Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text

Epilogue: Essentially Contested Concepts and Innocent Spaces

Essentially Contested Concepts and Innocent Spaces If women have a role to play . . . it is only in assuming a negative function: reject everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society. . . . A feminist practice can only be . . . at odds with what already exists so that we may say “that’s not it,” and “that’s still not it.” Julia Kristeva, Nancy Hirschmann, and Christine Di Stefano, “Revision, Reconstruction, and the Challenge of the New” In modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” IT IS IMPORTANT to acknowledge the contributions of Enrique Dussel, Iris Marion Young, and Achille Mbembe to the criticism of liberalism and modern reason.These three thinkers excavate the occult sites of Western philosophy , radically questioning their social integrity and viability and obstinately 197 Rodriguez EPI:Layout 1 12/26/08 5:46 PM Page 197 pointing to their flawed logic as ways of recognizing liberalism’s ethical obligation to unassimilable Otherness—Dussel in his reconsideration of modernity from its underside, Young in her all-out offensive against liberalism’s “innocent spaces” and “essentially contested concepts,” and Mbembe in his redefinition of sovereignty as necropolitics, the power to decide who lives and who dies. They are eager to expose the aporias of modern thought so that the gates are opened to other constituencies—women, ethnic groups, and the poor. Dussel, Young, and Mbembe keep modernity under siege on the theoretical , political, and cultural fronts by asking Western philosophy to respond. Feminist criticism’s radical examination of what its theorists call “essentially contested concepts”—power, freedom, rights—has made it possible for me to understand the chasm between proper and improper conceptual environments. These thinkers, like us, take the realization of a lack of fit between concepts and the social real as their point of departure. Their claim is that political philosophy ’s foundational concepts don’t fit women; consequently, the blueprint they offer for political analysis is flawed. Foundational concepts are grounded “on a vision of humanity that is historically specific and consistently exclusive in terms of class (propertied), race (white), sex (males), and gender (masculine subjects).”₁ Therefore, for each one of the exteriorities, to use Dussel’s term, multiple adjustments are due. This is a tough recall of the political, very much in line with the gesture of this text. From feminists reflections we have taken their robust impulse for democratizing the foundational notions and scrutinizing the “innocent space” to encompass the excluded. Their analysis was particularly helpful in reading Rigoberta Menchú’s discussion of civil society and in explaining the gap between publics and subaltern counterpublics in Menchú’s uses of civil society. It was also insightful in explaining the tension between public and private in our exploration of the murder of women in Juárez. One of the most important voices in this regard is Iris Marion Young’s. She responds to some of the antinomies raised by multicultural philosophers such Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, and philosophers of justice such as John Rawls, examined in chapter 1 of this book. Her intervention can be read as a critique of liberalism’s lack of ethical obligation to unassimilable Otherness . In particular I am interested in rehearsing her concept of justice, because Epilogue 198 Rodriguez EPI:Layout 1 12/26/08 5:46 PM Page 198 she addresses questions relative to institutionalized domination and oppression not generally considered in standard and ordinary theories, which “tend to restrict the meaning of social justice to the morally proper distribution of bene fits and burdens among society’s members.”² Hers is a position against the so-called distributive paradigm, for it limits itself to the allocation of material goods—things, resources, income, wealth—or the distribution of social positions . Public discussions on justice focus on inequalities of wealth and income, conceptualize issues of justice in terms of patterns, disregard processes, and, in taking the individual as the basis for all discussions, erase the importance of social groups and ignore their input. Concerning Young’s intervention, I want to highlight her identification of nonmaterial, immeasurable quantities and intangible goods, such as self-respect, equal opportunities, and free speech, that are never discussed in debates on justice, and her critique of predominant approaches to justice...