Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy. Berkeley, etc.: U of California P, 1997 [1996]; xi+278 pp.; ISBN: 0520202430 (pbk.); LC call no.: PN56.J87D56


I had heard many good things about this book prior to receiving this, the first paperback edition, for review in these pages, but was nevertheless struck by Robin West's words that appear in her endorsement on the back cover: "This is a masterpiece overflowing with insight, argument, scholarship and passion," says West, herself a masterful writer and brilliant contributor to the field of literature and law. I'd also heard that this book, written while Dimock was a professor at Brandeis University, caught the eye of Yale's English Department, into which she was hired, a new addition to a powerhouse of literature-law work in various departments. In short, the stage was set for my reading an exemplary work in a field of illustrious scholars: I was not disappointed, though I was at times surprised.

Dimock's ability to range through the centuries with conviction and erudition, and across the disciplines with sense and sensitivity, is indeed impressive; but even more striking is her sheer bravado, her originality, her ability to make not just a few, but a whole range of stunning assertions which, although sometimes questionable, strike and inspire the reader to think in new ways about fundamental issues. Residues of Justice is a 'postmodern' book, in that it works convincingly with reference to categories and tools such as anti-foundationalism, instability (of language and meaning), migration and negotiation. As might be expected, therefore, the ambition of the book is to "unsettle" a conception of justice, proposed by Kant, exemplified by Rawls, and present on a range of approaches, which proposes that justice "is analogous to truth not only because it presides as an absolute ideal but also because it exists as an ontological given" (4). Dimock's book challenges this conception of justice, it "makes it less immanent, less exhaustive, less self-evident both in its ethical primacy and in its jurisdictional scope." As such, justice for Dimock is "one virtue among others" which deserves only a "particular" claim, a "conditional" claim on our allegiance (7).

Dimock convincingly refuses the attempt to find objective adequation in, or for, the legal realm, and therefore seeks to recover the residues of justice, to account for what it registers, but also what it refuses. She does so through an amazing, although in some cases rather tenuous, series of references (and, from a broader perspective, syntheses) of works from political theory, legal history, cognitive sciences, linguistics, philosophy, literature, and theology. She moves with unnerving ease from Aristotle to Augustine, Kant to Marx, Locke to Luther, Bakhtin to Searle, Chomsky to Rawls, all the while shedding light upon literary texts, more or less well-known, from the canon of nineteenth-century American texts, by, for example, Kate Chopin, James Fenimore Cooper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Jonathan Edwards, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, Susan Warner, and Walt Whitman. As such, this book will appeal to those interested in American literature as much as it will to those interested in the philosophy-literature-law overlap, which receives a sizeable boost herein.

The book is divided up according to a series of oppositions and complements, "Crime and Punishment," "Part and Whole," "Luck and Love," "Pain and Compensation," "Rights and Reason," and thus touches upon some of the most fundamental areas of justice and judicial theory. The most surprising of these binaries, "Luck and Love," turns out to be the most original, in my opinion, although perhaps the most disputable, at least in terms of some of the specific claims. I fully endorse her emphasizing luck, which in my sense is overlooked far too often when we come to address the most complex matters of justice and legal redress. Her reference to luck allows her as well to reinforce her claim about the arbitrary nature of some choices, which can, if we allow it, serve as evidence for the arbitrariness of justice, its existence beyond any hope for intrinsic justification. In this chapter, Dimock thus boldly proposes "something like a constitutive theory of luck, one that studies its arbitrary agency not only in our actions but in our very selves, in that accidental conjunction of circumstances and attributes which make us what we are" (101). The problem is, this leads her to force Rawls's ideas into a Chomskian linguistic paradigm, a place where the latter and, I suspect, the former, would rather not go. It's a nice image to imagine that "we might call Rawls's 'rational person' a grammatical subject, for his affections are happily rule observing, governed by a generative syntax that not only maintains a structural form but also endlessly renews that form by substituting any given term with an infinite number of syntactic equivalents" (111), but to do so betrays the goal of Chomsky's own project, which is specifically centered upon understanding the nature of the brain's intrinsic language ability. So this Rawls-Chomsky link suggests nice analogies, just as does the idea that Whitman's poetry is "as close as any poetry can come to being a generative grammar" (113); but if taken too literally, that is, if extended beyond the fascinating Dimock project, it may lead the reader astray in terms of the specific work from which she draws some of her inspiration. Nevertheless, she is such a good reader, and such an amazing synthesizer, that she manages to teach the reader new things on virtually every page, including things relating to well-rehearsed areas of study.

Much of the material that comprises this book has been published previously, which means that individual chapters stand alone even as they follow the red thread towards the recovery of the residues of justice. "Crime and Punishment" explores the idea that punitive justice is not a "relic from time immemorial" but rather "a cognitive mode that has continued to evolve" with regards various contexts, literary and otherwise. "Part and Whole" picks up on the very familiar legal distinction between metonymy and metaphor, but also offers a fascinating reading of Marx's conception of justice, with some very valuable discussions of materialism, the individual, and the collective. Along the way, she provides a very nice (and very Bakhtinian) sense of the text as "an evolving cluster of resonances, its semantic universe unfolding in time rather than in space, unfolding in response to the new perceptual horizons that we continue to bring to bear upon it and that never cease to extend to it new possibilities of meaning (78-9). This of course makes it incumbent upon the theorist to consider the text differently, to "focus upon those moments in [it] where its historicity seems most tenuous, most problematic, using these moments to question the very idea of a unified 'whole,' but as it bears on the determining ground of literature and as it bears on the determinate shape of history" (87). "Pain and Compensation" questions Posner's work on economics and literature (a nice addition to the beautiful work done by Robin West), and "Rights and Reason" questions approaches which demand some intrinsic sense of rights, articulated by some strongly referential legal language. Her conclusion to this chapter, and to the book, is "a plea for an alternate language, a language that, responsive to the many shades and meanings of reason, will perhaps bring to our awareness not only the absolute claim of rights, not only the absolute claim of justice, but also what is not resolved by these concepts" (223). A powerful challenge, surprisingly articulated by this ambitious text.



Robert F. Barsky

University of Western Ontario