ABSTRACT
The instituting violence of law defies the justice discourse, for it is ungrounded violence, authority that rests upon itself—the legality, hence legitimacy, of itself. The double bind is akin to what, in another context, Jacques Derrida refers to as the "economy of violence". The violence involved in discourse generally, and specifically in every practice of metaphysics, stages a war in which the task of deconstruction is to counteract the aggression of speech as presence. Derrida provides people with some of the aporias involved in the juncture of law and justice. The nature of "right" assumes an indeterminate and equivocal status in Derrida's writings. To do justice, therefore, is to test the aporetic experience of justice, that is, to assume a responsibility for it. For Andrew Benjamin, the history of the other condition, that which makes decision possible, lies in replacing the "mythical violence" of the law with the justice of "divine violence."
