The promise of justice
Howard Caygill

Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise brings with it all the suffocating memories of the disappointments, and worse, that attend its history. Perhaps it is a promise better forgotten? Better not to repeat Josef K’s error in The Trial of believing and pursuing the ‘promise of justice’? Yet the prospect of a world without the hope of justice is too horrible to contemplate. The prefigurations of such a world, appearing in acts of rendition, indefinite detention and unaccountable corporate-political governmentality, revive the force of the promise, in spite of everything.1

One obvious way to do justice to the promise of justice is to realize its promise, yet this realization might be to betray both promise and justice. For a promise of justice can also be threat and its realization the wreaking of vengeance. The separation of justice from its immediate realization in vengeance is one of the legacies of ancient tragedy and prophesy, yet it is one that has recently been put into question. An emblem of this questioning is the current ‘reactivation’ of the French revolutionary Maximilian Robespierre by Alain Badiou and, most recently, by Slavoj Žižek, in his collection Robespierre: Virtue and Terror. Curiously, the ‘reactivation’ of Robespierre follows on the heels of that of Saint Paul. The saint who transformed the classical account of justice into the agapic feast and the theological virtues has been ‘reactivated’ alongside the architect and panegyrist of revolutionary terror and republican virtue.
The reactivations of Saints Paul and Maximilian direct attention to the religious and political charges that invest the ‘promise of justice’. Indeed, one of the emerging loci of debate is the meaning of the concept of ‘divine violence’ introduced by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Critique of Violence’ in his discussion of the limits of revolutionary action. Žižek provocatively defines divine violence as ‘justice, the point of non-distinction between justice and vengeance, in which “the people” (the anonymous part of no part) imposes its terror and makes other parts pay the price – the Judgement Day for the long history of oppression, exploitation, suffering’.2 The enthusiasm for a realized eschatology of justice, the promise finally kept in the wreaking of vengeance – the advent of the Kingdom or rather Republic of God – may be contrasted with the deferred eschatology of Derrida’s reading of ‘divine violence’. Feeling his courage fail before the implications of this concept, at the end of ‘Force of Law’, Derrida confirms his consistently held view that justice can only be promised; to realize it is to betray its promise to calculation or vengeance. For Derrida (as for Benjamin), the hesitation before the realization of justice forms part of a wider inquiry into messianicity.

The tension between regarding the ‘promise of justice’ in terms of either divine vengeance, on the one hand, or divine grace, mercy or forgiveness, on the other, is not only an urgent legal and political issue but also an intrinsic articulation of the promise of justice itself. It reveals the character of the promise to be inseparable from the form of its realization in time, the bringing into being of a promised justice. One way to loosen this articulation of justice, being and time is to analyse it historically, to trace the forms it has adopted (and not adopted) and to gain a sense of its current mutations and future possibilities. The tensions involved in the realization of justice, and thus the proximity of the questions of being and justice, point towards one of Heidegger’s most traumatized texts, the immediately postwar Der Spruche des Anaximander (The Saying or Judgement of Anaximander),3 which works through some of the articulations of the promise of justice and the question of being and time through a reading of Anaximander’s first fragment.

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