Tag: philosophy

[The void is] the anguished experience of lack of balance. We have been unjustly treated, insulted, humiliated: we want to get our own back, to get even, if need be to hurt innocent people as we have been hurt.

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 502.

Now it is because you approached the All and did not remain in a part of it, and you did not even say of yourself `I am just so much,’ but by rejecting the `so much’ you have become all. You will increase yourself then by rejecting all else, and the All will be present to you in your rejection.

Plotinus, The Enneads, 6.5.12.

I made this statement … that the law could be deconstructed. There is a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of positive laws, and this history is a history of the transformation of laws. That is why they are there. You can improve law, you can replace one law by another one. There are constitutions and institutions. This is a history, and a history, as such, can be deconstructed. Each time you replace one legal system by another one, one law by another one, or you improve the law, that is a kind of deconstruction, a critique and deconstruction. So, the law as such can be deconstructed and has to be deconstructed. That is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics, and progress. But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive, or the movement to improve the law, that is, to deconstruct the law. Without a  call for justice we would not have any interest in deconstructing the law. That is why I  said that the condition of possibility of deconstruction is a  call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law, to a given system of legal structures. That means that justice is always unequal to itself. It is non-coincident with itself.

—D. Caputo and J. Derrida, Deconstruction in a  Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, New York, Fordham University Press, 1997, pp. 16-17.