Pablo Oyarzun - Doing Justice

We are onto something here, in English, that bears on the definition of justice, and Pablo Oyarzun helps us to it, helps us see what English does —and what the Spanish infinitive hacer does not do. We might say: Pablo Oyarzun’s reading, in English translation, from his Spanish, of Benjamin’s German about the translation into German by Johannes von Guenther from the Russian of Nikolai Leskov helps do justice to what English is doing whenever “doing” translates hacer ; and it helps us see where Spanish fails to do justice.

Now remember Pablo Oyarzun’s summary definition of the character of the story with regard to Justice: “The righteous character of storytelling 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). That giving an account should precede something that is “substantive in itself” seems necessary to this taking account of the singular, inasmuch as the singular here is of the order of the event. Now, when we put the evental question “how” before the substantive question “who,” and even before the question “ what is this justice that’s to be done?,” we are not just deferring the ethical register: we may be destroying its classic shape—the shape in which an action is taken by a subject who attends to experience and circumstances, understands them, acts upon that understanding, and is thus responsible to circumstance and experience. In the beginning was the act, the how— before the subject and experience take on substance, even the substance of a name. Our tenses come into rhythm—from the how of the beginning, in the beginning, in the perfect past; to the present, when we say “Now, at this moment, I take account of the beginning, or ‘I’ takes account of the beginning and begins, as ‘I,’ and can become responsible for what ‘I’ does, justly, in view of reparation or restitution in the future.” But this beginning that allows me, I, to begin, is also the end, the destruction of the classical ethical register: the expression dar cuenta also means something like “to put paid” or, as the hoary Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua puts it, [D]ar cuenta de algo, Dar fin de algo destruyéndolo o malgastándolo , to end or terminate something by destroying it or using it unwisely. The last turn of Pablo Oyarzun’s Doing Justice allows us to imagine how the narrative destruction that flows from placing the how of doing justice before its substance may be translated into a strange, estranged ethical register. Darse cuenta is the story of how one gives oneself a story before there is someone to receive it and before the story concerns anything substantive: the ethical register of the “ante-predicative.” We have moved from offering a representation, an account, an allegory of justice to the much more unsettling realization that doing justice is allegory. What must concern us, in the wake of Pablo Oyarzun’s readings of Benjamin, is the translation of justice as allegory into effective social action: the production of political subjectivities on the great avenues of Santiago, on the streets of Los Angeles, even here, always now.

1 My epigraphs, in order, are from Bolivar Echeverría, Ensayos Politicos, ed. Fernando Tinajero (Quito: Ministerio de Coordinación de la Política y Gobiernos Autónomos Descentralizados, 2011), 210: ¿Pero estamos, en verdad, en medio de la realización del deber ser, como lo pretende el discurso histórico de los vencedores? ¿Si pasamos la mano sobre el relato bien peinado de esa historia, pero lo hacemos a contrapelo, como recomendaba Walter benjamin, no resultará, tal vez, que lo que ella tiene por “excepciones”—excepciones que no dejan de aparecer con fuerza incluso en nuestros días— puede enseñarnos más sobre la historia de la democracia en la modernidad, y sobre sus posibilidades actuales, que lo que ella reconoce como “regla”? (in my translation); Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” [1936], trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968), 83; and Sebastián de Covarrrubias, Tesoro de la lenguua castellana, o española (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611): Cuento se llama el puntal que se arrima a lo que amenaza ruina, y de alli se dixo andar, o estar en cuentos: estar en peligro, y sustentarse con artificio (in my translation). 2 “Benjamin in Latin America,” ed. David Kelman, Discourse 32.1 (2010). Kelman’s introduction follows Elissa Marder’s work to “state that the survival of [Benjamin’s] work depends on the translation of his biological life.” To a greater or lesser degree, the essays in his volume endorse this understanding of Benjamin’s reception in Latin America. See also Elissa Marder, “Walter Benjamin’s Dream of Happiness,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (London: Continuum, 2006), 184–200. An early collective overview of Walter Benjamin’s reception in Latin America can be found in Nicolás A. Casullo, Gabriela Massuh, and Silvia Fehrmann, Sobre Walter Benjamin: vanguardias, historia, estética y literatura: una visión latinoamericana (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1993). 3 Michael Löwy’s deep engagement with Benjamin’s work centers on the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (though his remarks on the theological strain in Benjamin’s writing are crucial to understanding Löwy’s own conceptualization of the theology of liberation in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America). See especially Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London: Verso, 2005); Michael Löwy, “Reflexiones sobre América Latina a partir de Walter Benjamin,” in Bolívar Echeverría, ed., La mirada del ángel: En torno a las tesis sobre la historia de Walter Benjamin (Mexico City: Facultad de Filosofía de la UNAM / Ediciones Era, 2005), 35–44; and Michael Löwy, “Marxismo e cristianismo na América Latina,” Lua Nova 19 (1989): 5–22. 4 There has been so much recent work on Walter Benjamin published in Latin America that any list risks seeming grotesquely partial; when it is not over-long, it will be idiosyncratic. In addition to Löwy’s work and the Glosario Walter Benjamin: Conceptos y figuras, ed. Esther Cohen (Mexico City: UNAM / Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2016), I have found especially valuable the following works: Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby, Walter Benjamin: La lengua del exilio (Santiago: ARCIS/LOM, 1997); Willy Thayer, Technologies of Critique, trans. John Kraniauskas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). On translation, Pablo Oyarzun, “Sobre el concepto benjaminiano de traducción,” in idem, De lenguaje, historia y poder (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 2006), 153–195; Andrés Claro, “La traducción como ‘posvida’ histórica,” in idem, Las vasijas quebradas: Cuatro variaciones sobre “la tarea del traductor” (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2012), 639–661; Miguel Valderrama, Traiciones de Walter Benjamin (Adrogué, Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Cebra, 2015); and Walter Benjamin, A tarefa do tradutor, ed. Lucia Castello Branco (Belo Horizonte: Fale/UMFG, 2008). Centering on violence, Pablo Oyarzun, Carlos Pérez López, and Federico Rodríguez, eds., Letal e incruenta: Walter Benjamin y la crítica de la violencia (Santiago: LOM, 2017); Federico Galende, Walter Benjamin y la destrucción (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2009). On art, vanguardism and modernism, Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Macarena Ortúzar Vergara, “Estéticas del residuo en el Chile del postgolpe: Walter Benjamin y la escena de avanzada,” Acta Poetica 28.1–2 (2007). Recent collections of essays include Walter Benjamin: Fragmentos críticos, ed. Esther Cohen, Elsa R. Brondo, Eugenio Santangelo and Marianela Santoveña (México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Libros Malaletra), 2016. 5 On the “now-ness” of Benjamin’s readings in the anglophone world, see Kevin McLaughlin, “Benjamin Now: Afterthoughts on the Arcades Project,” boundary 2 30.1 (2003): 191–197. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/41345. 6 For Jetztzeit in Latin America (and in Spanish), see the entry by Marianela Santoveña Rodríguez in Glosario Walter Benjamin, 229–239. A different way of approaching Jetztzeit can be found in Héctor Schmuckler, “La pérdida del aura: la nueva pobreza humana,” in Casullo et al., Sobre Walter Benjamin, esp. 249–251. 7 See Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby on “experience” in Collingwood-Selby, Walter Benjamin, 9–10. 8 The modality of possibility in Benjamin is the subject of Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 9 “Salvador Allende: Letzte Ansprache an das Volk Chiles.” http://www.kommunisten.ch/index.php?article_id=377.10 This widely cited translation of Allende’s last words was recently discussed by Fernando Muñoz León in his article “Competing Narratives about Sacrifice: Three Readings of the 11 September 1973 Coup in Chile and their Conflicting Constitutional Projections,” Political Theology 17.6 (2016): 507–524.11 The most compelling account I know in English of Benjamin’s complex concept of justice is to be found in Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Neither he nor Julia Ng, whose elegant entry “Gerechtigkeit” in Glosario Walter Benjamin, 105–117 offers a superb synopsis of the topic, address the matter of “doing” justice as Oyarzun understands it; neither articulates Gerechtigkeit with storytelling, though both attend to the relation between justice and translation.12 I follow Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), a work that, despite very seldom addressing Benjamin’s work directly, turns on the articulation of justice and storytelling as doing that we find in “The Storyteller” and in Oyarzun’s Doing Justice.