Review Essay: Three Gestures Toward Justice

• Published date: 01 October 2007
• Author: Nomi Claire Lazar
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591707299823
• Date: 01 October 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory
Review Essays
Volume 35 Number 5
October 2007 659-665
© 2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/0090591707299823
Three Gestures Toward
http://ptx.sagepub.com
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Justice
http://online.sagepub.com
Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice, by W. James
Booth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 264 pp. $42.50 (cloth).
Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law, by Marianne
Constable. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 232 pp. $29.95
(cloth).
Two Faces of Justice, by Jiwei Ci. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006. 264 pp. $39.95 (cloth).
In any inquiry, the questions one asks and the means one employs to
address them depend on the nature of the material under consideration. In
this respect, justice as a subject of philosophical contemplation is particu-
larly tricky. We continue to have only a shadow of an idea of what sort of
thing justice might be. Is it a predicate of a state of affairs? A set of rules
and procedures? And how should we then approach it? Both colloquially
and in serious scholarship, the genus of justice remains somewhat mysteri-
ous and our methods of study correlatively diverse.
Twentieth century authors wondered, when anti-foundationalist anxieties
allowed, how society ought to look were justice manifested there. But the
books reviewed investigate justice from the perspective that, whatever else it
might be and on whatever grounds it might rest, justice is something we expe-
rience subjectively. We feel injustice in our gut and our desire to see it righted
is at least that: a desire. Hence, these accounts rely less on our capacity to
weave a cohesive and consistent conception of justice out of our construction
of meaning in the world and turn instead (or in addition) to what purpose jus-
tice serves for us, and what makes us feel as though it ought to be woven into
our constructions.
Investigating these subjective experiences of justice requires a special
approach since such things are difficult to engage descriptively. The kinds of
arguments we can make about it will necessarily be less analytic, less rigor-
ous. But argument is only one among many ways of conducting inquiry, and
conclusions are only one aim. Provoking and unsettling can lead to insights
and new approaches to old problems. And in addition to these, the books
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Political Theory
reviewed below employ a method which we might call ‘gesture.’ Gesturing,
by which I mean drawing our attention by means of examples, stories,
metaphors, etc., may lead us to look in new directions without necessarily
knowing what we are looking for in advance.
Gesture provides an appropriate means of confronting the more subjective
elements of justice since it denies certain forms of limitation and boundary,
while the rules of argument constitute a set of fairly fixed boundaries. We
speak of the force of an argument because compulsion is the criterion of its
excellence. We also speak of the force of reason, a means of corralling the
passions. We are compelled, to an extent, to use argument if we wish to have
our ideas taken seriously in certain quarters, and the denigration of the senti-
ments has a longer pedigree than their serious investigation in the history of
moral and political thought. Gesture makes its appearance in these books in
a variety of forms: the authors trace patterns of ideas and insights around a
central claim until its outline emerges (Ci, Constable); or they use storytelling
to get at aspects of an experience (Constable, Booth); and all let subjective
experience illuminate new sides of justice.
From one perspective, the use of gesture is a way of speaking more qui-
etly. From another, it creates an enormous amount of ambient noise. In cer-
tain cases this noise can drown out the author’s message or disguise what is
ultimately fuzzy reasoning. Sometimes the ambience is intentional....