Residues of Justice : Literature, Law, Philosophy

In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice. To honor these "residues," she turns to literature, which, in its linguistic density, transposes the clean abstractions of law and philosophy into persistent shadows, the abiding presence of the incommensurate. Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict. In arguing for justice as an incomplete virtue, Dimock draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory; she discusses Aristotle and Augustine, Locke and Luther, Marx and Durkheim, Michael Sandel and Carol Gilligan, Noam Chomsky and Mary Ann Glendon. She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner. The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice. Frontmatter Acknowledgments (page xi) Introduction: Justice and Commensurability (page 1) 1. Crime and Punishment (page 11) Kant, Nietzsche, Beccaria (page 12) Taxonomy and Jurisdiction (page 19) Uneven Development (page 23) Gendered Justice: The Deerslayer (page 27) Crime as a Signifying Field (page 31) Equality Republican and Liberal (page 36) Decline of Political Rationality (page 43) Feminization of Virtue (page 47) 2. Part and Whole (page 57) Metonymy and Materialism (page 58) Bodies Physical and Nonphysical (page 62) Marxist Individualism (page 70) Marx and Durkheim (page 74) New Historicism and the Preposition "In" (page 77) Reading the Incomplete: Herman Melville (page 79) The Limits of Totality: Rebecca Harding Davis (page 89) 3. Luck and Love (page 96) Justice by Lottery (page 96) Luck and Desert: John Rawls (page 102) Syntax and Democracy: Noam Chomsky (page 106) Grammatical Subjects: "Song of Myself" (page 113) Semantics and Memory (page 120) Preference Human and Divine: The Wide, Wide World (page 124) The Language of Protestant Memory (page 128) Mere and Arbitrary Grace: Jonathan Edwards (page 135) 4. Pain and Compensation (page 140) A Just Measure (page 141) Quantifying Morality (page 146) Rational Benevolence (page 152) Tort Law (page 158) Functional Adaptation (page 163) A Cognitive History of the Novel (page 167) Radius of Pertinence (page 169) Incomplete Rationalization (page 176) 5. Rights and Reason (page 182) Moral Subjectivism: Hobbes and Locke (page 183) An Adversarial Language: The Awakening (page 191) Conflict Dissolution (page 197) Evidentiary Grammars (page 204) Substantive Jurisprudence: Lochner to Plessy (page 210) The Absolutization of Justice (page 218) Notes (page 225) Index of Names (page 271) Subject Index (page 275) In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate terms: punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice Takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. In arguing for justice as an incomplete virtue, this book draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory. In an unusually striking and indeed unusually chilling moment in The Philosophy of Law (1796), Kant takes it upon himself to defend the death penalty. Wai Chee Dimock. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 225-269) And Indexes.