A Just Grammar: Unspeakable Speech in Robert Meister

The work of preserving what is humanly valuable and defending the justice of this value involves defining what counts as the humanity of the victim, proper structures of mourning, and retribution for loss. Robert Meister’s previous book, Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx (1990), asked what kind of subject democracy imagines and constructs. His most recent book asks how, under the auspices of popular sovereignty, we identify with the history and persistence of injustice or large-scale loss.¹ How do we describe this “human” task, and who is the human we figure as the subject of this process? The answer—which Meister argues through numerous theoretical assemblages, historical case studies, and legal arguments across the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries—lies in radically reshaping humanitarian ethics and human rights discourse to make justice available in the present. While human rights has promised to redeem humanity from the repetition of past atrocities and prevent future catastrophes, it has accomplished only a state of endlessly deferred, universalized moral redemption by eliding both the structural roots of injustice and the ability for any survivor to put immediate pressure on those who continue to profit from these crimes. The work to be done now, Meister argues, is threefold: we must expose the ideological underpinnings of an ethics based in identification between a victim and a beneficiary, reimagine the “subject” and grammar of human rights discourse, and introduce a concrete legal process to value injustice differently.

Meister locates the emergence of human rights discourse at the moment when models of popular sovereignty transitioned from revolutionary conceptions of human rights (which he places roughly between the French Revolution, 1789, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989) to the “ethical transcendence of politics of revolution and counterrevolution” (ae, 7). Following the adjudication of genocide and systemic violence in Nuremberg, Johannesburg, and The Hague, Meister argues, human rights discourse of the twenty-first century proceeds as if its “international community,” led by the capitalist victors of the Cold War, has come after evil. These trials marked a shift from the moral psychology of struggle and such oppositional declarations of “rights of man” toward one of “reconciliation”—embodied perhaps most explicitly by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. The battle lines were no longer drawn against aristocratic, autocratic, and dictatorial power but inflected internally toward extremists or “inhuman” terrorists who refused to put past grievances behind them and accept the universal model of humanity, metonymized perhaps most strongly in the emergent image of the Israeli state and its protectors. Establishing a culture of humanitarian ethics meant, then, prioritizing the value and promise of this universal liberal ethical subject, even if that entails resorting to “emergency” violations of this “human” code and overlooking localized collateral damage and socioeconomic inequities. The least-just state, from this perspective, “would be that in which victors rule with the consciousness of victims” (ae, 23).

Aside from calling for a new narratological realism of injustice—one that he leaves the literary theorists to fill out—Meister proposes three main reforms both practical and representational. The first is to confront the challenges of imagining subjects beyond the neoliberal “victim/beneficiary” dyad of human rights discourse. The second is to establish a working legal, market solution for restitution or reparations. The last is to give expressive forms to structural socioeconomic inequalities that both authorize and perpetuate injustice. The first aspect of this reformulation includes a thorough critique of the subjectivities implicit in critical ethical theory, since Meister argues that “ethics” replaces politics in human rights discourse. For the most part, Meister follows Levinas in calling for an “ethics of substitution” over the virtues of recognition, promoting a perspectival realism of what Levinas would call “incomparable ones.” The self is preceded by a proximity and responsibility to the other, which Meister reads out of both the psychoanalytic (Winnicott and Klein) and the critical ethical tradition (Adorno, Levinas). This is posited...