Anastasia Chamberlen

This paper engages with dialectical critical realism to reflect on the problems and limitations regarding our contemporary justice practices and understandings. Our starting point is the idea that contemporary approaches to justice in liberal democratic settings are predominantly hostile; they are overly focused on episodic injustices, and dominant forms of addressing these injustices are pervaded with punitive logics. This pathological character of contemporary justice is linked to how it is socially experienced, imagined and reproduced as an absent presence: something that is already ‘there’, taken for granted, and only relevant when it is seen to be violated. Against this, we argue that concrete justice is mostly lacking in our social world, and that to tackle this lack, we need to reimagine and re-experience justice as a present absence. The paper then suggests that this alternative, lived sense of justice can be pursued through an engagement with the dialectics of belonging.

This paper critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It does so by defining this approach to justice as predominantly pathological, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in our contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy the concept of ‘dys-appearance’ used by Drew Leder in the context of his theory of embodiment to discuss how, in western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced and paid attention to when it appears negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we only become conscious of justice in our lived experiences through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. This phenomenological quality of justice, we argue, is intrinsically linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect.