Justice: The Law of the Law

Abstract

When I learned about the topic of this conference, ‘Applied Derrida’, I thought right away about one of my own previous dealings with this subject, a reading of the first part of Force of Law (1991c):¹ this is the piece I wish to present to you today. In its original setting, this short text already tackled applying or applied Derrida: it was presented in a political theory seminar which dealt mostly — as such things often do — with thinkers like Rawls and Habermas. The point of the text was thus not only to try to demonstrate that there is an ‘applied’, political side to Derrida, but also to do so to a group not necessarily versed in things deconstructive: thus I myself had to re-apply Derrida for that context. As to the success of this double attempt, let it suffice to say that I very much hope its reception today will be altogether other to the one it got then.