The Obscure Object of Social Justice

The phrase ‘Social Justice’ is an alluring one, and perhaps what is most tempting about it is the way it can be filled with many kinds of desire. It operates as a kind of ‘empty signifier’ - much like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ - into which are poured many different kinds of political agenda which then remould it and pull it in unexpected directions. The multivalent nature of Social Justice means that it can stand for a politically progressive approach to injustice, even congruent with the aims of liberation movements, while pulling in with it a more dubious heritage of conservative values.

You cannot have ‘Social Justice’ in an unjust world. One way of resolving that contradiction is to accept injustice, to be ‘disappointed’, and perhaps then to value ‘disappointment’ as a sign that ‘ordinary unhappiness’ has been something worth arriving at. We know psychoanalysts who have taken that route, and then calls for ‘Social Justice’ really are hollow.

This is the danger. Those who subscribe to those values often trade with a conception of desire that separates the individual from society, separates the interior world of desire from external constraints, and then ‘Social Justice’ is not, as we might expect and hope, on the left, but anchored on the right. Take, for instance, the use of the signifier in conservative Catholic discourse in which we are each of us treated as made in the image of God, worthy of respect and of the right to fulfil our potential. Here the focus is on individuals flourishing one by one and triumphing over adversity. It is this conception that was harnessed by the proto-fascist priest Father Coughlin whose newspaper, which was called ‘Social Justice’, peddled antisemitic conspiracy theories in the United States from 1936 to 1942.

Ostensibly radical representations of politics thus carry with them a toxic misleading ideological charge. See, for example, the 1941 film Meet John Doe in which Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck tangle with politics and try to