It is just that there be Law, but Law is not Justice-I

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I am situated in the humanities, a field misnamed, for which I have to inhabit a house that 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 has 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 publishable as expository prose rather than testimony. 

This is not to philosophise 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 that could produce signification 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 AmartyaSen, 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 of 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 transcendentalism 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 emphasise 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 to overturn into revolution in the business of educating educators. Marx repeatedly corrected him, because he believed that the difference between teacher and student should remain; it cannot be revolutionised. 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 internalised 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 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: nangakardunga­. 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 a lawyer, 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 patronising towards the Dalits but sympathise 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 legalised 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 meeting 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 the law is normal. But then, the 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 a 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 philosophising 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 decolonising 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 decolonising anything. (An aside here: sustained and persistent decolonising 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 effect is greed. But this is a very vulnerable population. The national or state curriculum can be taught in the old and bad way of memorising. 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.

 [To be concluded]

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Vol 57, No. 32, Feb 2 - 8, 2025