In Pascal's Pensées the important fragment 103 that has the title ‘Justice, force’ has been subject to a number of significant commentaries. In addition it has exerted a considerable influence on how the interconnection between questions of justice and their relation to the operation of power and force are understood. The fragment is, however, preceded by another.1 (It precedes it, principally, in the Lafuma edition.2) This latter fragment is of less certain origin; nonetheless, it forms part of the overall work. The fragment 102 reads:
Il faut que les Juifs ou les Chrétiens soient méchants.
(It is necessary that the Jew or the Christian are wicked.)
The juxtaposition is stark. More exactly the fragment presents an exacting either/or. What it sets in play is the position in which, in the first instance, it cannot be the case that both are evil, and then in the second, it cannot be the case that neither is evil; hence the either/or. Moreover, the fragment envisages a universe in which it holds true. While it may be countered that it is possible to suggest another in which this either/or is not operative, such a move would do no more than evince a failure to understand how a statement of this nature works. It creates the universe within which it applies. Within such a universe, given the application of this either/or, the position of both Christian and Jew is constructed. That is how they figure. Within that universe the Jew is named; Jews are ‘méchants’. The context, and it is a context created by the Pensées, within which to read the fragment that follows, i.e. ‘Justice, force’ has now emerged. The entirety of this later fragment is as follows:
Il est juste que ce qui est juste soit suivi; il est nécessaire que ce qui est le plus fort soit suivi.
La justice sans la force est impuissante, la force sans la justice est tyrannique.
La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours des méchants. La force sans la justice est accusée. Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la force, et pour cela faire ce qui est juste soit fort ou que ce qui est fort soit juste.
La justice est sujette à dispute. La force est très reconnaissable et sans dispute. Aussi on n'a pu donner la force à la justice, parce que la force a contredit la justice et a dit qu'elle était injuste, et a dit que c’était elle qui est juste.
Et ainsi ne pouvant faire que ce qui est juste fût fort, on a fait que ce qui est fort fût juste. (103)
(Justice, force. – It is just that what is just is followed; it is necessary that what is strongest is followed.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Justice without force is contradictory, because there are always evil ones; force without justice is condemned. It is necessary therefore to combine justice and force, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just.
Justice is subject to dispute; force is easily recognised and is not disputed. Thus we cannot give force to justice, because force has contradicted justice, and has said that it was unjust and has said that it is she herself who is just.
And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.)3
The text of fragment 103 contains a systematic form of argumentation.4 At the beginning the fragment opens up a fundamental distinction between justice and necessity. The position of the fragment is that to ‘follow’ and thus to accept justice is itself a just act. As concerns the response to justice there is no necessity in this instance. It is simply a description of what is entailed by the presence of justice. While a lot more needs to be said concerning this presence it should be clear, even at this stage, that justice involves a range of possible responses. Acting in accord with justice is just, i.e. it is an action taken as the result of deliberation. On the other hand, to act in accord with ‘might’ (le plus fort) is, for Pascal, a necessity given that survival would depend on it. There is a corresponding absence of choice. As a beginning therefore the distinction between justice and necessity involves the question of deliberation. What follows from this opening is that there is a link between justice and force. Justice, if it is to be more than simply posited (and thus present either as a type of ideal or as the simply pragmatic), must be enacted. In other words, justice must allow for the possibility of its own actualisation. (The realisation of justice is integral to justice.) Were this not to occur and if justice were to remain an ideal or merely pragmatic such that life – understood as the domain of lived experience – remained outside the realm of justice then justice would be without effect. In Pascal's terms justice would be ‘powerless’ (impuissante). The reciprocal position – and this is only one of a number of references Pascal makes to this topic – is that if there were to be the regularisation of life that took place independently of justice but which nonetheless involved force then that would be ‘tyranny’.5
The opening of the fragment therefore sets in play a series of abstract formulations. The internal elements counterbalance each other. The development continues with the assertion that there would be a contradictory element involved in justice if justice were positioned as occurring without force because not all acts are just. Therefore there is the need for the enforcement of justice and thus for judgment. Note, however, the line in which the position is advanced: La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours des méchants (Justice without force is contradictory because there are always evil ones). What is significant is the use of the word méchant. The term has, of course, already appeared. While noting the possibility that justice necessitates force because there are, inter alia, Jews, it is essential that the rest of the fragment, ‘Justice, force’, be developed in order to create the context within which it will then be possible to return to the identification of the Jew with the state of being méchant.6
As the fragment opens the combination of justice and force complement each other. Justice regulates force and force allows justice to be effective. The next paragraph, however, complicates the overall argument. The argument of the paragraph runs as follows. Justice is subject to dispute. Force is not. Thus one cannot give force to justice because force, taken as an end in itself, ‘contradicts’ (contredit) justice; in addition, force, as a position, has already declared justice to be unjust. Moreover, and the next move recalls the tradition in which might is equated with right (e.g. the position of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic), it has already been stated from the position of pure force that pure force is itself justice.7 The final predicament is that given the impossibility of making the just strong, all that can occur is making that which has force just.
The opening contrast is between justice as subject to dispute and force which is never disputed because it is easily ‘recognised’. There can be no doubt whether or not force is being used. It seems that what can be doubted is the operation of justice. Justice being ‘subject to dispute’ means that there is a question of whether or not justice is actually present,8 its presence being that which is disputed. However, there is more involved. (And from here it becomes necessary to read that which is essential yet implicit in Pascal's argumentation.) Disputation takes time. The immediate recognition of force does not. The evaluation of force in regard to its relation to justice becomes a process of judgment. Again, time is involved. Equally, the disputation concerning the presence of just acts involves a place, an opening, in which justice and judgment as actions, with the enjoining dispute and deliberation, can take place. Hence the presence of pure force as that which occurs ‘without dispute’ (sans dispute) needs to be understood in terms of both the temporality of disputation as well as the necessary interrelationship between place and justice. It is at this precise point that the argument becomes more complex.
From the presence of disputation Pascal concludes that force and justice have a founding incompatibility. Force not only contradicts, justice, it has, in certain instances, declared justice unjust and, more significantly, has adopted the name justice. Note, however, Pascal's formulation: ‘we cannot give force to justice’ (on n'a pu donner la force à la justice). What is important about this construction is the subject, the on (we/one) that is not able to give force to justice because of the contradictory relation. Defined internally, thus in its own terms, there is a type of consistency. And yet, once the capacity that was there in the formulation – ‘we cannot give force to justice’ (on n'a pu donner la force à la justice) – a capacity inherent in the word pouvoir (ability to do), is examined that consistency comes undone. It is not simply the identification of a restriction, the state of being unable to give. The refusal, which is itself evidence of more than a capacity, could have been refused. Given that all that is involved, if only initially, is an ability or capacity means that at the outset it is equally possible to have given force to justice and thus to have ignored the contradiction. Indeed, that is precisely what the position that claimed justice for force would have done. Hence the following questions: why in this instance, given that it could have been otherwise, is it not possible to give force to justice? If this is not something that ‘one’ (though also ‘we’) can do, then why, in this instance, would it not be done? The mere presence of a contradiction would not have been compelling. Is there another sense of force? If so then this would be the force that forces ‘one’ (now ‘us’) not to give force to justice, or, indeed on the contrary, to give it. If there is another sense of force – if, that is, force has a more complex presence that had be thought hitherto – then what would have emerged is a doubling of force. Once doubled what was there in addition, though equally as part of force, would be a sense of force that was positioned beyond the simple opposition between that which can or cannot be disputed.
The dispute that involves justice is always delimited by finite concerns. They pertain to the justice of given acts. Acts may be completely specific or they may implicate systems of decision-making. While it always possible to move to the position in which a response to this predicament would involve posing the question – what is Justice? – such a strategy would in the end be of little value as it would do no more than allow abstract essentialism a determining role. (Such a move would be the recourse to a type of Platonism.) As a consequence an alternative position needs to be created. However, that alternative can only occur if force and justice are already defined in relation to each other. It is precisely this possibility that has to hold if justice is not to be delimited by either its pure essentiality or reduced to no more than its pragmatic instantiation. Moreover, it is precisely this possibility that has already been suggested in the opening lines of the fragment. The line in which justice and force are brought together – ‘Justice without force is powerless’ (La justice sans la force est impuissante) – charts that complex relationship. The line reinforces the presence of an already existent relation between ‘justice’, ‘force’ and ‘power’. Despite its presence in the negative ‘power’ can be reworked in terms of a capacity to act. As such, force in this context has to be positioned in relation to the capacity to act justly. The scope of that capacity cannot be restricted in a straightforward manner. It can encompass an institution as much as an individual. What the line suggests therefore is that force is the capacity within justice for just acts. What this attributes to justice is an actative dimension, i.e. a dimension that identifies justice with activity, with the continuity of being just. Justice is therefore – is what it is – in its capacity to be acted out. As a consequence justice is then inextricably bound up with potentiality since a capacity holds independently of its actualisation. This is, of course, merely to reiterate the result of the already established interconnection between ‘justice’, ‘force’ and ‘power’.
While it will always be the case that any instance of justice is subject to dispute it does not follow from the presence of dispute that justice need be thought independently of force. This is the case for two reasons. In the first instance it is because judgment cannot be separated from justice as an activity and in the second it is due to the link that justice has to time and place. What the second of these points entails is that justice is acted out and is thus always situated. Moreover, it can also be argued that this inseparability of force and justice, an inseparability that is reinforced by the addition of ‘power’, will mean that there is a radically different sense of force involved than the one that is opposed absolutely to justice. (The presence of this opposition is re-enforced in the fragment by Pascal's use of the term contredite.) Indeed, the logic of Pascal's own argument necessitates a divide in how force is understood.
The tradition of philosophical essentialism cannot provide a response to the problems posed by the relationship between justice and force as that domain is concerned exclusively with a self-referential definition and therefore cannot incorporate what was identified above as the actative dimension within justice. Nor, moreover, can that tradition sustain a constant link between justice and dispute. This link can only be maintained if judgment is given centrality. In addition, the question of the relationship between justice and force cannot be resolved by resorting to an account of law in terms of custom; indeed, elsewhere in the Pensées Pascal has made this very point. Rather than advance an argument against the identification of law with custom he offers a diagnosis or a description of what occurs. There is the further point, also made by Pascal, that any problems posed by the plurality of laws cannot be rectified by the creation of another law. With regard to the relationship between custom and law he writes, bringing his unacknowledged relation to Montagine into play, the following:
De cette confusion arrive que l'un dit que l'essence de la justice est l'autorité du législateur, l'autre la commodité du souverain, l'autre la coutume présente, et c'est le plus sûr. Rien suivant la seule raison n'est juste de soi tout branle avec le temps. La coutume (est) toute l’équité, par cette seule raison qu'elle est reçue. C'est le fondement mystique de son autorité. (60)
(The result of this confusion is that one affirms the essence of justice to be the authority of the legislator; another, the interest of the sovereign; another, present custom, and this is the most certain. Nothing, according to reason alone, is just in itself; all changes with time. Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted. It is the mystical foundation of its authority).
What becomes important therefore is the recognition of the work of this ‘mystical foundation’. The ‘mystical’ in this instance concerns the reworking of appearance such that it takes on the quality of the eternal. The ‘essence of justice’ must be located elsewhere than in the possible confusion of essence with appearance. However, as Pascal is quick to point out, the capacity of appearance to operate, thus the capacity to identify legislative power with the appearance of the King, should not pass unnoticed. It may have a type of necessity. Nonetheless, as part of the structure of the Apology it is vital that what is fundamental to law becomes clear. That this will necessitate a return to a form of Christianity that eschews any mode of demonstration and is thus one whose truths are only known via the ‘heart’ is central.9 Within this setting the presence of that which is contradictory or inherently unstable such as the relationship between human law and the question of justice – hence the relationship between sovereignty and justice – are only resolvable in the figure of Christ (cf. fragment 257). Moreover, there is a direct link between the heart and knowledge of God, where the latter is understood as l’être universal (the universal being) (cf. fragment 423). Nonetheless, what is of significance in the critique of custom is the identification of a ground of law that cannot be demonstrated. As such, it would be as though one ‘mystical foundation’ would have replaced another. However, in the necessity that force open up, there is the intimation of a completely different form of argumentation. To the extent that it holds sway force is reformed. The opening up of force obviates the need for a ‘mystical foundation’ of any type as the link between justice and potentiality will have lifted justice beyond any oscillation between appearance and essence. In other words, the key point is that justice would then no longer be located within a setting that demands recourse to a ‘mystical foundation’ and that such a position is an already present if implicit possibility in Pascal.10
The emergence of the division within force occurs once it becomes possible to identify a form of force that was uniquely related to justice and as such was distinct from the conception of force that allowed for the exclusive identification of force with ‘might’. It should be clear from the start that what emerges within the confines of the fragment falls beyond the hold of what may have been initially intended. Pascal's aim was always to complicate the question of justice such that once trapped in a predicament in which justice can never acquire force, all that can ever be done is to try and ameliorate this condition by attempting to temper the strong and thus to make the strong just. While there may be a pervasive realism in Pascal's presentation, it is based on a position that need not hold, i.e. what need not hold is the possibility that there is by definition an impossible relation between justice and force.
What has emerged in the examination of the fragment thus far is the possibility of identifying in the interplay between ‘justice’, ‘force’ and ‘power’ a way of understanding another modality for justice, namely justice as involved in the necessity for varying forms of activity. These would include just acts as well as just laws and extend to a conception of justice that has the necessity of force as integral to it. As opposed to the position in which force contradicted justice, there would be the separate and importantly different argument such that justice as justice would be impossible were it not for the place of force and power within it. (Pascal notes, after all, the possibility of the place of force within justice.) Power, however, involves the making explicit of that which was only there implicitly. This connection repositions justice in terms of a fundamentally different distinction. In moving beyond any recourse to a ‘mystical foundation’, what is left to one side is the opposition between appearance and essence. Replacing them – a replacement signalling the presence of another mode of thought, a mode suggested by fragment 103 even though it remains unstated within it – is the relation between potentiality and actuality and as such stages a transformation of force.
As has been suggested above, the division within force, a division in which ‘force’, ‘justice’ and ‘power’ even as presented by Pascal are interconnected, creates a setting such that justice cannot be disassociated readily from its having the potential for actualisation. While Pascal would have wanted to locate justice and law within the realm of the divine, what has occurred within the interpretation of the fragment offered thus far does so as a result of repositioning ‘force’ and ‘power’ such that they have a necessary presence within the general setting of justice. The inscription of ‘force’ and ‘power’ reconfigures the active within justice in relation to potentiality. What results is the emergence of an important distinction between, on the one hand, justice as a potential and thus ‘force’ and ‘power’ as marking the continual possibility of actualisation and, on the other, what would have been the mere actualisation of force. (The latter always holds open the possibility that it is the actualisation of pure force, i.e. force without justice.)
Both the presence and the significance of this divide within force needs to be set against Derrida's engagement with the question of law and its relation to justice. Derrida's engagement forms part of his investigation of what counts as ‘the force law’ (le force de loi), an undertaking that will culminate in his interpretation of Walter Benjamin's paper the ‘Critique of Violence’.11 Part of the project involves a brief though important discussion of fragment 103. The importance for Derrida can be located within the clear relation between the interpretations of Benjamin and Pascal. While recognising that Pascal's work cannot be automatically separated from what Derrida describes as ‘its Christian pessimism’, Derrida is nonetheless keen to indicate that there is within the fragment under consideration another possibility.12 In this regard Derrida suggests that what is at work in the text is a critique of ‘juridical ideology’. However, he adds two further elements that need to be noted. The first is that Pascal's position inaugurates the centrality of faith and thus what Derrida refers to as an ‘appeal to belief’ (un appel à la croyance).13 More significantly he identifies another element within Pascal's writings to which he gives the name le mystique. This other element involves the following considerations:
The operation which amounts to founding, inaugurating, justifying the law, to making the law, would consist in a coup de force, and thus in a performative and therefore interpretive violence which in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice, no pre-existing foundation, by definition would be able to guarantee, contradict or invalidate.14
Whether or not Derrida is correct to think of this formulation as being in accord with the sense of a ‘mystical foundation’ as it occurs in either Montaigne or Pascal is a question that is not directly relevant here. What matters is that Pascal is being read as though there is the actual suggestion in his writings, specifically fragment 103, that there is a founding of law that occurs as the result of a performative – itself un coup de force – which is located beyond the hold of any foundation and therefore beyond the positive and negative determinations that justice can take. The final element in Derrida's analysis that needs to be noted is that this law, understood in terms of the founding of a law and its related conception of justice, brings with it an inevitable and founding violence. An important part of the argument hinges on the interpretation of the il faut (it is necessary) in the following line from Justice, force:15
Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la force, et pour cela faire ce qui est juste soit fort ou que ce qui est fort soit juste.
(It is necessary consequently to combine justice and force, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just.)
For Derrida a specific argument arises in regard to this Il faut, one giving it the quality of the inherently indeterminate. Derrida formulates this position in the following terms:
It is difficult to decide or conclude if the ‘it is necessary’ (il faut) is prescribed by that which is just in the justice (dans le juste de la justice) or by that which is necessary in force. This hesitation can equally be taken as secondary. It could be said that it floats to the surface from a deeper ‘it is necessary’ (il faut). Since justice demands, as justice, the recourse to force. The necessity of force is therefore implied in the justness of the justice (dans le juste de la justice).16
What is significant here is not the presence of necessity but that which sets the conditions for its interpretative presence. The il faut within Pascal's formulation is determined by a donc (consequently), such that the necessity that the il faut puts in place cannot be thought outside a direct relation to consequence. What is present is so as a clear result of the claim that force without justice is to be ‘condemned’ (accusée). Equally, it should be added that it is also consequent on the earlier proposition that ‘justice without force is contradictory’. The contradiction arises, however, because of the presence of those who are méchant. The resultant necessity therefore has at least two sources. The first involves related elements, i.e. the necessity that justice be located within force and that force is integral to the effective presence of justice. The second is that force itself has a necessity because of the méchant.
In the context of the fragment justice needs force because it has an already determined object. In other words, the way in which justice and force are combined is neither arbitrary nor is it the subject of chance. Their combination is the direct result of the presence of the méchant. Therefore contrary to Derrida's analysis, the ‘il faut’ and thus the sense of necessity that arises in the fragment are determined within the fragment itself by the need to identify and deal with the méchant. The consequence that mediates the il faut, a consequence that is there, ineliminably, in the donc that is announced concurrently with the il faut – Pascal wrote Il faut donc – delimits a clear and already present necessity. What is of greater interest is the question: what would happen were there to be a relation between justice and force, a relation that Pascal has already identified and yet there not be simultaneously an already identified and thus already determined object?
Prior to taking up that question it is important to note that Derrida is right to argue that force is already impliquée dans le juste de justice; however, what is not correct is the additional point that force for Pascal is linked exclusively to a violent law-making performative that falls beyond the hold of either the just or the unjust. In fact it is possible to go further and suggest that on the basis of the interpretation thus far the doubled presence of force precludes such a possibility. In sum, the basis of Derrida's argument in relation to Pascal is that a version of the ‘mystical foundation’ is connected to a founding gesture for law which is un coup de force located beyond the hold of the opposition between the just and the unjust. However, not simply is this itself the violent positing of an original and grounding form of violence, regardless of how such a gesture may come later to be judged, it is exactly this set up that Pascal can be read as attempting to undo. The undoing needs to be situated within the interpretation already offered of the relationship between ‘justice’, ‘force’ and ‘power’. The genuinely complicating factor, one ignored by Derrida, is that part of the prompt for Pascal's own delimitation of force – a delimitation that has been opened up – is the presence of the méchant.17 What needs to be pursued therefore is whether what is of value in the doubling of force can in the end differentiate itself from a relation that links justice to the already present status of the méchant. In sum Derrida misconstrues this possible doubling of ‘force’ while at the same time he remains unaware of the inherent link between questions of justice and the operative presence of the figure of the Jew.
Within the context firstly of what has been described as the doubling of force and secondly the encounter with Derrida it is now vital to return to the formulation which, while noted, was left out of the detailed examination of the fragment thus far. The line in question was: ‘Justice without force is contradictory, because there are always evil ones’ (La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours des méchants’). What was of interest here is that this fragment is preceded by one in which the state of being méchant is identified with the Jews (while, of course, not being reducible to Jews).
The figure of the Jew in the Pensées is itself a complex question. If there is a way of summing up that presence then it is in terms of what has been called the logic of the synagogue.18 The fundamental characteristic of that figure is her banded eyes and thus her blindness. She delivers or presents a truth that she, of necessity, cannot see. There is therefore a double necessity. Without her truth is not possible – here one example among many is the ‘Old Testament’ predicating the ‘truths’ that the ‘New Testament’ will then have been seen to instantiate. The second element is that she – and now this means the Jews – cannot participate in that which she announces. Indeed, the exclusion of the Jews is fundamental to the operation of the very Christianity that they are taken to have enabled.19 The logic of the synagogue necessitates that the Jews have to be included in order to be excluded. They have to be retained as blind.20 Of the many forms that this logic is given two of the most succinct are the following:
Mais c'est leur refus même qui est le fondement de notre créance. (273)
(But, it is their very refusal which is the foundation of our belief.)
Les Juifs en le tuant pour ne le point recevoir pour Messie, lui ont donné la dernière marque du Messie. (488)
(The Jews in killing him in order not to welcome him as the Messiah, have given to him the final indication of the Messiah.)
What is of interest here is the relationship between this logic, the either/or announced in 102 and the complex figure of justice as it appears in 103.
The effect of the either/or can be situated, initially, in the context of fragment 103. As was suggested if the line – ‘Justice without force is contradictory, because there are always evil ones’ (La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours des méchants) – can be reworked such that once 102 and 103 are read together then the claim is that justice needs force because there are Jews. (There needs to be the allowance, as has already been indicated, that the state of being méchant is not exclusive to Jews. Rather, the point is that all Jews are méchant.) As such dealing justly with the méchant necessitates that justice has actual presence. The important point here is that what occurs is the move from the position in which there is the claim that justice involves force, and it is force prior to actualisation, to another in which there is the actualisation of that force within a given context. The move therefore is from a conception of justice that always involves potentiality and in which justice is what it is insofar as it has the capacity for force, to a conception of justice in which actualisation has become direct application. Only in terms of the latter is it possible to dispute whether a specific instance of the enacting of justice is in fact just. What is beyond dispute is that there is an always already present relationship between justice and force and that this is central once that relationship involves potentiality rather than immediate application. What is precluded by the presence of potentiality is the complete and completing identification of actuality with pure immediacy. Indeed, it is possible to go further and argue that pure immediacy is violence. The counter-move to the violence of pure immediacy, which is implicit in Pascal and which is being worked out here, is to a conception of actualisation that is the result of the process of deliberation, a move demanding the inscription of time. It will be exclusively in terms of this move that justice will stand counter to violence.
The immediacy of judgment (recognising that the formulation has an oxymoronic quality) would close the space that judgment as a timed procedure, as the timed movement of deliberation, always necessitates.21 Immediacy takes on the temporal quality of pure force. What is emerging therefore is that the doubling of force continually displaces the violence of immediacy. This displacement has neither an ethical nor a moral basis. It arises from the fact of force's doubled presence. However, it will have implications that involve both the ethical and the moral. The displacing is bound up with the necessary connection between justice and judgment. This is a connection that holds to the fundamental presence of place and time. Time figures within the judgment. Place is that which will always be necessitated once deliberation occurs. Deliberation demands a setting.
What then of the connection between 102 and 103? The possibility of asking this question is not to impose an order on the fragments. Pascal is unequivocal concerning the status of the ‘pensées’ that comprise the overall text.
J’écrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre et non pas peut-être dans une confusion sans dessein. C'est le véritable ordre et qui marquera mon objet par le désordre même. (532)
(I shall here write my thoughts without order, and not perhaps in a confusion without design; that is the true order and which will mark my object by its very disorder.)
The absence of a determined order in which the text develops not only allows for the retrospective imposition of different ordering systems, it allows, more significantly, for an ideational or thematic consistency to be posited between the differing elements. It will be in relation to that accord that 102 and 103 are to be read together.
The point of departure is clear. Fragment 103 identifies the presence of a form of necessity. Justice needs force due to the fact that there are those who are ‘méchant’. Their presence becomes the ‘fact’ of the matter. Moreover, their presence as ‘fact’ arises from the operative dimension of the either/or in 102. As such, Jews, as an instance of the méchant, can be judged. What this means is that the relationship between justice and force, in this instance, is always determined in advance. Thus construed justice and force are not inherently connected. The connection arises because of the presence of the méchant. That object, and that object alone, provides the relation with its necessity. And yet the doubling of force means that force is also present as a capacity to act justly, moreover a capacity that will always be there independently of its actualisation. If this latter moment is privileged then it identifies a space that is internal to the operation of justice, a space, moreover, that is the result of the inscription of potentiality within justice itself. The presence of this space both positions as well as allows for justice. Justice is that which occurs, and more importantly can only occur, within this opened space; it becomes the place of judgment. The place of judgment is linked therefore to force as a potentiality. Once these elements are combined they stand counter to the position in which the relationship between justice and force is determined in advance. They stand counter therefore to violence. As such this allows for the introduction of the distinction between force and violence. This distinction is of central importance. The determination noted above occurs due to the relation that justice and force, within this configuration, already have to an identified and named object. Naming the enemy is integral to the structure of violence, though inimical to the identification of justice, force and potentiality. It is inimical as it marks the closure of the space of judgment. Moreover, it replaces the time of deliberation with a decision that has the quality of the immediate.
What cannot be overlooked in this analysis is the relationship justice and force have to the operative presence of the logic of the synagogue. Precisely because this logic is at work rather than merely gestural, the Jew is both excluded and retained. The Jew's function in relation to Christianity is given within that logic. As has already been noted there is an important division with regard to the two different ways in which justice and force can be connected. In the first instance justice and force work in relation to a given object. (This is the setting in which violence occurs and justice is absent.) In this case the object is the Jews and their immediate identification with the state of being méchants. That identification is given within the either/or staged by fragment 102. What forestalls the possibility that Jews could be other than méchant is the operation of the logic of the synagogue. For the logic to work it is essential that there be Jews. In addition, given that there are Jews, then they are automatically méchants. Nonetheless, within the terms set by that necessity, Pascal is able to distinguish between two different types of Jew. (Neither escapes the logic of the synagogue; moreover, both are retained because of it.)
Les juifs étaient de deux sortes. Les uns n'avaient que les affections païennes, les autres avaient les affections chrétiennes. (289)
(The Jews are of two sorts. Those who have only pagan feelings, the others that have Christian feelings.)
The second type can be redeemed. Redemption occurs through a process of assimilation or conversion. There would then be admission to what could be understood as the universal. This is the other possibility within the either/or. The process continues to allow for alterity to the extent that the other can, in the end, be assimilated or drawn into the universal. (This position has already been noted in relation to Hegel's figure of the Jew in the Philosophy of Right.) On the other hand, the first type of Jew must remain. There is an unavoidable sense of continuity and necessity at work within this first sense of being a Jew. Jews, those who remain ‘pagan’, are present therefore as more than the other to the Same. They are positioned such that they do not have a relation to the opposition Same and other (if that relation brings with it the continual possibility of the admission of the other to the Same). What is introduced is a further determination of alterity. It can be characterised as existing without relation to the process of universality (and yet necessitated in order that there be universality). This other Jew, the pagan Jew, has to be continually present. They have to remain even after the process of conversion even if their presence is purely figural. The ‘pagan’ has to be exterior to the process of universality. As a consequence Christianity as universality, though equally universality as Christianity, is maintained as a result. The logic of the synagogue therefore demands a process of universalisation to the extent that what is other to the process, held within a relation of without relation, is not simply maintained, rather it is held in place as the very possibility of the logic's effective operation. In other words, the conception of other held by the without relation allows for the logic of the synagogue to work in the first place.
What is ensured by this process is the retention of what enables the logic to operate effectively, i.e. the continual presence of Jews. After having taken conversion and assimilation into consideration, it is the Jew positioned within the without relation that must be present immediately. The pagan Jew becomes therefore a limit condition. Even if that which is created as the Jew – the figure of the Jew – is a creation of and for immediacy, it remains the case that the Jew must have an immediate identity and more significantly the function of that identity can never be brought into question. This underlies the structural determination that is the effect of the either/or.
Turning to the other side of the doubling of force two elements are central. Firstly determination is absent, and secondly the relation between justice and force does not assume an already identified and named object. Equally, that relation has a fundamentally different quality as it is no longer governed by immediacy and therefore not already implicated in the immediacy of violence. Folded into this position is the necessity that were there to be the doubling and the overcoming of immediacy then this would have reintroduced time, place and space within the relation between justice and force. Stemming the hold of pure immediacy is to displace the possibility of pure force and thus violence's inevitability. The mediacy that interrupts this possibility has to be understood, as was suggested above, in terms of the operation of time. Judgment necessitates not simply the time of its own occurrence, more significantly judgment opens the place of its own instantiation as a practice. Judgment therefore brings both the space of disputation into play as well as the actuality of any decision. (The decision operates as the determinate form taken by judgment.) This occurs precisely because there is a distinction between justice as defined by immediacy – a sense of justice that will in the end founder because it cannot be separated effectively from violence – and justice defined by potentiality. In the case of the latter, as has been argued, justice is linked to a sense of process and therefore to activity. The space and place of justice is not simply constructed, it has to be held open continually. This opening does not exist because of a commitment to the future – Rather, the future, the future of and for justice – is the consequence of the effective presence of potentiality and force.
If this analysis of fragments 102 and 103 allows for a conclusion that opens up beyond a strict concern with Pascal then it must touch on the question that has been at work throughout this chapter even if it has not been announced explicitly as such. The question is straightforward: what does it mean to be just to particularity? The answer to the question hinges on the nature of the distinction between the immediate and the mediate. Indeed, allusion has already been made to it insofar as such a response is bound up with the position that the immediate naming of the other, an act in which the other can be reconfigured as the enemy, has to presuppose the attribution of a fixed and determined identity. The identity is not itself subject to negotiation. Were it to be then the immediacy in which the other is both named and identified (identification as the attribution of identity) would have come undone. Within this structure, however, there is the possibility of another sense of particularity. What has to occur therefore is the emergence of a different possibility. Rather than being simply posited it stems from the recognition that the way the structure operates is that the identity of the particular is both immediate and determined externally. As such, it is necessarily singular. Singularity, in the sense of a conception of identity that is imposed externally, precludes, structurally and therefore necessarily, the possibility that identity could be the subject of dispute, argumentation and thus conflict. Thus for Pascal to assert that the Jews are méchant in virtue of being Jews, whatever may be said elsewhere in the Pensées, means that the singularity of identity is given. To argue in response that Jews are not méchant but rather that they are virtuous, or to try and counter the logic of the synagogue with the assertion of sight in contradistinction to blindness, is to do no more than counter the attribution of the singularity of identity with its opposite. If there is a counter it must be to the immediacy underpinning these attributions and impositions and not simply to the description of the identity that it intends to secure.
Particularity therefore involves a conception of identity having a twofold determination. In the first instance, it is defined in terms of internality, a position that is not immune to the external but which, as has been argued, is not determined by it. (Hence the history of any identity will always be refracted through the internal. Refraction, however, is not determination.) Secondly, the identity of the particular, when that identity takes the internal as its locus, has to incorporate a range of potentially or actually conflicting claims to identity. While some of these claims may seem to exclude others, viewed philosophically and thus in terms of a possible structure of identity, there cannot be a resolution precisely because any resolution would have to have an external source. To deploy the example from Pascal, were the question of Jewish identity – a question that endures as a source of creative conflict and tension defining particular conceptions of Jewish thought (thought both philosophical as well as religious) – to be resolved immediately with the claim that all Jews are méchants, then the already present conflict concerning identity would no longer figure within any account of that identity. The internal conflict would have become redundant in relation to the imposition of the singular determination whose source was external.
Allowing for particularity therefore necessitates the displacing of the figure and thus the work of immediacy. Internality which yields identities which themselves have a complex relation to the possibility of synthesis becomes the means by which particularity is affirmed within the recognition that particularity, in virtue of what it is when the internal and thus affirmation hold sway, continues within the time of continual mediacy. As a consequence what is incorporated is the temporal and spatial possibility of justice. As a result what it means to be just to particularities is, in the first instance, to hold to the necessity of the timing of judgment through the displacing of immediacy, and in the second to hold both philosophically and as a matter of social policy to the maintenance of particularities as sites of conflict and thus within terms they set and create to hold to the necessity that particularities have their own sense of self-transformation.
1. The relationship between justice and power is implicitly present in the way Hannah Arendt opens her discussion of power in On Violence (New York: Harvester Books, 1970), p. 51. She draws an important distinction between power and violence, summing up the distinction in the following terms:
Power and violence are opposites: where the one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
What ‘power’, as formulated in these terms, sets in play is the recognition of the necessity that just governance be effective. However, it does not follow from the presence of effective government that every instance of that presence – an instance that will involve what Pascal calls ‘force’ – is therefore an instance of violence. This, it will be argued, is the mistake made by Derrida in his reference to fragment 103. This occurs when Derrida takes up, albeit briefly, the fragment in his Force de loi (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994), pp. 26–33. In addition there is a further reference to the fragment in Voyous (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003), pp. 133–4. Derrida's earlier treatment of fragment 103 will be taken up at a later stage in this study. Louis Marin has also developed a sustained interpretation of this fragment in Pascal et Port-Royal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 117–27.
2. The edition of Pascal that has been used here is the one established by Louis Lafuma (Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1962)). There are other editions each with their own numbering systems. The other significant edition is by Brunschvicg. The question of there being a correct order has been addressed by Pascal himself in fragment 532. I have discussed that fragment further on. (All the pensées are cited in French followed by an English translation. The references are given in the body of text.) There is another fragment in which ‘justice’ and ‘force’ are related in fragment 85.
Si l'on avait pu aurait mis la force entre les mains de la justice, mais comme la force ne se laisse pas manier comme on veut parce que c'est une qualité palpable, au lieu que la justice est une qualité spirituelle dont on dispose comme on veut, On l'a mise entre les mains de la force et ainsi on appelle juste ce qu'il est force d'observer.
If one had been able to do it, one would have placed force in the hands of justice, but as force does not let itself be managed as one wants, because it is a palpable quality, while justice is a spiritual quality of which one disposes as one pleases. One has placed justice in the hands of might and thus what is called just which men are forced to observe.
While this is a central element to the Pascalian sense of ‘justice’, the argument developed in this chapter is that there is another dimension within Pascal's argumentation. It concerns what might be described as the potentiality for justice. Potentiality is present as a force. Moreover, force can be rethought as linked to potentiality.
3. For the sake of consistency juste and justice have been translated as ‘just’ and ‘justice’. It should not be forgotten, however, that juste also contains the sense of that which is ‘right’ or ‘correct’.
4. For a discussion of this fragment in the context of what could be described as Pascal's critical engagement with custom – which is in part a sustained engagement with Montaigne – see Hélène Bouchilloux, ‘Pascal and the Social World’, in Nicholas Hammond (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pascal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 201–16.
5. Tyranny is dealt with a number of times in the Pensées. See in this regard fragment 58.
6. There are a number of discussions of the fragments that refer to Jews within the literature on Pascal. Few, if any, try to establish a strong philosophical as opposed to merely thematic connection between those fragments and the overall project of the Pensées. For a general discussion see: Jean Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 14–54; Francis X. J. Coleman, Neither Angel Nor Beast: The Life and Work of Blaise Pascal (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 168–71. For an informative discussion of Pascal's arguments concerning the continuity between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New Testaments’ see David Wetsel, L’Écriture et le Reste: The Pensées of Pascal and the Exegetical Tradition of Port Royal (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981), pp. 182–9.
7. This occurs in the argument advanced in Republic (336b–367e). It goes without saying that Socrates counters Thrasymachus’ position with great precision.
8. The presence of dispute gives ‘justice’ a history. As such justice, rather than having an essential quality, can be redescribed in terms of the continuity of conflict concerning the actuality in a given situation of a specific act or decision being just. As such this should mediate the interpretation of the fragment's first line – ‘It is just that that which is just is followed’ (Il est juste que ce qui est juste soit suivi) – as having a structure similar to the categorical imperative. Marin interprets the opening line in terms of the categorical imperative. See his Pascal et Port-Royal, p. 117.
9. This position is integral to Pascal's critique of Descartes. For the clearest formulation of Pascal's position – one that cannot be associated either with scepticism on the one hand or mere faith on the other – see fragment 110.
10. Derrida identifies this use of le fondement mystique as a borrowing from Montaigne. He then notes in relation to this formulation as it pertains to both:
The authority of laws rests only on the credit that they are given. That credit is believed in. It is law's foundation. This act of faith is not an ontological or a rational foundation.
To which it should be added immediately that Pascal in fragment 7 sets out the position of faith and which, if read in conjunction with others on the relationship between ‘faith’ and the ‘heart’, defines a conception of knowledge (a knowledge that would not be irrational) in relation to both. In other words, ‘faith’ in Pascal is linked to knowledge that pertains to the ‘heart’. This functions as a critique of a certain conception of knowledge (Cartesian) but is not a critique of knowledge tout court. Derrida's further reflection of the relationship between knowledge and faith can be found in his Foi et Savoir (Paris: Éditions le Seuil, 2000).
11. Jacques Derrida, Force de loi: Le fondement mystique de l'autorité’ (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994). (All subsequent translations are my own.)
12. Force de loi, p. 32
13. Force de loi, p. 32.
14. Force de loi, p. 33.
15. ‘Il faut’ is an impersonal formulation with the direct translation ‘It is necessary’. Central therefore to any understanding of this passage of text is firstly the location of necessity announced by the Il faut and secondly that that necessity has an indissoluble link, in this context, to a form of consequentialism. The latter is there in the word donc. This link and its consequentalism – the donc – are overlooked by Derrida.
16. Force de loi, p. 28.
17. There are of course other readings of Pascal and thus other points of connection. In The Plural Event I argued that central to Pascal is a critique of representation and thus the Pensées is a work that cannot be automatically reduced to a simple expression of logocentrism (see pp. 61–83). Similar arguments are advanced by Léveillé-Mourin among others (see Geneviève Léveillé-Mourin, Le langage Chrétien, Antichrétien de la Transcendance: Pascal Nietzsche (Paris: Éditions Vrin, 1978). The work of Louis Marin is also orientated around complicating the presence of Pascal – see Louis Marin, La Critique du discours sur Logique de Port Royal et les Pensées’ de Pascal (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975), especially p. 258–69 and his Pascal et Port-Royal, pp. 169–239.
18. A clear instance of the logic which occurs outside the realm of both art (including sculpture) and the philosophical is evident in Dante. While Dante is drawing on St Augustine (De symbolo ad catechumenos, 4), lines 67–9 of Canto 22 of the Purgatorio read as follows:
Facesti come quei che va di notte,
che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova,
ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte
You did as he who goes by night and carries
the lamp behind him – he is of no help
to his own self but teaches those who follow –
(The translation used here is by Robert M. Durling. He also draws attention to the link to Augustine. See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Volume II. Purgatorio (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 365.) While the rest of the Canto would need to be interpreted in terms of the relationship between the Jew and metaphors of light it is nonetheless straightforward that what is at work in these line is what has already been referred to as the logic of the synagogue. In addition, the relationship between Augustine and his role in the construction and maintenance of a specific configuration of the logic of the synagogue comprises a field of investigation in its own right. To this end see: Paula Fredriksen, ‘Excaecati Occulta Justitia dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 3, no. 3 (1995), pp. 299–324.
19. This position is a version of the standard interpretation of Pascal in which the Old Testament is interpreted as having a double register. This allows it to be both continuous and discontinuous with the New Testament. For a detailed discussion of this position see David Wetsel, L’Écriture et le Reste: The Pensées of Pascal in the Exegetical Tradition of Port Royal (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981), pp. 165–211.
20. It should be noted that the affirmation of Jewish identity cannot be reduced to a mere argument for sight. That affirmation could only be there in having overcome the founding opposition between blindness and sight. As a result identity questions would be engaged such that while there would be an inevitable relation to that opposition it would not structure any response to the question of identity.
21. It is not as though clear references to judgment are not present in the text. One of the most important considerations occurs in fragment 529. However, references to judgment always stand apart from the figure of the Jew. The object of the chapter is, of course, to try and show what occurs once they are thought together.