Pablo Oyarzun - Doing Justice

Benjamin attempted to illuminate what I call here the fateful equivocity of the passive voice and to highlight in it all vestiges of the demonic—this other impersonality wrapped up as it is in vindictive, whimsical, and violent figures and poised to return at any moment, with the paraphernalia or malicious claim of an “always, again and again.” In other words, Benjamin wanted to differentiate demonic violence from a radically different kind of violence, one that is erased in the very instant in which it is unleashed, because it has emancipatory force. This ambition has left traces on his entire oeuvre. (Prologue, pp. xix– xx)

What do we make of the forty-year lag between the event and the experience on the one hand, and their interpretation on the other? Of the antithetical value of se —fatefully, dreadfully equivocal, but also demonic or daemonic, Oyarzun says (and we are to take daimon in its double sense: the insidious, the evil, the diabolical, but also the figure of philosophical integrity that calls the wandering thinker—call him Socrates—back to the just path, the path of truth). Se , coercively hegemonizing, but diagnostic and critical at the same time? A se that hides, disappears, buries the collective political subjectivity that Allende promised and sought to bring into being; but also one that, forty or fifty years later, can violently bring it forth: sea el pueblo de Chile, sé ?

Minimally, three things.

First, the event, never coincident with experience or interpretation, can eventually come into being, or even be commanded into being (¡sé! ). 7Forty years pass; knowledge ( saber, to know: yo sé , “I know”) catches up with the event of Allende’s radio transmission; the event of his promise to the people of Chile discloses itself (in Castilian, se revela , “it reveals itself”) to Pablo Oyarzun. Now Oyarzun can say, “I know to whom Allende’s phrase was addressed”; sé qui é nes [ se ] abrirán las grandes alamedas. Let’s call “redemption” the horizon of possibility that opens when, and since, an event does not disclose itself as one and does not come into being at one time. (I am reading Oyarzun’s reading of Benjamin through and with Adorno, whose suspicion of singularity I share.) The standpoint of redemption: that an event a world ago can be called into being: sé; sea el pueblo de Chile . And this retrospective calling into being operates according to what Oyarzun calls “a radically different kind of violence, one that is erased [ se borra ] in the very instant in which it is unleashed [= unleashes itself, se desencadena ], because it has emancipatory force.” Oyarzun rightly gives this “radically different kind of violence” its proper name: justice, Gerechtigkeit. The possibility of redeeming the event, the always open possibility of encountering or making a different addressee and of making appear a different world for the event of an enunciation, is the condition of (its) justice. 8

Second, we encounter this non-coincidence of the event with experience and with interpretation where a natural language’s substances (names, nouns, pronouns) touch on its times, on its tenses, on its verbs, on its eventuality. Where there is predication, there the event may be redeemed, and there justice may be done. And this means not only attending, as Oyarzun does with exemplary care, with the care of a translator and a philosopher, to Benjamin’s language; even more importantly, it also means committing ourselves to reading one natural language’s predications through and against another’s. German through and in Spanish; this English sentence I am writing, in and against Spanish. Each has its times; for each, predication installs a relation the subject bears to truth and to the event that another language can only paraphrase. To do justice to English is to install in it another language’s times and truths. Another language’s world is the condition of a language’s se.

The English language and Benjamin’s German parse their reflexive, passive, and impersonal constructions—their autopredications, the instants at which something like a reflexive position emerges in a language with respect to itself; its se- moments; the places and times where I act upon myself, or where an impersonal act carries the weight of a historical event—differently from Spanish, indeed differently from Romance languages in general. This is how Allende’s words have been translated into German. Note the reflexive, impersonal formation sich auftun werden for se abrirán.

Werktätige meines Vaterlandes! Ich glaube an Chile und sein Schicksal. Es werden andere Chilenen kommen. In diesen düsteren und bitteren Augenblicken, in denen sich der Verrat durchsetzt, sollt ihr wissen, dass sich früher oder später, sehr bald, erneut die großen Straßen auftun werden, auf denen der würdige Mensch dem Aufbau einer besseren Gesellschaft entgegengeht . 9

In English:

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, great avenues will again open, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society. 10

Oyarzun’s Benjamin is least familiar to the English-speaking world just here. In both English and German, the daemonic se- moment and the interval between event, experience, and articulation (the retrospective articulation of Allende’s interpellation of the Chilean people into political subjectivity) are foreclosed—so much so, indeed, that the German translation reaches for its object and calls out andere Chilenen by name just where Allende’s Spanish leaves the announced political subject as yet nameless. No language, not English, not German, not Spanish, can do justice to the event; but could Oyarzun have come to the story of waiting, hope, and political interpellation that Spanish offers him without reading Allende’s words through the in-justice that English and German do, each in its way, to the event, the experience, and their articulation?

In this sense, then: third, doing justice is indeed, along with Doing Justice , a matter of translation. This is why I’ll be running the risk of translating Oyarzun’s concern today—his concern with “doing justice,” with that “doing” that is claiming or demanding justice, with narration and justice in Benjamin’s work—into a matter that also matters to me—the matter of translation—but that would appear to be extrinsic to the immediate concerns of Doing Justice . I risk seeming to play irresponsibly, unjustly, with Pablo Oyarzun’s words by translating the problem of articulating narrating and justice into the problem of articulating translating and justice. Where Oyarzun subtly and convincingly tells the story of the narrator’s vocation for justice, you’ll fear to hear me say something like “Justice is a matter of translation,” or “Translation is a matter of justice, of doing justice.”

The questions how justice is to be done and how justice is to be demanded are Pablo Oyarzun’s topic. He approaches these desperately timely questions by shifting focus—for Latin America as well as for the anglophone world—from the famous essays “For a Critique of Violence,” “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” and “The Task of the Translator” (essays definitive of Benjamin’s reception in Latin America and the United States) to the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” called in Spanish “El narrador.” 11Let me attend to two sentences that mark this shift. The first is Pablo Oyarzun’s summary definition of the specific character of narrative, of the story, with regard to Justice: “The righteous character of storytelling,” he says, “consists in giving an account of the happening of the singular, that is, in giving an account of what is singular in its happening” (p. 105)—or, in Spanish, El carácter justiciero de la narración consiste en que ella da cuenta del acaecer de lo singular, es decir, da cuenta de lo singular en su acaecer . Justiciero is hard to translate—it means “justice doing,” but with a strong connotation of severity, of meting out justice with exemplary severity. The second is a sentence I take from the very end of this volume. Oyarzun recapitulates his argument.