at the end of the world court, then the possibility
that the complaint might be just also remains. But this complaint concerns at once the
missing Messiah and the missing language of nature. Complaining—or lamenting—about
the persistent absence of messianic language is therefore, although it pertains to messianic
matters, not itself by any degree of certainty ‘‘messianic.’’ It isammessianic—both amessi-
anic (without a messianic referent) and admessianic (relating to the possibility of a messi-
anic event)—language that serves as an advocate for a language that remains absent, a
language of a grief and an outrage that insists that a language for all and for everything
should be possible and shall come, without, however, being certain of it and without being

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