Dekonstruktion als Gerechtigkeit

The state and the law are based on inescapable power, which means that justice can only be regarded as being independent of the law and thus of the principles of generality and equality. Justice aims to satisfy both ‘the event’ and ‘the individual’, which can only be achieved by examining the problems connected to it without bias. Therefore, every conceptual approach related to this state of affairs has to be analysed down to its last inconsistency. That is the point of deconstruction, which has always been concerned with doing justice to the event in question. Democracy cannot be completed, only further developed, which contradicts the idea of a strong state. Democracy demands responsible citizens, that is, those who are willing and able to deconstruct, who have perennially come to the fore whenever people have distrusted the diverse interpretations of the world that have been proposed. Derrida’s understanding of the state assumes there is an unbridgeable gap between the law and justice that exposes democracy as being notoriously insufficient, which both the state and its citizens therefore have to uphold in order to strive for their emancipation as individuals.