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A translation of Werner Hamacher's essay "Andere Schmerzen," which he was unable to complete before his death on July 7, 2017. The essay analyzes the connection between pain and language in the work of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant, Hegel, and Valéry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to have rights was never a right to be had. Hannah Arendt's famous formulation of the most elementary right of all, the right to participate in the definition of rights, is not a description of a given right that belongs to one or the other form of law, but an indictment of a deficit in the construction of legality on the basis of the right to withdraw legal protection from members of a community, and therefore to refuse rights. The one and only human right thus turns out to be ungrounded in anything but the idea of its being had: a "property right" that traces back to the legal, philosophical and linguistic definitions of "one's own" since antiquity. Only the gift of the incalculable and of that which cannot possibly be legitimated can ground the autarchic self-relation of having: ungrounded in the rationally organized nature of any given, possessing the right to membership in a political community turns out to be permission to freely transfer this possession to another, without expectation of a return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The man of universal human rights is the owner of his own goods, the owner of his rights, the proprietor of his freedom. The universal rights of man are the 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, anthropotheological, and antisocial political society.

A translation of Werner Hamacher's essay "Andere Schmerzen," which he was unable to complete before his death on July 7, 2017. The essay analyzes the connection between pain and language in the work of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant, Hegel, and Valéry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to have rights was never a right to be had. Hannah Arendt's famous formulation of the most elementary right of all, the right to participate in the definition of rights, is not a description of a given right that belongs to one or the other form of law, but an indictment of a deficit in the construction of legality on the basis of the right to withdraw legal protection from members of a community, and therefore to refuse rights. The one and only human right thus turns out to be ungrounded in anything but the idea of its being had: a "property right" that traces back to the legal, philosophical and linguistic definitions of "one's own" since antiquity. Only the gift of the incalculable and of that which cannot possibly be legitimated can ground the autarchic self-relation of having: ungrounded in the rationally organized nature of any given, possessing the right to membership in a political community turns out to be permission to freely transfer this possession to another, without expectation of a return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text tries to make plausible the necessity in every thought of time to think an un-time--a 'field' without the form of time that only allows for conceiving of time as a form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though utterance assumes at least provisional determination, the very act of forming a proposition, sentence, or principle exposes gaps and indeterminacies in language itself. This essay unravels contradictions in Hegel's language on the ontological implications of meaning-making, in order to show that language abandons itself even as it seeks to leap from uncertainty into some form of determination. Hegel's identity principle, as linguistic enactment, reveals itself to be at once self-creative and self-destructive. Ultimately, this essay performs its own unraveling in an improvisational coda that exposes the internal negations of the Satz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the unintended consequences and complications of Derrida's différance through his own language and that of Heidegger, with additional reflection on the trace and its effacement. Self-revocation and forgottenness occur at the crux of any effort to articulate Being, in the very language of this effort, as a "prose-ontological ellipsis." Only in the margins of utterance, in the wandering from or skewing of the bindings imposed by language on thought (enacted in Derrida's own double-columned work Glas, which opens spaces between Genet and Hegel), can transcendence occur, and then only through dissemination. This performative text illuminates the ontological lacunae in language through repetition, refraction, and provisional formulae that inevitably break down in the act of reflection on negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derrida's "chance" or "coincidence" implies a fall out of time, or a contingency of times, intersecting and missing each other. This essay demonstrates, through a teasing-open of Derrida's own language, the rich contradictions of the contretemps, with its resonances in language, history, and imaginative worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the moral and ethical aspects of having human rights, through analyzing the political philosophers and theorists Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt's perspectives on the subject. An overview of the philosophy on freedom and religion, including Karl Marx's perspective on Christianity, is provided.