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Between the Ethics and Politics of Innocence

On the one hand it seems obvious, righting the wrong suffered by the innocent victim is a necessary ingredient of a politics of justice. The agreed upon justice of the allied cause in World War II, and the agreed upon injustice of the failure to intervene in the genocide in Rwanda, testify to the rightness of this ethical political intuition. The Geneva conventions established after World War II, the U.N. war crimes tribunals, and the human rights treaties being negotiated at U.N. sponsored meetings speak powerfully to the necessity of translating our ethical obligation to the innocent victim into concrete political practices. Things become difficult, however, when we bring the name Hiroshima into the discussion and when we attend to the debates surrounding the U.N.NATO intervention in the genocidal violence that raged in the former Yugoslavia. They become even more difficult when we examine the ways in which the ethical figure of the innocent victim has been translated into a post 9/11 American politics of innocence. This paper focuses on this post 9/11 American translation. It is premised on the idea that a politics of justice is possible, and argues that realizing this possibility requires attention to the difficulties of translating the ethical into the political. I lean on Lacan for identifying these difficulties and turn to Merleau-Ponty for ways to negotiate them. Most of the paper attends to the ways in which the post 9/11 American politics of innocence is a case study of the ways in which the imaginary’s seduction of the symbolic infects the translation of the ethical into the political and betrays its ethical aims. The point of the paper, however, is to use the example of post 9/11 American politics to examine the ways in which the tension between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real can become the ground of a politics of justice.