Although Derrida devotes a great deal of attention to an urgent period of undecidability that precedes any decision and the coinciding sense of betrayal that follows such a decision he only hints at what characterizes the subjectivity of the decider(s). He repeatedly emphasizes that such a moment of undecidability, resulting from the demand(request?) of a singular other, is one of anxiety. What does this say about the one who translates the demand, who calculates for the other and who makes the decision? Obviously, that they are capable of becoming anxious, that they can’t get any “shut-eye” because they are so busy looking out for incalculable requests, watching out for ghosts. But it also says that anxiety is caused by something and we should ask by what is it caused if not by a ghost?
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud says that unlike fear and fright anxiety is without object. Lacan will come to dispute this saying that anxiety has an object as its cause, objet a, the object cause of desire. Like any ghost objet a results from a disjointure, from a noncoincidence and it maintains, like any ghost, “that which happens between twos,” between the subject and his or her big Other. In this sense the decider would be able to let this ghost, as an anxiety-producer, guide him or her in the calculation of the request. It implies, and Derrida mentions this, a neurosis of some sort. Marx is invaded by an obsessional neurosis. Derrida describes Marx as obsessed with ghosts but characteristic of an obsessional neurotic Marx wants to do away with ghosts, to be certain about them, to make everything coincide. The decider of the undecidable would have to be invaded by ghosts so as to live with them without doing away with them, but nonetheless selecting them.
What interests me about this is that neurosis/anxiety is not conceived of as a bad thing, but as necessary.
[I apologize for the lack of citations. I don't have my books with me so all is from memory. I can find them if anyone needs specific references.]
I think too that the question of the necessity of anxiety in decision is a crucial one in Derrida and not a bad thing. However, I wouldn’t be so quick to equate this Derridian necessity with a Lacanian one. Lacan actually forces us to traverse our relationship to the other in our being “haunted” (I don’t know if Lacan would use this word) by it in an obsessional way, Derrida seeks to hold us within it and be haunted by it in this way. This means that he actually has a more rigorous notion of a subjectivity in decision-making than Lacan–or at least I think if you think of things this way aspects of Derrida will come to the fore that perhaps weren’t there before for you. This rigor is announced in something like The Gift of Death or even in “Force of Law,” which articulates a relationship to undecidability that must keep the undecidable PURELY undecidable, that is, with completely indeterminate risk (cf. “From Restricted to General Economy” on the notion of risk and speculation). This state he actually names love, within “Force of Law” and also within something like Memoirs of the Blind. The sort of haunting here is absolutely different than Lacan’s actually, because it isn’t a type of wariness for the other, but a surrendering to the rigor of a demand that you must comport yourself to something that will never reappear, and yet a feeling that the other has already appeared as yourself… This is all hasty and cryptic, but I just think in Specters of Marx we’re not getting any obsessional haunting in a Lacanian sense, a haunting we could and should traverse.