Justice and Personality: A Promissory Note

Drucilla Cornell located her work and alliances at contested borders of exchange, translation, prickly political showdowns, gender affiliation, and inherited jointures of enmity. Cornell made us think about what it means to live in America today, meaning yesterday and today, ceding to the destructive pull of a national death drive and the repeal of rights to which women and minorities never cease being susceptible. Her work “asks and answers” the question about the structural ground rules that make the rollback of rights inevitable , legally riding out a destiny on an exhausting loop with the dreary fatalism of Sisyphus, a relentless paring down of legal protection rigged to attack a determined portion of our citizenry, arriving not merely from a whim of a demented few. Though her analyses went to worldwide theaters of injustice, her grip was firmly on the United States and its regressive judiciary as well as legislative behaviors regarding reproductive restriction, voting rights, and specific axioms of civil rights. Her analyses saw us as structurally faltering—as being ever on the brink of losing acquired rights, a predicament that creates a political psychology of despairing repetition compulsion, promoting an inescapable losing streak, even when one pauses to “win” a few rounds and reshuffle gendered cards. Cornell understood an American civic tic that bore fatal consequences, given full view in the murder she and her cohorts mourn when wringing out their poignant contemplation of the destruction of Mary Joe Frug. Some of her strongest work on the injustices routinely dealt to women, mothers, and their allies comes forward as a tribute and an attribute of mourning, as tributary honoring. The grief she expressed over loss of rights, intimately bound up with loss of life, drives her North American passion. She kept her lynx eye on murderous habits that were sublimated to law and remain part of a sweeping exclusionary civic operation that won’t let up, going after minute corners and work spaces. To get a running start, she took her cues from Kant through Heidegger and Levinas when making critical assessments. They rode with elements of built-in racisms, a feature of philosophical inheritability and arrogant metaphysical say-so with which they each grappled, if, in some instances, testing posited limits to failure. This failure is our inheritance, still apportioning the cards we were dealt.