Werner Hamacher

The Right to Have Rights

(Four-and-a-Half Remarks)

One
For the classical Greek authors of political
theory, it was inconceivable that anyone outside
of the polis could be a human. A human could
be human only in a society, and this society
could only be one that was both permanently
established and internally consistent—that is, it
could only be a constitutional and thus political
society. The resulting definition, that the human
is essentially a political being, became problem-
atic with the expansion of a religion that did
not conceive itself as a political theocracy or as
a religion of political virtues and observances—
but rather defined itself as being disinterested,
indifferent, and structurally neutral with regard
to social and political matters. Nobis nulla magis
res aliena quam publica—this sentence, from the
Apologeticum of Tertullian, states that nothing is
more alien to Christians than public matters of
the empire.1 The statement was not just an assur-
ance of the harmlessness of an apolitical sect,
it also contained a declaration of independence
from the prerogatives of the sphere of politics
and introduced a new distinction into the deter-
mination of being human—a distinction that

The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.

Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.
344 Werner Hamacher

has been a constant source of disturbance in the political and theological

affairs of European and Near Eastern cultures ever since. That public, politi-
cal matters were matters alien to Christians meant nothing other than that
the human was henceforth not only a political being, but, moreover, and
above all, a social being. Politics, on the other hand, was thereby, however
discreetly, transformed into the sphere that was able to guarantee the neu-
trality of the constituents of the state with regard to the political. It was of
secondary importance that the community of the faithful organized itself
in the ecclesia as civitas according to the model of the imperium—secondary,
compared to the distinction that had been introduced between the politi-
cal community and the community of faith, between res publica and res
intima, between political constitution and psychic participation. The split
was widened further, between the public sphere and the sphere of interi-
ority, since Christian apostles and teachers proclaimed their Evangelium as
‘‘catholic,’’ that is, as universal and equally valid for ‘‘all peoples,’’ without
consideration for national, ethnic, or linguistic belonging. The Christian
religion was not a civil religion for the citizens of a nation-state, nor was it
the religion of a transnational imperium. It introduced itself with the claim
that it was the religion of humans in general, and of the divinity of man as
such. It presented itself as universal anthropo-theology.
This claim to the universality of human interiority and internal soci-
ality led, however, to a particular kind of politicity, which can be seen in
heretical and reform movements no less than in the dogmatic and orthodox
tendencies—and which became especially prominent in the most success-
ful of these reform movements, the Protestant Reformation. This move-
ment, following the path of a paradoxical conformism, led to the democratic
revolutions of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, put into effect its
principle of the universal equality of individuals (that is, of the individual’s
unmediated bond with both God and the community), and assumed the
form of modern democracy—a form that we still inhabit today. The promi-
nent political theories of modernity are political theologies of a democrat-
ism of Protestant provenance. This becomes clear in the works of Hobbes,
and clearer in those of Rousseau and of Kant, Hegel systematizes it as a
political theology of history, Tocqueville describes it in detail in his ‘‘La
démocracie en Amérique,’’ and the structural Christianity of the modern
state is the basis for the universal polemic that Marx directed against the
state-theology of the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie in his brief
and still scandalizing text ‘‘On the Jewish Question’’ (1844).
 The Right to Have Rights 345

Two
Marx takes as his starting point that the fundamental postulate of Christianity
is the sovereignty of man, and, for the most part, he follows the argumenta-
tive schema of Hegel and Feuerbach when he finds this sovereign human
within the political organization of his time to be a mere fantasy construc-
tion and dream: ‘‘The political form of democracy is Christian, because in it
the human—and not just one man but every man—counts as the sovereign
and supreme being. But the human in his . . . unsocial aspect, in his con-
tingent existence, as he is given beneath the domination of inhuman condi-
tions and elements—this man is, in a word, the human who is not yet a real
being of the species.’’ 2And yet, political democracy is Christian and the sov-
ereignty—that is, the divinity—of man is a secular maxim within democracy.
This means, however, that Christianity for Marx is not one among a multi-
tude of historical or possible religions, but is instead of universal religious
significance—‘‘von universalreligiöser Bedeutung (154)’’ Christianity is the
religion of all religions, the religion of religiosity itself, and proves itself as
such ‘‘by grouping the most diverse kinds of worldviews within the form of
Christianity—and even more so in that it never demands Christianity from
its followers, but just religion in general, whatever religion it may be’’ (154).
Democracy is the political form par excellence of Christianity, and thus it
need not make the Christian religion the required state religion. Essentially
Christian, democracy pursues the structural deprivileging of Christianity as
a confession. Democracy itself is religion—the religion of the religion and
the religion to end all religions—therefore, within it, religion must become
a private matter. ‘‘The perfection of the Christian state is achieved in the
state that confesses itself as a state’’ (‘‘der sich als Staat bekennt’’); ‘‘it is a state
that abstracts itself from the religion of its members’’ (155). But, because it
abstracts, withdraws, and absorbs itself in its confession as a state, Marx con-
tinues his argument, the political emancipation—and therefore the political
absorption—of religion is still not the same as the social emancipation—and
absorption—of religion. The ‘‘sovereignty’’ of man, while put into effect in
the political state, is not yet a social reality. The Christian distinction as
declared by Tertullian thus dominates, according to Marx, even when the res
publica is no longer res aliena, but has become the res publica christiana, now
brought to virtual universality in the form of political democracy. This dis-
tinction, however, and more painfully the rift, still remains between politi-
cal state and human society, since democracy knows the human only as the
346 Werner Hamacher

citizen ‘‘estranged’’ and ‘‘alienated’’ from the human, as the political being
who is separated from himself as a social being, as the human who stands in
opposition to every other human—and thus democracy, although dedicated
to the idea of an undivided, universal humanity, knows the human only
as ‘‘the human in opposition to the human,’’ and knows man only as anti-
man. The state, while being structurally Christian, is the political form of
the undoing of Christianity. Essentially homogenizing and conformist, the
democratic state form comes to its perfection by instituting an unbridge-
able rift between the human and itself—thereby dissolving the very concept
and the very essence of the human that it continues to promulgate.
Marx gives evidence for this structural rift in the concept of Man in his
analysis of the French Déclarations des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Dec-
laration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) of 1791 and 1793, and of
the constitutions of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. All of these docu-
ments accord faith (as the free practice of a religious cult, as freedom of
conscience and of opinion) with the privilege of being a human right. This
is either stated explicitly in the documents or is argued as a consequence of
another human right, that of freedom. But this human right of faith is noth-
ing other than a civil right: it is the right of a member of political society.
The double title ‘‘rights of man and of the citizen’’ is thus pleonastic: it
defines the one term (man) in terms of the other (citizen) and thus deter-
mines the human not in human terms but in political ones and, conse-
quently, defines the human as being against another human. Moreover, the
political being of man is, in all of the constitutions quoted, expressly deter-
mined as a naturally political being: the concept of nature, however, has the
double meaning here, as it does in the long tradition of natural law, of deter-
mining at once the ‘‘essence’’ of man—his principally rational essence—as
well as the status of man prior to civilization. In the concept of nation as well,
the mythical concept natio is present, of birth and naturally grown authen-
ticity. The freedom of conscience, belief, and opinion, guaranteed in these
declarations as human and civil rights—human as civil rights—of freedom
therefore constitute only a natural- and national-political right, a precivil
right within a nation-state, that defines itself above a diffuse amalgam of
territorial, ethnic, and linguistic properties. The constitutive gesture of the
nation-state lies in its definition itself, in the so-called autonomous self-
definition by which it defines—by defining them as the members of its sys-
tem—who qualifies for the rights of man and qualifies as human. The struc-
turally Christian democracy defines who is human and as such ‘‘free’’; its
 The Right to Have Rights 347

definition is, however, like every definition, not only a predicative determi-
nation, but an exclusion. The naturally and nationally political man is thus
constituted as a human whose limits are defined by other humans that exist
both within and beyond a given political organization. The human is thus
determined as a human against his own essence, as human-counterhuman.
The presumptive humanism of modern anthropo-theological democratic
politics is in fact a structural antihumanism and an essentialist antiessen-
tialism. The Christian state is, in its totality, from its very beginning, and
at every moment, a state of exception. It is a state against itself, a political
state against the societal state, and, since it can be a political state only if it
is the state of a society, it is neither political nor societal, neither state nor
human community, neither Christian nor rigorously atheist—a state, there-
fore, excepting itself, outside itself, with a sovereignty that, if at all, consists
in the permanent undoing of every form of sovereignty whatsoever.
Marx quotes from the Déclaration des droits de l’homme from 1793—the
most radical one, as he calls it—the second article: ‘‘Ces droits etc. (les
droits naturels et impréscriptibles) sont: l’égalité, la liberté, la sûreté, la propriété’’
(‘‘These rights etc. [the natural and imprescriptible rights] are: equality,
security, property’’). And he cites the sixth article, with its definition of free-
dom: ‘‘La liberté est le pouvoir qui appartient à l’homme de faire tout ce qui ne nuit
pas aux droit d’autrui’’ (‘‘Liberty is the power, belonging to man, to do any-
thing that does not harm the rights of another’’). And Marx comments ‘‘The
human right of freedom does not base itself upon the tie of man to man,
but rather upon the separation—‘‘der Absonderung’’—of man from man. It
is the right of this separation—Das Recht dieser Absonderung—the right of
the limited individual who is limited to himself. . . . [Civil society] does not
allow every man to find the realization of his freedom in other men, but
instead the limit—‘‘die Schranke—of his freedom’’ (157–58). And this limit
poses itself, just as with his natural qualities, in his property and in the
arbitrariness with which he may dispose of this property at his own discre-
tion (à son gré ). The man of universal human rights is the owner of his own
goods, the owner of his rights, the proprietor of his freedom—and, as owner
and proprietor, he defines himself as the enemy of every one of his fellow
men, of man in general and thus also as the enemy of himself. Civil society
is a society against society, an association of dissociated egotisms, and it
states, in its own self-declaration, that it is indeed merely the means of the
conservation of natural egotisms. According to Article 2 from the Declara-
tion of 1791—‘‘Le but de toute association politique est la conservation des droits
348 Werner Hamacher

naturels et impréscriptibles de l’homme’’ (‘‘The purpose of every political asso-

ciation is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man’’)
(quoted in Marx 159). The spirit of democratic society is thus the presocial
and antisocial bellum omnium contra omnes of Hobbes’s state of nature—a
condition in which it is not the essence of society that is realized, but rather
the essence of difference (quoted in Marx 150). Politics is the perpetuation of
nature by the means of the rights of freedom. At the center of this politics—
as guardian of the constitution, as guardian of nature and of the difference
of society from society—the police rule. ‘‘Security is the highest social con-
cept of bourgeois society, the concept of the police’’ (158). The police, to
whom executive power is entrusted de jure, are, according to Marx who on
this point can draw on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the de facto point of con-
vergence for all essential state functions—the legislative, the judicial, and
the executive—thus defining political society as policed society. The univer-
sal rights of man are the rights of the policeman: they are rights that every
individual must apply to himself and to everyone else in order to be able
to become and secure the human being of democratic-Christian, anthropo-
theological, antisocial political society. Politics is essentially national and
international police politics.

Three
Thus Marx insists on two points: 1) ‘‘Only under the domination of Chris-
tianity, which makes external all national, natural, ethical and theoretical
relations of man, was civil society able to completely separate itself from the
life of the state, tearing apart all species-connections of man, . . . dissolving
the human world into a world of atomistic, antagonistic, and opposed indi-
viduals’’ (168); and 2) ‘‘The splitting of man into the public and the private
man . . . is the completion of political emancipation, which thus does noth-
ing to eliminate the actual religiosity of man, no more than it even seeks to
eliminate it’’ (150). Thus it follows that 3), the possibilities of Christianity
as a political form are exhausted in the establishment and enstatement of
the sovereignty of the individual in the democratic nation-state and in the
democratic international. And further that 4), there is no possibility, inter-
nal to this political form, of topping this political emancipation with social
emancipation. Democracies indeed invoke universalist principles valid for
all humans, but the principles are those of universal human egotism, of the
human who is split from his own universality, and who defines himself—
 The Right to Have Rights 349

structurally psychotic—as human-against-human and not as the human-for-

human of the universal social man.
What is universal is only the split from the universal and the rift within
it: this is the principle of politics in general, because it is the principle of the
transcendental empirical divinity ruling over it, capital. Marx calls it ‘‘the
essence of difference’’ (150). He held fast to the idea that this essence of
difference—capital—would cease to separate society from civil society, to
divide ends from means and sever individuals from themselves and each
other, and he never ceased to speak for the possibility that this essence of
difference might be put to use by society. What will become of this essence
and its abominations, however, still remains uncertain.
Something that no longer remains uncertain, however, but that has been
apparent for almost a century, is the brutal fact that all Hegelian-Christian
prognoses concerning the course of history are further than ever from their
fulfillment, that political systems still have not become socialized, that in-
ternational capital is being put to use for a select few, that thus democratic
state ‘‘societies’’ have not become human societies, not national, interna-
tional, or global ones. Only capital—the agent of social, political, and eco-
nomic separation, difference, and strife—is global, and similarly global, the
distance from a human society—a distance that was already formalized in
the human rights declarations of the French and North American consti-
tutions, and that was restated and relegalized in the United Nations (UN)
charter on human rights in the middle of the twentieth century. Accord-
ing to Marx’s diagnosis, human rights are only conceived in national state
laws, and they are therefore conceived not as public rights but as private
rights. His diagnosis proved disastrously correct and, in fact, a little less
than a hundred years later, had to be sharpened by Hannah Arendt. Accord-
ing to her findings, anyone who is stateless is also without rights. This is
not only due to the lack of a universally binding institution that would be
able to determine definitively what might precisely constitute human rights
beyond all private-legal claims, but there is also not a single universally rec-
ognized transnational executive for the implemenation and enforcement of
these rights. This was the situation when Arendt published The Origins of
Totalitarianism in 1951.3 Fifty years later, things are not any different, and
the situation will not change for as long as not all states have at the very
least submitted themselves to an international penal court. Human rights,
furthermore—including those incorporated in the UN charter, which are
conceived according to private law—are paradoxical, self-contradictory, and
350 Werner Hamacher

possibly self-defeating in their definition: they are determined as natural

and inalienable rights, since their validity is not permitted to depend on any
historical or empirical instance, on any particular people, nation, or govern-
ment. But these rights are, on the other hand, placed under the legal and
executive sovereignty of exactly the same historical powers—the powers of
national governments. These governments thus can claim, for themselves
and their citizens, that they are able to define the standard of human rights
within their own borders, as well as able to depict themselves as particular
representatives of the regulative idea of ‘‘humanity.’’ Human rights, said to
be inalienable and thoroughly independent, are thus de facto made depen-
dent on a particular, that is, alien power to guarantee them, and are thus
exposed to the arbitrary will and the special interests of this power. Herein
lies the fundamental and unresolvable paradox of human rights, a paradox
that allows Arendt to speak of ‘‘the perplexities of the rights of man’’ (290).
And she goes further and speaks of an ‘‘end of rights of man’’ (267). The
identification of human rights with the rights of ‘‘sovereign’’ national gov-
ernments leads to the inescapable consequence that the loss of civil rights
is identical with the loss of human rights. This loss, which had been pro-
grammed into the structure of human rights itself, has become a political
mass phenomenon since the First World War at the latest. Laws of denatu-
ralization and denationalization, the deprivation of civil rights, forced de-
portation, enforced emigration, and the refusal of the rights of asylum—all
of these have been enacted by ‘‘sovereign’’ nation-states with the rights of
man written into their constitutions, thereby producing millions of people
who belonged to no state and had no civil rights and thus no human rights.
Those robbed of their legal status were then able to be deprived of their
minimal human right—the right to live—and could become subject of state-
organized murder. All this, to be sure, was done according to due legal
procedure and thus in the final instance under the perverse sanction of
the human rights themselves. Referring to rulings in France in 1915, Por-
tugal in 1916, Russia in 1921, Belgium in 1922, Italy in 1926, Egypt and
Turkey in 1926, France in 1927, and Germany in 1933, Arendt explains
this catastrophic turn of national governments against the universalism
of human rights by pointing out that a global power to guarantee these
rights was lacking (279). Her argument implies the further explanation,
however, especially in light of Marx’s critique of the first human rights dec-
larations, that this perversion is made possible by the internal structure of
 The Right to Have Rights 351

human rights themselves. Not only were the so-called denaturalization laws
enacted by the same powers that had included human rights in their con-
stitutions, without this contradiction causing the slightest legal or politi-
cal consequence. But, moreover, it was the human rights themselves that
sanctioned this flagrant contradiction in that they allowed, as rights of prop-
erty and security, for the defense against every attack (and even every pre-
sumed attack) on the integrity of the private person or the nation-state. The
withdrawal of civil rights, as well as the concomitant withdrawal of human
rights, extending to the withdrawal of the right of life itself, was legitimated
and indeed legalized—this is the epitome of the structural perversion of
these rights—by the so-called human rights themselves. The authors of the
1948 human rights charter of the UN may have been the first technicians of
international law to whom this horrendous paradox was clear. In the thir-
tieth and final article in their declaration, they included the following sen-
tence: ‘‘No determination contained within the present declaration may be
interpreted in such a way that any state, group or person is given the right to
exercise a capacity or take an action, the aim of which would be the annihila-
tion of rights and freedoms introduced in this declaration.’’ 4 With this her-
meneutic protection clause, the article expressly concedes that every indi-
vidual human right can be used toward the annihilation of human rights,
and that it is a matter of the interpretation and application of human rights
alone—and thus a matter that pertains to something other than a merely
legal power—that keeps the double bind of legal rights from becoming sui-
cidal. Human rights themselves cannot prevent, according to this article,
their own use toward the destruction of precisely these human rights. It
cannot be prevented, but it would nonetheless be wrong, according to the
authors of the article, for anyone to portray the self-destruction of law as a
legal occurrence.
According to their internal structure, the ‘‘rights of man’’—as private
rights and rights of property and protection—are thus elements of a law of
international civil war, in which the enemy can be declared to be a criminal,
a nonhuman, a ‘‘rogue,’’ or ‘‘scum of the earth.’’ In the concentration and
extermination camps, the essential content of human rights—its antisocial
and antihuman and thus suicidal content—made itself manifest. These
camps are, in every meaning of the word, the end, not only of human rights
and thereby of rights in general, but also the end of the possibility of con-
ceiving of what is called ‘‘man’’ within legal concepts.
352 Werner Hamacher

Four
Hannah Arendt rejects every attempt to tie hopes—of correction, of an
improvement in or political surpassing of the legally codified human
rights—to a progress in legal culture, or to supranational powers or to a
global government. After energetically keeping her distance from the (sup-
posedly) fundamental rights of freedom and justice, and following the intro-
duction of the more concrete concepts of the rights of action and of opinion
as the politically and socially decisive rights, she continues,
We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that
means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and
opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized commu-
nity, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could
not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.
The trouble is that this calamity arose not from any lack of civilization,
backwardness, or mere tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not
be repaired, because there was no longer any ‘‘uncivilized’’ spot on the
earth, because whether we like it or not we have really started to live
in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity could the
loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from
humanity altogether.’’ (296–97)
These considerations, which are clearly decisive for Arendt’s work, require
an extended commentary. Here only two remarks must suffice: 1) The explu-
sion from humanity can only be understood as a legal-administrative and
political operation by which the legal logic of human rights defined as natu-
ral and private rights reveal their implications. In them, the universalist
concept of the legally ‘‘civilized’’ ‘‘One World’’ is structurally laid bare and
historically brought to its end. This One World is the world that can first
exterminate in every sense of the word the One Humanity—by bringing this
humanity to its furthest limit, by excluding it from the limits of its own con-
cept, and by conceptually and physically annihilating it. Thus Arendt can
speak of ‘‘the end of rights of man.’’ Following this end, these rights may
continue to exist and produce certain salutary effects—and, indeed, they
still today invite and demand their deployment and further implementa-
tion—but they are unredeemable as merely national or international politi-
cal rights, and this remains nevertheless as a structural and historical fact.
A fact that may still be capable of bringing forth far more terrifying epochs
 The Right to Have Rights 353

than the one we would like to claim lies behind us. The end is not over
yet. And 2), with the end of human rights, another right announces itself,
a right that does not belong to the catalog of human rights, nor to that
of state and civil rights that are supported by them, and barely belongs to
juridically definable rights at all. It simply cannot belong to them as one of
their series, because it is the unconditional condition of all rights, there-
fore legally uncodifiable, and indeed inalienable and unrelinquishable. Arendt
calls it ‘‘the right to have rights.’’ She characterizes it as ‘‘the right of every
individual to belong to humanity’’ (298). This right of having rights and
of belonging to humanity is not contained in any historical declaration
of human rights: every existing declaration starts out with the descriptive
or prescriptive definition of what man is—by nature and according to his
essence—and seeks to elaborate specific rights befitting him on the basis
of this being. The charter of 1948 states in this sense that ‘‘All men are free
and equal in dignity and rights by birth. (. . .) Every human has the right to
life, freedom and security of his person.’’ In distinction to such rights, the
right to have rights is a privi-legium in the strictest sense, a prelegal premise,
a protoright, in which it is left open, what a human may be, who a human
may be, and which rights may be granted to him aside from this unique one
of belonging to humanity and of formulating his rights correspondingly.
Therefore, this privilege is preceded neither by a natural nor a historical
determination of man, of humanity, and its humaneness. Every given deter-
mination, whether it be given by the vague power of nature or by particular
historical-cultural powers and habits, would restrict the right to have rights,
since these determinations could not but bind this right to certain predi-
cates, properties, qualities, and paradigms (to the concept of the person, for
instance, of security, equality, naturalness), and therefore limit its absolute-
ness. Every given determination of man breaks with his right of belonging
to humanity, because only the humanity and humaneness that are not yet
given would be able to determine what or who a human is. This right, of
belonging to humanity and of having its rights, may not be handled like a
piece of data—since this right would be able to be granted by humanity itself
in its entirety alone—it must rather be treated as a principally open right,
open to humans and open to their humanity. It must be, for every present
time, the right to a future community and the right of this unpredictable,
unprogrammable future itself—a right, that is, to come. The right to have
rights therefore suspends all given, all posited rights that claim to define the
substance of man. It must be the right of the cessation and ex-position of
354 Werner Hamacher

positive rights; and the right of transforming the so-called human rights in
view of the rights for humanity. ‘‘The right to have rights’’ is a right that gives
rights their possibility, without, however, being, in any essentialist sense,
the source of a gift. The only reality that is laid down in this right is that of
this very possibility—of having rights, of using, transforming, and expand-
ing them. It is the possibility offered to the existence of each and everyone,
whoever or whatever he, she or it may be.
While the classical human rights are only valid for the citizens of politi-
cal organizations, sovereign nation-states and their federations, the right of
rights claims the belonging to humanity independently from every natural
or political legitimation. This right is thus valid for all of those who were in
the past excluded from civil rights and human rights or who were able to
be excluded de jure because they were not viewed as humans, but rather—
whether metaphorically or not—as animals, machines, as either beneficial
to life or life-threatening. The right to have rights is therefore primarily and
above all valid for those whom Arendt characterizes as absolutely deprived,
alienated in every sense of the word, exploited and divested, for those who
exist in ‘‘the abstract nakedness of being human’’ (299) as ‘‘a human being
in general—without a profession, without citizenship, without an opinion,
without a deed by which to identify and specify himself—and different in
general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality
which, deprived of expression within action upon a common world, loses
all significance’’ (302). This bare human existence, however, that Arendt
speaks of here, is—as being excluded from the shared world, distanced from
social action and foreign to every significant common language—no longer
a naked human existence, but a naked existence without further qualifica-
tion. Arendt therefore speaks of ‘‘unqualified mere existence’’ (301). This
mere existence is the only source of law for the right to rights; it is exis-
tence without qualities and thus mere being in its possibility of claiming the
right to qualities, predicates, and property—as well as in its impossibility
of being substantially determined by these particular rights or those predi-
cates or this property. Only such a being, without nature and without his-
tory, can be a being that is capable of nature and open to history. And alone
out of its freedom from predicates is mere existence capable of becoming
a social existence that is not determined in advance by the appurtenance to
a species, a group, a nation, a state, or even just a language. ‘‘Unqualified
mere existence,’’ which also comprehends the being of animals and of natu-
ral and artificial things, is the only universal that is at once utterly singular,
 The Right to Have Rights 355

a hapax legomenon. By it alone a universal order, a world—thus more than

just a global order—would have to orient itself. This world could not be a
legal one or a world of rights: it would have to be a world in which this each-
time singular universal, this universal singular could manifest itself—and
thus it may not be a world at all. Or it may be only an alien world or another
world, a world open to its own alterity.

And a Half
How is it possible to speak of it? Or to speak it? The classical political theo-
ries start by assuming that man is always both a zoon politikon and a zoon
logon echon, and that he is the one only because he is the other. The ability
to assign a political status is, however, not an accomplishment of the logos
in general; it is rather accomplished by the judging, predicative, apophantic
logos, which decides whether something is to be connected with something
else or not. The right to have rights—which also means to have political
rights—is itself evidently not a political right, but rather a parapolitical right
whose structure cannot be that of predicative sentences, because this right
consists in the minimal and not further reducible claim of the ability to be
connected with others—and thus it does not consist in a judgment as to
whether such a connection does or does not exist. Aristotle’s Politics formu-
lated the double determination of man as a political being and as a being
capable of language; in a famous passage of his ‘‘peri hermenias,’’ he names
as the sole example of a nonapophantic logos the euché. Euché means prayer,
plea, wish, claim, vow, also curse and malediction; Aristotle says of it that it
is a logos that does not utter a judgment over matters and their relation, and
that it therefore cannot be true or false. This euché, it may also be said, is not
the language of theory, but rather a genuinely practical—indeed, a proto-
practical—language at the minimum of its existence. It is the language that
claims something—for instance a right—that is not yet given; it is the lan-
guage of a claim to a future that is not yet present and perhaps never will
be. Devoid of all predicative content, devoid of the power to produce out
of itself what is desired, the euché is—present in every Now of speech—
the language of ‘‘unqualified mere existence.’’ Accordingly, the man of the
right to have rights would determine himself as the one who, as yet undeter-
mined, merely raises the claim to determination, pleading for it, desiring
it: he would only be a zoon logon echon as a zoon euchèn echon. What remains
of political theory and political anthropo-theology would be just the sheer
356 Werner Hamacher

existence of this language of the wish, the plea, or the prayer—a wish that
wishes that there may be less and more than politics, wishing that it may
be something other than politics, that there may be a society and that this
society may be that of the absolutely singular. And to this extent, the lan-
guage of the euché is the language of the may, of the volo ut sis of the Augus-
tinian definition of love that is quoted by Arendt in her Vita Activa. This
language pronounces no judgment as to existence, also none about itself:
As euché it is the plea—or the prayer—for existence and even for its ‘‘own’’
existence, and it is therefore itself not a being, but rather only the relation
to its possibility. It is the medium and the happening of the existence with-
out predicate as the happening of the possibility of such an existence. A
plea that it may be a plea, and thus a plea without being that is made to an
addressee without being—and only thus a right to have rights, a right to be
and to be otherwise.
‘‘‘(Initium) ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit’ ‘for
there to be a beginning, man was created, before whom there was nobody,’
said Augustine in his political philosophy. This beginning that is man inso-
far as he is somebody, doesn’t coincide with the creation of the world: What
was before man, is not Nothing but Nobody. The creation of man is not the
beginning of something that, once created, exists in its essence, develops,
remains or perishes, but rather the beginning of a being that itself has the
ability to begin: it is the beginning of a beginning, the beginning of begin-
ning itself.’’ 5
—Translated by Kirk Wetters

Notes
1 Tertullian, Apologeticum, trans. Alex Souter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1917), 38.
2 On Gattungswesen (species-being), see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Fried-
rich Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), vols. 1 and 2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1975–), 154. Subsequent
citations are given in the text.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958). Sub-
sequent citations are given in the text.
4 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 30. UN General Assembly Resolution
A/RES/217 A (III) 1948.
5 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 166; translated by Werner Hamacher.