ABSTRACT
Zizek's encounters with Derrida belong to a tradition of mutual Lacanian-Derridean agonistics in which Derrida's thinking was initially dismissed as mere "textualism". Sensitive to Derrida's objections, Zizek belongs to another generation of critics. Retaining the assumption that Derrida sharply divides text from referent, or equally "phenomenal" from "absolute other", Zizek's charge is the reverse of textual narcissism. Derrida does appreciate Levinas's power to highlight the structural violation of otherness built into traditional philosophy. To understand Antigone's act, Zizek explains, people 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. 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.
