it requires something of us in time, on time. The demand is articulated in the present tense: we demand action on climate justice right now, in the name of the future (in this case), or in the name of damage done in the past (reparations). The demand, though, is paradoxical in at least this sense—that whatever we do or imagine doing in response to the demand for justice is not held to what justice is now, when it is demanded of us or when we demand it of another or of ourselves; now, when we can articulate what we believe is just just now; now, when we are doing justice by doing what we represent to ourselves as just. Instead, whatever we are doing when we are doing justice to the demand is held to the standard of what justice will have been just now. A different tense makes itself felt just here. Once upon a time, I say, “A different tense makes itself felt,” or “Once upon a time, a different tense will have made itself felt.” I might say that the storyteller tells the story of the perpetual battle between these different tenses, and that the storyteller’s story is just, or does justice, to the degree that no tense triumphs, or becomes the story’s protagonist.
This is all rather allegorical, so let me be clearer as I move to close.
Recall the questions that lie behind Pablo Oyarzun’s title, the questions of what it means to “do justice” and to “demand justice.” “Doing justice” translates the expression hacer justicia, which in Castilian or Chilean Spanish is an infinitive expression: “to do justice.” In Spanish the infinitive lends itself to substantivization more easily than the English does—we say el hacer justicia, “the doing justice” or “the to do justice”—and can make that noun the subject of a clause like es imposible el hacer justicia, “the doing of justice is impossible,” which can be shorn of the pronoun to leave es imposible hacer justicia, a common nominal clause.
Of the philosophically non-trivial differences between the verbs hacer and “to do” remark just these two.
We say hacer in Spanish when we speak of making something—its etymology links it to the Latin facere, to produce, create, fabricate. The relation between facere and what is made, factum, and what is fabricated, fictio (< fingere), is well enough known—“fact” and “fiction,” hecho and hechura, this last the Castilian version of poiema, a “fashioning”; for example, man is God’s poem in Ephesians 2:10. Is justice, then, something hecho, something that is made, fashioned? Is justice a fashioning, a construction—contingent, made out of this or that material in someone’s hands at this moment, and out of something different, in another’s hands at another moment? Is justice different as it travels from hand to hand, or as the word travels from mouth to mouth, from one storyteller’s mouth to another’s? Is justice thus something that can be unfashioned, something of the order of the deconstructible? If justice can be hecha, it can be deshecha, when for instance un desfacedor de agravios like don Quixote is asked to undo an injustice that had appeared to some, at some time, to be justice. We are accustomed to granting that law is made or fabricated; about justice, though, the stories we tell are mixed. Justice is divine, a deity; it is irreducible and undeconstructible; it is the condition on which the law stands and the standard to which laws are held. A law can be unjust—and we will petition for redress, seek to change it, or seek to pass another, a just law. To refuse to obey an unjust law, though, puts us into contravention, not just of a law, but of justice—and this, at least, Socrates will not do. Are we ready to characterize this solemn principle as a fabrication? Even, tendentially, as fiction?
Note also this.
Hacer, I said, is infinitive. “Doing” justice, in English, speaks to us of dynamics in the present, of a present progressiveness: it is what we are, or should be, doing. Justice, as Pablo Oyarzun showed us, is not done; maybe justice is never done; it is imperfective, imperfectible. But the expression “doing justice” exists notwithstanding—we understand, roughly, imperfectly, what it means now, or what it is meaning. It is in the doing of justice that justice is poorly, unjustly imagined, or named, or presented. Let’s flip the poor phrase: justice is presented in doing justice. We should maybe even intensify the paradox: justice is just what is presented in doing justice. When we lose the passive we are almost in the familiar, cold grip of tautology: we do justice when we do justice. Doing justice regarding this or that circumstance also does the “justice” to which our doing justice will then refer. It also “does” the work of making that to which the word “justice” will refer.
When we ask what it means to do justice, we immediately ask after the matter of tense: doing justice does what we will refer to when we say that we are doing, will be doing, or have done justice.
We are onto something here, in English, that bears on the definition of justice, and Pablo Oyarzun helps us to it, helps us see what English does—and what the Spanish infinitive hacer does not do. We might say: Pablo Oyarzun’s reading, in English translation, from his Spanish, of Benjamin’s German about the translation into German by Johannes von Guenther from the Russian of Nikolai Leskov helps do justice to what English is doing whenever “doing” translates hacer; and it helps us see where Spanish fails to do justice.
Now remember Pablo Oyarzun’s summary definition of the character of the story with regard to Justice: “The righteous character of storytelling consists in giving an account of the happening of the singular, that is, in giving an account of what is singular in its happening” (p. 105). That giving an account should precede something that is “substantive in itself” seems necessary to this taking account of the singular, inasmuch as the singular here is of the order of the event. Now, when we put the evental question “how” before the substantive question “who,” and even before the question “what is this justice that’s to be done?,” we are not just deferring the ethical register: we may be destroying its classic shape—the shape in which an action is taken by a subject who attends to experience and circumstances, understands them, acts upon that understanding, and is thus responsible to circumstance and experience. In the beginning was the act, the how—before the subject and experience take on substance, even the substance of a name. Our tenses come into rhythm—from the how of the beginning, in the beginning, in the perfect past; to the present, when we say “Now, at this moment, I take account of the beginning, or ‘I’ takes account of the beginning and begins, as ‘I,’ and can become responsible for what ‘I’ does, justly, in view of reparation or restitution in the future.” But this beginning that allows me, I, to begin, is also the end, the destruction of the classical ethical register: the expression dar cuenta also means something like “to put paid” or, as the hoary Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua puts it, [D]ar cuenta de algo, Dar fin de algo destruyéndolo o malgastándolo, to end or terminate something by destroying it or using it unwisely. The last turn of Pablo Oyarzun’s Doing Justice allows us to imagine how the narrative destruction that flows from placing the how of doing justice before its substance may be translated into a strange, estranged ethical register. Darse cuenta is the story of how one gives oneself a story before there is someone to receive it and before the story concerns anything substantive: the ethical register of the “ante-predicative.” We have moved from offering a representation, an account, an allegory of justice to the much more unsettling realization that doing justice is allegory. What must concern us, in the wake of Pablo Oyarzun’s readings of Benjamin, is the translation of justice as allegory into effective social action: the production of political subjectivities on the great avenues of Santiago, on the streets of Los Angeles, even here, always now.
Notes
1 My epigraphs, in order, are from Bolivar Echeverría, Ensayos Politicos, ed. Fernando Tinajero (Quito: Ministerio de Coordinación de la Política y Gobiernos Autónomos Descentralizados, 2011), 210: ¿Pero estamos, en verdad, en medio de la realización del deber ser, como lo pretende el discurso histórico de los vencedores? ¿Si pasamos la mano sobre el relato bien peinado de esa historia, pero lo hacemos a contrapelo, como recomendaba Walter benjamin, no resultará, tal vez, que lo que ella tiene por “excepciones”—excepciones