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Are we truly, though, midway to making real what ought to be, as the historical discourse of the winners insists? If we pass a hand over that well-groomed story—but do so against the part and against the grain, as Walter Benjamin counseled—won’t it perhaps turn out that what this history holds to be “exceptional”—exceptions that constantly and forcefully occur, even in our days—can teach us more regarding the history of democracy in modernity, and about its current possibilities, than what that history recognizes as the “rule”?

Bolívar Echeverría, “El sentido del siglo XX”

beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

Benjamin

Cuento is the name given to the bolster used to shore up what threatens to fall into ruins; hence the expression andar, o estar en cuentos, to be or find oneself en cuentos: to be in danger, and hold oneself together with handiwork and artifice.

Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española

How, who, what is Walter Benjamin “in Latin America”?¹ What did and what does Benjamin teach Latin America? So asked a helpful collection of essays from 2010.² For Benjamin’s influence in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere, in Portuguese and Spanish translation, though read in German and English as well, has been profound. His “Theses on the Philosophy of History” help Michael Löwy understand the theology of liberation that takes hold distinctively across the continent.³ Benjamin’s “For a Critique of Violence”—first in Héctor Murena’s 1967 version del alemán, “from the German,” then in a faulty translation by Jesús Aguirre, and most recently translated from German in 2007–2008 by Pablo Oyarzun and republished in 2017 in a revised edition, with an accompanying group of essays by distinguished Latin American philosophers—serves to organize the Latin American response to the failures and successes of revolutionary movements, from Central America to the Southern Cone. A Glosario Walter Benjamin: Conceptos y figuras was published in Mexico in 2016. Benjamin is studied from the perspective of exile and, in Brazil, of the philosophy and practices of translation. He shapes the understanding of Latin American literary and artistic modernism.⁴ He helps define what has been called the barroco de indias. He is read against, and with, authors such as Mariátegui, Bolivar Echeverría, Óscar del Barco, and Viveiros de Castro. He is received in agonistic relation to Derrida, Agamben, Hamacher and others—each also read differently, in the publishing and scholarly markets that run from Mexico to Brazil, from how they are read in Europe or the United States. And, of course, the reception of Walter Benjamin has differed depending on the institutional and political cultures in which each country has read him and on the moment and circumstance of each country. Reading Benjamin is a different matter under Pinochet from what it is under the long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico; it is one thing to read the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” under Videla in Argentina and quite another to hear news of it in Havana, where Benjamin had once hoped to find himself, with Theodor Adorno’s help. Latin American Marxisms—which do not map easily onto the European varieties—take on Benjamin’s texts with different degrees of reluctance, violence, enthusiasm, and misprision—or reject them, again, for various reasons.

What does the complex, controversial, partial, rich, differentiated reception of Benjamin in Latin America offer anglophone readers of Benjamin’s work? And why now? Why offer now, in English, these essays about Walter Benjamin written by one of Latin America’s foremost philosophers, translators, and essayists? There is one answer for both questions: partly because Pablo Oyarzun’s Doing Justice will help an anglophone readership understand what it means to take account of, and to be responsible for and to, the “now.”⁵ What is it about today, just now, that requires thought, particularly the thought of those whose world is made up in, and of, English—the language of global capital at the moment of its crisis, in other words now? I’ll say that crisis is not a moment; that every moment is critical; that the relation that thought bears to crisis is a matter of justice, of doing justice to, in, and through crisis, of justly translating crisis: I can move through these assertions, from one to the next, stepwise, in the wake of Benjamin’s work. I arrive at the last one: I find Pablo Oyarzun’s work waiting.

I want to be careful, though. What Oyarzun’s essays offer the anglophone reader now is inseparably related to his writing about Benjamin in Spanish. That, though, was not these essays’ goal when they appeared in Spanish and helped to form Benjamin’s reception by Latin America’s Spanish-speaking readership. Rather the opposite: Pablo Oyarzun’s essays were intended to provide an alternative—in Spanish, with Latin America as a backdrop, a goal, and a resource—to the industry of Benjamin readings in English, French, and German, flowing South in translation or in the original from New York, or Paris, or Berlin. For this reason, a translation of Pablo Oyarzun’s work should have the constant company of disarming questions: what does it mean to write in Spanish about works from a philosophical tradition from which Spanish has long been excluded? How does the value that a moment (“now”), or a state, or a complex cultural prejudice assigns to a language like Spanish affects how its philosophers can make claims? How does such a language describe? How true can it hope to be? (Even phrasing the question this way proves violent. We think it means: Can the generality of a thesis’ truth claims be separated from the language in which these claims are articulated? But in Castilian Spanish we would say: ¿Cuán verdadera puede esperar ser? and we bring time, waiting, esperar, into the expression. In Spanish, I wait where I hope; less so, much less so, in English. The burning question of philosophical untranslatability… To the anglophone world, Spanish remains largely a servile language—the language of abjection, of la bestia; the language spoken on the other side of the wall; the language of the European PIGS—Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. In the age of Donald Trump, to reach for a philosophical timbre in Spanish will appear to some degree improper, or an act of defiance. These senses of Spanish are to be noted and understood as conditions of philosophical expression now, when the relation between Latin America and the anglophone world enters a different world, a world globalized utterly differently from heretofore, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Marx and Freud, Foucault said, founded discursivities; we might say that they were world making. As is Benjamin. A work, as well as the novel interpretation of a work or of a significant body of work, can make a world other, break it, unfound the discourse that composes it, and reconfigure it around the displacement of what was already assimilated and around all the emplacements that emerge now, in light of the new. The world of Walter Benjamin’s work has its rhythms, its crystallizations on different focal terms: violence; mysticism; law; allegory; history. These terms set values in different academic and non-academic markets and travel with greater or less ease from one language to another. Gewalt offers a sort of value, and offers it differently in the French academic context from how it offers it in the American or the Italian one; “violence” offers another, and differently in Santiago from in New York. And so on, at different times, with consequences that change and reconfigure past worlds, as well as what we imagine to be the case and what will come.

I say that the interpretation of a significant body of work makes a world other. This is hardly news. Any number of examples will come to mind; to choose a single one, or even a number, is to configure a world in which that sort of example has a normative weight. I’ll be offering the name “Benjamin,” for instance, as a sort of metonym: his name stands for other names, which stand for works that also make worlds new and make new worlds, when read out of place and against their time. This is familiar ground, well covered by subaltern studies and articulated recently in the languages of the so-called decolonial option. Yes, when Benjamin’s body of work passes through the South, through peripheral readings, through the capitals of the twenty-first century rather than of the nineteenth, or even twentieth, when it takes shape in the languages of the South, then the focal terms that arrange its values change sense, and the worlds they configure change too. Both suffer translations. What terms and worlds suffer will make up other worlds than those in which Walter Benjamin was first read and valued and received. The North (my caricature, of course) will be reading Benjamin through, and in, contexts for which his work was not explicitly intended. The South will no longer read Walter Benjamin as the bearer of European legitimacy. Like that famous word-laden suitcase that he carried to Port Bou, Benjamin will now have been lost—lost to the fantasy that his work bears to Europe, for Europe, the last illumination of European enlightenment (and that it bears to those it is not for, to the colony, just its shadows or reflections); and lost to the fantasy that his work, always already estranged from its original habitat, finds itself at home—or less unhoused—somewhere at the periphery, in Buenos Aires or in Santiago or in Johannesburg. Now, the boulevards and parks of Paris are distressed by, mapped on, the grandes alamedas, the great shaded avenues of (say) Santiago de Chile—and vice-versa.

But Walter Benjamin’s work, read in and from the South, seems to me particularly addressed to this moment, just for what escapes its representativeness, its metonymy; just for what makes that, vice versa, spurious. (Here is Benjamin’s difference: I have to say what “this moment” is, or what I take it to be; to whom his work sets on “offer” what escapes representativeness; I am responsible for addressing its address. This, I think, is what Jetztzeit entails.)⁶ Take this example. It’s phrase that recalls a moment like the one we are living now, when one world was unmade, and another announced—abortively, incompletely. Pablo Oyarzun opens Doing Justice by remarking: “An experience always overflows its context.” He is thinking about experiences we—he, history—seek to foreclose: “never again,” we say, for instance (it is not just any example), regarding los desaparecidos, “the disappeared.” For Oyarzun, the circumstance that gives rise to the injunction “never again” is not single. He recalls Salvador Allende’s words on September 11, 1973—Sigan ustedes sabiendo que, mucho más temprano que tarde, de nuevo [se] abrirán las grandes alamedas por donde pase el hombre libre para construir una sociedad mejor—the conventional translation of which would be “Do not stop knowing that, much sooner than later, the great shaded avenues will open again, down which free men will walk to build a better society.” Oyarzun tells us that it took him forty years to understand that Allende’s sentence did not lack the reflexive pronoun se, as in my conventional translation—[se] abrirán, “the great shaded avenues will reopen, will open themselves, will be opened”—but rather that the sentence embedded a promise and an injunction: the people of Chile, to whom the sentence is addressed, are enjoined into political subjectivity: Sigan ustedes sabiendo, “Continue to know,” or perhaps “Continue, progress, move forward, and do so knowing that sooner or later you will open for yourselves the great avenues,” or even “Press on in and by means of the knowledge that one day you will open for yourselves the great avenues…”

Forty years, Oyarzun tells us, separate the experience from his understanding. That period installed in Chile what he calls el régimen más despiadado del “se” and la equivocidad aciaga del “se”—which English can only render, rather poorly, as something like “the pitiless regime of the impersonal reflexive passive se” or “the fateful equivocity of the passive voice.” The impersonal reflexive passive erased Allende’s addressee. Where his call to the people of Chile beat implicitly, the regime installed the hegemonizing braid of political coercion, consensus, and (self-)knowledge that the homonymy of se carries. Poetically, with the vertiginous speed of the pun rather than the forty-year delay, the forty years of waiting with which it reaches Pablo Oyarzun (and us): an overdetermined number, Moses’s number, the number of waiting in the desert, the number of exile—poetically, the impersonal reflexive passive particle se tells us se sabe, “it’s generally known” (the coercion of consensus); it says the verbal form sé, “I know” (the unassailable assertion: I know what I know); and it speaks the imperative sé, “be!” (In Castilian Spanish we say ¡Sé bueno!, “Be good!”; and we translate דוֹא יִהְי or sit lux [Vetus Latina] and fiat lux [Vulgata] as “¡Que se haga la luz! or !Sea la luz!”) Like a call he now hears ringing under the “fateful equivocity” of se, against the hegemonizing coupling of political coercion and (self-)knowledge that anchored Pinochet’s regime, Oyarzun offers what he and others should have heard in 1973, what all Chile should have heard: Allende’s proper audience, the political subject that Allende sought to call into being by promising the collective addressee its future. Here Benjamin is Oyarzun’s—and Latin America’s—guide.

Benjamin se esforzó por echar luz sobre lo que aquí llamo la equivocidad aciaga del “se,” discernir en él todo vestigio de lo demónico—esa otra impersonalidad revestida de figuras vengativas, caprichosas y violentas, presta a retornar en todo momento con la parafernalia o la insidia del “siempre, una y otra vez”—discernir, digo, lo demónico de una violencia radicalmente distinta, que se borra a sí misma en el instante mismo en que se desencadena, porque emancipa. Las huellas de este afán siguen presentes en toda su obra.

Benjamin attempted to illuminate what I call here the fateful equivocity of the passive voice and to highlight in it all vestiges of the demonic—this other impersonality wrapped up as it is in vindictive, whimsical, and violent figures and poised to return at any moment, with the paraphernalia or malicious claim of an “always, again and again.” In other words, Benjamin wanted to differentiate demonic violence from a radically different kind of violence, one that is erased in the very instant in which it is unleashed, because it has emancipatory force. This ambition has left traces on his entire oeuvre. (Prologue, pp. xix–xx)

What do we make of the forty-year lag between the event and the experience on the one hand, and their interpretation on the other? Of the antithetical value of se—fatefully, dreadfully equivocal, but also demonic or daemonic, Oyarzun says (and we are to take daimon in its double sense: the insidious, the evil, the diabolical, but also the figure of philosophical integrity that calls the wandering thinker—call him Socrates—back to the just path, the path of truth). Se, coercively hegemonizing, but diagnostic and critical at the same time? A se that hides, disappears, buries the collective political subjectivity that Allende promised and sought to bring into being; but also one that, forty or fifty years later, can violently bring it forth: sea el pueblo de Chile, sé?

Minimally, three things.

First, the event, never coincident with experience or interpretation, can eventually come into being, or even be commanded into being (¡sé!).⁷ Forty years pass; knowledge (saber, to know: yo sé, “I know”) catches up with the event of Allende’s radio transmission; the event of his promise to the people of Chile discloses itself (in Castilian, se revela, “it reveals itself”) to Pablo Oyarzun. Now Oyarzun can say, “I know to whom Allende’s phrase was addressed”; sé quiénes [se] abrirán las grandes alamedas. Let’s call “redemption” the horizon of possibility that opens when, and since, an event does not disclose itself as one and does not come into being at one time. (I am reading Oyarzun’s reading of Benjamin through and with Adorno, whose suspicion of singularity I share.) The standpoint of redemption: that an event a world ago can be called into being: sé; sea el pueblo de Chile. And this retrospective calling into being operates according to what Oyarzun calls “a radically different kind of violence, one that is erased [se borra] in the very instant in which it is unleashed [= unleashes itself, se desencadena], because it has emancipatory force.” Oyarzun rightly gives this “radically different kind of violence” its proper name: justice, Gerechtigkeit. The possibility of redeeming the event, the always open possibility of encountering or making a different addressee and of making appear a different world for the event of an enunciation, is the condition of (its) justice.⁸

Second, we encounter this non-coincidence of the event with experience and with interpretation where a natural language’s substances (names, nouns, pronouns) touch on its times, on its tenses, on its verbs, on its eventuality. Where there is predication, there the event may be redeemed, and there justice may be done. And this means not only attending, as Oyarzun does with exemplary care, with the care of a translator and a philosopher, to Benjamin’s language; even more importantly, it also means committing ourselves to reading one natural language’s predications through and against another’s. German through and in Spanish; this English sentence I am writing, in and against Spanish. Each has its times; for each, predication installs a relation the subject bears to truth and to the event that another language can only paraphrase. To do justice to English is to install in it another language’s times and truths. Another language’s world is the condition of a language’s se.

The English language and Benjamin’s German parse their reflexive, passive, and impersonal constructions—their autopredications, the instants at which something like a reflexive position emerges in a language with respect to itself; its se-moments; the places and times where I act upon myself, or where an impersonal act carries the weight of a historical event—differently from Spanish, indeed differently from Romance languages in general. This is how Allende’s words have been translated into German. Note the reflexive, impersonal formation sich auftun werden for se abrirán.

Werktätige meines Vaterlandes! Ich glaube an Chile und sein Schicksal. Es werden andere Chilenen kommen. In diesen düsteren und bitteren Augenblicken, in denen sich der Verrat durchsetzt, sollt ihr wissen, dass sich früher oder später, sehr bald, erneut die großen Straßen auftun werden, auf denen der würdige Mensch dem Aufbau einer besseren Gesellschaft entgegengeht.⁹

In English:

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, great avenues will again open, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society.¹⁰

Oyarzun’s Benjamin is least familiar to the English-speaking world just here. In both English and German, the daemonic se-moment and the interval between event, experience, and articulation (the retrospective articulation of Allende’s interpellation of the Chilean people into political subjectivity) are foreclosed—so much so, indeed, that the German translation reaches for its object and calls out andere Chilenen by name just where Allende’s Spanish leaves the announced political subject as yet nameless. No language, not English, not German, not Spanish, can do justice to the event; but could Oyarzun have come to the story of waiting, hope, and political interpellation that Spanish offers him without reading Allende’s words through the in-justice that English and German do, each in its way, to the event, the experience, and their articulation?

In this sense, then: third, doing justice is indeed, along with Doing Justice, a matter of translation. This is why I’ll be running the risk of translating Oyarzun’s concern today—his concern with “doing justice,” with that “doing” that is claiming or demanding justice, with narration and justice in Benjamin’s work—into a matter that also matters to me—the matter of translation—but that would appear to be extrinsic to the immediate concerns of Doing Justice. I risk seeming to play irresponsibly, unjustly, with Pablo Oyarzun’s words by translating the problem of articulating narrating and justice into the problem of articulating translating and justice. Where Oyarzun subtly and convincingly tells the story of the narrator’s vocation for justice, you’ll fear to hear me say something like “Justice is a matter of translation,” or “Translation is a matter of justice, of doing justice.”

The questions how justice is to be done and how justice is to be demanded are Pablo Oyarzun’s topic. He approaches these desperately timely questions by shifting focus—for Latin America as well as for the anglophone world—from the famous essays “For a Critique of Violence,” “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” and “The Task of the Translator” (essays definitive of Benjamin’s reception in Latin America and the United States) to the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” called in Spanish “El narrador.”¹¹ Let me attend to two sentences that mark this shift. The first is Pablo Oyarzun’s summary definition of the specific character of narrative, of the story, with regard to Justice: “The righteous character of storytelling,” he says, “consists in giving an account of the happening of the singular, that is, in giving an account of what is singular in its happening” (p. 105)—or, in Spanish, El carácter justiciero de la narración consiste en que ella da cuenta del acaecer de lo singular, es decir, da cuenta de lo singular en su acaecer. Justiciero is hard to translate—it means “justice doing,” but with a strong connotation of severity, of meting out justice with exemplary severity. The second is a sentence I take from the very end of this volume. Oyarzun recapitulates his argument.

Como tantos otros textos de Benjamin, y podría decirse aun como un rasgo indeleble de su escritura, este ensayo hace ademán de celar un secreto cuya revelación destruiría por completo su fuerza de verdad. Una débil fuerza, entonces, como aquella de la que habla “Sobre el concepto de la historia”. Esta débil fuerza—que es aquella y sólo aquella requerida por la justicia— es, acaso, la que trama a la vez la narración del narrador y el texto de Benjamin. Es como si en la contextura general del ensayo, en sus vectores argumentales, en su repertorio de imágenes y ejemplos y giros, en suma, en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta de lo que el mismo ensayo atribuye a la narración.

As do so many other texts by Benjamin—so that we might even say that this is an indelible trait of his writing—[“The Storyteller”] gives the impression of guarding a secret whose revelation would completely destroy the force of its truth. It is a weak power, then, like the one “The Concept of History” speaks about. This weak power—which is the one and only one required for justice—might well be the power that weaves together both the story of the storyteller and Benjamin’s text. It is as if what the essay itself—in its general fabric, in its argumentative vectors and its repertoire of images and its examples, its twists and turns, in short, in its style—says about storytelling gave an account of itself. (Chapter 3, p. 107)

Here again the translation is tricky, and I’ll return to it—in this case, to the expression Es como si … en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta, which is not exactly, and not only, “It is as if… in its style, what the essay itself says about storytelling gave an account of itself.” The verbal form dar cuenta crops up in both cases, in the first sentence I quoted and in this last one: it can be translated “to give account” or “to render an account.” It is as if the philosopher gives an account, dar cuenta, or a reckoning of what the storyteller recounts: the Spanish verb is contar cuenta. And it is as though, at the close of Oyarzun’s Doing Justice, this account of a telling, this reckoning of telling, has a twist: Es como si… en su estilo, se estuviese dando cuenta. It is as though, in its style, it—but what? Or who?—were realizing, becoming aware, of what the essay itself attributes to the story. The work became its daemon. Darse cuenta: to realize, to come into reckoning with, though reflexively: dar-se, to give oneself the reckoning.

I’ll come back to these two sentences, but take away from them this: first, the uncomfortable joining of attention to singularity with the exemplary severity with which the “righteous” pay that attention, the exemplary severity of the bearer of the sword of justice. And, second, the essay’s drift from taking account to giving oneself, or itself, the reckoning. This movement, this drift, is a figure of coming to awareness or noticing. Its span is not forty years long; this drift, this movement, is to be accomplished in and by means of Doing Justice: it is, indeed, the condition on which justice is done. But the caesura between these two moments also blocks—opens an unbridgeable gulf between—the force of a law based on taking account, on empiricism, on nature and noting and a form of justice based on giving an account of oneself.¹²

Oyarzun begins with the observation that Benjamin’s concern “is the destruction of experience as a result of the unfolding, in modernity, of technology that culminates in war.” He says:

The development of the argument of “The Storyteller” offers convincing proof … that Benjamin considers the process of destruction compendiously. It is not a type of experience, but rather experience itself that is devastated by this process. But with this devastation something that belongs to the core of experience itself seems to get irremissibly lost, something that artisanal storytelling continues to protect like a dear treasure, something that is not substantive in itself but has the subtlety of a disposition, of fortitude and care, of attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit). This something is the vocation of justice that inspires storytelling. [Ese algo es la vocación de justicia que anima a la narración.] (Chapter 3, p. 76; my emphasis)

I hardly need to underscore the urgency that beats here, which Oyarzun reads clearly in Benjamin’s words. “Never,” writes Benjamin at the beginning of “The Storyteller,”

has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Harry Zohn’s translation)

The “field of force of destructive torrents and explosions” acutely assaulted and definitively changed the soldiers who were traveling home from World War I’s battlefields. The “destruction of experience” of which war is a type—the bloodiest, the most acute—is, for Benjamin, modernity’s condition and result. It is the condition on which capital trades accelerated consumption for use and habitation; and it is the effect of that trade. Planetary war—by which we now mean suicidal war with the planet, with the environment—is the evident successor to world wars, bloodier still, more acute even than the most acute of world wars. And, in a way that speaks both to the problem of scale—that is, to the terrible problem of the relation between justice and scale—and to the problem of kind—that is, to the terrible logic of the symbolic and material inequality of the “tiny, fragile” bodies, things, and creatures “under the open sky”—this planetary war is more unjust still than even the exterminating wars that make up human history.

Hence the urgency of the questions how justice is to be done and how justice is to be demanded.

We want first a practical answer; we want something that is “substantive in itself,” as Oyarzun writes (p. 76), and, if not that, we want at least a pronoun, an indication. Who will do justice—the prophet, the philosopher, the lawmaker, the activist, the storyteller? Who demands it, in whose name, and what will we be redressing, remediating, distributing?

But Benjamin and Oyarzun slow us down, in ways that my response here and now is unable, for practical reasons, to do more than note.

Just what is “the vocation of justice,” la vocación de justicia, that inspires or animates storytelling? A vocation is, of course, a calling. It is generally felt as an inner call, though this calling somehow chimes with a different sort of voice; and this chiming, this rhyming of the inner voice that calls me to something with a profession or a task, this chiming of my inner voice with something of a different order is what makes my vocation different from an appetite, for example, or from my desire, or from a whim. It is what distinguishes vocation from what in Castilian Spanish we’d call un capricho. I mentioned that I may feel called to a profession or to a task. I will say that teaching is my vocation, or that translating is the task to which I am called. When I attend to the call of my vocation I take account both of what is interior to me, which is of the order of what I want or fancy; and also of what, other than what is subjective in me and for me, rhymes with it but is of a different order. If I attend doubly in this way, I will have rhymed myself with, or also attended to, what is other than myself. I won’t call this vocation of the other than myself “objective” or “transcendental,” although we might say that the term “vocation” takes account of both. I’ll say that I will have rhymed myself with what is other than myself by taking account of what is other than my voice to myself, other than my conscience; that I will have brought myself to rhyme. And sometimes I will follow one rather than the other of these sketchily defined voices, and eventually find myself in the wrong profession, or performing a task that is not my calling.

Now, to answer to any vocation, it would seem, is to take account of what calls me other than my voice in me—the vocation to be a teacher, the call to become a translator. If it is not to be my whim, then any vocation takes account of what is other than my voice in me. But how will I know that my vocation is not just whim, or fancy? What I called “my voice in me,” my conscience or my desire inasmuch as these are subjective expressions, speaks to me now; but whatever it is that rhymes with it speaks out of that time, in a different tense. When I act on my desire but in time to the time of the vocation of the other in me, I’m bringing my now into rhyme, rhythmically, with a different time. I fancy now, but my vocation proves itself in the event; its tense is perfective.

This, I think, is generally true, whether I’m attending to the call of justice or to that of a profession—the call to nurse, to care, to be a payer of attention, to teach, to tell stories, what have you. But the vocation of justice is also of a different order again: it is not a type of taking account of what is other in me; the vocation of justice is not a profession among others except in the sense that to be called into justice and to respond is to profess.

Rather, justice is this taking account of what is other than me in me: it is the structure of all and any vocation. Justice is responsible to what is perfectly expressed now, my desire, and to what remains perfective.

To ask how justice is to be done now, today, in desperate urgency, when we are threatened by the “devastation” of experience, is to ask how we take account of what is other than ourselves in ourselves: so Benjamin says, as Pablo Oyarzun explains. “But with this devastation something that belongs to the core of experience itself seems to get irremissibly lost.” And now, faced with this “devastation,” “artisanal storytelling continues to protect [the vocation of justice] like a dear treasure.” This “vocation,” Oyarzun’s Benjamin says, “is not substantive in itself but has the subtlety of a disposition, of fortitude and care, of attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit)” (p. 76).

“Narration and Justice.” Perhaps this would be a way into (an Introduction to) a response to Doing Justice—the acknowledgment or the hypothesis of a special relation between the demand for justice, the demand that justice be done, and timeliness. By “timeliness” I would be designating something about the nature of the demand for justice: it is of a time; it requires something of us in time, on time. The demand is articulated in the present tense: we demand action on climate justice right now, in the name of the future (in this case), or in the name of damage done in the past (reparations). The demand, though, is paradoxical in at least this sense—that whatever we do or imagine doing in response to the demand for justice is not held to what justice is now, when it is demanded of us or when we demand it of another or of ourselves; now, when we can articulate what we believe is just just now; now, when we are doing justice by doing what we represent to ourselves as just. Instead, whatever we are doing when we are doing justice to the demand is held to the standard of what justice will have been just now. A different tense makes itself felt just here. Once upon a time, I say, “A different tense makes itself felt,” or “Once upon a time, a different tense will have made itself felt.” I might say that the storyteller tells the story of the perpetual battle between these different tenses, and that the storyteller’s story is just, or does justice, to the degree that no tense triumphs, or becomes the story’s protagonist.

This is all rather allegorical, so let me be clearer as I move to close.

Recall the questions that lie behind Pablo Oyarzun’s title, the questions of what it means to “do justice” and to “demand justice.” “Doing justice” translates the expression hacer justicia, which in Castilian or Chilean Spanish is an infinitive expression: “to do justice.” In Spanish the infinitive lends itself to substantivization more easily than the English does—we say el hacer justicia, “the doing justice” or “the to do justice”—and can make that noun the subject of a clause like es imposible el hacer justicia, “the doing of justice is impossible,” which can be shorn of the pronoun to leave es imposible hacer justicia, a common nominal clause.

Of the philosophically non-trivial differences between the verbs hacer and “to do” remark just these two.

We say hacer in Spanish when we speak of making something—its etymology links it to the Latin facere, to produce, create, fabricate. The relation between facere and what is made, factum, and what is fabricated, fictio (< fingere), is well enough known—“fact” and “fiction,” hecho and hechura, this last the Castilian version of poiema, a “fashioning”; for example, man is God’s poem in Ephesians 2:10. Is justice, then, something hecho, something that is made, fashioned? Is justice a fashioning, a construction—contingent, made out of this or that material in someone’s hands at this moment, and out of something different, in another’s hands at another moment? Is justice different as it travels from hand to hand, or as the word travels from mouth to mouth, from one storyteller’s mouth to another’s? Is justice thus something that can be unfashioned, something of the order of the deconstructible? If justice can be hecha, it can be deshecha, when for instance un desfacedor de agravios like don Quixote is asked to undo an injustice that had appeared to some, at some time, to be justice. We are accustomed to granting that law is made or fabricated; about justice, though, the stories we tell are mixed. Justice is divine, a deity; it is irreducible and undeconstructible; it is the condition on which the law stands and the standard to which laws are held. A law can be unjust—and we will petition for redress, seek to change it, or seek to pass another, a just law. To refuse to obey an unjust law, though, puts us into contravention, not just of a law, but of justice—and this, at least, Socrates will not do. Are we ready to characterize this solemn principle as a fabrication? Even, tendentially, as fiction?

Note also this.

Hacer, I said, is infinitive. “Doing” justice, in English, speaks to us of dynamics in the present, of a present progressiveness: it is what we are, or should be, doing. Justice, as Pablo Oyarzun showed us, is not done; maybe justice is never done; it is imperfective, imperfectible. But the expression “doing justice” exists notwithstanding—we understand, roughly, imperfectly, what it means now, or what it is meaning. It is in the doing of justice that justice is poorly, unjustly imagined, or named, or presented. Let’s flip the poor phrase: justice is presented in doing justice. We should maybe even intensify the paradox: justice is just what is presented in doing justice. When we lose the passive we are almost in the familiar, cold grip of tautology: we do justice when we do justice. Doing justice regarding this or that circumstance also does the “justice” to which our doing justice will then refer. It also “does” the work of making that to which the word “justice” will refer.

When we ask what it means to do justice, we immediately ask after the matter of tense: doing justice does what we will refer to when we say that we are doing, will be doing, or have done justice.

We are onto something here, in English, that bears on the definition of justice, and Pablo Oyarzun helps us to it, helps us see what English does—and what the Spanish infinitive hacer does not do. We might say: Pablo Oyarzun’s reading, in English translation, from his Spanish, of Benjamin’s German about the translation into German by Johannes von Guenther from the Russian of Nikolai Leskov helps do justice to what English is doing whenever “doing” translates hacer; and it helps us see where Spanish fails to do justice.

Now remember Pablo Oyarzun’s summary definition of the character of the story with regard to Justice: “The righteous character of storytelling consists in giving an account of the happening of the singular, that is, in giving an account of what is singular in its happening” (p. 105). That giving an account should precede something that is “substantive in itself” seems necessary to this taking account of the singular, inasmuch as the singular here is of the order of the event. Now, when we put the evental question “how” before the substantive question “who,” and even before the question “what is this justice that’s to be done?,” we are not just deferring the ethical register: we may be destroying its classic shape—the shape in which an action is taken by a subject who attends to experience and circumstances, understands them, acts upon that understanding, and is thus responsible to circumstance and experience. In the beginning was the act, the how—before the subject and experience take on substance, even the substance of a name. Our tenses come into rhythm—from the how of the beginning, in the beginning, in the perfect past; to the present, when we say “Now, at this moment, I take account of the beginning, or ‘I’ takes account of the beginning and begins, as ‘I,’ and can become responsible for what ‘I’ does, justly, in view of reparation or restitution in the future.” But this beginning that allows me, I, to begin, is also the end, the destruction of the classical ethical register: the expression dar cuenta also means something like “to put paid” or, as the hoary Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua puts it, [D]ar cuenta de algo, Dar fin de algo destruyéndolo o malgastándolo, to end or terminate something by destroying it or using it unwisely. The last turn of Pablo Oyarzun’s Doing Justice allows us to imagine how the narrative destruction that flows from placing the how of doing justice before its substance may be translated into a strange, estranged ethical register. Darse cuenta is the story of how one gives oneself a story before there is someone to receive it and before the story concerns anything substantive: the ethical register of the “ante-predicative.” We have moved from offering a representation, an account, an allegory of justice to the much more unsettling realization that doing justice is allegory. What must concern us, in the wake of Pablo Oyarzun’s readings of Benjamin, is the translation of justice as allegory into effective social action: the production of political subjectivities on the great avenues of Santiago, on the streets of Los Angeles, even here, always now.