Justice, If Such a Thing Exists

This chapter addresses the question of “deconstruction and the possibility of justice.” According to Jacques Derrida, not only does deconstruction have some sort of relation to the possibility of justice, some right to speak of justice, he asserts that deconstruction is justice. Deconstruction is a discourse on, indeed a discourse of justice. That startling claim turns to the distinction Derrida makes between justice and the law. By the “law” Derrida means the positive structures that make up judicial systems of one sort or another, that in virtue of which actions are said to be legal, legitimate, or properly authorized. The law, he says, is deconstructible and this is because the law is constructed in the first place. Deconstructibility is the condition of legal process, a self-revising and self-correcting ensemble of norms that distils the knowledge of the generations.