Entangling with/Listening to the Victims. Notes on Anamnestic Reason and Justice

Abstract

This essay aims to defend a reason and justice based on a specific conception of memory, hence anamnetic. In opposition to the dominant theory of justice, according to which justice lies not in contents but in procedure, it explores, rather, the negative path toward justice: one that gives primacy to the experience of injustice, to evil, to  harm, to violence; one that places victims at the center of its attention, rather than rational subjects who deliberate, presumably in freedom, what is fair. I investigate the difficulties of the term victim, always in dispute; the incomplete but necessary charac ter of language to expose horror and the theat ricalization of excess; I examine how we can provide intelligibility to the horror of the  unthinkable, but which has taken place. This essay articulates the experience of injustice with memory as an epistemic category and a corporeal epistemology.