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Time's Desire: Literature and the Temporality of Justice

Department of English, Calgary University, jkertzer{at}ucalgary.ca

This essay examines how the logic and the spectacle of the law jointly respond to Nietzsche's concern that the one condition that baffles the will is the fact that the past is unalterable. The will cannot will backwards, but justice can, in W.B. Yeats's phrase, dream back by devising a temporality to symbolically redeem the past through a passionate knowledge expressed through haunting spectacles of pain (torture) and payment (punishment). The essay analyzes rhetorical strategies in both literature and legal discourse that offer to transcend the irrevocable in ways that satisfy both the ethical and aesthetic demands of justice: the demands that justice be done by being seen to be done. However, bringing aesthetics to the aid of ethics also has the disruptive effect of opening a gap between the two, of exposing an incommensurability that makes moral repair over time conceivable only through unexpected acts of sacrifice and amnesty — a possibility envisioned in J.M. Coetzee's novel, Disgrace .

Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 2, 266-287 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1743872109102492


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