38 Elisabeth Weber

“Deconstruction is Justice”
Elisabeth Weber

This provocative assertion, from Derrida’s Force of Law (945), sharply

contrasting with the decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an
aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989
the stakes of an infinite task and responsibility that, in spite of and because
of its infinity, cannot be relegated to tomorrow: “[…] justice, however
unpresentable it may be, doesn’t wait. It is that which must not wait”
(ibid., 969). It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot
be postponed, that Jacques Derrida was an active and outspoken critic
and commentator on issues such as South Africa’s Apartheid, the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human
rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and on what
Richard Falk has termed “the great terror war.”1
In our era—the era French historian Annette Wieviorka has called
the “era of the witness”2—questions of answering to the other’s call,
questions of respons-ibility have gained, within the humanities, a
significance that they never had had in non-Jewish Western thought
before. This development would be unthinkable without the immense
contribution of Jacques Derrida’s writings. Throughout his oeuvre and
his life, he witnessed to the unheard, over-shouted or silenced voices of
those who have largely been excluded by the dominant currents of
Western thought—who have been, as Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved puts
it, “disremembered and unaccounted for.” What is more, Jacques Derrida
formulated the necessity of being fully aware of the risk and aporias of
this task of memory: that speaking for and remembering the other carries
in itself the seed of a second betrayal. The difficulties surrounding the
questions of memory and justice are “not infinite simply because they
are infinitely numerous, nor because they are rooted in the infinity of
memories and cultures (religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth)
that we shall never master” (Force of Law, 947). Rather, they are infinite in
themselves, because they are inhabited by a series of “aporias” that make
justice “an experience of the impossible” (ibid.), that is, of the incalculable
and the unpredictable. Far from encouraging resignation, or a turning
away from politics and history, these aporias actually render more urgent
the demand of justice. One of these aporias can be found in the tension

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2005

38 SubStance #106, Vol. 34, no. 1, 2005
Jacques Derrida: A Counter-Obituary 39

between the uniqueness of the address and the name and the necessity of
the generality of the law:

An address is always singular, idiomatic, and justice, as law (droit),

seems always to suppose the generality of a rule, a norm or a
universal imperative. How are we to reconcile the act of justice that
must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups
and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with
rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily
have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular
application in each case? (ibid., 946)

As Christoph Menke succinctly formulates it: The “deconstructive

unfolding of the tension between justice and law” occurs “in the name of
an experience that no political stance can capture, but that nevertheless
affects any politics as its border, and therefore as its interruption” (286).
Such an “experience” is given in the name, which is why the question
of the name is at the very heart of Jacques Derrida’s thought. The demand
for justice is not separable from the uniqueness of the gift of the name
and the implications of this gift. In a reflection on the “final solution,”
Derrida describes how the experience of the name affects politics as its
“border”, and as its “interruption”:

[…] one cannot think the uniqueness of an event like the final solution,
as extreme point of mythic and representational violence, within its
own system. One must try to think it beginning with its other, that is
to say, starting from what it tried to exclude and to destroy, to
exterminate radically, from that which haunted it at once from without
and within. One must try to think it starting from the possibility of
singularity, the singularity of the signature and of the name, because
what the order of representation tried to exterminate was not only
human lives by the millions, natural lives, but also a demand for
justice; and also names: and first of all the possibility of giving,
inscribing, calling and recalling the name. (Force of Law, 1042)

One must try to think it starting from the possibility of singularity not
only because “there was a destruction or project of destruction of the
name and of the very memory of the name, of the name as memory” (ibid.)
but also because this name is in fact indissociable from “bare life.”3
The ability to give a name is only given to those who have been
called themselves. Naming is intrinsically marked by the fact and the
conscious and, more importantly, unconscious recognition that we have
been called ourselves, by the inscription, in other words, of a call that, as
Emmanuel Levinas put it, preceded our ability to answer. This is the law

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40 Elisabeth Weber

at the “origin” of all laws: we have been called, and, to use Jean-François
Lyotard’s formulation, we are hostages to this call, whether we know
and affirm it or not. Now more than ever in the era of the witness, one of
our tasks is to bear witness to the uncanny strangeness of this call that
emanates as much from the Other as from myself, whom Eric Santner
calls “the bearer of an internal alterity” (9). The fact that naming the
irreplaceable “you” is in its very core marked by what Derrida calls
“iterability,” inscribes the institution in this unique event. It is only in its
iterability (in other words, recognizability) that the address can be heard.
But this iterability, this paradoxical repetition at the origin, does not
contradict unicity: it makes it possible in the first place. It is what could
be called the excess of the institution within the call. We can exhaust the
call as little as we can exhaust the fact that we were born. It has called us
into a life of relation and infinite contingency, and makes itself heard as
the radical openness and vulnerability that is ours, and that is called
being alive. This infinite finitude could be called the excess of the call
within the institution (the institution of language as well as the institution
of laws and rights). Derrida’s thought untiringly probes these two
“excesses”—the excess of the institution within the call, within singularity,
and the excess of the call and its singularity within the institution. Put
otherwise, it explores a logic of the phantom, a “hauntology” that has
far-reaching consequences for a political theory. The reflection on the
“final solution” is here again exemplary:
I ask myself whether a community that assembles or gathers itself
together in order to think what there is to be thought and gathered of
this nameless thing that has been called the “final solution” does not
have to show, first of all, its readiness to welcome the law of the
phantom, the spectral experience and the memory of the phantom, of
that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than
living, only surviving, the law of the most commanding memory,
even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, but for
that very reason the most demanding. (Force of Law, 973)
The necessity of welcoming the “memory of the phantom” marks
Derrida’s commitment to justice in its entirety and finds its philosophical
counterpart in concepts—introduced already in Derrida’s earliest
writings—such as the “trace,” “différance,” and the “supplement.” If
“deconstruction’s affair,” in Anselm Haverkamp’s words, is not “the
proven validity of results, nor the cutting of Gordian knots;” if, rather,
deconstruction sets out to find the “most complicated interlacement”
(Kritik der Gewalt, 7) of these knots, then one locus of a particularly
complicated interlacement visited by Derrida over and over again is the
question of memory, as memory of the phantom. The question is not so
much how to “address the phantom,” and whether one can question or

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Jacques Derrida: A Counter-Obituary 41

address it, as whether “one can address oneself in general if some phantom
does not already return” (Spectres of Marx, 279) And, referring to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Derrida continues: “If, at least, he loves justice, the
‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow would need to learn
it [to address himself to the other], and of him [the phantom].” In order
to address oneself to the other in the search for justice, one has first of all
“to welcome the law of the phantom,” precisely because this “law of the
phantom” is the “most effaced and effaceable” and, for that very reason,
“the most demanding,” the most urgent.
“Beloved” is, in Toni Morrison’s novel, the name on the tombstone of
a dead girl, of whom the reader never learns the living name. The violence
of her death and the brutality of slavery that caused it make her haunt
the lives of her mother, her brothers, and of all their relations. It is of her,
the returned and disappeared ghost, that Morrison writes:
“Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one
is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they
don’t know her name?” (274). Beloved’s memory is, indeed, “the most
effaced and effaceable,” and, as Morrison’s book powerfully shows, “the
most demanding.” So unbearably demanding that, in the end, her
apparition is chased back into invisibility: “It was not a story to pass
on” (274-75).4 The challenge that Derrida’s thought addresses to us is to
realize the need to “learn”—from the other, from the nameless, from the
phantom—how to address ourselves to her; how to learn her name with
the keen awareness that looking for that name and learning it bears in
itself the risk of “losing,” forgetting, betraying it in its singularity.
Such “learning” is all but confined to a philosophical or literary
meditation. It requires a wide-awake political awareness of which the
following quotes, from more recent texts by Derrida, give a first, and by
no means exhaustive, impression:
In our “wars of religion,” violence has two ages. The one […]
appears “contemporary,” in sync or in step with the
hypersophistication of military tele-technology – of “digital” and
cyberspaced culture. The other is a “new archaic violence,” if one
can put it that way. It counters the first and everything it represents.
[…] A new cruelty would thus ally, in wars that are also wars of
religion, the most advanced technoscientific calculability with a
reactive savagery that would like to attack the body proper directly,
the sexual thing, that can be raped, mutilated or simply denied,
desexualized—yet another form of the same violence. (Faith and
Knowledge, 52)
“The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to
legitimate, indeed to legalize (for it is always a question of law) on a
national or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation

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42 Elisabeth Weber

that best suits it in a given situation.” In the contemporary context of

politics, religion, and the “war against terror”, more than ever,

[...] radical changes in international law are necessary […] I would

be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, reflect in a
responsible fashion on these questions and demand accountability
from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the
language and institutions of international law. A “philosopher”
(actually I would prefer to say “philosopher-deconstructor”) would
be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective
consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage
and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is
so clearly undergoing mutation. (Autoimmunity, 105-06)

Further, Derrida writes:

We would have to analyze every mutation in the structure of public

space, in the interpretation of democracy, theocracy, and their
respective relations with international law (in its current state, in that
which compels or calls it to transform itself and, thus, in that which
remains largely to come within it), in the concepts of the nation-state
and its sovereignty, in the notion of citizenship, in the transformation
of public space by the media, which at once serve and threaten
democracy, and so on. Our acts of resistance must be, I believe, at
once intellectual and political. We must join forces to exert pressure
and organize ripostes, and we must do so on an international scale
and according to new modalities, though always while analyzing
and discussing the very foundations of our responsibility, its
discourses, its heritage, and its axioms. (ibid., 126, translation
modified)

“Deconstruction is justice,” since it calls for an untiring (in principle

infinite, because never “finished”) analysis of the philosophical heritage
and its juridico-political systems, an analysis that is inseparable from
an equally infinite responsibility. If hasty critics construe this doubly
“infinite” call as condemning us to paralyzed inaction, they are merely
acknowledging that this call is unbearably demanding, so unbearably
demanding that its fidelity to the most effaced and effaceable ones should
be chased back into invisibility, illegibility, inaudibility. But that is their
problem. Any careful reader of Derrida’s texts knows that the work
waiting to be done cannot wait.5
University of California, Santa Barbara

This essay was posted in the electronic German Law Journal in January
2005 (http://www.germanlawjournal.com).

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Jacques Derrida: A Counter-Obituary 43

Notes
1. Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (2002).
2. AnnetteWieviorka, L’Ère du témoin (1998).
3. On the concept of the “bare life,” see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereignty and
the Bare Life (1998).
4. See Spectres of Marx, 165: “The spectre, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a
certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by essence, is not
seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or being.
5. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my friend and colleague Julie Carlson for her astute and
inspiring comments and suggestions.

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Philosophy in a Time of
Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori, 2003.
——. “Faith and Knowledge.” In Religion, ed. J. Derrida and G. Vattimo. 1998.
——. Force of Law. Trans. Mary Quaintance. 11 Cardozo Law Review, 1990.
——. Spectres of Marx. 1993.
Falk, Richard. The Great Terror War. 2002.
Haverkamp, Anselm, ed. Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit. 1994.
Haverkamp, Anselm. Kritik der Gewalt und die Möglichkeit von Gerechtigkeit: Benjamin in
Deconstruction, in: Haverkamp, 1994.
Menke, Christoph. Für eine Politik der Dekonstruktion, in Haverkamp, 1994.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1998.
Santner, Eric. On the Psychology of Everyday Life. 2001.
Wieviorka, Annette. L’Ère du temoin. 1998.

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