WERNER HAMACHERable to anticipate it as such. It is the language of a revolt not only of the unpredictable but
also of the impracticable, imperformative, afformative; a revolt not only of the absence of
judgment, but also of muteness—and therefore the insurrection of what Benjamin calls a
‘‘mystery.’’ Mystery here has not only the sense of the Christian messianic mystery plays
but also that of a structural secret. In the remaining of remaining absent, the perseverance
of its lacking and the insistence on its own failure, language ceases to be a judgment or
an act, a predication or a performance, an adjudication or execution, and leaves open the
question of whether it can still be called language. It no longer has an addressee (for the
jury flees), nor an object (for the very possibility of such an object is withdrawn from
judgment), nor even a subject (which could constitute itself only in a language that would
be more than a mere complaint or a testimony). Language, which at its extreme is com-
plaint and testimony, is the language only of its own lack.Language is its own stoppage—
and therefore the stoppage of all judicial powers that might appeal to it, of all judicial
titles that might be claimed through it, and of all ‘‘human rights’’ that have been or might
still be declared through it.
Some consequences concerning the structure of what are called ‘‘human rights’’ need
to be drawn from the considerations that are condensed in Benjamin’s short text. A
judgment is not a form of justice, and right not a category of its integral realization. For
as long as there are only human rights, there will not be human justice. The political,
anthropological, and theological authorities who claim to be the advocates of human
rights would serve the justice, freedom, and dignity of man best by expanding the zones
of their indecision and by bringing about circumstances in which none of their rights
need ever be appealed to—circumstances in which the right not to need and not to use
rights could be exercised without any limits. Since this freedom to abstain from the use
of rights cannot be brought about by force, and since the suspension of the sphere of
right can only succeed if this sphere of right is internally developed to be as just as possi-
ble, everything must be done in order either to remove the degrading, incapacitating, and
impoverishing elements from human rights or to render them harmless by transforming
them. This applies in particular to the right to property, the right to sovereignty of the
state, and the right of states to punish, exclude, and segregate their members and guests.
Since justice cannot be expected, right must be furthered—foremost the right of those
who don’t have rights or cannot exercise them: the right of advocacy for everything that
is silent, silenced, or mute, for the unborn and for the dead, for the natural as much as
the technical in humans, for everything that is no more and not yet, for what has no
voice, for the future and for the future of their pasts. The right of advocacy for everything
that does not speak the language of right, of juridical argument and of judgment, includ-
ing the right of both philosophy and literature, of myth and of mystery, of the court of
the dead and of the fleeing world court in which the ruling forms of right and of judgment
are suspended, along with the form of the human that they define.
—Translated by Tobias BoesPAGE 690690.................16224$ CH34 10-13-06 12:37:44 PS