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  • Beyond Epistemic Injustice, Toward Epistemic Outrage:On Saskia Sassen’s Analytical Destabilizations.
  • Eduardo Mendieta

In the Work that she presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 7 March 2013, in Galloway, New Jersey, Sassen most tellingly began her keynote with a reflection on method. She spoke of “Before Method.” She spoke of the need to step back, and suspend our extant methods. Emergent social orders, or what she called, in her massive and transformational text Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, the emergence of new assemblages, requires that we rethink our old categories, or that we try to assess their usefulness or allow ourselves to countenance their obsolescence. The “before method,” and the invitation to step back, to bracket, or to suspend, evidently will have great resonance for philosophers informed by pragmatism, which has thematized so deliberately and consistently the question of rethinking our methods and epistemic categories in light of new and unexpected challenges. The “before method” should also evoke for some of us Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” and Jacques Derrida’s essay with the same title. The allusions signal the preoccupation that standing before the law means at least two things. On the one hand, “before the law” means that we have been brought before the law to be judged. We are already partly guilty as we are before, in front, facing the law. We must have made an infraction; we must have violated some law, in order to be before it. A judgment and a sentence are forthcoming. On the other hand, “before the law” also means that which is temporally and analytically before the law, as in what gives rise to law. The “before” here is the zone of theoretical indistinction in which we neither know how to apply extant law nor is there law to apply. This “before” is thus the non-place of indiscernibility, in which we are standing in the darkness of both ethical expectancy and alertness. [End Page 96]

Now, I will argue that Sassen’s invitation to stand “before method,” should be understood in this second sense of “before the law”; that is, she is not asking us simply to stand back into the non-space of “epistemic innocence,” or “epistemic non-commitment,” or “epistemic vigilance.” Rather, in the face of the kind of epistemic closure, nay, in the face of the agnotological effects that our existing methods may enact, Sassen invites us to stand back and stand in the zone of epistemic outrage, the place of ethical solicitude that is alert to how our theorizing our disassembling and reassembling social order comes at the heavy price of new forms of social suffering, what she calls new “elementary brutalities.” We ought to see, this is at least one of my arguments, Sassen’s work as the enactment of an epistemology of resistance, to use that felicitous expression coined by José Medina, that is fueled by epistemic outrage at the production, the making of new inequalities, new injustices, new forms of “expulsion.”

One of the hallmarks of Sassen’s work is that it urges us to think beyond binaries and in terms of co-determining processes that involve the national and the global. For her, the global is not the occlusion, or overcoming, or subordination of the national, and the national, in turn, is not simply the refusal, the resistance to the global. Globalization, in very broad strokes, is a process that is enabled by the national, through processes of both denationalization and renationalization, which may or may not be enabled through urban geographies, or global cities. One of the tensions that her work explores very well is that between an emergent legal order that is above states, or which is not simply inter-state. This new legal order was partly anticipated by philosopher Immanuel Kant, when he the coined the term “cosmopolitan law.” In recent years, or at least since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the development of a catalog of rights that are part of “cosmopolitan law” has given rise to the discourse on “cosmopolitan citizenship.” Now, this discourse is different from the “transnational...

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