The Micropolitics of Justice: Language,Sense and Space 1

Abstract

This article treats the micropolitics of justice. Whereas the macropolitics of justice involves the way states administer the law, an analysis of the “micropolitics” of justice focuses on the way individuals and collectives are affected by legality/illegalities, such that they participate in a culture of feelings or sensibilities and subsequently engage in discursive encounters about what is just. Because much of my concern is with the tension between formal legal justice and embodied senses of justice, I turn to philosophical approaches to space, language, and embodiment that help me to derive insights from artistic texts that stage discursive encounters between persons who embody incommensurate senses of justice. In approaching such encounters, I conceptualize and illustrate with examples, interrelationships among law, space and cultures of feeling, especially in terms of the way justice-related encounters articulate the spatial bases – boundaries and cultural enclosures – separating alternative loci of enunciation.