The Subject of Injustice: Political Action, Law and Empowerment

Normative and communitarian traditions define justice either as abstraction or as concretization, and in terms of either universal reason or of particular identity. In both cases, the archetypal morphology of the rule of law reproduces essentially the same representational schema, in which the singular, and concrete, event of injustice is denied any theoretical value. In response, this book aims to think from this event; giving voice to those cast outside of the accepted categories, the excluded and outlawed, the insurgents and rebels.

These subjects of injustice articulate subjectivity beyond empty abstraction and forced concretization, yet by being radically indeterminate, they prevent it from becoming hegemonic. As such, they express a principle of unfounded hope, which in turn underwrites the redemptive power at the heart of political justice. Here, then, the event of injustice is considered as a constitutive, and indeed revolutionary, moment which nevertheless demands to be transformed into a constitutional one. And it is in its theorization of law from such an event that this book offers an original account, not of the creation of victims, but of the ways in which the experience of injustice can empower the vulnerable.