Excerpt from Mourning, Melancholy, and the Act by Slavoj Zizek

[The] ultimate paradox of Christianity is obliterated in what poses today as melancholic, postsecular thought, the stance that finds its ultimate expression in a certain kind of Derridean appropriation of Levinas. In this, one fully concedes that modernist critique undermined the foundations of onto-theology, the notion of God as the supreme entity, and so forth. However, what if the ultimate outcome of this deconstructive gesture is to clear the slate for a new postdeconstructionist and indeconstructible form of spirituality, for the relationship to an unconditional Otherness that precedes ontology? What if the fundamental experience of the human subject is not that of the self-presence, of the force of dialectical mediation-appropriation of all Otherness, but that of a primordial passivity, sentience, of responding, of being infinitely indebted and responsible to the call of an Otherness that never acquires positive features but always remains withdrawn, the trace of its own absence? One is tempted to evoke here Marx's famous quip apropos of Proudhon from his The Poverty of Philosophy (instead of actual people in their actual circumstances, Proudhon's pseudo-Hegelian social theory gives these circumstances themselves, deprived of the people who make them alive): instead of the religious matrix with God at its heart, postsecular deconstruction gives us this matrix itself, deprived of the positive figure of God that sustains it.

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The radicalism of Derridean politics involves the irreducible gap between the messianic promise of the democracy to come and all of its positive incarnations; on account of its very radicalism, the messianic promise forever remains a promise, cannot ever be translated into a set of determinate economic and political measures. The inadequacy between the abyss of the undecidable Thing and any particular decision is irreducible; our debt towards the Other cannot ever be reimbursed, our response to the Other's call is never fully adequate. This position should be opposed to the twin temptations of unprincipled pragmatism and totalitarianism, which both suspend the gap. While pragmatism simply reduces political activity to opportunistic maneuvering, to limited strategic interventions into contextualized situations, dispensing with any reference to transcendent Otherness, totalitarianism identifies the unconditional Otherness with a particular historical figure (the Party is historical reason directly embodied) [...]The to-come (à venir) is thus not simply an additional qualification of democracy but its innermost kernel, what makes democracy democracy. The moment democracy is no longer to come but pretends to be actual--fully actualized--we enter totalitarianism.

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To put it in the terms of the opposition between ethics and politics: what Derrida mobilizes here is the gap between ethics and politics.

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The ethical is thus the (back)ground of undecidability, while the political is the domain of decision(s), of taking the full risk of crossing the hiatus and translating this impossible ethical request for messianic justice into a particular intervention that never lives up to this request, that is always unjust towards (some of the) others. The ethical domain proper, the unconditional spectral request that makes us absolutely responsible and that cannot ever be translated into a positive measure or intervention, is thus perhaps not so much a formal, a priori background or frame for political decisions, but rather their inherent indefinite différance, signalling that no determinate decision can fully hit its mark. This fragile, temporary unity of unconditional ethical injunction and pragmatic political interventions can be best rendered through a paraphrase of Kant's famous formula of the relationship between reason and experience: "If ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind." Elegant as this solution is (ethics is here the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the political, simultaneously opening up the space for the political decision as an act without the guarantee in the big Other and condemning it to its ultimate failure), it is to be opposed to the act in the Lacanian sense, in which, precisely, the distance between the ethical and the political collapses.

Let's take--what else?--yet again the case of Antigone. She can be said to exemplify the unconditional fidelity to the Otherness of the Thing that disrupts the entire social edifice; from the standpoint of the ethics of Sittlichkeit, of the mores that regulate the intersubjective collective of the polis, her insistence is effectively mad, disruptive, evil. In other words, in the terms of the deconstructionist notion of the messianic promise that is forever to come, is Antigone not a protototalitarian figure?

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst, is senior researcher in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is editor of Cogito and the Unconscious (1998) and author of The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (1996), The Plague of Fantasies (1997), and The Fragile Absolute, or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000). His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is "A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism" (Summer 1998).

(Excerpt from) Mourning, Melancholy, and the Act - Critical Inquiry (Summer, Vol. 26, no. 4)