Žižek, Slavoj. “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” Critical Inquiry. 32.2 (2006): 226-249. PDF download
Here we get the difference betweenHegel and Derrida at its purest.
Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert the innocent ideal against its distorted realization. This holds not only for democracy but also for religion.
The gap that separates the ideal concept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself.
However, againstHegel, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess in the ideal concept that cannot be reduced to the dialectic between ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,” the excess of an abyss that cannot ever be actualized in its determinate content.Hegel’s own position is here more intricate than it may appear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, one can master the gap between concept and its actualization and achieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowledge”).
Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure” contradiction that is no longer the contradiction between the “undeconstructible” pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” that precedes any Otherness. 232
Actualizations and/or conceptual determinations are not traces of the undeconstructible” divineOtherness, but just traces marking their in-between.
Or, to put it in yet another way, in a kind of inverted phenomenological epoche, Derrida reduces Otherness to the “to come” of a pure potentiality, thoroughly deontologizing it, bracketing its positive content, so that all that remains is the specter of a promise; and what if the next step is to drop this minimal specter of Otherness itself, so that all that remains is the rupture, the gap as such that prevents entities from reaching their self-identity? 232
What if the idea of infinitemes-sianic justice that operates in an indefinite suspension, always to come, as the “undeconstructible” horizon of deconstruction, already obfuscates the
“pure”différance, the pure gap that differs an entity from itself?
Is it not possible to think this pure in-between prior to any notion of messianic justice? Derrida acts as if the choice is between the positive ontoethics, the gesture of transcending the existing order towards another higher positive Order, and the pure promise of spectral Otherness. However, what if we drop this reference to Otherness altogether? 233