V—
Justice without Violence?
I would agree that we have, as Adorno says, undoubtedly thinking of Benjamin's "Theses," an imperative responsibility to "contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption": an obligation to envision—and make visible in a negative dialectic—perspectives" that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light."[128] But will we, can we, know the difference between messianic visions of justice and the false visions against which Benjamin warns us—the visions, namely, of "seers whose visions appear to them over corpses"?[129]
Heidegger refuses to exclude absence from the realm of what is recognized and seen as present (AX 37, H 323). This may be read as an implicit call for justice. But he nevertheless questions the standard way of interpreting and translating Anaximander's word,
we usually translate
by "penalty". This leads us to translateas "to pay". Whatever lingers awhile in presence pays penalty; it expends this as its punishment ().
And then he remarks, assuming first an ironic tone, then a more serious tone:
The court of justice [Der Gerichtshof ] is complete. It lacks nothing, not even injustice—though of course no one rightly knows what might constitute injustice. (AX 45, H 330)
If one juxtaposes Benjamin's sentence about the seer's prophetic vision of the "criminal courts of justice," quoted at the beginning of our reflections on his thought, and these last two se1ntences of Heidegger, where he turns his gaze from
courts of justice in our world, a certain provocative and intriguing entrechoc might be said to occur. Yet, in the end, both want to call into question not only the conventional institutions of justice, problematizing the claims of those who believe that they know very well what justice and injustice are, but also all the utopian visions of justice that have been handed down by the philosophers in useless and dangerous enthusiasms.
Of course, it must be noted that
Speaking of the confusion that has accompanied the oblivion of being, Heidegger asks: "What mortal can fathom the abyss [Abgrund ] of this confusion?" And he follows this question with an apocalyptic warning reminiscent of Nietzsche:
We may try to shut our eyes before this abyss. We may entertain one delusion after another. The abyss does not vanish. (AX 57, H 343)
For Heidegger, then, our institutions of justice must be held in suspense over the abyss—and the greatest danger comes from forgetting the radical anarchy, the more radical justice, that must be allowed to pass sentence on them from out of its reserve. Just as truth as correctness is "grounded" in the deconstructive, totality-defying anarchy of
But it is when our eyes turn back to the immediate injustices of the world, after gazing into the fragments of Western civilization, looking for the revealing traces that might spell a secret of hope for the coming of a redeeming justice; or when our eyes turn back to the world after a "moment of vision" that has already seen the ruin of all political institutions spelled out in the
the world and its history of suffering, that the extreme difference between Heidegger and Benjamin is most pronounced. When it comes to the political meaning of the justice their respective gazes would make visible, there is ultimately no way that I can see to mediate and reconcile their visions. Both philosophers attempted to think, and themselves see with, a vision released from the historical time and memory of a metaphysics complicitous in the repetitions of violence that rage within the social world. And yet, as Caygill has argued with compelling logic, despite the abstractness that sometimes weakens Benjamin's own dialectical perspectives, it would be difficult to deny that his constellations of memory-images are "awakening" and "motivating" in a way that Heidegger's attempts at a visionary recollection which would release us from the spell of our captivity in the present have neither conceived nor desired.
It is Adorno's conviction that "to gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects . . . is alone the task of thought."[130] It may be easy to concur with this suggestion. But will we ever learn to see justice purely, as what Benjamin once wanted to call pure mediacy—without violence?
Even if we hold, with Heidegger, that
One can imagine Benjamin taking up this question by returning to Anaximander's words and finding in them, as Heidegger did, the first moment of an extremely difficult meditation on justice—a moment of thought described with exquisite precision by Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg, when he wrote, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen , that
das Chaos muß in jeder Dichtung durch den regelmäßigen Flor der Ordnung schimmern [in each poetic statement, chaos must shimmer through the veil of regular order].[131]
Doesn't the chaos of an impossible, but absolutely imperative sentence of justice persistently shimmer through the words of Anaximander's saying? But the question that puts us in question returns, returning again and
again, for the justice of fate can never abrogate or efface the justice of our responsibility. At stake is our responsibility, as Heidegger and Benjamin understood, for a justice no longer hostage to the serial orders of time and history that have served relations of domination among beings: a justice which can only belong to messianic time. At stake, then, is the possibility of our return to the paradoxical experience of an originary temporality outside conventional time, other than eschatological time, gathering before the gaze its barely visible indications, its oldest promise, of a justice so long denied—the justice of a past that has never been present, a future that has already happened, a present always still to come. This is what we need somehow to see. Justice for the other in the ruins of domination. Justice for the other in the ruins of revenge. Untimely justice. Right now!
For there is no Enlightenment other than the one [still] to be thought.
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship
The Vanity of Compassion
How can one still have ideals when there are so many blind, deaf, and mad people in the world? How can I without remorse enjoy the light another cannot see or the sound another cannot hear? I feel like a thief of light. Have we not stolen light from the blind and sound from the deaf? Isn't our very lucidity responsible for the madman's darkness?
Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair