What times are these?

specters of the endless demand for justice and rights in contemporary literary studies

Abstract

The general aim of this article is to problematize the historical and theoretical reasons why, since the 1980s—a period marked by the post-dictatorship context in Brazil and the rise of French Theory in the United States—literary studies have increasingly assumed the task of contributing to the realization of justice and the validation of human rights. Drawing on Didier Fassin’s (2011) proposal for “a moral history of the present” in his investigation of humanitarian reason, the article examines the impact of the works of Antonio Candido (2004), Jacques Derrida (1994, 2018), and Shoshana Felman (2014) on conceptions of the relationship between justice, law, and literature. In doing so, it seeks to investigate some of the reasons behind the success, within the field, of a democratic ideal of the management of life, particularly shaped by an ethics of “survival” according to which “deconstruction is justice.” The article asks whether, more than three decades after Derrida’s formulation, it might be possible to conceive of “justice” without relying on the rigorous infinitism of deconstruction.