Chapter 3, no Nazi or totalitarian sympathizing there. More about not pitting people against each other through a false sense of allegiance to someone else, which ultimately western philosophy does. I guess Lilla just doesn’t like inconclusiveness. I am sometimes plagued by being able to see both sides of things and not discounting either side. At the same time I think I’m loyal to the truth, and have faith that the Orthodox Church has it, so I’m glad I can bring my inconclusiveness to the Church and let her deal with it. I accept God’s answers that He provides there. The Orthodox Church has a singular non-judgmental conservatism, if you get the paradox.

I really like Derrida’s points here, and continue to think Lilla prefers premature dogmatism.

In Chapter 4 on justice and law,

The problem with law, in his view, is that it is founded and promulgated on the basis of authority, and therefore, he asserts (with typical exaggeration), depends on violence. Law is affected by economic and political forces, is changed by calculation and compromise, and therefore differs from place to place. Law is written into texts and must be interpreted, which complicates things further.

Of course, none of this is news. Our whole tradition of thinking about law, beginning in Greek philosophy and passing through Roman law, canon law, and modern constitutionalism, is based on the recognition that laws are a conventional device. The only controversial issue is whether there is a higher law, or right, by which the conventional laws of nations can be judged, and, if so, whether it is grounded in nature, reason, or revelation. This distinction between law and right is the foundation of continental jurisprudence, which discriminates carefully between loi/droit, Gesetz/Recht, legge/diritto, and so forth. Derrida conflates loi and droit for the simple reason that he recognizes neither nature nor reason as standards for anything. In his view, both are caught up in the structures of language, and therefore may be deconstructed.

Now, however, he also wishes to claim that there is a concept called justice, and that it stands “outside and beyond the law.” But since this justice cannot be understood through nature or reason, that only leaves one possible means of access to its meaning: revelation. Derrida studiously avoids this term but it is what he is talking about. In Force de loi he speaks of an “idea of justice” as “an experience of the impossible,” something that exists beyond all experience and therefore cannot be articulated. And what cannot be articulated cannot be deconstructed; it can only be experienced in a mystical way. This is how he puts it:

If there is deconstruction of all determining presumption of a present justice, it operates from an infinite “idea of justice,” infinitely irreducible. It is irreducible because due to the other–due to the other before any contract, because this idea has arrived, the arrival of the other as a singularity always other. Invincible to all skepticism . . . this “idea of justice” appears indestructible…. One can recognize, and even accuse it of madness. And perhaps another sort of mysticism. Deconstruction is mad about this justice, mad with the desire for justice.

Or again in Specters of Marx:

What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction, is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice–which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights–and an idea of democracy –which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.

There is no justice present anywhere in the world. There is, however, as Derrida puts it, an “infinite idea of justice,” though it cannot and does not penetrate our world. Yet this necessary absence of justice does not relieve us of the obligation to await its arrival, for the Messiah may come at any moment, through any city gate. We must therefore learn to wait, to defer gratifying our desire for justice. And what better training in deferral than deconstruction? If deconstruction questions the claim of any law or institution to embody absolute justice, it does so in the very name of justice–a justice it refuses to name or define, an “infinite justice that can take on a ‘mystical’ aspect.” Which leads us, without surprise, to the conclusion that “deconstruction is justice.”

Socrates equated justice with philosophy, on the grounds that only philosophy could see things as they truly are, and therefore judge truly. Jacques Derrida, mustering all the chutzpah at his disposal, equates justice with deconstruction, on the grounds that only the undoing of rational discourse about justice will prepare the advent of justice as Messiah.

Maybe Derrida’s showing his Jewishness here, still waiting for the Messiah. Well perhaps he couldn’t find Him in the western Church and the laws of its land. Still, with the judge and jury system, instead of a computer generated outcome based on formula, there is room for Messianic inspiration. I like the phrase, “The Eastern Orthodox Church knows where the Spirit is, but does not know where He is not.”

Chapter 5,

Unless, of course, he places the “idea of justice” in the eternal, messianic beyond where it cannot be reached by argument, and assumes that his ideologically sympathetic readers won’t ask too many questions.

I’m seeing correlations with the Last Judgment and its element of surprise. However, as Father Stephen highlights, Christ has come and we can find direction here. Plus we have intuition.

As to the rest of the chapter, Derrida’s right, people are seeking the Messiah in their politics,whether Marxist or Democratic, and that’s good, seeking the Messiah that is, but these ideologies have dissapointed. They fall short. Derrida very much criticized aspects of Marx, and by no means supports totalitarian regimes, and I got this from Lilla’s paper! Lilla’s defaming agenda towards Derrida and his belittling of his impressed readers is very oppositionally Platonic, but has less basis in fact (the ones thathe presents and supposedly support his conclusions) than he purports. Our Ochlophobist is right, he is a twit. Oops, that’s too anti. My lack of transcendence is showing.

Well this is just downright insulting, now Lilla thinks that Americans should hate themselves too. From Chapter 6,

No wonder a tour through the post-modernist section of any American bookshop is such a disconcerting experience. The most illiberal, anti-enlightenment notions are put forward with a smile and the assurance that, followed out to their logical conclusion, they could only lead us into the democratic promised land, where all God’s children will join hands in singing the national anthem. It is an uplifting vision and Americans believe in uplift. That so many of them seem to have found it in the dark and forbidding works of Jacques Derrida attests to the strength of Americans’ self-confidence and their awesome capacity to think well of anyone and any idea. Not for nothing do the French still call us les grands enfants.

I’ve been caught up in anti-post-modernist anti-dogmatism, but now I see that there’s room for some of it. The west has been too dogmatic and falsely confident about many things. We’re really not that far removed from cruelty to Others deemed less-than. Becoming Orthodox after 40 years of Protestant dogmatism has made me more open to the idea. Shouldn’t persecutors question their ideas? It’s only ok to be stubborn if you’re right, but then there’s mercy…