Pablo Oyarzún, Doing Justice: Three Essays on Walter Benjamin, trans. Stephen Gingerich, (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), xlvii + 147pp.
Reviewed by Benjamin Brewer, University of Toronto
‘In the saving and punishing quotation, language proves itself as the matrix of justice [Mater der Gerechtigkeit]. It calls up the word by its name, breaks it destructively out of its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin’
-Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’[1]
Pablo Oyarzún’s Doing Justice is a deceptively simple little book. It is, on one level, an introduction to the thought of Walter Benjamin. Each of its three chapters introduces the reader to a key essay or group of essays in Benjamin’s corpus. As a reader and expositor of Benjamin, Oyarzún displays a rare subtlety without ever letting the writing become dry or pedantic. (Indeed, Oyarzún’s elegant Spanish has always been a distinguishing feature of his writing, though this elegance is captured unevenly in the translation). The true achievement here is that, rather than offering commentaries or systematic readings, Oyarzún rigorously and meticulously opens up Benjamin’s thinking for further reading.
It would be a mistake, however, to take Doing Justice as simply an introduction to Benjamin’s thinking or a collection of exegetical essays. As Jacques Lezra’s introduction and Oyarzún’s prologue show, at the heart of the book is an insistent examination of the entanglement of language, time, death, justice, and singularity that brings to mind Jacques Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ and Werner Hamacher’s Sprachgerechtigkeit.[2] What do we mean when we speak of ‘doing justice’? In what tense, and through which tensions, do we say that justice is, has been, must, or will be done? Animating these questions is the recognition that, while anything but passive, justice can never be assigned completely to the agency of a subject; while constituting the very urgency of the now, justice cannot be experienced in the present; while neither the universality of law nor the most precise fidelity to the particularities of a case can guarantee justice, it demands both.
Oyarzún’s prologue is traversed by the strangeness of these conundra. Inscribing itself within the specificity of Chilean history and the idiomaticity of the Spanish language, it brings out what ‘is latent in [this] context but overflows it or undercuts it, without limits’ (xxxii). Take, for instance, Oyarzún’s deft presentation of the play of the reflexive pronoun se in Spanish. Verbal constructions with se are often translated as passive voice into English, but they are perhaps better understood as a middle voice that can point both to the messianic excess of justice beyond the agency of any particular agent (se hará justicia, justice will be done) and to the ‘ruthless regime of the passive voice’ (xxxvii), which naturalizes injustice and violence in a dictatorship by diffusing agency and responsibility (the panoptic surveillance of se dice que, ‘it is said that’ or se sabe que, ‘it is known that’ [xxxvii]). Inscribed in the ambivalence of the se is the fact that ‘no one who presents her- or himself using the pronoun “I” may claim the faculty to ‘do justice’’ (xxxix), because ‘justice is not, nor can it be, a deed, an order, an agreement, a reckoning; it is nothing that can be done or found in the world’ (xlvi). Which does not mean that Oyarzún turns our attention away from the world, as if the non-assignability of justice to any one deed, agent, or moment were equivalent to fatalism. Rather, by turning our attention to how language reveals the paradoxical urgency of justice, Oyarzún shows how Benjamin’s thinking can ‘turn the world into the highest good,’[3] to ‘neither concede nor confirm the world as it is’ (xlvi). This relationship to the world not as it is but as promise ‘radically outstrips the world as what is given and absolutely surpasses everything a subject can do. “Justice will be done” names the secret force that awakens responsibility, that encourages the effort. Justice will be done [Se hará justicia]’ (xlvi–xlvii). Oyarzún thus links, in the ‘fateful equivocity’ (xxxix) of the se, the impersonality of justice’s agent to the promissory character of its temporality.
Though they were written across more than two decades of Oyarzún’s career, the three essays that constitute the body of Doing Justice follow the intertwining of justice, time, death, language, and singularity through Benjamin’s diffuse corpus. The first chapter, ‘On Benjamin’s Concept of Translation’ (1990) takes up two of Benjamin’s notoriously obscure early essays—‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ and ‘The Task of the Translator’—plunging into the kernel of Benjamin’s reflections, namely, the mutual irreducibility and inseparability of language and being: ‘The spiritual being [das geistige Wesen—we might also say, ‘the intelligible essence’] of a thing consists precisely in its language—this view, taken as a hypothesis, is the great abyss into which all linguistic theory threatens to fall.’[4] Oyarzún traces how Benjamin navigates the pull of this abyss. In the ‘Language as Such’ essay, Oyarzún argues that Benjamin draws out communicability as that dimension of being that finds expression in language: ‘language does not happen unexpectedly to being [no le sobreviene—we might also say ‘befall’ or ‘strike’] from the outside…Being and language are identical only to the extent that we consider the communicable aspect of a being; but in any case its communicability is necessary to being’ (12). This, however, would seem to contradict Benjamin’s well-known rejection of ‘communication’ as the standard of translation at the beginning of ‘The Task of the Translator.’ Rather than a contradiction, Oyarzún sees here evidence that Benjamin used the concept of communication ‘strategically’ in the ‘Language as Such’ essay, ‘to measure the scope of the theory of language’ (21). Picking up where that essay left off, ‘The Task of the Translator’ sets translation ‘at the absolute center of linguistic relations’ (20), while simultaneously freeing translation from ‘any submission to content’ (21). That is, there is no unified, totality of either being or language prior to translation, no “meaning” external to language that must be transmitted via this or that particular language. Rather, the plurality of languages is irreducible (36). Accordingly, on Oyarzún’s reading, the enigmatic ‘language as such’ or the ‘pure language’ Benjamin evokes in both essays, is no pre-Babelian ‘primordial identity that one might attempt to restore’ (37). ‘Pure language’ is instead ‘nothing but the free deployment of the partial and imperfect languages of human beings’ (37). Importantly, these languages are not partial and imperfect—that is, finite—because they are unable to capture some ontological plenum that exceeds them. Rather, by placing translation and the plurality of languages at the heart of language itself, Oyarzún argues that Benjamin offers us a glimpse at the finitude of being itself (38). Just as there is no pre-Babelian unity of languages, there is no pre-linguistic unity of being. What we get instead is ‘a separation within ontology, an internal separation: onto/logy. The illegible bar that separates is that mark which suggests that the possibility (forever deferred) of saying “being” arises from the open hiatus between the two’ (39). This is undoubtedly the most difficult chapter of the book, but to the reader willing to follow the painstaking turns of Oyarzún’s readings, it offers genuine insight into a crucial dimension of Benjamin’s thinking.
The second chapter, ‘Four Suggestions about Experience, History, and Facticity’ (1992–94) turns to the core of Benjamin’s late thinking, namely the problem of historical knowledge. Focusing on ‘On the Concept of History,’ Oyarzún traces how Benjamin’s theory of historical knowledge displaces ‘the will to knowledge’ itself ‘in favor of the irreplaceable singularity of what is known’ (43). Rather than articulating a critical method as a means by which one could extract knowledge from any given historical object, Benjamin’s method aims at ‘establishing the indissociable link between truth and justice,’ whose ‘fundamental rule’ Oyarzún glosses as follows: ‘if our knowledge does not do justice to what is known, it cannot claim truth for itself’ (43). Just as in the essay on Benjamin’s concept of translation, Oyarzún grounds this claim on a careful reconstruction of the transcendental argument that undergirds the more familiar normative and political aspects of Benjamin’s thinking, in this case, his early attempt to articulate a concept of experience capacious enough to guide philosophy beyond the narrow confines of neo-Kantian epistemology.[5] This allows Oyarzún to clarify the distinction between the methodological enemies of historical materialism, namely historicism and progressivism. Unlike many readers of Benjamin, Oyarzún both demonstrates what these enemies share, while rigorously distinguishing them: ‘For both, the truth of history is not in itself historical but timeless, “eternal,” whether it is located in the eternity of the past, as historicism is…or in the eternity of the future, as progressivism sees it’ (72). Fascism, then, emerges at the end of the essay as the attempt to convert ‘history into myth (into rigid nature)…a petrification of historical happening and the horrendous ecstasy of this very petrification’ (73). The emergence of fascism, then, is truly ‘the end of the philosophy of history,’ Oyarzún argues, to the extent that it sets us before the twin dilemmas that stand at the origin of any philosophy of history: ‘the theoretical problem of the knowledge of the individual’ and ‘the practical justification of evil and pain’ (74). Because each of them only addressed one these questions, historicism and progressivism failed to answer either, so that ‘truth and justice remain split’ (74). Benjamin’s thinking of history, Oyarzún concludes, wagers that only a thinking of history that begins from the intersection of these two dilemmas, which is to say of the intersection of truth and justice, would be capable of ‘thinking history and of thinking historically beyond the epoch of the end of the philosophy of history,’ characterized by fascism’s onslaught (74).
The final chapter, ‘Narration and Justice’ (2008) concludes the book with a commentary on Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller,’ which Oyarzún reads as ‘a fundamental essay in dicaeology, the theory of justice’ (103). After reconstructing Benjamin’s claim about the decay of ‘experience’ (which he does, interestingly, without recourse to German’s oft-cited distinction between individual lived experiences [Erlebnisse] and cumulative or collective experience [Erfahrung]), Oyarzún turns to how the experience of communication—indeed, communicability itself—is transformed in various media. Benjamin’s careful differentiation of the newspaper, the novel, and the story is not primarily motivated by concerns of genre theory, Oyarzún claims, but rather with the ‘the vocation of justice that inspires storytelling’ (76). Whereas the novel is destined for ‘individual consumption’ (85), and whereas information ‘homogenizes all content of experience’ (87) so that it becomes nothing more than fodder for ascertaining factual claims, storytelling responds to the call of the unforgettable, the claim of everything creaturely ‘to be perceived in its irreducible and unrepeatable singularity’ (106). It does this by giving its creaturely subjects ‘room to play—in the space of language—so that storytelling can make the irreplaceable traits of its individuality resonate’ (106). This, Oyarzún suggests, is the basis of ‘Benjamin’s interest in the stories of rascals and criminals’ like those he cites from J. P. Hebel and Nikolai Leskov: ‘More than a vindication of the outlaw, what we have here is the opening of a space in which the outlaw appears before or on the margins of any sentence.’ Tying the storyteller together with Benjamin’s early work on language, allegory, and experience, Oyarzún thus presents us with the story as the point of convergence in which Benjamin’s historical method, his thinking of language, and his politics of justice coalesce. As Benjamin himself says at the end of the essay, ‘The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself’ (GS 2: 465; SW 3: 162, Oyarzún 103).
A reader familiar with Benjamin’s corpus—and especially with its reception in Latin America in general and Chile in particular—might, upon finishing the book’s third essay, have the awkward sensation of arriving at the top of a flight of stairs that is one stair shorter than expected. Why, they will ask incredulously, is there no chapter here on Benjamin’s early essay ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’? This is especially curious in the case of Oyarzún, since he has authored at least two essays on it, edited another volume of essays on it, and, as Lezra notes in his introduction [x], translated the essay into Spanish.[6] Though he does not mention his own essays on ‘Towards the Critique of Violence,’ Oyarzún acknowledges in his prologue that ‘nowhere is the affirmation and elaboration’ of the ‘essential difference between law [derecho] and justice’ ‘sharper than in [Benjamin’s] early work…namely, ‘Fate and Character’ and, above all, ‘Critique of Violence’’ (xxxix). If Oyarzún does not include a more explicit discussion of the paradox of law and its relation to violence in Doing Justice, this is in order to draw our attention to how ‘justice and language remain founded in each other,’ as Benjamin puts it in an essay on Karl Kraus.[7]
Hopefully Oyarzún’s work on the ‘Critique of Violence’ essay is translated into English as soon as possible. For now, Doing Justice stands on its own as both an important contribution to anglophone scholarship on Benjamin from one of Latin America’s most incisive voices in continental philosophy and literary theory, as well as a profound meditation on language, time, and justice. It will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars working in continental philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, German studies, and critical theory.
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Walter Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus,’ in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2015), 363. Further references to Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften are cited with the abbreviation GS, followed by the volume number. ↑
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See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law,’ trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228–98 and Werner Hamacher, Sprachgerechtigkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2018). ↑
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This quote is from a fragment not included within Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften, which Oyarzún quotes from Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 166. Cited at Oyarzún, xlvi. The second quote in this sentence is part of Oyarzún’s explication of the first. ↑
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Benjamin GS 2, 141, cited at Oyarzún, 4. ↑
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In the early text titled ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,’ Benjamin argues that every ‘great’ epistemology has ‘two sides’—the certainty of knowledge and the ‘dignity’ of experience itself, and that Kant (and the neo-Kantians) were only capable of giving a ‘valid explanation’ to the certainty of knowledge, but that they did so at the cost of experience’s dignity (GS 2: 158). ↑
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For Oyarzún’s translation and edited volume, see Letal e incruente: Walter Benjamin y la crítica de la violencia, eds. Pablo Oyarzún, Carlos Peréz Lopéz, and Federico Rodríguez (Santiago: LOM ediciones, 2017). For his own essays, see “Autoridad ley violencia,” in Letal e incruente, 271–91 and “Espectralidad, amenaza y poder” in Walter Benjamin y la crítica de la violencia: constelaciones actuales e inactuales, eds. Lucila Svampa, et al. (Buenos Aires: Instituto de investigaciones Gino Germani, 2020), 91–106. ↑
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Benjamin, GS 2, 349, cited at Oyarzún, xliv. ↑
