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Jacques Derrida

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'''Jacques Derrida''' (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an [[Algeria]]n-[[born ]] [[France|French]] [[literary critic]] and [[philosopher]] of [[Jew]]ish descent, most often referenced as the founder of "[[deconstruction]]" or, by more unsympathetic theorists, "[[Jacques Derrida|deconstructionism]]". * [[Slavoj Žižek|Žižek, Slavoj]]. ''[[The Ticklish Subject|The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]''. [[London]]: Verso, 1999. pp. 158-9: [[Abraham]]'s sacrifice 321-2: [[Descartes]]'s [[withdrawal]]-into-[[self ]] 34: on [[Heidegger ]] 9-10: [[ontology ]] versus [[heauntology ]] 238: pure [[notion ]] of [[gift ]] 56
: On the Spint 9
* {{Z}} ''[[The Fragile Absolute|The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For]]''. London and New York: Verso. p. 47
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==
Žižek’s encounters with Derrida belong to a [[tradition ]] of mutual Lacanian– Derridean agonistics in which Derrida’s [[thinking ]] was initially dismissed as mere “textualism”. From the reminder that phenomena take recognizable shape only through interpretative artifice, and that an irreducible gap remains between [[event ]] and its [[linguistic ]] description (Derrida 1976: 158), it was too quickly concluded that Derrida eradicates any [[referent ]] and, in an auto-created [[world ]] of self-referential textuality, celebrates a free play of differences without purchase on [[reality ]] and too playfully ironic to be practically relevant.
Sensitive to Derrida’s (Derrida 2003: 87–8) objections, Žižek belongs to [[another ]] generation of critics. Retaining the assumption that Derrida sharply [[divides ]] [[text ]] from referent, or equally “phenomenal” from “absolute Other”, Žižek’s charge is the reverse of textual [[narcissism ]] (“Th e [[Real ]] of [[Sexual ]] Diff erence”). Supposedly, in a Levinasian [[about]]-turn, the “later Derrida” negates the textual [[imagination ]] (e.g. [[legal ]] systems, [[political ]] measures) to preserve a pure, transcendent referent (a hypostatized absolute [[Other ]] such as justice itself). “Derrida’s operation”, Žižek argues, merely turns from “textualism” to a different, but equally practically impotent, [[impossibility]]. He argues that [[Lacanian ]] [[logic]], represented ''inter alia'' through Lacan’s “Borromean knot”, copes better with the complexities of [[ethical ]] [[practice]].
The Lacan–Derrida [[encounter ]] is consistently based on mutual misconstrual, and Žižek’s [[reading ]] is no exception. However, unpacking his misinterpretation of Derrida’s operation has the [[value ]] of clarifying Lacan’s [[ontological ]] stance concerning the [[traumatic ]] Real and the [[complex ]] logic of [[human ]] appropriation, which, incidentally, finds allegiance, not opposition, in Derrida’s operation, properly [[understood ]] in [[terms ]] of the “plural logic of the aporia”.
Using Creon and [[Antigone ]] as metonyms for two extreme attitudes (“unprincipled pragmatism” and “totalitarianism”), Žižek takes up Derrida’s [[insistence ]] that one ignores at one’s peril the irreducible gap between [[economic]], phenomenal reality (the human law Creon invokes) and the aneconomic, transcendent Divine Other (obeyed by Antigone). To close the gap by denying all transcendent [[Otherness ]] in the [[name ]] of phenomenal reality can only be to promote the unprincipled [[pragmatism ]] exemplified by Creon, whose [[refusal ]] to contravene the [[letter ]] of human law makes of him “a pragmatic [[state ]] politician, mercilessly crushing any [[activity ]] that would destabilize the smooth functioning of the state and civil peace” (“The “[[The Real ]] of Sexual Difference”: 68). However, to leave open the gap by submitting phenomenal reality to a hypostatized Divinity is instead to risk “totalitarianism”. Antigone remains blindly faithful to the [[singular ]] call of the Divine, which nobody else can [[understand]]. As a proto-totalitarian, her “decision” to bury her brother is the result not of careful deliberation but of her insistence on her Divine, sovereign [[right ]] to do just what she decides, whatever it is.
Between unprincipled pragmatism and [[totalitarianism]], one faces what [[Lacan ]] (SXI: 210–12) calls “the mugger’s choice” (i.e. the [[injunction ]] to choose “your [[money ]] or your life”). Th is is no [[choice ]] at all: a circularity persists whereby, in choosing one option, the other is lost; yet, because they are interdependent, this is also to lose the original choice. Negatively, in rejecting one option and gaining the other, one thereby regains the rejected original. Fearing the [[terror ]] of singular totalitarianism, which threatens the [[social ]] edifice, one might institute a shared, regulatory legal [[economy ]] that aims instead for justice. However, the consequence of perfecting this economy by eradicating “evils” (unfairness, singularities, etc.) is not the hoped-for justice, but rigid prescriptions that apply badly “from above” to [[dynamic ]] ethical realities. Ironically, when laws prevail over justice, law becomes totalitarian. Conversely, fearing the merciless strictures of unbending law, one might, like Antigone, answer to an anarchic, singular [[idea ]] of “Justice itself” (“Th e Real of Sexual Difference”: 67). But all individuals, then, may legitimately apply personally held supreme principles at their own discretion. Th e consequence of this successful “totalitarianism”, where no overall [[principle ]] suffices to arbitrate between [[power ]] struggles, must be unprincipled pragmatism. Th is lose/lose circularity suggests that viable ethical practice cannot depend on either/or choices between binary opposites.
On the [[impotence ]] of binary thinking, Žižek and Derrideans concur. Žižek claims, however, that Derrida cannot off er an adequate heuristic to negotiate the “mugger’s choice” between immanence (Creon) and transcendence (Antigone), because his thinking remains trapped within a [[religious ]] [[matrix ]] that understands the Real in terms of sharply opposing ontological spheres. Derrida, for example, “retains the irreducible opposition between … the messianic call of justice and its ‘ontologization’, its transposition into a set of positive legal and political measures” (“Th e Real of Sexual Difference”: 65). Further, all “determinate economico-political measures” will betray the transcendent principle of, for example, justice because Derrida has merely replaced a problematic positive [[figure ]] of the absolute Other, associated with the “metaphysics “[[metaphysics]] of presence”, with its equally problematic conception as a hypostatized absolute [[absence]]. Th is means that our [[relationship ]] with the Other cannot be one of [[active ]] hermeneutic uncovering. Instead, we must respect the purity of the absolute Other by renouncing any determinate [[structure ]] involving real [[people ]] in real circumstances and embracing a “primordial [[passivity]], sentiency, of responding, of [[being ]] infinitely indebted to and [[responsible ]] for the call of an Otherness that never acquires positive features” (''ibid''.). This move, Žižek argues, underpins the unacceptable “lesson of deconstruction”: facing the [[impossible]], we may justly [[renounce ]] any [[demand ]] for determinate decisions concerning [[practical ]] measures.
By contrast, Žižek adopts Lacan’s supposedly alternative [[understanding ]] of the Real as one ontological region, whose “immanent transcendence” presents as [[trauma]]. Lacan argues that the Other can neither be hypostatized nor negated and thus, as Copjec [[notes]], “eternally returns or repeats” (Copjec 2002: 96). The “hard kernel” of the Real that halts analytical [[interpretation ]] because we cannot make [[complete ]] [[sense ]] of it is also a seed, as disseminative as différance, because we are obliged nevertheless to strive for sense. Th is describes the dynamic of immanent “sublimation”. It is in its determinate [[interpretations ]] that an event is constituted as a phenomenon, but precisely because they cannot be definitive these interpretations themselves require interpretation. Th us the determination of an event endlessly calls for more determination and the event becomes self-transcending.
To explain why Žižek’s encounter with Derrida is misconceived, one must address Derrida’s adjudication between [[phenomenology ]] and Levinasian [[ethics ]] in “Violence “[[Violence]] and Metaphysics” (Derrida 1978: 79–153). Ironically, Žižek’s critique of “Derrida’s operation” precisely echoes Derrida’s critique of [[Levinas ]] for: (a) opposing a centripetal Greek spirit of [[totality ]] (sameness, immanence, [[history]], [[philosophy]]) to a centrifugal, eschatological, implicitly “Hebraic”, spirit of infinity (otherness, transcendence, ethics); (b) insisting on an abyssal gap between these poles; (c) assuming an either/or choice between supposed opposites; and (d) rejecting what he sees as violent, [[phenomenological ]] “totalization” for the pure [[non-violence ]] of an appeal to infinity, which he calls Ethics (Derrida 1978: 82–3). Derrida shows in multiple ways that Levinas’s insistence on the purity of the wholly Other remains inconsistent, since his [[discourse ]] in fact requires the “contaminating” phenomenology he rejects (ibid.: 133). Derrida argues accordingly that we have no access to any pure spirit of non-violence, but can only choose the passage of least possible violence between the paralysing extremes of totality and infinity. This passage, he argues, is achieved better by [[Husserl ]] than Levinas. For Levinas, the [[alterity ]] of the wholly Other is respected only by abandoning hermeneutic uncovering. Phenomenology, by contrast, can tolerate the inescapable violence of active appropriation by accepting that inadequation (the impossibility of perfect evidence) marks transcendence. Th is imperfection accommodates both an indefinite potential in the other for phenomenality (for showing, illumination and evidence) and respects its alterity (its wonder, terror, surprises and secrets). Derrida does appreciate Levinas’s power to highlight the [[structural ]] violation of otherness built into traditional philosophy (including phenomenology). Against strict Husserlian phenomenology, he launches an adapted wholly Other, which points not to an [[external ]] Other in opposition to the sphere of immanence, but to the unpredictability inscribed within every immanent horizon of expectation, which opens all phenomena to potentially traumatic shattering. Th is precisely aligns his discourse with the [[paradox ]] of “immanent transcendence” described in Lacan’s version of the traumatic Real.
To deal with this ontology of immanent transcendence in [[order ]] to show, for example, that genuinely ethical [[action ]] is neither purely phenomenal (obedience to [[moral ]] [[codes]]) nor a [[passive]], abject response to the call of an inscrutable Other, both Lacan and Derrida develop complex logics of contamination. As Žižek explains, to understand the [[logical ]] structure underpinning Antigone’s act as an act of decision rather than proto-totalitarianism, one must develop a “spectral “[[spectral]] analysis” of the “other” as a [[three]]-fold [[concept]]. Th e [[imaginary ]] Other names other people like me (my neighbour as my [[mirror ]] [[image]]); the [[symbolic ]] “big Other” refers to the impersonal codes that coordinate [[intersubjective ]] co-[[existence]]; and “the impossible Thing” indicates an unfathomable, monstrous otherness in every person (“The Real of Sexual Difference”: 70).
Notably, this is aligned with Derrida’s contention that terms like “the other” cannot cohere, since they encompass incompatible senses, which can neither be reduced to one another nor ordered hierarchically. Instead, these senses are bound together in complex forms like the Borromean [[knot ]] of circular opposition and interdependence. Here the linkage between [[them ]] is such that each holds the other two together and apart in a tensioned relationship, and suspending one term engenders the collapse of the other two. To understand Antigone’s act, Žižek explains, one must first note that the monstrous [[Thing ]] only becomes a “fellow human like me” through a [[third]], mediating [[agency]]: the impersonal Symbolic Order to which all of us are willing to submit. To suspend the functioning of [[the Symbolic ]] Order, as Antigone did, is to collapse the border between knowable “friendly neighbour” and unfathomable “monstrous Thing” (''ibid''.).
Žižek argues that the ethical act, the [[moment ]] of genuine decision, is made possible only when [[the symbolic ]] order is suspended and the actual Antigone becomes the Thing. In this brief, passing moment of collapse, she herself becomes singular, unfathomable and inimitable. Th us she excludes herself from the networks that constitute communal [[life]], becoming the traumatic [[cause ]] of her own framework of value. But the moment of decision is fleeting. Caputo articulates precisely this insight in Derridean terms, where he argues that justice slips our grasp. To pin justice to an event by drawing maxims from a decision, or to individuals by calling them just, is to lose what justice “is”, for in the former [[case ]] justice is reduced to the application of rules, whereas in the latter justice is reduced to a knowable [[character ]] [[trait ]] in the friendly neighbour. Justice “appears” only “in a singular action in a singular [[situation]], and this only for the while that it lasts, in the instant of decision” (Caputo 1997: 138). This is just as well, for were this not the case no intersubjective life would be possible at all.
To re-establish intersubjective life subsequent to the decisive moment, the world’s Antigones and their communities must come to terms with (make sense of, codify) the traumatic reconfiguration of value, and therefore face again Creon’s kind of unprincipled pragmatism that the decision disrupted. Derrida argues that without this circular predicament, there would be no call for decisions, but only calculative application of laws under the [[illusion ]] that we [[know ]] enough, or the abdication of [[responsibility ]] under the illusion that we know [[nothing]]. But it is because individuals can neither know for sure nor [[claim ]] absolute [[ignorance ]] that we are [[subject ]] to the singularizing trauma of making decisions and taking responsibility for them. The “lesson of deconstruction” sounds rather a lot like the “lesson of psychoanalysis”.
==References==
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