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In Violence and Difference Andrew McKenna explores the many parallels between Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and René Girard’s victimary hypothesis. This important book not only explains why Girard’s theory can stand the test of deconstruction but also argues convincingly how the mimetic hypothesis can save deconstruction from becoming a mere language game and can recover an ethical dimension to poststructuralism.

But to the uninitiated Derrida’s criticism of the whole of Western philosophy can often seem inaccessible and tedious in its insistence on a complex origin and undecidability of meaning. It is quite tempting at times in an act of frustration to conclude that life is too short for deconstruction.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand offers us an entrance into the Derridean world that might lead us to a different conclusion. In the third part of the cinema version of the comic-saga, humans have apparently found a cure for the mutant x-gene that gives the mutants their supernatural powers and makes them different from humans. Interestingly enough, the source of the cure is a mutant boy, who has as his supernatural gift the force of neutralizing mutant powers. As Dr Kavita Rao, member of the research team that developed the cure, explains: “We can replicate it but we can’t generate it.” Thus even when all the mutants are “cured” and turned into “normal” humans, there remains one mutant at the very centre of humanity from which the cure stems.

The difference between mutants and humans cannot therefore be absolutely discerned. It follows the same “poststructure” as Derrida’s discussion of Plato in “Plato’s Pharmacy”. Plato can only distinguish “real” knowledge from the madness of the poison of false knowledge through an act that works itself like a poison, an antidote. The same applies to Girard’s theory of violence. When a society tries to expulse violence to an outside through the expulsion of a scapegoat it commits an act of violence that will remain at the very centre of the community.

In X-Men 3 a rebellious mutant group under the lead of “Magneto” tries to kill the boy who is the source of the cure in order to destroy humanity. However, their project is subject to the same paradox as the human project. They will never be able to kill the boy because as soon as they come close to him they lose their supernatural power and become human. There is thus never an outside to either humanity nor the mutants and thus no absolute difference between the two but only difference within the two – what Derrida called differance. The difference between humans and mutants is produced from a source that is both mutant and human and cannot itself be differentiated and is thus truly undecidable.