Via negativa (harm and injustice)

Abstract

In the last decades, several authors and theories have been resorting to the notion of via negativa, a negative path or an approach focused on negativity, to refer to the place that experiences and processes of negativity have in shaping normative systems. Normally in this approach negativity is defined as injustice and the suggestion, then, is that there we should attribute some kind of primacy, either genetic or hermeneutic, to perceptions and experiences of injustice over the definitions of what may be shaped as just or correct in a given normative system. A preliminary outline of a theoretical map will be here be advanced, in which the intuition of the purported primacy of the negative is located when it comes to understanding the normative dimensions -ethical, political and juridical- of social processes and systems. This map is incomplete and, as will be argued, rather points to the fact that the negative path is a hermeneutic tool in the hands not only of theorists but also of social agents themselves for the understanding of the genesis of practical ideas and norms, of their breakdowns, resistances and reformulations, and of the articulation of programs or proposals of normative orders that can subsequently be taken as just and acceptable. In more descriptive terms, the negative path would focus on the processes of refusal, complaint, denunciation, resistance or opposition to a given normative regime, whether in the form of revolution or a collective action of reform, or as an expression of individual actions of dissidence and disobedience.