"Deconstruction is Justice"

Abstract

This provocative assertion, from Derrida's Force of Law (945), sharply contrasting with decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989 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 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, IsraeliPalestinian conflict, bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, death penalty, and on what Richard Falk has termed the great terror war.' In our era-the era French historian Annette Wieviorka has called