At the Center of the Margin: Derrida, Žižek, and the Illusion of Origin

The Debate. AI art

Introduction

The 2019 debate between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, held in Toronto, was billed as a confrontation between Marxism and Capitalism. However, beyond economic systems or identity politics, one of the most revealing moments came when Žižek expressed distaste not for capitalism or ideology, but for marginality itself. Reacting to what he saw as a postmodern valorization of resistance without real subversion of power, he remarked:

“His project was never revolution but rather small resistances, marginal sites of power. And that’s precisely what I don’t like about what you call postmodernism. Let’s not even call them Marxists, but ‘revolutionaries.’ It’s this enjoyment of self-marginalization. The good thing is to be at the margin, not at the center. It almost makes me nostalgic for old Communists who at least had the honesty to say, ‘We don’t enjoy being marginal—we want to seize power.’ I find this celebration of marginality disgusting.”

This moment is striking not just politically but philosophically. Žižek’s language implies a rejection of the “margin” as a place of powerlessness and retreat. Yet for Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most influential figure associated with postmodernism, the margin is never merely peripheral—it is constitutive of the very structure it appears to stand outside of. In Derrida’s thought, the center does not precede the margin; rather, the center is imagined through the exclusion of the margin. Žižek’s commitment to revolutionary centrality might thus obscure the deeper philosophical logic that Derrida exposes: the center is an effect, not a cause.

Derrida’s Deconstruction of Center and Margin

In his 1966 lecture Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida makes a now-famous statement:

“The center is not the center.”

This cryptic phrase captures a seismic shift in philosophical thought. What had long been considered the stable ground of meaning—be it God, reason, presence, or truth—is revealed to be an artificial construct, introduced to halt the freeplay of structure. According to Derrida, the history of metaphysics is the history of substitutions of one center for another, each installed to cover the absence of an origin.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida reorients attention toward what had been thought marginal: writing, the supplement, the trace. These elements, long treated as secondary to speech or presence, turn out to haunt and structure the systems that exclude them. He writes:

“The outside maintains a relationship with the inside that, as always, is anything but a simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside has always already been caught in the inside…” (Derrida, 1976, p. 152)

In this framework, the margin is not external but already folded into the logic of the center. The supplement—that which appears to add something to a complete whole—reveals instead that the whole was never whole to begin with. There is no pure presence, no uncontaminated center. As he later notes in Margins of Philosophy,

“There are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.” (Derrida, 1982)

Žižek’s Nostalgia for the Center

Žižek’s complaint about postmodern politics reflects a different metaphysical posture. He mocks what he sees as the refusal to seize power, to occupy the center of social change. In contrast to Derrida, Žižek retains a certain fidelity to Hegelian-Marxist totality, where contradictions are sublated into a higher unity, and history has direction.

Yet in his dismissal of “enjoyment of self-marginalization,” Žižek risks falling back into the very logocentric gesture Derrida critiques. To seek the center, to idealize it as the place of genuine political efficacy, is to assume that it stands apart from what it excludes. But as Derrida shows, the center only functions by constituting its margin, and the margin, in turn, reveals the instability of the center’s claim to origin.

In other words, Žižek’s distaste for marginality might be based on the illusion that the center is a place to be occupied, rather than a function of exclusion and repression. When he says, “We want to seize power,” the question remains: where is this power located, and who defines it? Is it not the case that “power” as such is structured by what it disavows?

Marxism and Postmodernism: A False Dichotomy

The broader context of Žižek and Peterson’s debate hinges on another binary: the supposed opposition between Marxism and postmodernism. Peterson claims that “postmodern neo-Marxists” have replaced class struggle with identity politics. Žižek responds by denying that any such group exists:

“Where did you find that? I don’t know them. I would ask you: give me some names. Who are the Marxists here? What you describe as postmodern neo-Marxism… Where is the Marxist element in it?”
 

However, this back-and-forth misses a deeper point: the history of critical theory is not composed of sealed systems, but of cross-contaminations. Thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and even Lacan were shaped by Marxist frameworks before reworking them. Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) explicitly acknowledges his debt to Marx. Foucault began his career with ties to the French Communist Party. Althusser famously interpreted Lacan’s psychoanalysis through Marxist categories.

These intellectual migrations suggest that the divide between Marxism and poststructuralism is porous, not absolute. To frame postmodernism as a betrayal of Marxism, or to deny any continuity at all, is to impose false boundaries onto traditions that are already internally divided and constantly in motion.

Conclusion: The Ghost at the Center

Derrida’s philosophy invites us to rethink not only textual meaning but political imagination. The margin, far from being a place of impotence or retreat, reveals the constitutive exclusions by which any system—including revolutionary politics—defines itself. When Žižek expresses longing for a politics of centrality, he may be overlooking that the center is a trace, not a location. It is haunted by the very margins it attempts to suppress.

To celebrate marginality, then, is not to resign from history—it is to recognize the dynamic play through which all meaning and power are structured. Žižek’s critique may apply to shallow forms of identitarian self-enclosure, but Derrida teaches us to look deeper: at the unstable foundation beneath every position of power.

References

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge.
Žižek, S., & Peterson, J. (2019). Žižek vs. Peterson Debate. Sony Centre, Toronto. [Online Video].