Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

The crisis today of liberal democracy in the West may have roots that run far deeper than what the prevailing theories consistently suggest. Innumerable causes and factors have been cited to question the long haul viability of liberal democracy. Yet in certain respects these “reasons” are simply excuses diverting our attention to an underlying structural shift—we might even invoke the rather clichéd descriptor seismic—in what Michel Foucault, analyzing almost half a century ago the precipitous transition from the modern to the postmodern, elegantly termed the present-day episteme. Foucault rightly and insightfully recognized that the fatal crisis of modernity was fundamentally a crisis of representation.

The crisis was precipitated, Foucault observed, when modernism after Immanuel Kant rejected the classical theory of representation as reflective analogy and offered instead the dual strategy of replacing the idea of knowledge as representation with either a formalized system of quasi-mathematical tokens, as in the case of symbolic logic, or the “transcendental” investigation of the nature of the subject in its variable guises. Postmodern philosophy took an entirely different course in seeking to resolve the crisis by demystifying the subject entirely and returning to the Renaissance focus on interconnections among signs. Foucault’s own “discourse analysis”—the emphasis on broad, linguistic procedures whereby knowledge is produced and power relations maintained—was one major staple of this “semiotic” revolution in which the peculiar postmodern era of thought emerged.¹

The crisis of representation, however, has had an especially corrosive effect on political thought and practice, and in the sociocultural macrocosm that is the present-day order of things has undermined the very order of legitimacy on which liberal democracy was always based. The conventional idea of liberal democracy as “representative democracy” strongly implicates such a close correlation. In liberal democracy both legislative and executive institutions in a wide range of degrees represent the “will”—more specifically the aggregate interests—of the populace. But representative democracy as a set of institutions, or Foucault’s praxes of “power/knowledge,” has ultimately foundered on the crisis of representation itself, which is in truth an epistemic crisis. Different epistemic strategies have been brought to bear in aiming to resolve it, or to go beyond it, for several centuries.

As the English political philosopher C. B. McPherson noted, about the same time Foucault published his major theoretical work in France known as Les Mots et les choses (translated into English as The Order of Things), the very anchoring principles of liberal democracy were forged in, and are peculiar in both their language and historical relevance to, the situation in England in the seventeenth century.² MacPherson helps us understand how the situational idiosyncrasies of the discourse of the “rights of Englishmen,” to which the American colonists appealed a century later, cannot be separated from a theory of political sovereignty bound up uniquely with that period’s tendency to “deconstruct,” as we would say nowadays, previous natural law theory in order to operationalize once and for all the identification of sovereignty with subjectivity—subjectivity as ownership or the appropriation of everything that was distinctively not human in nature.

The definition of “humanity” in original liberal theory thus was based on a pure limit-concept, the abstraction of the possessive individual for whom all instances of otherness are never real or concrete, but theoretical bounding principles utilized for the defense of property. Even the state is no longer envisioned as a corporate persona, as it was in the Roman context. Its alterity belongs to this limit-concept as well.

Even if “rights” nowadays have been abstracted to include such intangible propria as privacy, freedom of speech and mobility, etc., this essential “representational” model—the governing function as the protection of what is uniquely one’s “own”—remains. As MacPherson observes, “the difficulties of modern liberal-democratic theory lie deeper than had been thought, that the original seventeenth-century theory of individualism contained the central difficulty, which lay in its possessive quality. Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”³

The abstract individual, therefore, remains at the same time merely, as Marx would have phrased it, an abstract human being. Classical liberal political doctrine abstracts from the concretized formality of homo historicus—the unique social, relational, and technological creature who has developed and been transformed over time, metamorphosing from a mere ligament in the primitive collective to modern participant in civil society. These progressive transmutations are what confer genuine content upon the subject matter of all post-Enlightenment anthropologies. The contentless formalism of “possessive individualism”—a not-so-disguised homology for humanitas as redefined by modern capitalism according to such a theory—is deployed nominally to support the ideal of human emancipation, but paradoxically becomes the operational principle of enslavement.

Such servitude is the outgrowth a fundamentally defective theory of human nature, a truncated characterization of the species itself that, according to Marx, substitutes mere “acquisitive” desire (which in itself results from the self-alienation of labor value as monetized, and hence abstract, surplus value) for the full, “natural” ensemble of productive, reciprocal, and inextricably social connections and commitments. But the political theory of possessive individualism, as first articulated in the early twentieth century by R. H. Tawney and enshrined in the early 1960s with the publication of McPherson’s chef d’oeuvre by the same title, can no longer be sustained in the post-Marxist era as the groundwork for a critique of liberal democracy. The failure of such a theory has less to do with the collapse of Marxism itself as a global motivating force for historical change as with the growing recognition that the current world crisis stems from an even more profound failure to discern something in the human reality that has hitherto gone unnoticed. Moreover, the crisis of representation in political thought itself is simply an adjunct of this failure to discern. It stems not so much from a system of foundational oversights within the ambit of anthropology as from a necessity to retool the basis of political theory itself. It arises from not only a hollowing out of the conception of human, but from a reductionism that makes sclerotic, or even “zombifies,” the very embodiment of sovereign authority we have understood since Aristotle’s time as the politeia, the notion of a certain community from which we derive the words politics and political.

We are not by any means the first, of course, to be concerned with the dissolution of the political in our time or to begin to conceive its possible rescue through its reformulation on “theological” grounds. Like Schmitt, the German Catholic whose influence has been immense, we have Leo Strauss, the Jew, whose works has had an outsize impact on recent political thought. Both Schmitt and Strauss were passionately preoccupied with the disintegration of liberal democracy in the lengthy period since the European Enlightenment. At the same time, Strauss and Schmitt’s reputations have been tarnished over the years because they have been associated for different reasons with now suspect, or discredited, historical movements. Schmitt was long dismissed as a proto-ideologue of National Socialism. More recently, Strauss has been typecast as the intellectual inspiration for neoconservatism and the Bush administration’s military adventures in the Middle East. Schmitt turns out to be more historically culpable because of his actual flirtation with the Nazis. Strauss’s fall from favor unfortunately is more a matter of guilt by association insofar as the neocons were always citing him in their academic justifications of policies after 2001.

We raise the question of Schmitt and Strauss here only because each in his own way had certain provocative, if not somewhat eccentric, insights into problems with modern democracy that Western “liberalism” in general has too long ignored and is currently in danger of ignoring at all our peril. Their insight, broadly speaking, was that any form of democracy that seeks to marginalize the religious is bound to shatter against its own internal contradictions.⁴

Furthermore, both figures, like Nietzsche in the nineteenth century—and Heidegger, Lacan, and Žižek in the following one—frame the question of the political in terms of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity—what Heidegger dubbed “subjectism.” It has been the distinctive insight of so much of modern “political theology” that subjectism and the political are intrinsically incompatible with each other. The philosophical postulate of the transcendental subject reigned supreme for three hundred years from Descartes forward, but ultimately collapsed in the twentieth century with the realization that all subjectivity is intersubjectivity. The thesis of intersubjectivity was first advanced in Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, but refined considerably in the thought of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas. Concomitantly, the political theory of the possessive individual fractures with the recognition that property is inherently unrepresentable, mainly because it has no real “interests” to represent. It is no more than a transcendental condition of the right to appropriate, which outside the state of nature amounts, as Marx presciently saw, to the infinite right to expropriate. What is expropriated is not the bounty of the state of nature, but the productivity of labor.

The “right” to expropriate in pursuit of some ultimately abstract, unrepresentable construct of self-identity has been the preoccupation of both postwar left and right, as social philosopher Christopher Lasch acidly opined during the late 1970s in his best-selling book The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch also made the point that liberal democracy is impossible without a commitment within the culture to building strong personal character, which in turn requires a consensual obligation to common, clearly articulated values as well as a general deferral to the guiding role of religion and the family. The idea harks back all the way to Jefferson and even beyond that to the Enlightenment assumption that effective self-governance was ineluctably founded on the maintenance of “virtue” throughout society.⁵

The crisis of representation, however, as Nietzsche discerned, is not merely a problem of the degeneracy of a civilization. It can be attributed to the innate autocorrosive properties of the modern episteme itself in which the theory of representation is rooted. Nietzsche’s well-known prophecy of the advent of modern nihilism was not some proto-Spenglerian identification of a “decline of the West” syndrome. Nihilism stood “at the door,” according to Nietzsche, because of the hollowing out of the very Platonic architecture of thought that sustained the entire episteme itself, the architecture he dubbed the “moral view of the world” where “scientific” concepts and values remained indistinguishable from each other across the landscape of a metaphysical lotusland rife with idealist illusions. The virtuosity—the indigenous “excellence,” or what the Greeks termed the arête, of the peoples of the West—had not simply succumbed to the inevitable civilizational cycles of decay and disarray, as Plato had predicted. “The highest values devalue themselves.”⁶ Why?

Nietzsche, like Freud, Marx, and the other great critics of “ideology” in the nineteenth century, was convinced that an answer to such a question required a clinical diagnosis rather than an explanation. A diagnosis is focused on symptoms, not causal connections. And Deleuze’s innovative redescription of philosophical transparency as symptomatology rather than as phenomenology owes a direct debt to Nietzsche, who was his most telling, lifelong source of inspiration. Unlike phenomenology, a symptomatology does not seek to bring the deeper essentials of a situation to light. It seeks to show how a certain confluence of actions, artifices, and indexes are interrelated in such a way that the general condition in which we find ourselves becomes merely more intelligible. A symptomatology, as Deleuze pointed out, is concerned with surfaces rather than underlying realities. The diagnosis comes from the careful coordination of observations regarding transient effects, even if at some point the obvious “causal” factor becomes apparent. Despite the philosophical theory of causation, which he considered a spectral afterglow of God language, what mattered most for Nietzsche was the way in which both synchronic (cultural) and diachronic (historical) patterns of signs and meanings coalesced into a kind of critical language that would set in motion wholly new vistas of interpretation. Nietzsche’s “gay science” was, therefore, a hermeneutics of lightness, an emancipation of thought from the clunky, factitious posturings of metaphysical explanation and allowing it to “dance” with the liberated movements of what he called “free spirits.” Postmodern philosophy, mistakenly dismissed as antiphilosophy, is the progeny of Nietzsche’s mythic free spirit.

Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), first published in 1887, deployed this method in a formidable manner that distinctly colors every later aphoristic comment on Christianity, Platonism, modern philosophy, and European culture. However, his collection of essays on history entitled Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (translated in various ways, most commonly as “Untimely Meditations”), completed in 1876, over a decade earlier, provides the theoretical key to Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy.

Particularly in the essay Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (“On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life”), Nietzsche attacked contemporary German historicism and its obsession with “understanding” historical events as the clue to the present. Many biographers of Nietzsche have cited his disgust with the self-congratulatory rhetoric in the new unified Reich following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War and its pseudo-appeal to German cultural superiority as the motivating factor behind his criticism. But Nietzsche was less compelled by his signature distaste for Teutonic chauvinism than by the insight that historical criticism could either “serve life” or serve the degenerate tendencies of an increasingly “philistine” bourgeois civilization. The latter indeed had bought into a pervasive cheap form of neo-Kantianism, which made “truth” indistinguishable from morality. Kant himself had encouraged this popular German view of truth in the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals when he went beyond his earlier efforts to demonstrate the limits of scientific rationality and argued that supersensible, or “noumenal,” reality (i.e., the Platonic eidos or “idea”) can be correlated with the human mind if it is a “representation” (Vorstellung) of our consciousness of the universally valid moral law.⁷

For Nietzsche, this popular manner of thinking constituted the ultimate mongrelization of Western ontology, far more than had been the case even with Plato. In essence, Kantianism itself was clear evidence that the crisis of representation could be seen as the inexorable culmination of the Platonic identification of being with value. Historicism and scientism, used in the service of mass propaganda, amounted to the same kind of degeneracy. What were taken smugly as “facts” supporting the new democratic ideals of nationalism and the sovereignty of the Volk were in actuality covert valuations that did not serve “life” but decadence.

History as opposed to historicism, therefore, must concern itself with reshaping the present. “History belongs … to the man of deeds and power, to him who fights a great fight.”⁸ The transformative element—which is also a “transvaluative” element—in the pursuit of history is comprised of what Nietzsche calls a “plastic force” that can be found in persons as well as cultures. Out of this plastic force grows “distinctively” the power to “replace what is lost” and to reform (nachformen) the “broken forms” from past cultures.⁹ Nietzsche would later name this “plastic force” the “will to power” (Wille zur Macht). It is the stunting of the plastic force that has produced the decadence and hypocrisy of Western culture by channeling it into an obsession with the transcendent “reality” behind what is merely given, by locating the essence masked by the appearance, by insisting on a “formal” system of evidentiary correspondences between representations and mere sense presentations, by seeking to ground the “noumenal” in the force of reason itself.

The force “behind” phenomena is, instead, a creative force that must be mastered, structured, morphed into one’s own command rather than simply reacting, as in Kant’s moral epistemology, to the dictates of “pure reason” (reine Vernunft). These dictates, Kant insisted, must be “represented” as a “command,” because to recognize them required not simply our conscious assent but our active obedience. Whereas for Kant one defers to the force, in Nietzsche one takes the reins over it. The historian hence becomes a genealogist. A genealogist, as Deleuze observes, “evaluates the origins of forces from the point of view of their nobility, or baseness, since it discovers their ancestry in the will to power and the quality of the will.”¹⁰

Nietzsche’s genealogical approach, therefore, relies on historical discernment that serves the plastic force. Foucault’s subsequent use of the term genealogy to analyze discursive practices as the interplay of language and power adopts many of Nietzsche’s tactics. A genealogist, according to Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, is not concerned with “origin” (Ursprung) but “emergence” (Enstehung), which is always “produced through a particular stage of forces.”¹¹ What Nietzsche termed “effective history” (wirkliche Historie) is an interpretative “dissociation” of seemingly coherent processes, themes, and principles that brings to light this confluence of forces. History is not a question of understanding (Verstehen), as it was for Wilhelm Dilthey’s historicism, or of divining deeper significations and applications, but of the articulation of these forces for which events are but “masks.” Nietzsche’s celebrated aphorism—alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske (“what is profound loves masks”)—testifies to this antimetaphysical assemblage of forces with phenomena as what we would term the “events of history.”¹² A “mask” does not hide something in the background as it serves as a metaphor for the intractable opacity of events as they occur. We cannot, and should not, seek what is “behind” the mask. We should seize these forces as we find ourselves enmeshed in them and redirect them, make each one a tour de force.

Furthermore, Nietzsche’s genealogical strategy has a genuine bearing on what we would call the political, even though Nietzsche should never be considered a political thinker in the usual connotation of the phrase. Our thesis is simply that the crisis of liberal democracy, stemming from the crisis of representation, requires a genealogy focused on the forces immanent within modern history, an opening to seize the momentary configuration of what lies at hand in the new, globalized world and bring about a transformation of values. Politics is ultimately about values. But values are not lucidly inscribed within the order of things. Values are neither discovered nor selected, but—as Nietzsche understood—“willed.”

The classic problem of expressing “will” in its political formulation—whether we are talking about Plato’s philosopher kings, the baroque absolute monarchs, liberal democracy, or the twentieth-century totalitarian state—comes down to what scholars have noted is the critical untranslatability of the word from which “political” eminently derives, i.e., politeia. Politeia was the word Aristotle himself employed in his Politics, which most experts regard as a designation of the formal and theorizable structure of the city, or polis.¹³ Politeia is also the actual Greek title of Plato’s Republic, which draws on Cicero’s translation of the same Greek word. Why Cicero invented the expression res publica (“matters public”) to render politeia remains something of a mystery among classicists. Perhaps it reflected the Roman “republican” emphasis on civic service as opposed to the Hellenic preoccupation with human nature and the cultivation of virtue.

But the question of the “best” form of politeia, which is at bottom the question of political theory, cannot be seriously engaged without an assessment of the decisional components in the form of organization itself. Plato was suspicious of democracy because he had recent historical memories of the disastrous results of the Peloponnesian War and the thirty tyrants who had manipulated the demos for their dictatorial ends. Aristotle, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for later notions of “representative” democracy with his favoring of a “mixed” politeia that combined the democratic, aristocratic, and oligarchic forms. The issue of authority, or who “authors” the decisions made in governance, is the key to what is meant by politeia, and it has been since ancient Greek times.

All these ancillary issues coalesce centrally in Nietzsche’s question, which Foucault framed, of “who speaks”? Perhaps a better way of framing the question, “genealogically speaking,” would be “who wills?” As Alan Schrift has commented in his penetrating study of the influence of Nietzsche on French poststructuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, the former’s “recognition that the faith in the representational accuracy of language had been eclipsed led Nietzsche to shift the focus of his critical attention away from what was said, turning this attention instead toward a genealogical critique of who said what was said, and what the reasons were which had given rise to what was said.”¹⁴ Nietzsche himself regarded what the French poststructuralists, such as Lacan and Foucault, deemed the “creation of the subject” as an act of interpretation, which is at the same time an act of affirmation. In this “yea-saying” the Wille zur Macht, drawing on its “plastic power,” both forms itself and commands others, and thus transvalues the passive “slave values” of the political masses.

Poststructuralism has routinely been accused of contributing fatefully to the crisis of representation and, by implication, of contributing to the undermining of liberal democracy. But the record clearly shows that the opposite is the case. The crisis of representation was astutely recognized, not only by Nietzsche but also by Heidegger, as the condition of modern nihilism, for which poststructuralism sought an answer. Using different styles, the different post-structuralists performed their own “genealogical” investigation as the route to a new philosophy of both the affirmative and the singular as opposed to the generic or universal.

The torchbearer for this post-Nietzschean project was actually Jacques Derrida, especially in his later “political” and “religious” phases. The Derridean backdrop and contribution to the effort first undertaken by Plato in The Republic has still not been appreciated with any real subtlety to this date. For both Plato and Derrida, the secret of the politeia is the establishment of “justice.” But for both Plato and Derrida as well the secret lies not in an economy of relations among those who make up the “political” community, but in the very eschatological question, the question of how to evaluate these relationships as one approaches the finite limits of human life, knowledge, and achievement.

The problem of justice at the outset of The Republic is introduced as an obsession of the wealthy Athenian Cephalus, who is “filled with apprehensions and concern about matters that before did not occur to him.”¹⁵ Cephalus wants clarity on how his wealth and behavior has affected others, both positively and negatively, and what he can look forward to in the afterworld. As The Republic winds through its ten books and numerous pages, it meanders from Cephalus’s concern with the status of his own soul in the afterworld through various discussions about how the meaning of the term dike in ordinary language transitions to the well-known portrayal of an ideal state, finally coming full circle to the initial conundrum of what happens in the hereafter, as portrayed in the Myth of Er.

In Derrida the eschatological question is revived once more; it relates to what he terms the “messianic,” not the hereafter but the avenir, the “to come,” which makes justice at once “impossible” and “undeconstructible.” In Derrida’s work we have the riddle of justice as the overarching theme in any inquiry into the unsearchable mystery of what is not yet, which throws any consideration of the “political” back on to outer limits of representation itself—something standard political “theory” has always resisted. The proper ordering of human relationships that “politics” subtends therefore diffuses into the region of not merely the supersensible, but the form of transcendence we recognize as the “religious.” Recognition of the boundaries of representation within the realm of the political cannot be attributed solely to the Hebraic magnitude of Western thought as it has endured for two millennia in tension with the Hellenic, the tension Derrida identifies as our “Jew-Greek” dilemma. It is found in Plato himself, the architect of the very Western theory of representation.

Thus a genuine genealogy of the crisis of representation belongs to a general “deconstructive” reading of philosophy as a whole, something on which Derrida cannily embarked in his later years. Nietzsche’s charted “reversal of Platonism” is far less than meets the eye, insofar as the matter of nihilism perhaps is seated within a fateful misreading all along of the theoretical project of describing “justice” as the proper symmetry of human relationships within a “state.” Indeed, the problem of the state has little to do with Plato’s baseline problem of the politeia.

Nietzsche’s true “political” heir is Derrida, which first becomes apparent in his keynote address to a major conference titled “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice” at Cornell University Law School in 1989, which was later captioned in a set of collected essays as “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’”¹⁶ Until he was invited to give such an address, Derrida had not explicitly tied the “demand” of justice with his already famous concept of deconstruction. Even though the address itself is complicated, it signifies the first, major fracture in the kind of textualist-enclosed armature of Derrida’s earlier writings, opening the way for what is in a regular, overly simplistic manner depicted as his later concerns with ethics, politics, and religion. Derrida never proceeded topically with his particular interests, only strategically with respect to ever more sophisticated “deconstructions” of important classical and contemporary texts. So this opening amounts less to a “turn” away from pure deconstruction to matters ethico-political and religious than a kind of epochal elucidation of what has been tacit but not apparent in his philosophical enterprise all along.

Early on in the talk, Derrida makes it clear that he is not for the first time simply “addressing” the consummate issue of the political. It is the issue of how the politeia is to be constituted, the same as Plato’s challenge of establishing the proper connotations of dike, or justice. His address is not really “addressing” the affinity between deconstruction and justice. The affinity has been there all along. Deconstruction, like Kierkegaard’s “authorship,” always takes on tasks obliquely. “At this very moment,” Derrida asserts, “I am preparing to demonstrate that one cannot speak directly about justice, thematize or objectify justice, say ‘this is just,’ and even less ‘I am just,’ without immediately betraying justice, if not law” (231).

If justice is not a predicate, as Kant said of “existence,” or a state or condition that might be defined, characterized, or teased out in its intricate extensions, then what is it? Deconstruction makes “possible” both law and justice. Both law and justice as schema, operations, or procedures—how in a practical sense they in fact become concrete and meaningful—only remain viable or successful in the measure that they are “enforceable.” The theory of enforcement belongs, Derrida says in citing the German philosophical tradition of both law and justice as derivative forms of “right” (Recht), has everything to do with an understanding of the jurisprudential as “force” (Gewalt). In the German language Gewalt, which can also be translated as “violence,” is normally used in the case of “law enforcement” and is distinguished from Kraft, the other word for force, which Nietzsche used routinely. “There is no law (loi) without enforceability and no applicability or enforceability of the law (loi) without force” (233).

The question of justice, therefore, curiously boils down to a “force that can be just.” And the larger question of the “just” type of politeia—the “political” question—hinges not so much on its form of organization as on the forces that converge to realize its formal makeup. Derrida moves immediately into his own “genealogy” of the relationship between force and justice through an exegesis of a familiar, but brief, essay by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt.” Derrida points out that the normal translation into English (and also for the French) is “Critique of Violence,” but he makes the salient observation that Gewalt in this context really means “force.” The translation “violence” automatically suggests the force is unjust. But he argues that Gewalt, as Benjamin contextualized it, implies also “legitimate power, justified authority.” The association of justice with the “justifying” role of Gewalt in the creation of the state and the enforcement of its law goes to the heart of “deconstruction.”

Derrida’s crucial axiom in “Force of Law” is as follows: laws are deconstructible, justice is not. Derrida explains this asymmetry in the following quotation: “it is this deconstructible structure of law or, if you prefer, of justice as law, that also ensures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice” (243). The curious aspect of this seminal statement on Derrida’s part is what significance can be attached to the locution “itself” or “in itself.” Both deconstruction and justice have this strange an sich quality. Derrida naturally is not somehow reviving the German idealist construal of the “in itself” as either pure givenness (Gegebenheit) or mere perceptual inaccessibility (as in Kant’s Ding an sich).

But justice has nothing to do with judgment in either the epistemological or the juridical sense so far as Derrida is concerned. Justice is not the subordination, as in Kant, of the specific datum to a principle with universal validity, but follows what I have elsewhere called the grammar of address.¹⁷ Justice turns inexorably on the “aporia” of two subjects encountering one another. “One must know that this justice always addresses itself to singularity, to the singularity of the other, despite or even because it pretends to universality” (248). Justice often demands an on-the-spot decision, a response to the infinite claim of those who in themselves also require justice, as Levinas might say. The impossibility of justice is inseparable from its “heteronomy” or, more pointedly, its heterology. There is always an “excess” of justice when measured against “law and calculation,” hence its alteration with “deconstruction.”