Status Updates From Living Speech: Resisting th...

is the law inherently an instrument of the empire of force? Or can it be not the servant of the empire but something of a counterforce to it, a way—a structured and learnable way—of not respecting it? Can it in fact be an organized way of respecting the humanity of others? If not, can it at least be a place where these positive possibilities can be defined, and the forces that oppose them be contested?

the internal aspect of the problem, what might be called the literary aspect, is permanently with us, present in my own use of language and yours, all the time—including in this book, this paragraph—and requires our constant and unrelenting attention. Learning to understand the empire of force, and how not to respect it, is a task and responsibility for each of us. It is this task that is the subject of this book

the problem she identifies does not go away when we act on the side of the oppressed ... when we explain and justify what we think... our own formulations can quickly become the language of another empire, full of slogans, sentimentalities, falsities, and denials, of trivializations and dehumanizations. What we think and say can in a deep way replicate just what we should be most trying to resist.

Her sentence is not a call to quietism or removal from the world.

Sigh.