*Justice or Your Mother

 The seminar today was given by a Professor of Political Theology. His topic: Justice or Your Mother; Levinas and Zizek...I forget what the rest of the heading was...and this is a crude recount...

At any rate, the seminar opened with Albert Camus's statement when he received the Noble Peace Prize in literature. He stated, if I had to choose between Justice or my mother I would choose my mother. This indicated a preference of the particular over the universal. That we are inclined to decide for the loyalty and love we have for the one's closest to us over the justice driven by the state, an extension of patriotism or nationalism; justice being one of many that represents a universal. This poses a problem for the speaker. That how are we to decide when faced with such a tension between that which is particular over that which is universal. My thought is that we must beg the question before anything meaningful can truly come out of this. What is the particular and what is the universal? What are its contents? And what are the circumstances of each?

The speaker goes on to discuss Levinas, who starts with the negation of God and goes on to discuss the responsibility of persons. That because responsibility, in a Sartre sense, is one that is placed upon the burden of all persons to love thy neighbor and place them before the selfish needs of the individual, it is a suicidal self-abnegation. That it is a perpetual asymmetrical relationship between the self and the other. Because there is no God, the divine responsibility shifts unto the neighbor. That this calls for a subjective responsibility for the "salvation" of others. As such this leads one to consider particulars and circumstance. For a greater sense of empathy for our individual neighbors.

In contrast, Zizek proposes for the universal through the domain of "the third." The domain of the victims of collateral damage. The unseen faces. That Justice, not love, is blind and must consider the absent. That there is a responsibility to Justice. The unseen faces, those constituting "the third," must be taken precedent over the subjective faces of the present. This is a call for the Universal. And that because there is no God, it is humanity that must take on divine responsibility.

There is a polarization of the universal and the particular. The speaker notes that he thinks this polarization and leaning towards one or the other have resulted from a pronounced death of God, as both Zizek and Levinas do not start with and do not place a concept of God within their assessments. The speaker suggests that we pronounce the death of the death of God. That we should be able to utilize both the Universal and the Particular for an ethical over the political.

I, personally, do not see a difference whether God is in the picture or not. If he is in the picture then we have an array of other issues of heremeneutics in interpreting what God is, and what his "law" is as a Universal and how to apply it to the Particular. And yet, even if we did the pragmatic concerns will still persist about the Universal and the Particular. And in the event of without God, we have a Kantian conception of how to describe and ascribe a universal law of human rights, its enforcements and how to apply it. The set of practical issues are the same in drawing a relationship between the universal and the particular. What do we do? A Christian leader does not necessary entail a more just government nor does a secular one. The bickering over labels ring empty and hollow to me. Perhaps a better approach, as suggested from the audience, is framing the issue in another matter and at the same time consider what the content of the Universal is. This is a task of framing what the good life is and what is morally good. What are the virtues?

I want to return quite briefly to Camus and wonder, what he still choose his mother over justice if his mother was a serial killer? Or a genocidal dictator? And would Justice be chosen over one's mother when Justice is not truly Justice? There are corruptions and judicial mishaps in the pursuit of Justice. The court system is not perfect and there have been many innocent people convicted of a crime (the 'Innocence Project' is a documentary of innocent men who were released from Death Row after a DNA test exonerated them). There are alternative questions to this Justice vs. Your mother question. And to me the issue cannot possibly be one or the other without considering the circumstances and how the issue is framed in posing such a dreadful dilemma. I love my mom. And I will take humanity over patriotism any day.