Philosopher views

DECONSTRUCTION IS GOOD

1. DECONSTRUCTION IS JUSTICE

Jacques Derrida, Professor of Philosophy, quoted by Bill Martin, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. xi.

It is this deconstructable structure of law [droit], or, if you prefer to justice, as droit, that also insures the possibility of deconstruction. justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructable. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. I think that there is no justice without this experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia. Justice is an experience of the impossible. A will, a desire, a demand for justice whose structure wouldn't be an experience of aporia would have no chance to be what it is, namely, a call for justice. Every time that something comes to pass or turns out well, every time that we placidly apply a good rule to a particular case, to a correctly subsumed example, according to a determinant judgment, we can be sure that law [droit] may find itself accounted for, but certainly not justice. Law [droitl is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate the incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule.

Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. 2.

I aim to open a space for reading the writerly dimensions of western political modernity and some of its canonical texts, as well as to open a common space for diverse voices that have recently begun to make themselves heard. The aim, indeed, is to open the "archive" of difference as found in both the canon of western modernity‑even if in the form of a repression of the other that must be read in the margins‑and in the experience of the masses. Even in the western and especially U.S. atmosphere of historical amnesia., nothing is truly or fully forgotten. There is an archive of difference and the strivings of people toward justice that may not be in books (or the books may not always be in the hands of the people), that may not be in peoples minds (or in their conscious thoughts), but that exists in their hearts, their lives, their forms of life, and the social institutions that they inhabit and have marked with their lives. This characterization of the archive and the need to open it, and to let it open itself, is deconstructive in both the letter and the spirit of Derrida's work. My entire text must be the argument for this last claim, and I hope that the reader will be convinced. The problem is truly that of showing the coterminousness and compearance (co‑appearance) of deconstruction and justice.
3. DECONSTRUCTION TAKES APART RACISM

Niall Lucy, nqa, INTERPRETATIONS: DEBATING DERRIDA, 1995, p. 6-7.

They have real effects, if Derrida is right, because‑at the level of conditions of possibility, conceptual axioms, or discursive statements‑they are the same as those that sanction apartheid. That is why apartheid is so abhorrent‑or why it ought to be‑and not because those who suffer under a state‑sanctioned racism (which in a sense is everyone) suffer to a 'greater' extent than others. It isn't the effects of apartheid that constitute it, as a special case, as the ultimate racism. It isn't the effects but rather the logic of apartheid that is offensive. And it is this logic that Derrida mourns in 'Racism's Last Word', precisely because it is not a 'special' logic; to this extent apartheid is not a special case, even while being also‑and necessarily‑a 'unique appellation'. The word concentrates separation, raises it to another power and sets separation itself apart: 'apartionality,' something like that. By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi‑ontological segregation. At every point, like all racisms, it tends to pass segregation off as natural‑and as the very law of the origin. Such is the monstrosity of this political idiom. Surely, an idiom should never incline toward racism. It often does, however, and this is not altogether fortuitous: there's no racism without a language. The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. Even though it offers the excuse of blood, color, birth‑or, rather, because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse‑racism always betrays the perversion of man, the 'talking animal.'