The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (review)

"Freedom's most sublime meaning is eros" (180). This is the central claim of Cynthia Willett's powerful new book, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris. Therein Willett brings together critical theory, care ethics and other forms of feminist theory, and the "visionary pragmatism" of African-American thought to challenge liberal conceptions of individuality and freedom. Willett demonstrates how liberalism operates with an asocial conception of the individual, including a misplaced emphasis upon autonomy and choice that obscures the import of social interaction to individual freedom. Providing an alternative to these views, Willett argues both that individuality is expressed through and that freedom is found in one's desiring relationships with others. Nurturing one's libidinal and erotic ties with others is not merely relevant to developing individual agency and freedom; it is the optimal way to do so.

Willett's goal in exploring the links between eros and freedom is to find ways to more effectively challenge oppressive social and political situations than traditional Western political theory has so far provided. Mining the largely overlooked resources of African-American thought and situating her analyses in the context of African-American slavery, Willett demonstrates how "[e]ros is a threat to culture that is based on oppression" because it can "[s]erve as a major catalyst for social change" (178). Precisely because it is so powerful, however, eros often is seen by dominant groups as something to suppress or destroy. One way this is done is by reducing eros to mere sexuality, especially reproductive heterosexuality, thereby robbing other areas of intimate life of their erotic power (178). Another way—one that is especially pertinent to Willett's concern for racial justice—is to attempt to rip up ties between friends, family, and community, as the American system of slavery did. By separating family members from one another, which occurred both by removing people from their communities in Africa and by selling family members independently of each other once they were brought to the United States, the erotic social fabric that is needed to challenge injustice was torn.

Modernity's treatment of separation as a positive phenomenon comes under frequent fire in The Soul of Justice. For example, while modernity's story about the formation of subjectivity makes separation crucial to it, Willett demonstrates how the experiences of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery challenge this claim. Willett argues that from a modernist perspective, "separation from the sentient bonds of family gives way to the formation of the rational will and the necessary discipline for entry into the working world" (198). However, her own position is that the destruction of erotic connections through the violence of separation does not in fact produce autonomy or freedom. It results instead in social death (211).

Another key focus of The Soul of Justice is the phenomenon of hubris, which in Willett's view is perhaps the greatest enemy of eros. Hubris is not merely a character flaw, as modern scholars often interpret it to be. It is an assault against the fabric of social relationships, as the ancient Greeks well understood (12). "Hubris is a crime of arrogance and social power" (16) and must be recognized as such if eros and the freedom it includes are to be supported. It is important, moreover, to understand how the arrogant power of hubris operates through the production of surplus pleasure taken in the experience of degrading another. Willett provides an insightful and provocative account of how this took place in the case of slavery. One might think that the ultimate insult that a slaveholder could heap upon his or her slaves would be to view them solely as nonhuman brutes. From that perspective, for the slaveholder to see his or her slaves as...