The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments

Abstract

The declaration of human rights is a judgment about man. 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. The right of advocacy for everything that does not speak the language of right, of juridical argument and of judgment, including 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.