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140 chaptEr 6 Christian God. But is not this solitude the solitude also of the self? Derrida , as he speaks of the inability of any man [sic] to attain the solitude of God, also speaks of a certain selftaste in its radical isolation and insularity. He speaks of “the experience of a ‘selfbeing,’ a ‘selfhood,’ a ‘self-awareness’ that, long before thinking itself, long before the cogito, senses the taste of the self” (698). This sense of the body, this aisthesis, is related to the moment of justice. This moment is also related to the moment of uniqueness and singularity. For J. Hillis Miller, as Derrida asserts, justice is again related to the “ethical necessity” of the “example” to knowledge. For no knowledge is possible without the example. yet each example, in its uniqueness, escapes necessarily—even if a tiny bit—from the generality of knowledge. “Miller’s exemplary justice consists of paying essential attention to the irreplaceability of the example” (695). And then again, the notion of the example brings us back to the theme of law. For law, like the universal knowledge, cannot work except with examples, cannot work without instances that are each unique, each calling for an interpretation. Derrida describes this as the “terrible paradox of the law” in that, “despite its universal structure, it is formulated always in the performative of an event” (707). Thus the inalienable link between law and justice. The irreducibility of justice to law or the absolute heterogeneity of the two concepts is not enough to sever their connection. For justice, as the interruption of law, is constitutive of the latter. And law, as the ground that justice interrupts, constitutes justice. is it possible to de-link the “man” and the Christian God from this notion of justice? Can the soiled, brown, dead woman in the little village of colonial Bengal be just? She cannot be just by the sheer reaction to the terror of patriarchy in her every day. Does she reach out to the transcendent? is the reader/ writer of the event of her acts ready to wrench her out of a foreordained immanence ? Even as he or she writes through the immanent and transcendent space-time of postcolonial states, societies, and academic institutions, is the reader/writer ready to acknowledge his or her own un-homely queerness of being? These are probably some of the questions one would have to face if one approached the question of justice from the standpoint of the aisthesis of the corporeal. The death of Chandra’s body was the death of the body that bore the fetus that it expelled. if it was the place where women’s solidarity was acted out, it—at least—was also the place where the body of the woman turned metaphoric. The body—on death—only performed what it already was: absent. But that performance was an act of the just, of the justice enacted not by the apparatus of the law but through the body of the woman. This, we perhaps realize, also interrupts law for the moment. aEsthEticizinG laW into JusticE 141 notEs i thank all the participants in my presentations of this theme in its various forms at various places. A part of this essay repeats the argument i put forward in another essay, “Choice, Life and the (M)other: Towards Ethics in/of Abortion” (2010). 1. On the contrary, one may speak (with Derrida 2005a) of the “at once continuous and differentiated becoming of reason” (141), of a rationality “that takes account of the incalculable so as to give an account of it, there where this appears impossible, so as to account for or reckon with it” (159). 2. This specific sense of law and justice is found in the works of Jacques Derrida (especially 1994 and 2002a and in numerous other works that follow him in this regard ). See Buonamano 1998; Cornell 1992, 1995; Keenan 1997; ieven n.d.; Sokoloff 2005; and Spivak 2003a. 3. The whole text of the judgment, with concurring and dissenting opinions of the judges, is available online at the website of “Priests for Life,” hosted by Catholic Online and has been used extensively in the following discussion on the topic. 4. See Balakrishnan 1994, Weiss 1995, and especially Menon 1996 for detailed discussions on the parallels between the arguments against female feticide and the prolife positions, a phenomenon that, for me, indicates the contextuality of all purported generalities, even the feminist ones. 5. i discuss the...

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