utopian counterterm, justice. The messiah has not yet arrived
( 257 ).
Speaking to an audience of law students and professors,
Derrida in his Cardozo speech avoids discussing whether par-
ticular laws are just or not (a crucial part of legal philosophy).
Instead, for him, every law is in some sense unjust, since law
by its nature cannot accommodate the transcendent stature
of justice as an idea. Derrida’s reliance on justice as an un-
fulfillable demand, a demand constantly made of us, marks his
debt to Lévinas, who like Derrida remains decidedly anti-
Kantian on this subject. (For Kant, justice is characterized by
obedience to the law, if one has decided that the law is just.)
Lévinas insists that the presence of a person in need, a victim
of violence or oppression, stimulates not our sense of law but
rather our sense of justice. The law, again, is inherently unjust:
we tacitly endorse a certain degree of oppression by declaring
(for example) that social inequality is inevitable. Our laws
mandate, or at least permit, the existence of wars, prisons, and
other social miseries. But when we come face-to-face with
oppression, we cannot bear it: justice enters our conscious-
ness. We have an instinctive—a true—reaction, and recoil be-
fore the rationality of the law. An empirical event, the face-to-
face, determines this response, which is not to be understood
by metaphysics.
For Lévinas, then, justice is an instinct, and it proves our
humanity even when we turn away from it. The Mosaic com-
mandment forbidding murder is at work deep within us, ac-
cording to Lévinas. Even the Nazis had to tell themselves that
they were exterminating vermin rather than other human be-
ings, in order to avoid being confronted by the face of the
neighbor. As the critic Susan Handelman points out, the Lé-
vinasian face-to-face, in which the presence of another person
Politics, Marx, Judaism 223