ABSTRACT
Ž ižek’s encounters with Derrida belong to a tradition of mutual Lacanian-Derridean agonistics in which Derrida’s thinking was initially dismissed as mere “textualism”. From the reminder that phenomena take recognizable shape only through interpretative artifi ce, and that an irreducible gap remains between the event and its linguistic description (Derrida 1976: 158), it was too quickly concluded that Derrida eradicates any referent and, in an auto-created world of self-referential textuality, celebrates a free play of diff erences without purchase on reality and too playfully ironic to be practically relevant.
