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Given want to speak up for social justice as a desire. Not ‘just as an obscure object of desire’ but as Audre Lorde might have termed it, an erotic. For me, social justice is a desire of life and of destination. I take Ian Parker's many points about the vehicle of social justice - its capaciousness, its ability to encompass the treachery and deviousness of neo-liberal claims. I accept that there are many projections and longings. I recognise the necessary disappointments of desire unmet. I also understand the gap and the limits of accomplishing what we want and the interplay between revolutionary praxis and reformist achievements. And yet. And yet. I don't want to jettison the aspiration that is social justice.
And I am not so sure I like the modifier ‘just’ in our title. Why just? Why the diminishing of social justice? I'm also not sure I like the notion of obscure in this context. It feels akin to a sneer, as though we, the analysts, know better. The punters, the people, are well, just that. Somewhat less aware of their motivation and the complications of their desire. Hmmm. Who says? It's 2021. No time to be smug. Social justice is being redefined. It's being decolonised. We don't own it. We are not in charge of the definitions. In a curious way, our moment, the moment of leftist psychoanalytic thinkers and activists is taken up and challenged by a new woke politics on the streets by Black Lives Matter, by eco warriors, and intersectionality all over the world.
The idea that social justice is just an obscure object of desire would enrage the people on the streets, the activists and the progressive lawyers, trade unionists, workers, actors, criminologists, city planners, farmers, and so on, whose lived experience in the midst of our vicious political system, endeavour to make social justice not only a desire but a process and an outcome. Is it a naïve desire? Perhaps. We have all known defeat. But we have also lived through gains and changes and hugely personal tran