I wanted to write this quick note about Wednesday’s class discussion.
Central to our concerns, of course, is the relation between law and justice in Derrida’s “Force of Law” essay. The claim is that law is founded in an act of violence and rests on a mystical foundation, which is a way of indicating the fiat character of the law. That is, law does not have a legitimate ground other than the exercise of sovereign power at the moment of law’s insertion into the social order. Law is measured by justice, to be sure, but not in a way that authorizes law with justice; this is why I shied away from the metaphor of “birth.” Law is only birthed by justice if justice is a terribly invasive and destructive parent, wholly unwilling to give autonomy to its child – which is actually just another way of saying that law is made unstable by justice. Justice cannot provide a ground for law. Law is always a betrayal of justice.
Part of this argument is straightforward: there is no such thing as a just law. We cannot imagine a world in which law and justice are squared. The consequences of this are enormous, as it requires us to radically rethink visions of liberation. (There is a long discussion to be had here in relation to utopia, but that will have to wait.)
What is not so straightforward, and is always the nuance of deconstruction’s intervention in thinking about law, is how we can configure that relation between law and justice which remains after we break apart the relationship. The fractured – aporeitic – terms of the relation are clear. Law is concerned with the universal, and so manifests itself best in relations of equality. Justice, on the other hand, is concerned with what the singular Other asks of me. As such, justice is a relation of inequality – I do not ask from the Other, the Other asks from me. And that asking from me institutes a sense of obligation in me, from which I cannot hide and deny.
Therein lies the aporia of decision, by the way. We’ll have to get clear on “decision” through a reading of the second half of the essay, but what is important is that the undecidability of action lies in this space between the demands of law and the demands of justice – how to understand my relation to the law when I (and therefore also the law) am called to justice. For, there is no equality or reciprocity in justice, so law is both of no assistance and functions as a violence against the inequality and non-reciprocity of the singular Other’s demands. As Julia pointed out in class, appeal to the law when it coincides with justice is itself a betrayal, for justice is always in the first position, the position of absolute and unqualified authority.
[Sidenote: this is a sense of justice in Levinas' work. For a series of summaries of articles on the Levinas-Derrida relation, see the web project from Spring 2007's course Between Levinas and Derrida. (A few are reproduced on this site, by the way.)]
So, this is an abstract rendering of a tension that is, for Derrida, constitutive of political life itself. A concrete site for seeing this problematic: Gustavo Gutierrez’s conception of solidarity in A Theology of Liberation, as well as On Job. (Hey! to the people from Latin American Political Philosophy!) Gutierrez makes a simple argument, beginning with the claim that we are called to solidarity with the poor. That means that we who are called to the poor – a relation of justice, not law – are also called to transform our sense of subjectivity. Rather than instruct the poor, we listen and respond. This puts the social Other (the poor) in the first position; the poor are neither called to conform to the laws of the country (their demands are extra-legal, and so all the more powerful) nor to my conception of justice. This relation of listening and response moves outside the law in order to attend to injustice – that site in which justice makes its ultimate appeal to us.
The problem – and this is the question of decision in the face of the undecidable – is how we are to understand our action in response to this listening. Is it in order to change law? To institute another legal order? Or simply to interrupt and destabilize the political and legal order? Surely liberation means change. But Gutierrez, and he’d have an interesting companion in Derrida, argues that liberation in a process in constant flux and renewal, for there are always those outside the law whose faces call us to justice. In this site and with this companion, we have to think of the law as in constant question and in constant revision, all the while keeping in front of us the need for law – a deconstructed law, always aporeitic and always put in question by justice. Put in question and destabilized, that is, by those singular Others whose suffering calls us outside the legal order.
A quick addendum: the Gutierrez case underscores the refusal of putting equality in first position. It is not that the poor are unfairly treated by the law and need fairness (equality). That would be a discourse of center-margin, where the margin needs to be allowed or facilitated back into the center. The poor, for Gutierrez, is a discourse of subalternity – a discourse about those wholly outside the center-margin tension.
Outside this relation of center-margin, the poor do not and even cannot invoke law as equality in their obliging me in an openness to solidarity. Rather, the poor accuse from outside the system and draw me into this space of inequality. I answer to the poor. We do not dialogically or dialectically negotiate a middle space. The very notion that I “answer to the poor” operates on a logic of unequal relations; I listen and respond, or perhaps even just begin the process of learning how to listen to the poor in order that I may put myself in their service.
At this point, Gutierrez is exactly onto the logic of a justice that destabilizes law. In fact, I’d argue, it is a case of a deconstruction of law from justice.
Later, on to what it would mean to think about decision…but that’s for next week!
John (or someone who took the Levinas/Derrida class), could you point me to a work where Levinas lays out this conception of justice as listening to what the singular Other asks of me? It would be nice background and resolve some of my uneasiness about how Derrida describes justice, I think.
I think the comparison you make to Gutierrez is really interesting. I remember last semester (in the Latin American Political Philosophy class) I tried to conceive of Utopia as a society where there is no subaltern. However, that might of course be impossible. But the fact that it is impossible plays nicely into Derrida’s idea (from what I got out of last class) that everything is perpetually deconstructed, destablizied, and changed – Utopia is an idea there to keep us pushing for progress even if we never actually reach the “conclusion”.
Then of course I get insecure about the meaning of “progress” when talking about a task that never has a conclusion (which would seem to make talking about progress rather silly). But that’s another topic.
Jay, and others interested in this, I’ll post a text or two by Levinas that might help. In particular, there is Levinas’ essay on Paul Celan in the collection (by Levinas) Proper Names. In that essay, Levinas develops just a bit – very interesting – the idea of utopia.
For Levinas, utopia is the space of justice, but with a key qualification: utopia is not a dreamed or fantasized space. Rather, utopia is read in terms of its original signification in the Greek, that is, being-out-of-place. The order of the world is out-of-place, utopian in that sense. And so we are called by that out-of-placeness into relations of obligation – to respond to the just call of those put out of place (the dis-placed, quite literally) in the world.
In that sense, Levinas and Gutierrez meet on this point: the displaced are the center of the world concerned with justice, yet, at the moment we turn to that center, the world as we know it becomes untenable and falls apart. Justice is therefore the instigator of social revolution, whatever form that revolution might take.
I’d recommend checking out the secondary source project from last semester’s Between Levinas and Derrida course. Good stuff there, great way to get started:
http://hacu259.wordpress.com
I hope this helps a bit.