Is justice present, or forever becoming?

Justice is not something that is simply present. It is not calculable as being here, now, to precisely this degree. If we think of something that exists as something that is present, and present to a calculable degree, then I’m afraid the bad news, at least from Derrida, is that justice does not exist. -Peter Blum

Peter Blum’s view of deconstruction makes of it something like the move I make with my “anti-ideological” arguments: reality is more complex than any of our theories of it, and people who cannot escape their own theories when faced with actual events make mistakes. Sometimes horrendous mistakes. He quotes Terry Eagleton, discussing the way reality always partially escapes our renditions of it:

Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic.

Judging, of the sort Christ chastised the authorities for neglecting, is not simply applying a universal law. Our universals oversimplify. Loving attention to the particulars is part of finding the right way.