This article proposes a new philosophical framework for restorative justice: restorative justice is concerned with being, whereas conventional justice is implicitly focused on having. I will take two examples to illustrate that this quest for new forms of justice is more focused on being than on measures and on equivalences: mass atrocities on the one hand, and widespread sexual violence on the other (committed either within the Catholic Church, or in society in general that provoked strong reactions as shown recently by the #MeToo movement). These two situations seem very different from one another, but they reveal common features. In both examples, the aim of justice is to re-establish the individual and the political into their being. Massacres and rape have long existed, but there were traditional healing processes and an usnchallenged patriarchal order. Liberal societies decided to do without the consoling role of religion (that still exist but emigrated in privacy), and to contest violence even in the intimacy of societies such as patriarchal order. This explains why courts pay an increasing and overall transformed role in our democracies: they became an instance for recognition and not only of arbitration on rights. Justice plays a more central role because it deals with the symbolic efficacy of meaning, the fact that we are affected by our common values in a shared understanding of life. The function of justice is neither to solve problems nor to provide care for individuals, but to re-enact the reasons why we go on living together and to eventually modify them for a better future.
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