That Obscure Object (a) of Drive: The Politics of Negativity in Derrida and Žižek

This paper investigates the theoretical nature of negativity and its ethicopolitical implications in Derrida and Žižek. It argues that there is an illegitimate shift in Derrida’s thinking of the limit from his early essay on différance to his later political formulation. With différance, the limit is strictly immanent within the system; however, the limit is transposed to the outside and to a figure of impossibility in his later work. Such a move has crippling implications for politics because it elevates passivity and imperfection into ethical principles, thus rendering radical political intervention inconceivable. The paper thus offers an alternative theorization of the limit from a Žižekian point of view. Central to this view is the ontological status of object a in psychoanalysis. The ontology of lack, thought from the point of view of the drive, is both self-fissuring and self-engendering. It posits an immanent negativity that, at the same time, constitutes the positive condition for radical political intervention. Politics, in this view, is not founded on primordial passivity or constitutive imperfection. Rather, it involves an element of subjective decisionism that, through the enactment and the embodiment of the limit, brings about symbolic suspension and allows new political sequences to unfold.