Critical Distance

It's really quite amazing what distance accomplishes. It can create a space of fear and aniety. Once we are distant from what we were close to, new fears and insecurities can enter, filling in the new space, the distance, restoring closeness, although at a cost. Distance can make also make us less aware; it can render what was once distinct blurry and uncertain, allowing other images and ideas into the picture.

I have been moved by Iris Young's description of the relation between distance and desire. Although we once spoke about Marcuse, and how relevant he remains, I had forgotten the importance of Marcuse for her work. Yet, I read in her Justice and the Politics of Difference:

 Desire, the desire to be happy, creates the distance, the negation, that opens the space for criticism of what is. This critical distance does not occur on the basis of some previously discovered rational ideas of the good and the just. On the contrary, the ideas of the good and the just arise from the desiring negation that action brings to what is given.
...
Each social reality presents it own unrealized possibilities, experienced as lacks and desires. Norms and ideals arise from the yearning that is an expression of freedom: it does not have to be this way, it could be otherwise.

Some critical theorists today are pushing again what they see as the necessity of a prior notion of justice or the good, that is, a notion that becomes the standard for judgment. I admire the way Iris presents a rigorous political theory that steadfastly refuses the satisfaction of such a vision, embracing instead desire, a desire that can't be fulfilled. She stands by this desire, absorbing its radical potential, its hope for justice.

I prefer this vision to one of justice to come: it's more protean, expansive; it allows for unimagined possibilities, possibilties wrought by unsatisfied desire. Iris doesn't know if it will be fufilled, but she retains the desire. Desire itself inspires and moves; it can't be satisfied; it can't be stilled. It is producing and stirring, but it doesn't fear lack; rather, it draws its energy from it, its awareness of the glimmer of the otherwise that things might be.

Comments

[Charles]

Yes but, there is desire aplenty in the idea of a 'justice to-come'!

[Ken]

Hi Jodi, Congrats on the book! I will go one-click, pre-order after this. But, following Charles, what distinction do you see between the justice you describe here and "justice-to-come." I always, always miss the failings and shortcomings of Derrida that others see so readily .....

[Jodi]

Thanks, Ken--hope you like the book.

Ken and Charles: to me the difference has to do with desire; maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't have a sense of justice to come as figured through or thought through desire. It doesn't have to be incompatible with it; but my sense is that Iris Young (and here I'm reading her through Zizek as well as Marcuse, who she draws on directly) emphasizes the role of lack and desire, the working of the negative in propelling both the sense of current inadequacy and the hope for something more; so, justice isn't simply to come, the awareness and appreciation of the fact that it is missing, combined with the desire for something more, is what enables us to think something like justice as an ideal at all.

[gpatrick]

Hi Jodi,

First time responder, long time reader.

Is not the difference b/t the conditional and the unconditional a form of lack, or a lack that anticipates and creates the desire for the unconditional (justice)?

I'm wondering if Young's conception of justice seems more "protean and expansive" because it hinges on desire, a figure that, rhetorically, is associated with a sense of not only the visceral/physical/primordial but the unbounded and seemingly infinite. And perhaps if Derrida had used terms like desire his conception of the avenir would not seem so bloodless, metaphysical, or undead.

In any regard, I appreciate your gloss of Young. I confess I'm unfamiliar with her work, but heartened to discover her unwillingness to fully join the others who desperately reach back for the Enlightenment in order to approach today's political problems.

[Jodi]

GPatrick--thanks for commenting! (you have a terrific blog, btw). I like very much the way you express the point of the difference between the conditional and unconditional in terms of lack (I might be tempted to frame it in terms of a lack that splits the conditional from itself thereby introducing the possibility of the unconditional).

To me, your point about the visceral and physical dimensions of desire, particularly as I find it in Young, is a good one. I confess to being a poor reader of Derrida--there are some texts that I've benefitted from, but he's never spoken to me in a sense of really capturing my imagination or longing. I think that the matter may be of language. Young, particulary in her earlier writing, was influenced by Kristeva and Iragary. She also wrote about embodiment (her essays on breasts and menstruation are staples of many women's studies courses). I confess that I was surprised and a enchanted when I came back to her work as I wrote an obituary for her over the past couple of days. I had forgotten the activist passion which informs her work; that is, I had too quickly shelved her with the liberals and Habermasians. This was to my detriment. Fortunately, I can still learn from her writing.

[Dasein]

Jodi,
Congratulations on your new book. I have pre-ordered it at once.

i think the desire would generate the praxis and the possibilities in all the impossiblities.