ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how conservative and liberal fears that the term 'miscarriage of justice' must be an oxymoron can be rendered irrelevant by the force of law's alterity. It describes how deconstruction of recent official discourse on women's crimes and women's imprisonment in England showed not only that such revisionist discourse had always and already been made both possible and impossible by reformist rhetoric and deconstructionist discourse. The chapter explains conditions under which a specific play of governance results in both official and unofficial discourses becoming so visibly divorced from their extra-discursive objects that their flawed credibilities implode/explode in comic relief. There are no master narratives which guarantee the truth of statements or discourses. It has nowadays become routine for writers on poststructuralisms to stress that many elements of poststructuralist critiques of epistemology and knowledge were always and already the other of Enlightenment projects in pursuit of rationality and truth.
