Abstract
Adi Ophir has suggested that the political realm is an order of evils, producing and managing regular forms of suffering and violence rather than eliminating them. Thus, the political is always to some extent a corrupted order of justice. Emmanuel Levinas’ work presents in its focus on the face-to-face relationship a means of rethinking how to make the political more open to compassionate justice. Though Levinas himself doesn’t sufficiently take on this question, I argue that his work facilitates a way of thinking about commiserative shame that provides a means to connect the face-to-face to its potential effects in the political sphere. If such shame isn’t ignored or bypassed, it produces an unsettling relation to the other that in its adversity motivates a kind of responsibility and care for the other that can alter the public sphere.
Highlights
Adi Ophir has suggested that the political realm is an order of evils, producing and managing regular forms of suffering and violence rather than eliminating them
Adi Ophir in The Order of Evils argues that political orders are not merely organizations aiming to control factional interests and manage populations
Etienne Balibar theorizes political orders differently, but in a way that I find usefully relevant. He argues that political orders, especially liberal ones, take as their fundamental ideological presumption that “violence can be eliminated” (Balibar 2015, p. 2), a notion that treats violence as the fundamental evil that politics is supposed to subdue
Summary
Adi Ophir in The Order of Evils argues that political orders are not merely organizations aiming to control factional interests and manage populations. Religions 2018, 9, 381 thinly shared forms of public propriety on subject populations so that people who are different and thereby inevitably in forms of conflict can live together This begs a central question: if Ophir’s and Balibar’s assertions are correct, and I would argue that they are (even if they are not the whole story of politics), what is justice and what is its place in politics, especially if one sees political orders as a means to produce and distribute evils, to structure and manage violence, or to “civilize domination”. The fact that justice often treats compassion as a problem rather than a resource, especially in the legal and political spheres, manifests why the decision about whether to treat justice as arising within a political/juridical field or an ethical field first is so important
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