Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics

Abstract

In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a violent tone that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek's attempt to retrieve Robespierre's notion of Terror. This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida- Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines Derrida's and Žižek's respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent (immanent) politics within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek's critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida's attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek's alternative construal of a purified violence and (Hegelian) self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida's writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of 'becoming other' in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference (and the risk of invocation of the ontotheological) is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference.