Feeling the absence of justice: Notes on our pathological reliance on punitive justice

Abstract

This article critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary Western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It starts by arguing that we have a predominantly pathological approach to justice, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy Drew Leder’s concept of ‘dys-appearance’ to discuss how, in Western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we mainly become conscious of justice through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. We then explore this phenomenological quality of justice which, we argue, is linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. The article concludes by exploring how this punitive impulse can be resisted, through what we term a ‘lived sense of justice’.