ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida's work and the poststructuralist movement with which it was associated had long been suspected of—perhaps unwittingly and unintentionally— promoting nihilism and authoritarianism. This chapter suggests that the "Force of Law" lecture and subsequently published essay is an apologia, a response to critics, a manifesto on deconstruction and poststructuralism, in the midst of this crisis. Many excessive practitioners of the Enlightenment have been willing to defer to the future, defer to history, defer to the revolution, defer to the market, more serious attention to nonviolence as they perpetuated unprecedented violence in the name of justice here and now. In the act of representing, violence may have a place in such rituals—religious, legal, or political—but not in a manner that fully revives the founding moment. Deconstruction is no more guilty of arbitrary violence than the tradition, democratic or philosophic, that Derrida is accused of repudiating.
