Abstract

This essay attempts to restore the mother as a subject who can preside over the works of love and justice by contrasting two mother figures, one in Sophocles' Oedipus the King and the other in Denis Villeneuve's 2010 film “Incendies.” Iocaste cannot be a tragic subject, a pitiable mother though she is; she urges Oedipus to stop investigating into the truth of incest and patricide, and escapes into suicide as the concealment of truth proves impossible. However, Nawal, a comtemporary counterpart of Iocaste in the movie “Incendies,” does not avoid confronting her family trauma; she works through it, cutting a vicious circle of revenge and thereby bringing about justice. The dead mother demands that her children should discover the hidden truth of violence and incest in their family and realize justice. But the passion for justice should not be allowed to deteriorate into resentment. Justice must be supplemented by love. The act of mourning is to create a new social order in which justice is enveloped with love. This essay argues that the ethics of care meet the demand of justice, and that the ethics of justice should go beyond fair distribution of rights within an exchange system; it must be connected with the ethics of love. Love is an act of enacting an asymmetrical relationship beyond reciprocity and mutual interdependency. Justice is united with love as it is reconnected to an emancipatory project of restoring a right order of human relationship. This paper searches for the possibility of combining justice with love by connecting restorative justice, recently conceptualized in Jewish-Christian circle, with Jacques Derrida's justice as a gift.