Tag: justice

Possibility and necessity are terms opposed to justice … Possible means all that the strong can impose upon the weak. It is reasonable to examine how far this possibility goes. Supposing it to be known, it is certain that the strong will accomplish his purpose to the extreme limit of possibility. It is a mechanical necessity.

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

mississippistreet:

queerfabulousmermaid:

mississippistreet:

– Betty McLellan, Beyond Psychoppression: a feminist alternative therapy, pg. 70

Okay but fuck racist radfem Mary Daly and fuck Betty McLellan because Audre Lorde definitely wrote “The Uses of Anger” circa 1981. And considering that Mary Daly didn’t fuck with Audre Lorde—not since 1979 when lorde wrote a letter critiquing her white supremacist views and behaviors—I am highly suspicious of this clear paraphrasing of Lorde’s argument which according to McLellan’s citation was written in 1984 after Lorde’s essay which was published as early as 1981.
This is the 1981 publication of “the uses of anger” that I found. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005441
Here’s Audre Lorde’s 1979 essay “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordeopenlettertomarydaly.html
Fuck the historical erasure of queer Black women’s words, ideas, and activism. Fuck that.

thank you for pointing this out.

audre lorde was a lesbian though- she used the words lesbian & dyke-  let’s not say “don’t erase queer black women’s words” when by doing so you are obfuscating and rewriting the very important lesbianism that informed her politics.

Source: mississippistreet

I made this statement … that the law could be deconstructed. There is a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of positive laws, and this history is a history of the transformation of laws. That is why they are there. You can improve law, you can replace one law by another one. There are constitutions and institutions. This is a history, and a history, as such, can be deconstructed. Each time you replace one legal system by another one, one law by another one, or you improve the law, that is a kind of deconstruction, a critique and deconstruction. So, the law as such can be deconstructed and has to be deconstructed. That is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics, and progress. But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive, or the movement to improve the law, that is, to deconstruct the law. Without a  call for justice we would not have any interest in deconstructing the law. That is why I  said that the condition of possibility of deconstruction is a  call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law, to a given system of legal structures. That means that justice is always unequal to itself. It is non-coincident with itself.

—D. Caputo and J. Derrida, Deconstruction in a  Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, New York, Fordham University Press, 1997, pp. 16-17.

reitsc:

1. Revenge is a mirror. I find my image marred in its reflection. An image is recurrence, just as an echo is the return of my voice, divested of its origin, its intervals descending into silence. Revenge is an echo whose volume only rises.

2. Money and spite, like Adam and Eve, are halves of a whole. (The name Adam breaks from the Hebraic adamah, meaning ‘ground’, the red earth from which he was made and into which he will return. Adamah is sired by the Semitic adam, meaning ‘red’. Dam is ‘blood’. Anger, shame, jealousy, fear—emotions that hasten the heart, like bombs in the body but which linger like a fever, feelings of fire and heat that make our blood burn—are each an ample engine for revenge. Revenge is the eternal, animal, incendiary inner essence.) For every vengeful person, a wound is a due, a slight a fee, an offense remembered signed yours truly by the object of their malice: for every vengeful spirit’s posture is YOU OWE ME.

3. What follows is that, feeling hurt, I am thus empty; being owed something must mean that I lack that thing. The desire to get even then fills my hollow, this rising up of desire itself a process of revenge, much like the pain of hunger and the desire to eat—a clockwork lack, its animal response. The rouge arises with each gonging of the wound, in memory its harmony repeats, dissonant, distinct, its smoke ascending with each flutter of the flame, a blossom in the lungs, quickening the heart, the breath, the eyes and mind myopic in its plumes, I’ve been overcome, put down, made less, littler and worth loathing. I’m trembling. But I go on, no reason to console me except the reason of get even, get back, strike harder, be proud, have cunning, purity, patience, but above all don’t care and don’t slip. All with a grip of death to hold a grudge so heavy I sink my own ship.

4. Hungry, hurt, hunted, I become a hunter.

5. An act of revenge implies an equilibrium, a zero state, a calm horizon. A balance disturbed such that my retaliative act is an act of restoration. Revenge is a mirror because payback’s a bitch, karma’s a bitch, life’s a bitch and then you die: YOU DESERVED IT. This leap from lacking to possession, from being owed to paying someone back and therefore having that thing (since how can I give what I lack?), is the same leap we make from depth to surface, from body to glass, person to image…

6. forgiveness, humility