Loving justice, living Shakespeare

154 Pages·2017·0.68 MB·English

by  Schwartz

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/16, SPi
Loving Justice,
Living shakespeaR e
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/16, SPi
Loving Justice,
Living Shakespeare
regina mara
schwartz
3
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
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© Regina Mara Schwartz 2016
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/16, SPi
to sandro
with infinite love,
“the more I give to thee, the more I have”
—Romeo and Juliet 2. 2.134
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Foreword by Rowan Williams
What might it be to see the world ‘justly’? our usual language about
justice doesn’t seem to help at all in answering, or even understanding,
such a question. We have become used to thinking about justice as a
matter of discharging clearly defined ‘debts’—just as we have increas-
ingly come to see rights as a matter of satisfying clearly defined claims.
Justice is sometimes opposed to ‘charity’ in our political and social
discourse: it is supposed to provide hard rather than soft imperatives, to
deliver us from sentimentality and condescension. Relieving poverty
or suffering ceases to be a gratuitous and generous action that brings
honour to the agent, and is reconfigured in the prosaic but honest
terms of simply rectifying a balance or compensating for an injury.
there are important insights here, of course. We don’t want to
perpetuate an attitude which privileges the status of the generous giver
in a way that takes our eyes off the question of how and why we got
into a situation where such action needed to be taken. We don’t want
to settle with a picture of charity as the ultimate emotional tool of
power. We are rightly eager to emphasize the fact that what is given to
the needy is what is due, not a kindly bonus. Yet this language alone
leaves us feeling that we have missed some crucial point. Regina
schwartz, in this moving, subtle, and impassioned book, helps us see
that talking about justice without talking about the quality of human
relating is not just vacuous but profoundly dangerous, making us crassly
insensitive to how we manage our encounters with actual human
need, pain, and crisis. and to connect this sense of unease with the
need for us to learn how to see truthfully and lovingly is one of the
tasks this book addresses.
this is where shakespeare’s dramas come in. shakespeare shows us
repeatedly what it is to fail in justice: which is not to fail to do what
we ought, in the narrow sense of leaving debts unpaid, but a failure to
see and to communicate—and to let oneself be seen and communi-
cated with. this is what love has to do with justice, because this seeing
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viii foreword by rowan williams
and communicating requires an embeddedness within trust and patience
which can manage the profound risk of exposure to one another. We
can see justly and do justice—in the rich and complex biblical sense of
this phrase—when we grasp that truth will not kill us; or if it does, it
kills the evasive, rivalrous, myth-making self that imprisons us in inequity
and violence. Shakespeare neither reduces love to positive emotion
nor renders justice as the exact payment of debt. He makes both ideas
denser and more unfamiliar by weaving them brilliantly together, and
so sketching a picture of what is fundamentally human in both. Love is
intensely demanding in precise particulars; justice is about debts
that can never be paid. And in so doing, he helps us formulate a set of
necessary challenges to our current fictions about medical care, about
economic life, about penal policies and their goals, and about entire
political systems. Regina Schwartz’s close readings especially of The
Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet draw out in detail how reflection
on love can prompt the most far-reaching political and economic
questions, laying bare the starkness of all alternatives to just love and
loving justice.
This is a study of unusual breadth and freshness, in which insights
from literature, psychology, philosophy, and personal experience are
woven tightly together. At a time when we are assailed by a variety
of temptations to moral short cuts, to impatience with the full depth of
what is to be ‘seen’ in human beings, it is timely, humane and radical.
—R.W., Master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge,
104th Archbishop of Canterbury, and author of The Tragic Imagination.
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Acknowledgements
a project that takes ten years incurs much gratitude. My chief intellectual
debts are to nicholas Wolterstorff and charles taylor whose important
works on justice are marked not only by great rigor but by values
i consider essential to thinking through justice. Both their work and
frequent substantive conversations with them provided me with a vital
sense of community as i wrote this.
My special thanks to the institute for advanced study of culture in
charlottesville, virginia, where i was privileged to be a Fellow and
participate in a reading group on Justice. My thanks to the Law s tudents
at northwestern university Law school who filled my course on
“ideas of Justice” for six years and asked penetrating questions, and to
the remarkable graduate students in the academy for advanced study
of the Renaissance for thoughtful conversations about shakespeare.
special thanks to andrew keener and patrick Mcgrath for their
generous help.
i want to thank the university of pisa Department of philosophy
for the opportunity to lecture to their graduate students on justice in
aristotle and shakespeare, the humanities institute at Johns hopkins
university for the opportunity to offer two chapters in progress, the
Fetzer institute for the chance to contribute to their symposium on
punishment and forgiveness, the castelli philosophy colloquium in
Rome for the opportunity to present my thoughts on scarcity, the
kingston shakespeare series in London, and the shakespeare institute
in stratford-upon-avon for helping with my thoughts on The Merchant
of Venice, harvard university Divinity school for the invitation to
respond to Rowan Williams with my work on Lear and Love, ucLa’s
shakespeare conference for the chance to share thoughts on Hamlet,
and the university of california santa Barbara’s Department of
Religious studies for inviting me to give their annual tipton chair
address on forgiveness. My debt to Michael crawford is of another
kind: his work became my prose model as i boldly inserted myself into