Jacques Derrida · Philosophy
In his later years Derrida turned to ethics and politics, surprising those who thought deconstruction was a nihilist game. He argued that justice itself is <em>undeconstructible</em> - the very thing in whose name we deconstruct unjust laws - and developed a series of ‘impossible’ ideas: pure hospitality, the gift, forgiveness, and a democracy always still ‘to come.’
For decades critics charged that deconstruction was ethically and politically bankrupt - a clever game of unraveling texts that could give no account of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and that, by dissolving all foundations, left us with nothing to stand on. In the late 1980s and 1990s Derrida answered this charge head-on, turning explicitly to ethics, law, and politics. The pivotal text was a 1989 lecture, later published as Force of Law, delivered to a conference of legal scholars. There Derrida made a startling claim that overturned the whole picture of deconstruction as nihilism: ‘Deconstruction is justice.’ Far from dissolving justice, he argued, deconstruction is the very movement of justice at work.
The key was a distinction between two things usually run together: law (in French, droit - positive law, statutes, legal systems) and justice. Law, Derrida argued, is constructed: it is made by human beings, written down, enforced, historically variable, full of compromises and exclusions. Because it is constructed, it can be deconstructed - analyzed, criticized, shown to rest on contestable choices and to harbour injustices, and therefore changed. Justice, by contrast, is undeconstructible. It is not a body of rules we possess but an infinite demand, never fully captured by any law, in whose name we judge laws to be just or unjust and push to reform them. Deconstruction operates exactly in the gap between the two: it deconstructs the always-imperfect law in the name of the justice that no law can ever fully embody.
Why call justice undeconstructible and even ‘impossible’? Because, Derrida argued, a genuinely just decision can never be merely the mechanical application of a rule. If justice were just following the rules, a computer could dispense it, and there would be no responsibility and no judgment involved at all - just calculation. But every real case is singular: this person, this situation, in all its irreducible particularity. To do justice, the judge must apply the general rule and respond to the singular case the rule cannot fully anticipate - must, in a sense, reinvent the law afresh for this case. Derrida says a just decision must pass through an ‘ordeal of the undecidable’: a moment where the rule does not simply dictate the answer, where the decider must actually decide, taking responsibility rather than hiding behind the rule. A decision that merely follows the rule is not, strictly, a decision at all.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the later Derrida drew a sharp line between law (droit) - which is constructed, calculable, and always deconstructible - and justice , which is undeconstructible: the infinite demand in whose name unjust laws are criticized and reformed. You also met his ‘impossible’ concepts: pure hospitality, the gi…
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