neighbor. Derrida approvingly cites Lévinas’s notion of “Jew-
ish humanism” (so different from the humanism endorsed by
metaphysics) and states that “the Lévinasian notion of justice”
comes close to “the Hebrew equivalent of what we would per-
haps translate as holiness” ( 250 ).^1
As Derrida continues his discussion, his idea of justice
starts to accumulate the swirling hyperboles that he earlier at-
tached to his previous God-term, writing. Justice, Derrida
writes in something close to an aria, “seems indestructible
in its affirmative character, in its demand of gift without ex-
change, without circulation, without recognition or gratitude,
without economic circularity, without calculation and without
rules, without reason and without theoretical rationality, in
the sense of regulating mastery. And so, one can recognize in
it, even accuse in it a madness, and perhaps another kind of
mysticism. And deconstruction is mad about and from such
justice, mad about and from this desire for justice” ( 254 ). “Jus-
tice remains to come,” Derrida proclaims, “it remains by com-
ing,ithasto come, it isto-come, the to-come, it deploys the
very dimension of events irreducibly to come....Justice,”he
adds climactically, “as the experience of absolute alterity, is un-
presentable” ( 256 – 57 ).
In this passage, Derrida seizes upon the imagery of the
Bible’s Book of Revelation (“I come quickly,” says Christ the
bridegroom). He combines this emphasis with the more sub-
tle Jewish messianism that one might have expected from him,
given his revived interest in Lévinas: the idea that the mes-
sianic age cannot be represented and that it defeats our usual
notion of history. Messianic justice is all the more spectacular
because it is “unpresentable” and “unrecognizable,” utterly
unexpected. Yet, as Derrida somewhat glumly concedes in his
lecture, the fallen law that we know still exists alongside its
222 Politics, Marx, Judaism