“…justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible.”

“Deconstruction is justice.”

Derrida, 1990, Force of Law

There is an ‘aspect’ of justice seeking, being succumb to justice, that requires deconstructing the very concept. What we call “justice” is more like a tool that does that. In the process, the tool reveals its own essence. This is due to what we call time and why our concepts of justice change with time. Deconstruction of ‘justice’ is what one experiences as ‘justice.’ This is what makes justice ‘that which deconstructs justice’ and ‘that which is not subject to deconstruction’ at the same time.

It also suggests that some of our ideas of justice are the very obstacle to justice revealing. Temporalities reveal the changing relationship that we often have with justice. Over time our ideas evolve into other ideas that are more peace-bringing, closer to the justice that we could never find. We come to know justice as ‘essence’ (of being). What we let go of, what is therefore subject to deconstruction, are unessential ideas of justice. They may be, for example, an idea of justice that we have inherited from somewhere else. They may be someone else’s version of justice. Essential justice invokes our own ideas.

I may even agree with certain ideas about justice, but they may not be mine. The only justice I will experience – indeed, the only justice I can experience – is of essence. It is not merely a principle of the social world, which is made up of social facts. Justice may be a brute fact. It is being as much as I am being. As I become it also becomes, something else. What are termed the ‘principles of justice’ are my own First Principles. Upon realization of the rules of life I have set out for myself, I can invoke them in the face of violence and violation. I become, I am, the forebearer of my own justice. The deconstruction of ‘justice’ pivots me away from institutional court to my own inward court of law, to my own memory and what my memories demand. Justice as essence of being, if such a thing exists at all (Derrida, 1990), is not deconstructible. It is therefore real.  

Justice dissolves and reveals in a way that resembles Rumi’s dyad in Coleman Barks’ translation of Be Melting Snow:

Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.