Abstract
Building on the assumption, advanced by psychosocial studies, that psychic and social processes are intimately intertwined, this chapter’s key contribution is to enquire into the psychosocial conditions of possibility – and impossibility – for social justice: Who must we be, if social justice is to become possible? And what conditions must be in place for us to be able to be the who we must be? The chapter utilizes the resources afforded by Levinasian ethics to suggest that our capacity for ethical responsiveness – upon which practices of social justice implicitly rely – is grounded in a primordial vulnerability to the other’s most profound appeal not to let them face death alone, “or else risk becoming the accomplice of that death.” Turning to Judith Butler’s work on the unequal distribution of precarity and grievability, the chapter suggests, however, that, inasmuch as we routinely refuse to respond to the appeal that issues forth from (some) others’ precarious existence, we do indeed repeatedly become “accomplice[s] of that death.” What accounts for these refusals of responsibility? The chapter suggests that Butler’s consideration of the “structural” or “systemic” character of social violence is insufficient on its own and must be supplemented by an analysis of the psychic forces that are inevitably also always in play. Jessica Benjamin’s recent discussion of what she calls the core fantasy of “only one can live” is helpful in moving us toward an understanding of these psychic forces, as is Stephen Frosh’s suggestion that a capacity to endure – as “a way of facing things without fear” – is a vital component of ethical responsiveness.