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José Luis Barrios
To discover the meaning of fault and offense in contemporary societies, requires us to fathom the sense of suffering in our world. I do not make so extreme a claim idly. The genealogy of fault, of the moment preceding the crime, is the product of a disproportion: that of human life. Pain, like pleasure, is a phenomenological outer limit of the subject. They are the deterritorializations of consciousness, the very forms taken by the discrepancy of the individual with regard to him or herself. Pain, in particular, is an imminence and a question. It is the imminence of time as the prelude to death, and the question posed to a possible otherness. When in pain, the body is the scene of a battle: the battle of time as carnality, the battle of humanity as disproportion. A disproportion with regard to oneself, and also with regard to a radical otherness, of whom one asks the question why. Wrongdoing is therefore not the explanation for pain and death, on the contrary, it is the last two that explain the fault. As Paul Ricoeur has shown, it is a matter of the fabile condition of human beings. The original disparity of the relations between the will, the body and the other. In order to be able to speak, then, of the relation between fault and crime in contemporary society, we must consider the place occupied by the binomials of freedom/fate and justice/otherness in our environment. Only then can we understand that the fault is a product of man's proximity to himself, to the world and to the other, whereas crime is born of the distancing of these originary relations, achieved by symbolic power systems through the suppression or oblivion of pain. From my point of view, suffering ought to function as the regulative condition of the various ethical relations established by human beings with their environment.
The binomials constituted by freedom/fate and justice/otherness are no more than the ontological structures of the subject's activity/passivity. On the one hand, freedom versus destiny is the struggle humanity engages in against itself, a struggle of will and consciousness striving to reach beyond the bounds of nature or destiny; on the other, justice versus otherness marks the emergence of a "second", an interlocutor whom I may question as to the meaning of my pain; either the possibility of solidarity or the stirrings of the idea of normative justice on which the concept of crime is founded. But more than this, beyond the primary relationship established within each binomial, a more complex relationship must be envisaged: that which is established between the two binomials themselves with the intervention of a "third party" in the attestation of a witness and/or a testimony. This is the relation in which the alternative is set up between human solidarity and institutional repression, between the community and the police system of surveillance. In that case, the question about the relation between fault and guilt in contemporary societies implies, first, an inquiry into suffering, followed by an interrogation of the connection between fate and individual liberty, to find out who may constitute the other in today's society, and, finally, a discussion of the role of attestation -the dialectic of witness and testimony- in contemporary systems of symbolic representation. In the last instance, we shall be inquiring into what may be the place of suffering for the self and for the other, and who or what bears witness to such a meaning, or meaninglessness, of pain. (…)
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