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Thinking through différance: Derrida, Žižek and religious engagement

The recent work of Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek betrays an increasing and yet divided preoccupation with Jacques Derrida. The division in his responses to Derrida’s work derives from a perceived division in Derrida’s work, between an ‘earlier Derrida of différance’ and a later Derrida, whose work engages more explicitly with ethical and religious issues. Žižek, on the one hand, is progressively more open about the similarities between his own work and that of early Derrida. In his recent work The Parallax View, he acknowledges a debt to Derrida’s différance, asserting: ‘now – when the Derridean fashion is fading away – is perhaps the moment to honor his memory by pointing out the proximity of this “minimal difference” to what he called différance’. On the other hand, however, the religious aspect of Derrida’s later work, termed by Žižek, the ‘“postsecular” Messianic turn of deconstruction’ is sweepingly dismissed as part of the contemporary re-emergence of religious interest which, for Žižek, is a ‘massive onslaught of obscurantism’. My article will be split into two sections, with the first analysing Žižek’s reading of différance and his claim that Derrida’s later work obscures différance. I will argue that Žižek mistakenly conflates différance with his own ‘minimal difference’ and consequently overlooks the consistency of différance in Derrida’s work. The second part of my article will examine Žižek’s critique of the religious elements of Derrida’s work more closely, looking at Žižek’s own ‘religious turn’, some unexplored similarities between the two, and asking why Žižek’s critique is quite so vehement.