In "Force of Law," Derrida argues that, although a threat to law, deconstruction can bring about the condition of the possibility of justice. The crucial question is the connection between deconstruction and the possibility of justice. He asserts that the suffering of deconstruction "is perhaps the absence of rules, of norms, and definitive criteria to distinguish in an unequivocal manner between law and justice‖ (231). The struggle is to distinguish between law and justice ―in an unequivocal manner.‖ Deconstruction does not bend to any criteria and it is against its very method (in fact its non-method) to submit to the hegemonic nature of law. It is the radical critique of social-political hegemonies, powers, and institutions. To appeal to a definitive criterion means giving credit to law over justice. To distinguish them in an ―unequivocal
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manner‖ is impossible because as soon as you choose your criteria, you allow the appropriation of your argument by the hegemony of that law. The discourse of that specific law appropriates the language of your argument and cause the secondariness of justice. The problem of deconstruction is its lack of laws, norms, or any alternative criteriology. Deconstruction judges by questioning "what judgment itself authorizes‖ (231). It questions the very rules of judging.
Referring to his previous essays like ―Violence and Metaphysics,‖ ―Before the Law,‖ or ―The Laws of Reflection,‖ Derrida maintains that he has been foregrounding the theme of justice in his works at least ―in an oblique fashion.‖ He insists that deconstruction ―only apparently‖ has not addressed justice, ethics, or politics: ―It goes without saying that discourses on double affirmation, the gift beyond exchange and distribution, the undecidable, the incommensurable or the incalculable, on singularity, difference, and heterogeneity are also, through and through, at least oblique discourses on justice‖ (235). He argues that one cannot speak of the singular, the incalculable, and the undecidable in a direct language and not to risk reducing them to the general, to norms or rules. To speak of the irreducible singular justice, ―one cannot speak directly about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say 'this is just;' and even less 'I am just;' without immediately betraying justice, if not law‖ (237). A direct discourse points at objectivisation and betrays the singularity of justice. Justice will never submit to an idea, theme, or reducible doctrine, legal, political whatsoever. It will be always on the way to come as the singular.
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Derrida claims that the possibility of justice in its imperfect but essential form is possible only by deconstruction. Deconstructive questioning deconstructs ―the partitions that institute the human subject‖ and reinterprets ―the whole apparatus of limits within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology‖ (247). Deconstruction has a double movement: 1) a responsibility in the sense of without limits and 2) a responsibility in the sense of a radical irresponsibility. Deconstruction has the unconditional responsibility of ―recalling the history, the origin and the sense, thus the limits, of concepts of justice, law [Loi] and right [droit], of values, norms, prescriptions that have been imposed and sedimented there, from then on remaining more or less readable or presupposed‖ (247-48). Derrida insists that this responsibility is not ―only a philologico-etymological task or a historian‘s task but a responsibility in face of a heritage‖ (248). He contends that deconstruction is embroiled in the demand for infinite justice, which imposes a responsibility which would appear to be a radical irresponsibility because it involves suspending all of a society's accepted forms of responsible thought and action. Derrida argues that this responsibility is before memory or before the very concept of responsibility. This is the moment in which everything is suspended. The unconditional, radically irresponsible task of deconstructive questioning creates this moment, ―this period of epoche, without which there is, in fact, no possible deconstruction‖ (248). Deconstruction is the possibility of justice and this moment is the very moment of justice:
It is not a simple moment: its possibility must remain structurally present to the exercise of all responsibility if such responsibility is never to abandon
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itself to dogmatic slumber, and therefore to deny itself. From then on, this moment overflows itself. It becomes all the more anguishing. But who will claim to be just by economizing on anguish? This anguishing moment of suspense also opens the interval of spacing in which transformations, even juridico-political revolutions, take place. It cannot be motivated, it cannot find its movement and its impulse (an impulse that, however, cannot itself be suspended) except in the demand for an increase or a supplement of justice, and so in the experience of an inadequation or an incalculable disproportion. (248-249)
Derrida argues that the metaquestioning of deconstruction starts ―by destabilizing or complicating the opposition between nomos and physis, between thesis and physis - that is to say, the opposition between law [loi], convention, the institution on the one hand, and nature on the other, with all the oppositions that they condition‖ (235, his emphasis). It is, therefore, "through and through a questioning of law and justice, a questioning of the foundations of law, morality, and politics‖ (235). For Derrida, the performative act of questioning should not remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses, but:
[…] to aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible (though always, of course, in a mediated way), not only in the profession but in what one calls the city, the polis, and more generally the world. Not to change things in the no doubt
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rather naive sense of calculated, deliberate, and strategically controlled intervention, but in the sense of maximum intensification of a transformation in progress. (236, his emphasis)
Deconstructive meta-questioning aims to change things in the world. It facilitates and contributes to the force of language, the force of law and its paradoxes, and is always at work in institutional discourses. In the interminable transformation process of law, deconstruction attempts to release more and more of the paradoxical forces within law that in turn might introduce further justice to our world. Derrida's advice to add to this transformation in progress and to justice is that "if it seems urgent to pay attention to this joint or concurrent development and to participate in it, it is just as vital that we do not confound largely heterogeneous and unequal discourses, styles, and discursive contexts‖ (237).