of what the storyteller recounts: the Spanish verb is contar cuenta. And it is as though, at the close of Oyarzun’s Doing Justice, this account of a telling, this reckoning of telling, has a twist: Es como si… en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta. It is as though, in its style, it—but what? Or who?—were realizing, becoming aware, of what the essay itself attributes to the story. The work became its daemon. Darse cuenta: to realize, to come into reckoning with, though reflexively: dar-se, to give oneself the reckoning.
I’ll come back to these two sentences, but take away from them this: first, the uncomfortable joining of attention to singularity with the exemplary severity with which the “righteous” pay that attention, the exemplary severity of the bearer of the sword of justice. And, second, the essay’s drift from taking account to giving oneself, or itself, the reckoning. This movement, this drift, is a figure of coming to awareness or noticing. Its span is not forty years long; this drift, this movement, is to be accomplished in and by means of Doing Justice: it is, indeed, the condition on which justice is done. But the caesura between these two moments also blocks—opens an unbridgeable gulf between—the force of a law based on taking account, on empiricism, on nature and noting and a form of justice based on giving an account of oneself.12
Oyarzun begins with the observation that Benjamin’s concern “is the destruction of experience as a result of the unfolding, in modernity, of technology that culminates in war.” He says:
The development of the argument of “The Storyteller” offers convincing proof … that Benjamin considers the process of destruction compendiously. It is not a type of experience, but rather experience itself that is devastated by this process. But with this devastation something that belongs to the core of experience itself seems to get irremissibly lost, something that artisanal storytelling continues to protect like a dear treasure, something that is not substantive in itself but has the subtlety of a disposition, of fortitude and care, of attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit). This something is the vocation of justice that inspires storytelling. [Ese algo es la vocación de justicia que anima a la narración.] (Chapter 3, p. 76; my emphasis)
I hardly need to underscore the urgency that beats here, which Oyarzun reads clearly in Benjamin’s words. “Never,” writes Benjamin at the beginning of “The Storyteller,”
has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Harry Zohn’s translation)
The “field of force of destructive torrents and explosions” acutely assaulted and definitively changed the soldiers who were traveling home from World War I’s battlefields. The “destruction of experience” of which war is a type—the bloodiest, the most acute—is, for Benjamin, modernity’s condition and result. It is the condition on which capital trades accelerated consumption for use and habitation; and it is the effect of that trade. Planetary war—by which we now mean suicidal war with the planet, with the environment—is the evident successor to world wars, bloodier still, more acute even than the most acute of world wars. And, in a way that speaks both to the problem of scale—that is, to the terrible problem of the relation between justice and scale—and to the problem of kind—that is, to the terrible logic of the symbolic and material inequality of the “tiny, fragile” bodies, things, and creatures “under the open sky”—this planetary war is more unjust still than even the exterminating wars that make up human history.
Hence the urgency of the questions how justice is to be done and how justice is to be demanded.
We want first a practical answer; we want something that is “substantive in itself,” as Oyarzun writes (p. 76), and, if not that, we want at least a pronoun, an indication. Who will do justice—the prophet, the philosopher, the lawmaker, the activist, the storyteller? Who demands it, in whose name, and what will we be redressing, remediating, distributing?
But Benjamin and Oyarzun slow us down, in ways that my response here and now is unable, for practical reasons, to do more than note.
Just what is “the vocation of justice,” la vocación de justicia, that inspires or animates storytelling? A vocation is, of course, a calling. It is generally felt as an inner call, though this calling somehow chimes with a different sort of voice; and this chiming, this rhyming of the inner voice that calls me to something with a profession or a task, this chiming of my inner voice with something of a different order is what makes my vocation different from an appetite, for example, or from my desire, or from a whim. It is what distinguishes vocation from what in Castilian Spanish we’d call un capricho. I mentioned that I may feel called to a profession or to a task. I will say that teaching is my vocation, or that translating is the task to which I am called. When I attend to the call of my vocation I take account both of what is interior to me, which is of the order of what I want or fancy; and also of what, other than what is subjective in me and for me, rhymes with it but is of a different order. If I attend doubly in this way, I will have rhymed myself with, or also attended to, what is other than myself. I won’t call this vocation of the other than myself “objective” or “transcendental,” although we might say that the term “vocation” takes account of both. I’ll say that I will have rhymed myself with what is other than myself by taking account of what is other than my voice to myself, other than my conscience; that I will have brought myself to rhyme. And sometimes I will follow one rather than the other of these sketchily defined voices, and eventually find myself in the wrong profession, or performing a task that is not my calling.
Now, to answer to any vocation, it would seem, is to take account of what calls me other than my voice in me—the vocation to be a teacher, the call to become a translator. If it is not to be my whim, then any vocation takes account of what is other than my voice in me. But how will I know that my vocation is not just whim, or fancy? What I called “my voice in me,” my conscience or my desire inasmuch as these are subjective expressions, speaks to me now; but whatever it is that rhymes with it speaks out of that time, in a different tense. When I act on my desire but in time to the time of the vocation of the other in me, I’m bringing my now into rhyme, rhythmically, with a different time. I fancy now, but my vocation proves itself in the event; its tense is perfective.
This, I think, is generally true, whether I’m attending to the call of justice or to that of a profession—the call to nurse, to care, to be a payer of attention, to teach, to tell stories, what have you. But the vocation of justice is also of a different order again: it is not a type of taking account of what is other in me; the vocation of justice is not a profession among others except in the sense that to be called into justice and to respond is to profess.
Rather, justice is this taking account of what is other than me in me: it is the structure of all and any vocation. Justice is responsible to what is perfectly expressed now, my desire, and to what remains perfective.
To ask how justice is to be done now, today, in desperate urgency, when we are threatened by the “devastation” of experience, is to ask how we take account of what is other than ourselves in ourselves: so Benjamin says, as Pablo Oyarzun explains. “But with this devastation something that belongs to the core of experience itself seems to get irremissibly lost.” And now, faced with this “devastation,” “artisanal storytelling continues to protect [the vocation of justice] like a dear treasure.” This “vocation,” Oyarzun’s Benjamin says, “is not substantive in itself but has the subtlety of a disposition, of fortitude and care, of attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit)” (p. 76).
“Narration and Justice.” Perhaps this would be a way into (an Introduction to) a response to Doing Justice—the acknowledgment or the hypothesis of a special relation