°Right to have rights
Again, though I’ve already posted an extract of this before, here’s the entirety of Werner Hamacher’s “The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Remarks),” from SAQ, 103:2-3, 2004:
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 problematic 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 assurance 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 determination of being human” - a distinction that has been a constant source of disturbance in the political and theological affairs of European and Near Eastern cultures ever since.
That public, political 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 neutrality 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 political 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 interiority, 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 sociality 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 successful of these reform movements, the Protestant Reformation.
This movement, 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 prominent political theories of modernity are political theologies of a democratism 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 democracie en Amerique,” 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).
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 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 universalreligiser 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 Declarations 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 Declaration des droits de l’homme from 1793 - ”the most radical one,” as he calls it - the second article: “These rights etc. [the natural and imprescriptible rights] are: equality, security, property”. And he cites the sixth article, with its definition of freedom: “La liberte est le pouvoir qui appartient e 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”.
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. 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 imprescriptibles 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.
Three
Thus Marx insists on two points: 1) “Only under the domination of Christianity, 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 individuals” (168); and 2) “The splitting of man into the public and the private man … is the completion of political emancipation, which thus does nothing 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, internal 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 - 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 international capital is being put to use for a select few, that thus democratic state “societies” have not become human societies, not national, international, or global ones.
Only capital - the agent of social, political, and economic 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 constitutions, and that was restated and relegalized in the United Nations (UN) charter on human rights in the middle of the twentieth century. According 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.
According 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 recognized 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 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 government.
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 dependent 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 governments leads to the inescapable consequence that the loss of civil rights is identical with the loss of human rights. This loss, which had been programmed into the structure of human rights itself, has become a political mass phenomenon since the First World War at the latest. Laws of denaturalization and denationalization, the deprivation of civil rights, forced deportation, 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, Portugal 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 declarations, that this perversion is made possible by the internal structure of human rights themselves. Not only were the so-called denaturalization laws enacted by the same powers that had included human rights in their constitutions, without this contradiction causing the slightest legal or political consequence. But, moreover, it was the human rights themselves that sanctioned this flagrant contradiction in that they allowed, as rights of property and security, for the defense against every attack (and even every presumed 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 thirtieth and final article in their declaration, they included the following sentence: “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 annihilation of rights and freedoms introduced in this declaration.”4 With this hermeneutic protection clause, the article expressly concedes that every individual 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 suicidal.
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 conceiving of what is called “man” within legal concepts.
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 (supposedly) fundamental rights of freedom and justice, and following the introduction 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 community, 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 explusion from humanity can only be understood as a legal-administrative and political operation by which the legal logic of human rights defined as natural 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 concept, 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 implementation - but they are unredeemable as merely national or international political 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 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, therefore 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 determination, 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 predicates, properties, qualities, and paradigms (to the concept of the person, for instance, of security, equality, naturalness), and therefore limit its absoluteness. 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 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 expanding 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 political 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 qualification. A
rendt therefore speaks of “unqualified mere existence” (301). This mere existence is the only source of law for the right to rights; it is existence 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 predicates or this property. Only such a being, without nature and without history, 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 natural and artificial things, is the only universal that is at once utterly singular, 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 theories 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 formulated 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 euche. Euche 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 euche, it may also be said, is not the language of theory, but rather a genuinely practical - indeed, a protopractical - 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 language 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 euchariste - 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 undetermined, merely raises the claim to determination, pleading for it, desiring it: he would only be a zoon logon echon as a zoon euche n echon. What remains of political theory and political anthropo-theology would be just the sheer 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 language of the euche is the language of the may, of the volo ut sis of the Augustinian 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 euche - 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 without 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 insofar 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 beginning itself.”5
Endnotes
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, Friedrich 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). Subsequent 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.
