Discourse Theory, Nodal Points, and Stereoscopic Optics on Justice

ABSTRACT

Specific domains of modern life—social, ecological, legal—involve distinct issues of justice that often lead to a single-focused political-philosophical engagement with justice. Such engagements, argues Marianna Papastephanou, risk turning issues of justice that lie beyond the adopted perspective into discursive injustices (i.e. of silencing the Other’s voice) and condemning them to invisibility. To address this risk, Papastephanou proposes a stereoscopic approach that better illuminates the many facets of justice and, concomitantly, the many instances of injustice that escape the dominant political-philosophical perspectives on justice. In the present article, I discuss Papastephanou’s theory of a stereoscopic approach to justice along with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory and notion of “nodal points.” I suggest that the synergy between the two approaches enhances their efficacy: Papastephanou’s theorization concretizes the implications of establishing nodal points, which, in turn, reveal how the reduction of justice to one of its facets occurs at the discursive level. Enriched by Papastephanou’s theorization, discourse theory makes more visible how a stereoscopic approach to justice can unveil discursive injustices of selective and partial outlooks on (in)justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Justice
• race
• wronged Others
• discourse theory
• Marianna Papastephanou

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author.

Notes

^1. On how Papastephanou theorizes the different face(t)s of justice, see Papastephanou, “A Stereoscopic Approach to Distinctions of Justice,” 1–14; hereafter abbreviated as “SA” and cited in the text; and Papastephanou, “And That’s Not All,” 1–16; hereafter abbreviated as “TNA” and cited in the text.

^2. See, for example, Fricker, “Epistemic Justice,” 154–73.

^3. Papastephanou, “Justice and the Conspicuous,” 185–202.

^4. Papastephanou et al., “Philosophy of Education in a New Key,” 1083–98; Papastephanou, “TNA,” 1–16.

^5. When an issue pertains to the neglected category of geopolitical-cosmopolitan justice and thus escapes the confines of the extolled facet of social justice (and the scope of the Western burgher), it is highly unlikely that it will mobilize the political philosopher. For instance, the Nagorno Karabakh armed conflict (1988–2024) being a geopolitical and not a social justice issue, has not come up in the academic dialogue on justice. One reason for this omission may be precisely that this conflict falls outside the hegemonized perspective that treats justice as social.

^6. As Papastephanou explains, the implications of such a reduction exemplify the non-theorized and unexplored use of adjectives in philosophy and in other projects related to justice (“SA,” 8).

^7. Papastephanou, “Virtue-Epistemology and the Chagos Unknown,” 284–301; Vine, Island of Shame.

^8. Arnaud, “Are the Courts Dividing Puerto Ricans,” 701–31.

^9. Soto, “Mutual Aid and Survival as Resistance in Puerto Rico,” 303–8: ‘Faced with an onslaught of disasters, government mismanagement of life-threatening crises, and the injustices of colonialism, Puerto Rican communities have bet on their own survival. Their mutual aid efforts testify to both the power of grassroots organizing and the scale of state neglect.”

^10. Maurer and Hogue, “Introduction: Transnational Nuclear Imperialism,” 35.

^11. Ibid., 25–26, 27. For more on this, see Threet, “Testing the Bomb,” 29.

^12. I acknowledge that these examples of injustice are confined to Britain and the United States. This is so partly for reasons of space, but also because the leading theories of justice are the products of Western philosophy. More importantly, Chagos, one of the specific cases that Papastephanou discusses, is clearly an issue of injustice that remains invisible to the prominent Western philosophies. As Papastephanou argues, this case has not become a metonymy of injustice and figures nowhere in contemporary Western theories of justice.

^13. Papastephanou, “Cosmopolitan Dice Recast,” 1338–50.

^14. Gurnham, “The Otherness of the Dead,” 348.

^15. Drousioti, “Anti-ethnic Hegemony,” 63–82.

^16. For more on the historical background of the Cyprus problem, see Hitchens, Hostage to History; Anderson, “The Division of Cyprus,” 7–16; Drousioti, “Anti-ethnic Hegemony,” and Papastephanou, “Coming Full Circle,” 77–88.

^17. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 112.

^18. Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis, 26 (emphasis added),166, 26.

^19. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 178.

^20. See Drousioti, “Anti-ethnic Hegemony.”

^21. For more on patriotic leftist anarchism, see Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State; and Kinna and Harper, Great Anarchists.

^22. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 112, 139, 177.

^23. In “Does Judith Butler Subvert Gender Binarism,” I unpack these ideas and suggest that, unlike bisexuality, the example of homosexuality is not as subversive of gender binarism as the relevant literature has assumed. since it maintains the criterion of the sex of the body for one’s sexual preference and sexual identity.

^24. Cooke, Re-presenting the Good Society.

^25. As Papastephanou puts it, “a grammatical-syntactic operation, that of determining exalted nouns through adjectives, is deep down a political operation of significance for scholarly and research engagements with justice” (“SA,” 3).

^26. Cederström and Spicer, “Discourse of the Real Kind,” 178–205.

^27. See Drousioti, “Anti-ethnic Hegemony.”

^28. Strand, “Educative Justice in Viral Modernity,” 244.

^29. Lie, “When Unhappiness Is Not the Endpoint,” 186 (emphasis added).

^30. Papastephanou, “Philosophy of Education in Times of Crises,” 1–15.

^31. Indicatively, for Papastephanou, movements that have monopolized attention such as the Black Lives Matter focus on social kinds of racial injustice and are in no way “myths to be debunked.” However, they should not be seen as redemptive carriers of all change because this would block what these movements overlook, namely, cases of racial injustice that lie beyond the social spheres of their attention; one such example is the silence of such movements regarding the racial injustice to the Chagossians.

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Kalli Drousioti

Kalli Drousioti received her PhD in Philosophy of Education at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.. Her research interests include discourse analysis, ethnic identity, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, utopia and educational ideals. Her publications have appeared in various Greek and international scholarly journals. She currently teaches at Unicaf University.