proclaimed in his speech that, despite appearances to the
contrary, deconstruction had always been fundamentally con-
cerned with justice and ethics. “What one currently calls de-
construction, while seeming not to ‘address’ the problem of
justice, has done nothing else while unable to do so directly but
only in an oblique fashion. I say oblique,” Derrida continued,
“since at this very moment I am preparing to demonstrate that
one cannot speak directlyabout justice, say ‘this is just,’ and
even less ‘I am just,’ without immediately betraying justice”
(Acts 237 ).
Derrida’s game is clear. To the exact degree that decon-
struction refrains from judging, it serves the ideal of justice. By
contrast, those who make declarations about decisions or per-
sons being just or unjust (as all of us do from time to time)
prove that they have no real sense of justice. Deconstruction’s
seeming avoidance of the issue of justice, then, turns out to be
exemplary of a higher morality. Derrida insists that decon-
struction is not (as its critics claim) “a quasi-nihilistic abdica-
tion before the ethico-politico-juridical question of justice
and before the opposition of just and unjust” ( 247 ). Instead,
the difficulty of defining what is just marks the affinity of jus-
tice with deconstruction, which is also notoriously hard to
define. The law can be cited and discussed; but justice is ter-
minally elusive. If we merely do what is required by law, we
are not truly being just. Justice is in excess of the law: it
asks more of us than mere obedience to a set of rules. Justice—
and deconstruction—calls us, Derrida announces, to “the sense
of a responsibility without limits, and so necessarily excessive,
incalculable” ( 247 ).
This point is where Lévinas enters Derrida’s lecture—the
Lévinas who never tires of stating the priority of the face-to-
face encounter, the meeting with the stranger who is also one’s
Politics, Marx, Judaism 221