This provocative assertion, sharply contrasting with the decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989the stakes of an infinite task and responsibility that, in spite of and because of its infinity, cannot be relegated to tomorrow: "[…] justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that which must not wait." It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot be postponed, that Jacques Derrida was an active and outspoken critic and commentator on issues such as South Africa's Apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and on what Richard Falk has termed "the great terror war".

In our era -- the era French historian Annette Wieviorka has called the "era of the witness" -- questions of answering to the other's call, questions of respons-ibility have gained, within the humanities, a significance that they never had had in non-Jewish Western thought before. This development would be unthinkable without the immense contribution of Jacques Derrida's writings. Throughout his oeuvre and his life, he witnessed to the unheard, over-shouted or silenced voices of those who have largely been excluded by the dominant currents of Western thought -- who have been, as Toni Morrison's novel Beloved puts it, "disremembered and unaccounted for." What is more, Jacques Derrida formulated the necessity of being fully aware of the risk and aporias of this task of memory: that speaking for and remembering the other carries in itself the seed of a second betrayal. The difficulties surrounding the questions of memory and justice are "not infinite simply because they are infinitely numerous, nor because they are rooted in the infinity of memories and cultures (religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth) that we shall never master." Rather, they are infinite in themselves, because they are inhabited by a series of "aporias" that make...