This Keynote lecture was delivered at the History for Peace annual conference titled 'The Idea of Justice' in Calcutta on August 3, 2023.
In your generous introduction you have claimed that I have revolutionized the study of South Asia, yet there is nothing less true than that statement. If anybody knows this, then it is Prof. Thapar sitting at the back. I am not a South Asianist. I am, rather, a Europeanist who studies post-Hegelian and contemporary theories of interpretation. I have not revolutionized the study of South Asia. In fact, I remember Romila scolding me once for having written nonsense on South Asia, and that truly consolidated our friendship. I would like to be identified as a cynic, as Naveen [Kishore] described. I do not speak from the humane point of view because I am not a big fan of the human being. So you will have to bear with me for having no big words for the human.
I am situated in the humanities, a field misnamed, for which I have to inhabit a house which is not mine. But my feeling after teaching the humanities for several decades is that, when taught like the humanities, if other disciplines produce knowledge and ideas, then the humanities teach the practice of learning.
It is often said that talking the talk is easy, and then claiming to be walking the walk is even easier. That is what the humanities try to combat. It is difficult to speak or keynote only on the idea of justice. Ideas, because they are one, don’t help us in the long or short run. What the humanities would really look at is a sense of justice, which is rather different from an idea. Again, the word ‘sense’ in English and German have a very long history which is really a correction of the idea that we can access ideas to help us go forth. Ideas are too pure to follow, and so we turn them into a sense and so thinking justice becomes cultural. This is easier done than said. Is it necessary to be institutionally educated in order to have a sense of justice? No, just to talk about it publishably as expository prose rather than testimony.
This is not to philosophize the idea of justice, for I am not a philosopher, although I do admire the first philosophies of the world which ask questions on the meaning of the human, of history, of justice, of the future, and so on. But the question here is, whether we institutionally educated folks can follow the line where Sinne—sense—corrected the idea that we could have ideas which could produce significations in turn, giving us systems that could then be followed to bring justice into the world? Hence, justice is to be looked at as a cultural practice.
Even at variance with the ideas, one could think of the entire idea of the tradition of justice through Rawls and Amartya Sen, who are representatives of a certain kind of authority in the thinking of justice today. Although unintentionally, they do reveal the situation where they have to take it for granted that the readers are themselves dispensers of justice. Therefore, in their writing, they never ask who dispenses justice, because it is assumed that the readers do so. This is a certain kind of cultural practice inherent to the British-German position of producing coherent ideas about justice.
Rawls keeps correcting himself to produce the best theory of justice. But when the best theory has been produced, problems arise regarding who uses this theory. This is why I keep repeating that justice should always be seen as a cultural practice. We think of the idea of justice by following certain predefined rules about how to think ideas. A particular edition or the revised edition which is better than the previous edition, and multiple footnotes, do not offer the best theory, as Rawls claims, except through a predetermined set of pedagogic and publicational rules. Therefore, that’s where I want to begin with a sense of justice.
The idea of justice is transcendental and not supernatural. Immanuel Kant writes about this at great length in The Critique of Pure Reason because transcendental is often misunderstood as supernatural. In other words, you must assume something but you cannot really account for it. There is the transcendental. Justice can’t be proved, there is no reason that anything should be just. You cannot, for example, provide any proof that human beings have inalienable rights. On the other hand, in order to move forward, it is necessary to assume certain things without being able to prove them. These are legal fictions; and in the cultural practices of justice, justice is one such. That’s the sense, not the idea.
For me, most things are like that. When I think of the English word, that’s what it is—not what is justice, but a way of thinking justice, as it were, and this transcendental assumption of justice. That’s where my title comes from: It is just that there be law, but law is not justice. This is a line from Derrida. I have not used this to point at him but to emphasize the importance of reading—and not writing down everything I say, so that you can spot any citation I use. My understanding of the sense of reading is that it is like a relay race. You take the baton, make yourself worthy of running the relay and take whatever the man or woman is saying to somewhere else. Activist history is a relay race. This is the humanities, the practice of learning. That’s where I come from. That’s why I’m thinking that justice is a cultural practice.
Before I begin with the explanation of the title, I wish to say that, by way of this lecture, I am asking educators to educate themselves. There exists a pertinent question as to who will educate the educators. This too is a citation—from Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach: Who will educate the educators? Marx said this and Engels constantly revised it. I have often been asked why I use ‘overthrow’—Umwälzung in German—when Marx used Revolution which means ‘revolution’. This is due to Engels’ revisions. He would revise ‘sense of justice’ into ‘idea of justice’, as he systematically turned overturning into revolution in the business of educating the educators. Marx repeatedly corrected him, because he believed that the difference between teacher and student should remain; it cannot be revolutioned out. It is a difference that is practical and adheres to common sense. When it is abused as power, then the effort of running the relay of educating the educators disappears.
Anyway, I took Derrida’s remark as a kind of invitation for that relay—take it somewhere else. So when he says ‘law is not justice’, it means that, a law being passed is a very good thing but it’s not justice. You pass a law and then you have to enforce it and this enforcement comes through a certain kind of internalized class prejudice. There are some who can follow the law and others need to be enforced upon to follow it. It’s a class prejudice, gender prejudice, and all other kinds of things. And once enforced, you have to acknowledge the loopholes. In case of cyber politics today, one makes law after law yet there is loophole after loophole. Though not in the case of rape politics and bribe politics, where the law enforcers are ill-educated, so they too are a part of class discrimination.
And owing to this class apartheid in education, I’m talking about educating the educators all over the world in order to distinguish that the idea of justice brokenly translates into various kinds of cultural practice. So quite often, because of the way the hands-on and on-ground enforcers mete out justice, whenever you think of the sense of justice, you think about difference. You don’t go to the theories of justice, the idea of justice, where things are unified for you. It’s convenient, you must have them, but immediately teach your students to break it. Break it not in order to reject it but to show the limits of unified ideas and theories of justice. Therefore, unification is good, but it is a methodological necessity for us. It doesn’t reflect the way we make the idea accountable.
For example, I was recently publicly humiliated at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A colleague took the risk of explaining away the grounds of humiliation, and the humiliator threatened her: nanga kar dunga. I will strip you naked. We thought of the recent cases of the collective punishment of tribal women stripped, and I thought of the globally diversified senses of gendered stripping as the cultural sense of justice.
Unification is necessary but without transgressing it you can’t go forward. This is our limitation. This is why, although reason, the instrument for putting together ideas, is our strongest weapon, it has its limits. If you have children, you know it. If you are lawyers, you know it. It is the most powerful instrument, but it is also limiting. To an extent, you break it when you teach your students to break it immediately.
As a person of language and comparative literature, I can say that the sense of justice may be dependent upon not only your mother tongue—that is quite easy—but also the wealth of the world’s languages, ranging from the extraordinary languages in Africa to those mnemic languages that are wrongly called oral. Although naming is necessary, it is impossible to do so in a unified manner when considering the idea of justice possibly translated into many languages as practiced by gendered folks not necessarily vehicles of the institutional customization that we call education. It is necessary, yet impossible. Not to say that it is bad because it is impossible, but it is connected somewhere with the transcendental. Therefore, law is not justice; for the idea of justice is transcendental, an a priori that synthesizes humanity.
On the other hand, there is a way in which you fight this impossibility. You don’t just give it away or declare that it’s impossible. The impossibility is an invitation to an active relay. That’s why I say to the high-school teachers here that it is very important to teach this, especially to the English-medium high schools in Calcutta and outside. English-medium high schools are the starting points of class prejudice. It might not be strong or deliberate, yet it exists, especially when the students think of being dispensers of justice themselves. When they have access to English as a class, they should learn it. Not be patronizing towards the Dalits but sympathize with them as fellow human beings—that’s not what I am talking about. I stress this idea that the sense of justice is moving us towards something that is necessary, which is the passing of good laws. But it is impossible to secure justice by passing good laws. Passing of good laws, then, is both necessary and impossible with respect to upholding justice.
When I was in the ethics committee of the World Economic Forum, before it ceased to exist, I often had conversations about business degrees teaching legalized cheating where you can’t strive for a change, to which my friends would say that it could be possible but in another world. Yet they made it possible by fitting it into knowledge management. The surveys we take where we rate from one to five in ascending order of our preference actually produce statistics and knowledge management. Through those conclusions, they decide that another world is possible and congratulate themselves—they tell us about the statistics of 16 million schools and congratulate themselves. So, to an extent, this idea that meting out justice is possible and we can collectively do so is also an aspect I intend to address through the title. Legality through knowledge management abdicates the transcendentality of justice.
Nonetheless, what do we do in the humanities? We try to rearrange desires. That takes time. The humanities rearrange desires, not change minds because you can’t change minds—that will have to be god. Although, money can change minds, humanities teaching cannot do so. It can only rearrange desires to a certain extent. And in order for that you have to work very hard to have a sense of what desires roughly might be in the group you are looking at. We can only try to rearrange desires to make folks think that law is normal—not that we must obey the law, but that law is normal. But then, law disappears as law. This is the training in the practice of wanting equality for other people, which again is a transcendental thing. It’s not just about liberty for me but also equality for other people. Achieving this is hard. Other people who don’t resemble me, or may not be good people, or might be thieves and dogs and rapists—it is impossible to unify the idea of justice for all but necessary at the same time.
The other side, another example of justice as cultural practice, even when it is totally at variance with the idea, is the vocational justification of the Hindu past—Brahmins used to teach, Kayasthas had a clerical profession and so on. Such vocational justification of caste is a cultural practice of injustice, even when it is at variance with what the justification shows us. In places like the Silicon Valley and Bay Area in the United States, most of the people are caste-Hindus—mostly Brahmin—who have graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. This data is substantiated by an anthropological study performed at the University of Minnesota. In the United States we keep complaining that there is racism against us, by identifying with white folks. So the idea of vocational justification of caste at its origin is also one of those examples of cultural practice.
In the second part of the essay from which this title is indebted—‘Force of Law’—Derrida, who was a Sephardic Jew having certain kinds of difficulties in France, and not just an analytical philosopher who never thinks that he or she himself is a philosophizing human being, wrote that if one pushed Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ to its consequences, it would be indistinguishable from Hitler’s ‘final solution’.[1] Here we have to remember that, although Sir Francis Bacon said that revenge is a kind of wild justice, in reality, justice and revenge often become indistinguishable.[2] This too falls within the sense of justice. The sense of justice here is: a justification for my life’s injustices that may well be indistinguishable from revenge? Varied justices, all kinds of language-located justices, justice as cultural practice can be related to Raymond Williams’ point, in his Marxism and Literature, that every moment of cultural practice is something like a collective dance.[3] There is a dominant, and the dominant is the idea of justice, especially in the imperial languages that unify. Since all the wealth of languages divide, the big imperial languages must be used, and it is necessary but impossible to get justice through them alone for one and all. So you must break it. That doesn’t mean we introduce the vaadi, samvaadi and vivaadi which the English language doesn’t have, and declare that we are decolonizing the discourse of justice. While it is true that I am speaking more from the vivaadi angle of establishing things by breaking idea into (the cultural practices of) sense, it doesn’t mean I am decolonizing anything. (An aside here: sustained and persistent decolonizing would involve regulating capital, ultimately interrogating, again persistently, the Anthropocene itself. Justice as not-quite-not-law enforced?)
The idea of this sense of justice can be understood from the situation where justice is indistinguishable from revenge. So for each situation, many of which you will not be able to access justice, because you are yourself trapped within. I am not able to access this, but I can think this—that is called the imagination. I have suffered for 40 years because I dared to introduce the fictive imagination into a very silo-like understanding of history as the production of truth. And so I should know what happens when the imagination is allowed in. This is also part of my title. I didn’t write it just to go and read Derrida.
And I will say, therefore, to the high-school teachers, that adolescence is when the students are drawing close to voting. Because of access to English of various kinds, and multiplicity of intentions, most of these children only want to be financially successful, which puts forward a benign family value and expression of the fact that the basic human affect is greed. But this is a very vulnerable population. The national or state curriculum can be taught in the old and bad way of memorizing. But in class, do not teach them a survey. Because that’s the way to stop thinking and begin citing. In this way, they will produce other-endorsed senses of justice. Today we need to think that we are being played by planetary justice in front of which human accountability is trivial and non-existent. Our adolescent students must learn this in every way. If there is anything like a general cultural practice (still broken by the wealth of languages), this is it. Beyond imagination, planetary justice begins when one creature that we call human makes more than it needs and thus starts destroying what exists as such.
Marx knew that the difference between good and bad can be perceived through the fact that human beings make more than they need. State formations made Marxism into a formula—hence, Marx and Engels say in the 1872 Introduction to The Communist Manifesto that the revolution parts of that text are outdated because, in the last 25 years, between 1848 and 1872, big business has gone, so far that all that has been said in the revolution section has become useless. Therefore, when Marxist ideals are taken to be a unified formula—which is not impossible to do—you get totalitarianism. So, to an extent, it ignores the senses of justice. Mao Zedong tried to do it by a quick cultural revolution, so justice as cultural practice would be communistic, but of course he could not accomplish it, for it can only be done through a persistent rearrangement of desire of a collective composed of individuals. That would supplement the idea-based inclination to totalitarianism. To supplement is to question the totality of any system by identifying a lacuna which the supplement attempts to fit as exactly as possible, indefinitely.
So it is in imperial-language high schools that the remote consequence of planetary justice begins. The imperative today is to reimagine the possibility of a monstrous future. We are now being played out by greater planetary narratives. Human accountability is way short of trivial. In the context of that, everything is impossible, but as long as we are alive, there’s the other necessary part which is: knowing that it is seriously impossible. One of the extraordinary things about ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’ by Mahasweta Devi is that she is one of the very few people—there are other literary folks imagining—who distinguish between the fact that although planetary justice will be extinct anyway and is impossible, it is necessary also for us to strive towards it.[4] Nationalism divides and India will not achieve anything by way of exceptionalism—as prophesied by current political figures. Phrases such as ‘One World’ and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is my family) hold no meaning except as ideas. It is within this context that Mahasweta Devi in ‘Pterodactyl’ distinguishes between the fact that pterodactyl’s extinction is due to planetary or global law, rather than cosmic law; at the same time, Puran Sahay must do human things. The Sea Wall, a 1950s novel by Marguerite Duras, distinguishes between two kinds of planetary justice: possible; and necessary but impossible.[5]
We have to realize that just a little restraining of our greed is not going to do anything. One has to have the power and force of imagination. When Marx was writing about the possibility of social justice, he spoke of a form, the value-form, which is empty, contentless—inhaltslos. This was because you can measure everything by the value form—it is the general possibility of measurement. Workers can combat capitalism if they perceive the sum of private labour in the value-form, that is, labour power. At the same time, he is so moved by the fact that demands such as private labour and private suffering be denied in preparing for this combat, that he writes in Section IV of Chapter 1 of the first volume of Das Kapital that one must also forget that everything must become like a single form, or exist in the value form. And the only time that Marx describes the content of revolution and not the form is in 1852, after he witnessed the revolution of 1848. Marx was 30 years old during the 1848 revolution. While he describes the content of the proletarian revolution of the nineteenth century, he says, ‘It will take its content from the poetry of the future.’ The impossibility of being able to do it now cannot be ignored. Justice as cultural practice: tragedy, farce, dance, poetry.
In one of Aesop’s Fables, ‘The Boasting Traveller’, the traveller claimed to have leapt great distances while at Rhodes and that eyewitnesses would bear testimony to this. A listener promptly replied, ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta’—this is Rhodes, jump here. This is the example of false promise, a failure. Such promises are impossible to be fulfilled, yet necessary to be made. This is how Marx describes the imperatives of the proletarian revolution in the Eighteenth Brumaire. This is the idea of justice I put forward: A sense of justice that is divided, refraining from teaching surveys and encouraging intellectual labour. It has to be kept in mind that malpractice/misuse of the idea of justice is the beginning of class prejudice, people taking over the right to help others, and thus subalternize the people below through legalized cheating. This cultural practice divided against itself is not what the idea of justice or the sense of justice stands for.
Question and Answer Session
GCS: Let me just say: this concept of vaadi, samvaadi, going into mother tongue, etc., and calling it decolonization, is the worst among so-called diasporics, so I’m glad you are the first one to ask a question. Carry on.
Audience Member 1: I am Subhradeep, a graduate student at Rutgers. My question is: if we understand idea by imagination—I am thinking of the word ‘Begriff’ when you speak about ‘sense’—is there a suggestion that imagination should overpower justice—akin to culture—to the extent that the meaning of justice as culture is turned around from the inside?
Audience Member 2: I am Satish. I have been an educator formally for ten years now. I am a visiting faculty at the Department of English at Ashoka University. As an educator, what I repeatedly confront is a sense of despair. So I was wondering if this sense of justice accommodates an empathy for despair as well.
Audience Member 3: My name is Akhila and I am a high-school teacher from Chennai. I teach in an English-medium school and my students mostly come from well-off backgrounds. There is not much disparity; by and large, their backgrounds are uniform. The question I have is: How do I help them and help myself understand the connection between entitlement, one’s own capacity and justice, as people who are quite privileged?
GSC: There’s nothing wrong with English medium. I adore English. You think I would’ve taught English for so long if I would have never loved it? And when I teach here, among the landless illiterates—the tapsilis and adivasis (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes)—I teach them to love English by pointing out the immense range of just 26 letters that can create different sounds simply by positioning the vowels differently. You would need to love English in an extra-moral sense. And this, for me, is a way to undermine the fact that English is a class privilege—not by rejecting English because that would be like committing suicide. In today’s world, you have to acknowledge that English is a mother tongue and as a language, altogether well elaborated. This is why the English language is learnt and lexicalized by people who don’t know English. Tribals would rather say ‘harassment’ than nirjaton, although they understand the English word as little as the elite Bengali. Mahasweta Devi’s ‘conter’—encounter or death in police custody without charge—is another example of lexicalization. Such lexicalizations are important but so is standard English. It’s no use saying that Indian English is another variety of English. English, that has gone so far in Japan, is the standard English and not Indian English. I respect the presence of local Englishes, but it is important to hang on to standard English. You should invite high school students into thinking this.
Nothing in the high-school classroom should be superficially political. This is an age that is extremely vulnerable and so, the teacher has a responsibility to accept their class privilege as normal and not encourage them to do good to the poor, etc., which would intensify the idea of privilege one way or other.
They can certainly think of English as a wonderful language that unifies, but they should also be able to think that it divides us from the world’s wealth of languages as well as languages in India. Perhaps they can have a collective project of making a language map of the world in a broad and general way. And so, if you are doing justice, then the sense of justice will have to come by way of English, actively, not simply as a survey of other people’s thinking. But they must also be able to produce a cultural practice of justice through their mother tongue. With the teacher’s help, of course, since they have never done such a thing before.
About idea and imagination being thought of together—why do it? Keep the difference alive. We have seen how ‘imagination’ is different from the unifying force of the ‘idea’. And as for the word Begriff: yes, it is held by the metaphor of grasping, but we are talking of the discipline of philosophy owning the idea of justice. Whereas the sense of justice leads to cultural practice where to focus on the trivial truth that the word idea is also a metaphor refuses to tangle with the diversified predicament of the practice of justice, marshalled by the law as the instrument of enforcement of the law as conceived by the idea of justice. To put idea and imagination together would solve a problem so easily that you wouldn’t have to think about the difference. Here, as in most cases, it is the difference that pushes us forward.
Another thing which also addresses the Ashoka University English faculty is that thinkers have thought that extra-moral sense and stasis is good. I mean, nirvana is not life. My friend Maung Zarni, a Burmese person who is against the military situation in Burma and supports the Rohingyas, talked about his father who refused nirvana because, nirvana—not in the Buddhist sense, but as a colloquial idea—although it seems very good, is just stasis. Freud was himself bored by the pleasure principle where one was constantly looking at trauma. He writes that the ego always balances the pleasure and un-pleasure, so that normality can be maintained and we can live. His interest was in the more complex concept of the death drive, normality being just a glitch in the middle of it. Marx, when describing a just society, says that if everybody was rational, there would not be the need for a revolution or a social contract. When he describes a just, socialist society, he lists seven ‘ifs’—wäre in German. Although impossible, if all of the listed things happened, then in the end there would be no distinction between community and society—the old anthropological difference that Marx learnt from Lewis Morgan. Now the question is: If the idea that when everybody is rational we would not need a social contract is in reality impossible, why would we want to use this concept for ourselves?
In order to deal with the students’ despair, I would have to know the group well. That is the requirement for the uncoercive rearrangement of desire. I would then perhaps focus on groups that are in greater despair and ask for solutions. I am myself very doubtful about the word ‘empathy’ because one should be aware of the fact that going into another’s space in order to share affect is an extremely difficult thing. It cannot be defined by an easy word. Sympathy is good enough, although difficult. Empathy is an American word where this pretence has to remain. That is not my philosophy and I don’t particularly like the human being. Therefore, let’s take that word away. I don’t see why we need to focus on that word. Despair is itself a big word. Remember: I was saying rearrangement of desires. If one hangs by his own desire to help, etc. . . . if one can in the classroom try and get into the desire pattern. Individuals are different, but they are in your classroom. You can’t teach one-on-one tutorials, because most of the countries chose the German education system rather than the British one, in the eighteenth century. So, in that situation, you have to make some kind of a conglomerative desire. One has to turn this despair into some pattern of desire, because despair can be anything, such as a price hike, like people at my village school say. So despair at inflation is very different from the despair of the mortality of human beings or inequality in education. So you have to have different senses.
I sometimes wonder: Who wants to learn history? Most of the youth want to learn legalized cheating or computers. Therefore, for so-called artificial intelligence, they forget the word ‘artificial’. It becomes a labour-saving device. But what kind of labour does it intend to save? Intellectual labour. Intellectual labour is not meant to be saved. Rather than empathize with their despair, and turn it into that kind of a formula and simply agree, why not make it a problem for yourself? Of course, you are in a university situation. I remember someone from Ashoka University wanted a man from Hong Kong to talk on elections. The first thing I asked was: What did he understand by democracy? The Hong Kong guy, of course, simply understands that democracy is not China. But the woman from Ashoka University said: if there is a clean election, that is democracy. That’s the way to keep the vote banks moving. So therefore, at universities and colleges, there are much more advanced problems—they are already pre-professionalized. That’s why I am so keen on high schools. Because before that they are too young and after . . .
I don’t have much faith in just empathizing with despair. I am not a good teacher but a very sincere teacher, and the students who can learn from me can take this harshness and extra-moral madness in their stride, unless it is only Brahminical arrogance, as my recent humiliator seemed to think.
Audience Member 4: I am Garima Sharma. I teach middle school. I am an educator from Shiv Nadar, Gurugram. The sense of justice is very fluid and varied, and it differs from one person to another. Even when we interact with children, we find that they have different understandings of justice. Do you think it is necessary to have a sense of uniformity or the same form of justice in a society? And, do you think it is possible?
GCS: Yes, of course. What I have been trying to say is that that rational sense of uniformity must be seen as always compromised by phenomenal difference. So the students should be carefully introduced to heterogeneity, as long as they know, by way of careful examples, that the homogenous is also and absolutely necessary. (Modi worshiping at the new Ram temple would be a good social text.) There should be—however few or maybe just one, as Rawls has given us—a formula of fairness. I proposed another one, although not originally mine: Justice as not revenge. There has to be some kind of uniformity. I was using the word Sinne which is a German word and locates phenomenal heterogeneity, and the one that makes it to the other side, to uniformity, is Bedeutung or signification—meaning, which is in a system, and so you can understand the meaning. But sense is not something you can understand perfectly. In fact, you cannot understand the Bedeutung either, but let’s not go there.
Edmund Husserl, who introduced the sense of perspective that Sinne or sense caries, also says that Sinne can be understood only in a ‘noematic’ way. ‘Noematic’ means the format of someone knowing something. This is why Sartre says, in a less profound sense later, that consciousness is vectored—visé—and is always moving/proceeding/advancing towards that knowing structure, rather than being infinitely repeatable by itself. That is why you have to go in all different directions, still remembering the rational unicity of justice.
There is such bad teaching in the rural schools, so different from the way you folks teach in your schools, that one doesn’t know what to do. The two teachers at my two schools are from an Adivasi community. One of them has a BA and the other has a high-school diploma. They had no idea what it really meant to say that the world is round. They have some pictures in their books which say it spins like a top, and so they think it goes round and round, fast. When I sat them down some weeks ago and said: Look, now that you are sitting down, what do you see? The further you see across the fields, it is flat, isn’t it? It is so big that you will never see it as round, but it actually it is so. And people on the other side are hanging. We are sitting on top and they are hanging down in outer space. Imagine how big it is. That is uniting, that is uniformity, humanity on the planet, yet we are also different.
Then, I hold a stick, and as the sun moves, I can show them how much the earth has gone round.
Planetary justice, yet heliocentric heterogeneity of time.
From the book, they think it is like a top. I told them that it moves very slow and with it, we all move. So the young woman with the BA asks if houses and trees and everything move. I said: Yes, they move, and then I told them Galileo’s story. And I always choke up when I have him stamp on the earth and say after the recant-enforcers have moved on: E pur si muove.
Why don’t they fall off, she asked. Imagine how badly taught they are in their undergraduate degree. I said: They don’t fall off but move together—just like when I go upstairs, my shoes also go upstairs.
The difference between teaching down there and teaching in your school is huge. One ought to be able to discuss the structural and multifaceted aspect of education, and its heterogeneity. And that here, planetarity is the uniformity, the extramoral justice that holds us together.
Notes
[1] Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926 (Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 236–52.
[2] Francis Bacon, ‘Of Revenge’ (1625) in The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans. Available online at: www.gutenberg.org/files/575/575-h/575-h.htm (last accessed on 22 June 2024).
[3] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
[4] See Imaginary Maps (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak trans.) (Calcutta: Thema, 2001).
[5] Marguerie Duras, The Sea Wall [New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985[1952). Translated from the original French, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950).
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