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Werner Hamacher, “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks)”. South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004).

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 argumentative schema of Hegel and Feuerbach when he finds this sovereign human within the political organization of his time to be a mere fantasy construction 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 contingent existence, as he is given beneath the domination of inhuman conditions and elements—this man is, in a word, the human who is not yet a real being of the species.”2 And yet, political democracy is Christian and the sovereignty—that is, the divinity—of man is a secular maxim within democracy. This means, however, that Christianity for Marx is not one among a multitude 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 continues 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 distinction, however, and more painfully the rift, still remains between political state and human society, since democracy knows the human only as the 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 antiman. 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 unbridgeable 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 (Declaration 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 documents 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 nothing 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 determines the human not in human terms but in political ones and, consequently, defines the human as being against another human. Moreover, the political being of man is, in all of the constitutions quoted, expressly determined 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 determining 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 authenticity. 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 system—who qualifies for the rights of man and qualifies as human. The structurally Christian democracy defines who is human and as such “free”; its definition is, however, like every definition, not only a predicative determination, 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 antiessentialism. 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, therefore, 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 söreté, la propriété” (”These rights etc. [the natural and imprescriptible rights] are: equality, security, property”). And he cites the sixth article, with its definition of freedom: “La liberté est le pouvoir qui appartient á l’homme de faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas aux droit d’autrui” (”Liberty is the power, belonging to man, to do anything 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 discretion (á 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 Declaration of 1791—”Le but de toute association politique est la conservation des droits naturels et impréscriptibles de l’homme” (”The purpose of every political association 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 concept 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 convergence for all essential state functions—the legislative, the judicial, and the executive—thus defining political society as policed society. The universal 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.

This, then, should be underlined: “I am persuaded that, in the end, democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man, and fixes it on man alone.” - Tocqueville, via Brett.