Concept
Justice
The normative distinction that binds power to a center greater than itself
Ask AI about Justice“The only way to provide sovereignty with an appropriate form of justice is to give discursive articulation to the difference between power applied so as to preserve the social order and power applied in obedience to a power greater than the sovereign.”
From the Archive
“Justice is a supplement to the originary deferral of appropriation; it punishes the violation of a norm that was enforced in the originary scene by the sacred power that manifests itself in the presence of the community as a whole.”
“Injustice is the core representation or idea of resentment, which gives rise to its feeling (anger, rage, depression…). We feel injustice if and only if we consider ourselves capable in principle–perhaps not in practical reality–of justifying this sentiment.”
“Even though the overarching model of justice is the originary moral model, it cannot apply to concrete situations as the template of a static utopia but only as the horizon of a movement toward greater reciprocity.”
““Justice” is the subsistent center, to which the occupant of the center is subordinated.”
“We cannot “rid” ourselves of the notion of “justice” or some equivalent because we cannot rid ourselves of resentment, which in turn is some complaint made to the center that terms it has laid down have not been adhered to—as they never can be, hard as representatives of the center may try.”
“you can’t complain that justice is not being done without taking for granted that it could be done”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Justice in Generative Anthropology descends from the originary scene, where the sign defers appropriation and holds the participants in an equal, reciprocal relation to the central object. Gans derives our "sense of justice" negatively, through the scandal of its breach: "Injustice is the core representation or idea of resentment." Katz gives this a scenic and juridical edge — "Justice is a supplement to the originary deferral of appropriation; it punishes the violation of a norm that was enforced in the originary scene by the sacred power" — so that justice always points back to a center that enforces the norm no single agent invented. Because the originary model is one of perfect reciprocity that no actual order can instantiate, justice functions "not as the template of a static utopia but only as the horizon of a movement toward greater reciprocity"; it is a standing measure against which resentment lodges its complaint, never a closed procedure.
This is what distinguishes justice from the institutions that administer it and from sovereignty itself. Against the adjudicatory apparatus — the-juridical — justice is the normative difference that apparatus is supposed to make legible; "we cannot 'rid' ourselves of the notion of 'justice'" precisely because we cannot rid ourselves of resentment as "some complaint made to the center that terms it has laid down have not been adhered to." Against sovereignty, justice is the subordinating term: "'Justice' is the subsistent center, to which the occupant of the center is subordinated," and the sovereign secures his own centrality only "by instituting justice in accord with this 'higher power' and 'true law.'" Justice thus names the point where power is answerable — the discursive articulation binding whoever occupies the center to a center greater than themselves.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“Like the New Historicist cultural critiques inspired by Michel Foucault, GA recognizes the ubiquity of power—and its frequently unequal distribution among individuals—as an elemental aspect of human relations. Unlike New Historicism, however, GA does not simplistically conflate linguistic or intellectual power with physical and economic domination. Instead,…”
“The originary hypothesis shares with post-structuralism and speech act theory the same basic post-metaphysical premise: the purpose of language is not to communicate true statements, it is to make things happen. If we ask, to make what happen, we all depart from each other, as post-structuralism has an implicit answer (to subvert the violence of reducing…”
“The only way to provide sovereignty with an appropriate form of justice is to give discursive articulation to the difference between power applied so as to preserve the social order and power applied in obedience to a power greater than the sovereign. There are dangers here. The identification of some power greater than the sovereign will be made possible…”
“Yes, we could start with "disciplinary vs. originary"--I have a more "positive" and a more "negative" way of using "disciplinary," though--in the positive sense, disciplinary thinking is orgiinary thinking; in the negative sense, they are therefore opposed. For the negative sense, I'm much more likely to use "the disciplines" rather than "disciplinary," and…”
“This discussion is necessary because while I have been generating a new way of using the concept of the center within GA I have not sufficiently insisted on the fact that “origin” and “center” are complementary ways of referring to the constitution of the event. This can make it sound like central power stands and commands on its own, which comes close to…”
“[Q:chewingofthecud] >But my worry is, what is so different about the ‘originary event’? Is it not just another instantaneous origin, from which ‘animals’ become ‘men’ and all subsequent social order must follow and be legitimized from? I'm less familiar with GA than many here, but the main difference seems to be that Hobbes' originary event is entirely…”
“[Q:Reader] That definitely sounds fair to me. If he doesn’t use Harvard law, he will still need to go to (or be informed by) some other socially constructed tradition to give him meaning though right? I thought that was one of the insights of GA. Yes, but relying on traditions to give meaning is different from relying, for justification, on concepts…”
“Even someone transformed from a close associate of the occupant of the center to one stripped of everything might have the same part of the all afterward insofar as he has exchanged the allocation given or inherited by him for the power, glory or momentary satisfaction aimed at by some transgression against the center; and if we are speaking of a case of…”
“If we can use his model to arrive at useful results in a concrete situation, so much the better, but this model can make no anthropological claim (for example, that the equality of distribution in the originary event is the basis of our sense of justice). It could only do so by relinquishing its raison-d’être , the not merely implausible but deliberately…”
“While similarities may be found between the concepts of justice in Rawls and Nozick and the two conceptions of justice to which I refer, the notion of justice itself plays a very different role in GA than in either of their systems. GA proposes no “theory of justice”; its concern is to understand how the dominant model at a given moment is derived from…”
Key Texts
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