From the myth of being to the myth of justice

Abstract

The present article wishes to examine John Caputo’s notion of ‘hyperbolic justice’ considering his critique of Heideggerian philosophy. In Demythologizing Heidegger (1993), Caputo tries to deconstruct Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s being as Sorge, as Being-towards-death in its existentiality, facticity and fallenness, not by rejecting that account but by showing that it is fissured by an absence, the absence of kardia (heart), of flesh, disablement, affliction. According to Caputo, Heidegger’s aesthetics of Being, and his concern to overcome the oblivion of Being, left him scandalously oblivious to the cry of the suffering other. Against Heidegger, Caputo opposes what he calls the “prophetic imagination” of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, and particularly Jacques Derrida. I will seek to examine the ways in which Caputo opposes to Heidegger Derrida’s ‘undeconstructibility of justice,’ whilst also resorting to Levinas’ ‘hyperbolic justice’.