Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
The Domestication
of Derrida
Rorty, Pragmatism and
Deconstruction
Lorenzo Fabbri
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# Lorenzo Fabbri 2008
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ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9778-0
ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9778-9
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Taking Rorty Seriously
vii
1
7
7
15
26
37
45
45
53
60
74
87
87
99
115
Notes
129
Bibliography
141
Index
147
Acknowledgements
Many people have been close to this book in the different phases of its
realization. My warmest gratitude goes to my family for having supported me in all my endeavours. Donatella Di Cesare had the patience
of following and encouraging my work from its very beginning. I am
grateful to Ari Lee Laskin, Arianna Lodeserto, Daniele Manni and
Nicola Zippel, who provided extensive and lively comments to earlier
drafts. I would also like to thank David Carroll, Ellen Burt, Franca
Hamber, Gol Bazargani and my friend James Chiampi for their
impeccable hospitality in the department of French and Italian at the
University of California, Irvine. Many thanks also to Ngug wa Thiongo
and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine
for the generous financial support to this project.
Without Vuslat Demirkoparan, this book would have never come to
light. While I take full responsibility for its weaknesses, she should be
credited for all the good moments of The Domestication of Derrida.
I am also grateful to the following: Milan Kundera and Faber &
Faber Ltd for the permission to quote from The Unbearable Lightness of
Being; Cambridge University Press for the permission to quote from
Richard Rortys Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Fata Morgana for the
permission to quote from Maurice Blanchots Linstant de ma mort (#
1994); Les Editions de Minuit for the permission to quote from Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattaris Quest-ce que la philosophie? (# 1991);
Random House Inc., for the permission to quote from Michel Foucaults Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with
Michel Foucault (in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow);
Routledge for the permission to quote from Jacques Derridas
Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism (in Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe); Stanford University Press for
the permission to quote from Giorgio Agambens Pardes: the writing of
potentiality (in Potentialities, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen); Verso
for the permission to quote from Jacques Derridas Marx & Sons and
Terry Eagletons Marxism without Marxism (both in Ghostly Demarcations, edited by Michael Sprinker).
An earlier and very different version of this project was published in
Introduction
Introduction
adjournments (i.e., analytic philosophy) and get interested in experimenting of new ways of thinking; he would make the metaphysical
quest for truth look trivial and idiosyncratic. But if the true Derrida,
the one that starts after The Post Card, refuses the projects of digging up
the infrastructure of the real, then how does one have to understand
his work?
In the sixth chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes
in a passage crucial for understanding the whole pragmatist rearrangement of deconstruction that Derridas greatest merit consists in
transforming philosophical reflection into a private matter, therefore
bridging the gap between theory and literature. When Derrida realized
the inconsistencies of any epistemological project, he got rid of the
craving for generality that still haunted his earlier works. He dropped
theory and started exploring the mental associations produced by a
thought liberated from the necessity of representing the structure of
the mind or of the world. According to Rorty, Derrida at his best plays
with philosophy without yielding to the nostalgia for a time in which
words pretended to exhibit the conditions of Being, and without the
hope of selling out the possibilities of thinking. In other words:
deconstruction is able to reduce philosophy to a production of fantasies which do not claim to have any epistemological or public relevance. I will argue that Rortys reading ends up assigning to the
deconstructive operations two kinds of privacy: deconstruction is private because it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendental
demand, privatizing itself in the autobiographical genre, but it is also
private because it deprives itself of any political pretension.
It is precisely this double privacy that I will challenge in The Domestication of Derrida. After tracking the context and tone of Rortys pragmatism, I will confront the two key features of his privatization of
deconstruction: on the one hand, the reduction of deconstructive
writing to a sort of autobiographical drift, an activity liberated from the
presuppositions on which the whole philosophical tradition, from
Descartes to Kant and beyond, is grounded; on the other hand, the
belief that Derrida dismisses the endeavour to engage philosophy with
political struggle, a concern that has deeply dominated French contemporary thought (Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.).
In the second chapter, Derrida, the transcendental, and theoretical
ascetism, I question the legitimacy of attributing to Derrida the sort of
theoretical ascetism to use a fortunate expression coined by
Rodolphe Gasche which one can see at work in Ernst Tugendhat: is
Derrida really a hero in the virtuous and strenuous resistance to the
temptation of falling back into the much maligned presuppositions of
transcendental philosophy? To answer such a question, I comment on
two of Derridas texts that Rorty heavily relies on. While Rorty gives the
idea that White mythology and Envois are the places where the
Introduction
actuality, Rorty in essays such as The priority of democracy to philosophy suggests that everything must be done to enforce the now
and defend it from any radical modification. For Rorty, philosophy
should not try to disturb what we are today: it is surely true that the
pattern of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies has imposed
on its members many different constraints, but the advantages provoked by this pattern compensate by far for the constraints. The only
political task philosophy should thus assume is to reinforce the solidity
and the solidarity of the form of life we were trained to be. Working for
the security and the sanity of the social body as a perfect epidemiologist
would do, Rorty believes in a politics whose sole objective is to manage
social tensions in order to sustain our actual form of life.
The Domestication of Derrida might at first appear as a hostile critique
of pragmatism. But I hope that one will recognize in it the signs of my
admired and grateful homage to the late Richard Rorty.
Chapter 1
It was only after the battle against religion was won that philosophy
started feeling the exigency of claiming a significant difference from
the sciences: once the mission of clearing the path for scientific revolution had been accomplished, philosophy risked being left without a
purpose. Kant was the first consciously to identify the essence of philosophy as theory of knowledge, thus allowing for the survival of
philosophy and securing it as an autonomous discipline.
The self-understanding of philosophy as the science able to evaluate
the legitimacy of other scientific discourses is not a characteristic limited to modern philosophy; this self-understanding continues, for
example, all the way until modern phenomenology. The influence of
the Kantian identification of philosophy as epistemology is especially
clear in Martin Heideggers claim that Being is the proper and sole theme of
philosophy.3 Whereas positive sciences have a positional character, that is,
they deal with beings or domains of beings that are given, determined
10
Rorty wonders if we can still exploit the image of the mind as mirror:
did the mirroring theories succeed in their effort to explain how language reflects reality, or did they fail? If we are unsatisfied with the way
in which philosophy has tried thus far to legitimize the transcendental
presupposition, we can choose among three options:
1. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way to
demonstrate the transcendental presupposition. In this case, we
would engage with the Kantian question on the possibility of
knowledge.
2. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way to
demonstrate the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposition. In this case we would still be engaged with the
Kantian question on the possibility of knowledge.
3. We can decide that it is a waste of time either to attempt to
legitimize or to invalidate the transcendental presupposition.9
The first two options share the belief that philosophys goal is to
enlighten the true structure of knowledge, the relation between factual
reality and propositions. The third one instead concludes that it does
not pay to keep working within the sophistsPlatoHumeKant
mechanism, and hopes for a philosophy that will not be a theory of
knowledge. This third track leads, according to Rorty, to ironist
theory.10
What clearly differentiates irony from traditional philosophical
thought is that the former does not acknowledge the vocabulary used to
criticize the Kantian approach as closer to the structure of reality than
other vocabularies. Thus, irony should not be confused with the relativistic position: Rorty argues that relativism is self-refuting because it
claims that all beliefs have the same value, and that such a belief is not as
relative as the other beliefs.11 Since any attempt to demonstrate correctly and clearly the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposition is inconsistent, one is therefore left with two of the three previously
mentioned possibilities: either one tries to demonstrate the transcendental presupposition along with the advocates of realism, or one just
stops talking about it. But is realism actually possible or is it, in its turn,
unsustainable? First, we must understand what we mean by realism.
Rorty specifies three criteria for a theory to be defined as realist:
a. Realism assumes a distinction between scheme and content, such
as the one between concepts and intuitions, representations and
objects, language and world.
b. The internal coherence of the elements on the side of the
scheme is not sufficient to assure that genuine knowledge has
been reached; further legitimation is necessary.
11
12
The ironist, unlike the realist, does not believe that the credibility
demonstrated by certain beliefs is granted by their different relation
with a presumed reality. Rather, he trusts certain beliefs to have a more
remarkable authority since we are not willing to challenge them: they
are necessary to our form of life because they are very useful and are
largely agreed upon. Rorty considers the realist charge of being of the
same species as the relativists absolutely unacceptable. It is not true
that everything is relative, insofar as there are alternatives to our cultural perspective so distant from our own way of thinking that we
cannot even seriously consider them. In the spirit, if not in the letter of
On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, one might affirm that in
giving up the dualism of scheme and content one does not give up the
world but only the presupposition that what makes our opinions true is
their correspondence to reality rather than to history and language.
Rorty thus wishes for his argument to be recognized as a form of
ethnocentrism. His intent is not the relativization of truth but its
banalization: the snow is indisputably white if the proposition the
snow is white is true for the particular historical linguistic community
in which we find ourselves speaking.21
For Rorty, the ironist is convinced that anything can look good or
bad depending on how it is redescribed. Accordingly, she keeps
placing the vocabularies which she does not approve in a negative light
so that her proposal to switch vocabularies becomes more seducing
and less indecent. She is substantially a parasite who devours the great
texts of the philosophical tradition, nibbling and chewing on them
13
14
15
What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than
reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for
speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of
cultural change.26
16
rather than the distant in space, for time is the means through which
spirits influence each other.
The poet is terrorized by the fear that the tradition has been
implanted so deeply in him as to deny him any possibility of differing
from how he is. This anxiety does not derive from perceiving some
worldly beings as fearsome. Rather, the absorption in worldliness
provides precisely the means of turning away, getting distracted, from
anxiety. The peculiarity of the anxiety of influence is that the only
entities that are truly threatening, those that provoke anxiety and not
just fear, are those who share our mode of Being. The threatening
character belongs, therefore, not to things (res extensa), but to thinking
spirits (res cogitans) since they are of our own genre. We flee away
from others of our own kind because we fear we will become just like
them. We do not want to be to put it with Heideggers Being and Time
as they are.
Bloom argues that the faces by which the poet feels threatened are
those of the great authors of the past. Since writing has acquired the
symbolic meaning of coitus as an act which consists in allowing a
fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper28 the fear is
of insemination by the liquids spilled into the muses of Poetry. Having
conquered the Muses with their creations, traditions strongest poets
cast their spell on us, obliging us to speak with their voice, to persist in
their language, to live in their vocabulary. The capacity of foretelling
the future Poets were properly called divine in the sense of diviners,
from divinari, to divine or predict29 would have, in fact, granted
them the authority to rule us in the present. And the threatening
character of the ghosts from the past grows with the Muses age. This is
because the more time that passes from the birth of poetry, the more
plausible is the assumption that such a literary genre has exhausted its
task; that all which needed to be said has been said. If one arrives five
hundred years after Shakespeare, it is not likely that Calliope would still
be available. With so many suitors already taken and deceived, among
so many flirts she whored with as Bloom says30 why should I be
special for her? The presence of other poetical egos wounds the young
authors narcissism since his uncontaminated solitude is disturbed by
the discovery that he is not alone, and even less that he is not the one.
Broadening the scope of Blooms inquiry, transforming his theory of
poetry into a theory of poiesis, Rorty claims that not only the poet, but
anyone engaged in a poiein, in a production, in the activity that aims to
posit an unexpected event, is terrorized by the demon of belonging to
the continuum of history. Modern mans fear is to be belated, to have
come afterwards, to have been thrown in that bankruptcy of time in
which no original task can be undertaken because debts have imposed
themselves as unclearable.
Thus the expression poet should refer to all those men (such as
17
Rorty insists that language is the privileged means through which the
past enforces its aggression. The vocabulary inherited from tradition
can be conceived as a vast cemetery haunted by ghosts. If one cannot
allow oneself to be possessed by such spectres, then one needs to forge
a language capable of liberating oneself from the eternal return of the
same. It is impossible to break out of the language in which we are
contained, as much as it is impossible to step outside of our skins.32
But we can still choose whether to leave our skin untouched or to
modify it according to our will. If we are terrorized by the angst of
being influenced by the spectres of language possessing us, we have to
elaborate strategies to exorcize them. The intention of the maker is to
create his own language, a language which would free him from being
the heir of any tradition. As Bloom would put it: he wants to be his own
father.
The original sin, whose burden some men feel, is to be, from the
very moment of conception, indebted. As Nietzsche suggests in the
second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the feelings of guilt and
shame connected with this debt have their mundane origin in the most
ancient and original relationship between people: the relation between
seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. One feels guilt (Schuld) if one
cannot settle the debts (Schulden) incurred with others.33 Rorty, following Nietzsche, believes that it is through poetic creation that such
indebtedness can be overcome: the poet is he who owns himself, he
who has liberated himself from every mortgage and thus owes nothing
to tradition. If one could switch from this is how I was thrown to this
is how I throw myself, the bills of the past would be paid off and no
jury could pass a verdict of guilty. Redemption is not a matter of
reproducing a past model; redemption is the creation of something
radically original. One is saved if an absolute new future is instituted.
18
19
They were going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature of
reality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would thereby
inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not
ourselves. They would exhibit the stamp which had been impressed on all of
us.35
It is true that we are all mortals, yet we are not all mortals in the same
manner. Some people, instead of politely following the rules of traditional language, challenge the continuity of time and try to make new
metaphors break out.
20
21
22
23
Rorty believes that the truth of a story should not be evaluated on the
basis of how much such a narrative reflects a presumed reality existing
before the recit. It must be evaluated on the basis of its capacity to make
the future arrive. Bloom defines this sort of relation with the past as a
form of misreading: every historical redescription is a misreading, an
aberration, since it is the attempt to walk away from our common
understanding and open a new horizon towards which moving. Central
to the activity of giving an account of a fact, is the moment of application: to remember is to donate a sense that enables the possibility of
the present to become otherwise. The stories told about the past are
meant to clear the debt that binds one to it. Thus, every revisionism is a
perversion since its appearing is a protest against the alleged naturality of standard historiography. As art and metaphor, ironist theorizing was born as clinamen, as an unexpected detour from normal
history: the young thinker throws himself on the vocabulary of his
authoritative precursors, he devours them to the point of imposing on
them a deficiency in which he can find space to say something original.
The redescribed tradition looks like a sequence of self-liberating caricatures, for only by demonstrating that the past has failed, can one
believe there is still a mission to accomplish in the present. The Muse
did not give herself to anybody else: chaste and pure, she waited so
long for me to come.
The past of the ironist is constituted by that literary genre which
attests, with a straight face, the existence of a vocabulary that no
redescription will ever alter, of a language so sacred that it is immune
to irony. Shaped within the tradition of metaphysics, ironists are bound
to it by an uncanny familiarity. They know they are products of traditional philosophy, but at the same time they are somehow foreign to it
as well. Thus, ironists feel the need to understand the will to truth
(their past) without becoming a victim of its fascination. If they manage to avoid being caught in the compulsion to repeat possibilities
already lived by others, they might escape from the rules of the home
and autonomously construct new laws for thinking.
The ironists new history of philosophy shows that the attempts to
invent a final vocabulary are just clever and historically determined
ways of substituting worn metaphors with original ones. When Heidegger wrote that there is truth only as long and as far as Dasein exists,
he meant (or for Rorty, should have meant) that truth depends on
humanity, not on something that stands independently from it. Truth
24
25
26
It is now the moment to answer the question which opened the first
section of the present chapter: what determines the existence of philosophy as a discipline and as a faculty? According to Rorty, it is neither
a methodology, nor a privileged relation with things. It is not even a
circumscribed and homogeneous set of epistemological topics. Philosophy, by being just one of the many literary families of modernity,
cannot assume to be the only sector of culture that lets us rigorously
grasp the unseen presuppositions of positive sciences. Philosophers
are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects or
methods but in the family resemblance way in which latecomers in a
sequence of commentators on commentators are connected with older
members of the same sequence.47 In this perspective, one can finally
understand the reasons behind Rortys interest in the work of Jacques
Derrida. Rortys attraction to Derrida an attraction whose first
important signs are two of Rortys essays from the late 1970s48 arises
from the firm belief that the Jewish-Franco-Algerian philosopher allows
us to recognize the continuity of the philosophical tradition from Plato
to Heidegger, and thus to read philosophy as a kind of family romance.
What still links Heidegger to the metaphysical family is a certain passion for light.
In the final pages of Differance, in what has by now become a
famous passage, Derrida, confronting The saying of Anaximander,
tracks the ambiguity which organizes the questions posited by Heidegger and destines him to be placed in Platos light. Heideggers
movement stems from the desire to respark the fire of a purely proper
and appropriate language; a flame which might illuminate the path for
thinkings nostalgic return to its lost native country: Greek logos.49 Such
27
28
Heidegger was not satisfied with dismantling the authority of philosophys heritage by historicizing it. He hoped that on the ruins produced
by his destruction of tradition, a totally other construction could be
erected; something not only different from the usual house of philosophy, but also more authentic. The authority of metaphysical presence was surely deconstructed, but only in order to affirm the
sovereignty of thinkings possible future, that is to say, of its past.
As Derrida concludes, Heidegger was guided by a kind of reevaluation and revalorization of the essence and dignity of man, which
culminated in his effort to restore a natural nearness of man with that
which an authentic vocabulary unveils.52 Derrida suggests that Heidegger was not content with consuming, like a parasite, the grip of
other theories. Rather, he wanted to ground his own discursive edifice
into some kind of authority external to such vocabulary. In a word, for
Heidegger, not every philosophical discourse is equal to another.
Heideggers quest for the forgotten Seinsverstandnis, for the vocabulary
which might properly be called an understanding of Being, attests to
his acceptance that: (1) a particular vocabulary is indeed more
authentic and authoritative than all the others and substantially different in regard to them (i.e., less obfuscated and forgetful); and (2)
proper to man is the possibility of deciding to dwell in such a language,
which is the only one that can serve as a home, custody and final
shelter of the fire of Being. Today, when philosophizing is so barbarous, so much like a St. Vitus dance,53 we can actually save ourselves
from the vortex of philosophical tradition, which pulls us deeper and
deeper, solely by rising up on our feet in the open of a luminous
clearing. Proper to man, his property, is the possibility of erecting
himself and gathering in the light of Being. As Derrida notes in Ends
of man: The near is the proper; the proper is the nearest (prope,
proprius) (p. 133).
Instead of trying to reactivate the original and authentic philosophical fire as Heidegger did, Derrida endeavours to overcome Heideggers problematic completely by revaluing what could not find
place within a philosophical scenario organized by the lust for light.
And it is primarily through the appreciation of writing that Derrida
opposes the photophilia governing the philosophical romance. Now,
what is so offensive in characterizing philosophy as an act of writing?
Philosophers who hold scientists as their models, those who hope
that philosophy might mutate into a rigorous science, are convinced
that putting a theory in writing is an unfortunate necessity. They seek
words so discreet that they will allow a reader to hear the voice of their
writer with perfect isomorphic correspondence and transparency. In
this way, the world will be displayed and explained to the reader. The
fullness of vision will end all need of further clarification; no other
comments, no glosses, no notes will be necessary. Writing is thus
29
30
Derridas texts are footnotes for other footnotes, and each one of these
notes contains many others. There is no original and fundamental
centre around which the various senses of Derridas writing can be
organized. One of the three epigraphs opening Speech and Phenomena is
a passage from Ideas I, which is worth looking at since it gives a good
idea of Derridas complicated style. Here is the scene that Husserl
stages: somebody happens to say something which reminds me of my
last visit to the Dresden painting gallery. Memory teletransports me
into the corridors of that gallery. Before me stands a portrait representing a gallery of paintings. Now I find myself wandering in the
paintings of that gallery. On some of these pictures are epigraphs. I
read them. Who knows where these epigraphs will lead me. For Derrida, we are always in the gallery. There is no memory or promise of the
broad daylights kiss. Contrary to what our desire cannot not want to
believe, the thing itself always withdraws.59
The disappointment that one feels when reading Derridas essays is
due to the fact that his writings do not end with a vision that offers the
things in themselves, nor with a final redescription; rather, they
inconclusively and endlessly relaunch the movement of conceptualization, which coincides as we saw in de Man with the calling
of things with inappropriate names.60 Derridas philosophy is a kind of
writing, for it is not the primary prescription or the prophetic
annunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination.61 It
31
brackets the dream of one correct way of interpreting things and texts.
As Differance announces:
There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we
must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely
maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the
contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance. (p. 27)
The West has been dominated by the belief that masturbatory praxis
is not only an improper pastime, but also a habit that predisposes one
to a great number of illnesses. Derrida deals specifically with JeanJacques Rousseau, but a broader and still circumscribed account of the
grounding of masturbation as a self-destructive practice would require
much further investigation.64 To give some other examples from
Rousseaus epoch (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), Tissots
Lonanisme, Debrays Hygie`ne et physiologie du mariage, Larousses Grand
Dictionnaire Universel, as well as Proudhon, Mandeville and Littre, all
describe at length the fatal results of the solitary act of pleasure.
Attuned with such a (pseudo)science, Western popular tradition
affirms that the practice of masturbation causes the obfuscation of
sight; it makes young men go blind, making them unable to see how
things really are. Writing, according to some philosophical experts,
provokes the same effects.
32
33
34
where God and man, thought and its object, words and the world meet, we
want speechlessly to say; let no further words come between the happy pair.
Kantian philosopher would like not to write, but just to show. They would
like the words they use to be so simple as to be presuppositionless.72
35
36
37
positions with which the tradition always and continuously tempts us,
but to drive ourselves, finally, toward other passions.
38
The letters which constitute this collection talk about and are the
effects of Derridas desires. They witness a private and personal Streben
that does not necessarily apply to the whole of humanity. While Heidegger ended up trying to ground philosophy on something bigger
than himself, Derrida quite honestly shows that theory is just the product of the contingencies of ones own private life.
The key event in Envois is the discovery of a book on divination by
the medieval chronicler Matthew Paris. What, however, strikes the
author of the postcards and lets just call such a textual persona
Derrida is not the topic of the book, but rather, Pariss illustration
displayed on its cover. The portrait shows two characters: one sits at a
scribes desk writing, while the other, holding up his index, urges the
former from behind. Above the head of the one sitting is written
Socrates, and above the other, plato, with a small p. Derrida goes
crazy over the picture that reverses the canonic story between Plato and
Socrates, and thus decides to acquire an entire stock of this image;
from this love at first sight, he will write only on such reproductions,
using them as postal paper. The relationship with his faraway love is
mediated through the flipside of the Socratesplato postcard.
Derrida fantasizes with his thou about the S-p picture. In fact,
alongside the case of mistaken identities due presumably to the inattentive copyist, something else catches his attention. For no clear
reason, there is a big something (looking a bit like a skateboard)
sticking out from between Socrates rear end and the chair he is sitting
in.80 What is that strange tool that almost stabs Socrates in the back?
Derrida seizes the opportunity to interpret the situation in the most
obscene way. It is an overbearing erected penis that Plato is handling
behind the impotent Socrates.
39
Is this not what happens daily? Are we not always already in the age of
mechanical reproduction? The desire to have children is connected by
Derrida to the Socratic desire to conceive universal, general truths;
both operations are ways to defeat finitude, to leave an indelible trace
of ones self. The illusion of philosophers is that the works they
brought to life will always conform to the intentions of those who
originated them. Behaving as faithful representatives, the texts produced will speak with their authors voice, in their stead. Unfortunately, texts, just like children when they grow up, are not infants
(speechless); they have their own voice (p. 25). If it is true, as Aristotle
suggested, that a man is the father of his books as he is of his children,
then being a father can only mean having the extremely joyful and
painful experience of the fact that one is not the father that a son or
daughter is someone one does not answer for, or who answers for
themselves, who can speak for themselves.82 Texts and children always
end up being, in one way or another, parricides because they are truly
alive only when they put in question the authorial sovereignty of the
father. In this perspective, one can affirm that writing is a matter of
being exposed to death, for the texts signed off will travel without any
regard for their authors original will. Once they are gone one has no
control over them. Derrida is conscious of the fact that without the risk
of dying, there would be no writing. Yet, accepting the temporary
nature of any author and authority, he decides not to do anything to
prevent the works he signs, sends, addresses, from turning against
himself. Of course such a decision is killing Derrida, but it would be
worse otherwise.83 Worse than death for Rorty would be to give in to
the male desires with which the philosophical tradition is tempting
Derrida.
40
41
42
43
from school at the age of eleven for being Jewish (p. 87). To that
wound, dated 1942, Derrida ascribes his inability to distinguish
between the materiality of the empirical I and the ideality of the
transcendental ego. The ambient of culture, of theory, of knowledge,
was not alien to the concreteness of Europes and little Jacquess history. Envois, like Circumfession, expresses the necessity to show that
it is always an I, this I, who writes, thinks, in a determinate place, on
a specific occasion.
For metaphysics, the date on which a thought was elaborated, its
hour, its place, its language, the mood and the gender of the one who
conceived it, all these aspects belong to the sphere of the inessential
and of the frivolous. The imposition of a distinction between the
transcendental ego that philosophizes and the empirical I interested
in the world implies that one can ascend from the worldly and banal
reign of idiosyncratic factuality to the transcendental heaven of
essential meanings and truths. But Derrida, instead of describing Geists
trip in search of Absolute Knowledge, is interested in a phenomenology of Witz which tries to remember and preserve everything (signifiers, contingency, language) metaphysics considered of little
account. As he puts it in A Taste for the Secret: philosophy, or academic
philosophy at any rate, for me has always been at the service of this
autobiographical design of memory (p. 41).
Derrida does not claim to say something about things, Being,
humanity, the West. He is only speaking for himself and for those who
had a past analogous to his. Just like anybody else in his daily practice,
he tries to rewrite his past in order to open new paths for the future.
Philosophical praxis is thus privatized inasmuch as it is shown that the
theorein, brought back to the horizon of love, is never disinterested, but
always contaminated by the desires that every narrative for being
oriented towards the moment of application chases. The dirty Jew
(p. 38) of Spanish origin from Algiers with fantasy and effort has elaborated a new manner of writing and thinking of philosophy. What is
the purpose of writing in such a way? None, if we expect from philosophy answers and demonstrations. A lot, if, sharing some of Derridas
experiences, especially his tensions of desire, his o`rexis, the books he
read, we consider somehow relevant the problem of how to leave
metaphysics behind. By creating a new canon, Derrida is able to forge
the tools to circumvent philosophy, to navigate around its coasts without
running aground on them. Of metaphysics, Derrida made a compendium, treating it allusively and carelessly.
Rorty often recalls a certain passage from Heidegger. He approvingly
quotes it also in a note from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity defining it
as the slogan of ironist theorizing:
44
Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome
metaphysics. Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave
metaphysics to itself.90
Chapter 2
In 1989, Richard Rorty commented that for years a quarrel had been
simmering among the American admirers of Derrida: On the one side
there are the people who admire Derrida for having invented a new,
splendidly ironic way of writing about the philosophical tradition. On
the other side are those who admire him for having given us rigorous
arguments for surprising philosophical conclusions. 1 The first
skirmishes had already broken out at the beginning of the 1980s. For
example, Jonathan Culler perhaps the Jonathan who staged the
encounter between Derrida and the Socratesplato postcard in
Envois2 declared that using the term Derridadaism to label Derridas work is a witty gesture by which Geoffrey Hartman blots out
Derridian argument.3 Defending Hartmans light-hearted tone, Rorty
deemed Cullers interpretation of deconstruction as too old-fashioned
to grasp Derridas originality. Either Derrida is a rigorous thinker,
someone who has complied with the argumentative procedures of
philosophy and thus proved his conclusions to be right, or he has
altogether distanced himself from the philosophical machismo which
inspires the quest for accurate representations.4 In a manner of
speaking, one cannot have both: the choice is between becoming a
woman by betraying the norms of tradition, or staying a man by
arguing rigorously. It should by now be clear that femininity is the
quality that Rorty appreciates the most in Derrida.
46
By the time that Rorty released Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity one
of the smartest and most energetic books in recent contemporary
philosophy the line-ups were pretty clear. Rorty was anxious to
explain why pragmatism and deconstruction might, or should, go hand
in hand. The American Derrideans (Jonathan Culler, Rodolphe
Gasche, Christopher Norris) kept affirming that between deconstruction and pragmatism there could be no we. Some of the American
admirers of Derrida and one wonders why Rorty defines such
admirers American or North American5 when among his primary
references only Culler is from the USA accused Rortys ironist
pragmatization of Derrida as being too frivolous for them, it dismisses
Derridas serious philosophical work by focusing, instead, almost
exclusively on word games, jokes, vulgar allusions and private memories. According to Culler, thinking of deconstruction as a protest
against the serious claims of classic philosophy would mistake it for a
playful celebration of the irrational and unsystematic. Pragmatism, as
Norris argues, would reduce philosophy into a species of applied
rhetoric.6 In Rortys opinion, deconstruction and pragmatism should
in fact work together to blur the distinction between literature and
philosophy and advocate the idea of a text that is not interested in
determining its own genre but only in producing effects. After all,
Derrida himself suggested that genres should not go unmixed. But
philosophy is not just a kind of writing, nor can it simply be circumvented. For this reason as the American Derrideans argued
according to Rortys self-understanding of the debate deconstruction
deserves more seriousness than Rorty is willing to concede it.
Yet it would be ungenerous to define Rortys interpretation of Derrida as a case of misreading (Norris) or misunderstanding (Gasche),
for he is well aware that a serious philosophical endeavour is somehow
present in Derrida. The first pages of the chapter dedicated to Derrida
in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity make it clear that Derridas earlier
works legitimate Gasches (quasi-)transcendentalizing account of
deconstruction. Nonetheless, the problem with The Tain of the Mirror is
that, in order to function, it needs to overlook Derridas latter work.
Gasche himself admits that his book, aiming to expose the essential
traits and the philosophical thrusts of deconstruction, is based on
Derridas production prior to 1979.7 As a matter of fact, Gasches
selection excludes not only The Post Card (first published in 1980), but
also Glas (first published in 1974). Despite recognizing the limitation
of his book, Gasche still insists that the motifs found in earlier works
continue to inform and direct Derridas more playful texts. Yet
such playful texts declared to fit easily in the reading protocol of The
Tain of the Mirror do not even appear in the books bibliography. This is
no mere oversight: once one suggests that these playful texts are primarily the application of infrastructures discovered in the first phase
47
48
49
linguistic entities, how the world gear moves the language gear. If one
were able to do so, one could finally justify a belief by exhibiting its
extratextual conditions. However, it is impossible to explain the way in
which the world provokes the words we use to talk about it. Unfortunately, as Davidson puts it, no thing makes sentences and theories true:
not experience, not surface irritations, not the world, can make a
sentence true.12
Davidson suggests that our beliefs can be justified only on the basis
of other beliefs, and our propositions on other propositions. The
probatory vectors do not run vertically from the mind to the world but
they redirect us horizontally to other mind products. Therefore Derrida, to be coherent with his own anti-transcendental therapy, cannot
profess that the structures he introduced on the philosophical scene
have a dignity which other metaphors lack. He cannot silently enforce
the presupposition that certain special non-words are somehow able
to mirror something beyond and behind the propositional truths,
something that is not already textual. But if the structure is already
textual which for Rorty means historical, contingent, exposed to
falsification, in one word, finite it cannot avoid being recontextualized and transformed into a totally different infrastructure. Any
structure that is in fact marked by finitude must imply the possibility of
becoming other than itself. For this reason, Derrida cannot state that
any discursive formation (present, past or future) necessarily works on
the ground of differance. Only by being the God-like entity which one
cannot be, would it be possible to lay such a general claim. Yet, in a
certain sense, it is not wrong to understand Derridas metaphors as
infrastructures. For sure, they are the conditions of the possibility of
deconstruction, the devices that allowed its discourses to be produced.
Without them, Derrida would not be who he is. But in order to be
consistent with the Davidsonian intuition that any level of meaning
must be language-like,13 that no magic language or name can ever be
proper and final, Derrida has to dismiss the belief that there exists a
hidden logical space from where to anticipate the structure of any
possible utterance. Instead of foreclosing what might be, of offering
transcendental insights on the conditions for the possibility of Being as
such, Derrida should be content in playing with the vocabularies he
finds on his way in order to keep the future coming the only beyond
he should take care of. Derridas need to find new metaphors once his
current ones lose their poignancy suggests that he is less interested in
systematizing the structure of the real, in showing the infrastructures
which ground it, than in shaking it up in order to promote its afterwards. Given this interest, Rorty concludes that Derrida should be
satisfied with having given a response to the tradition that is influential
to the present of philosophy. A response and not the response because,
50
51
The tolerance which enables Rorty to grant Derrida the right to say
whatever he wants to, actually anesthetizes deconstruction into an
52
53
the inquisitor who burns books, and sometimes even their authors, is
more respectful of their theses than the ironist in the contingent,
solidaire and ironic republic of ideas.19 However, it is clear that Rortys
reading is too quick to grasp deconstruction without betraying its spirit.
As Derridas comments quoted above reveal, he is explicitly resistant
to the kind of interpretation Rorty proposes of his work. Derrida is not
at all happy about the theoretical ascetism to use a fortunate
expression coined by Gasche in referring to Ernst Tugendhat20 with
which Rorty labels him.
Is it not too generous to assume that Derrida, at a certain point of his
philosophical career, starts avoiding the urge for transcendentality and
confines his thought to a propositional and linguistic conception of
truth? Is it true that Derrida moves in a hermitage sheltered from any
theoretical and transcendental temptation? Does he actually stop
referring to the public world and take refuge in a post-philosophical
and post-transcendental privacy? In order to answer these questions, it
will not suffice to rely on Derridas reaction. The only way of judging
the validity of Rortys interpretation is by paying close attention to what
happens in Derridas texts.
54
55
cannot simply say that autobiographies speak about real events and real
people. And if it does accurately represent real events and real people, if
it is not literature, that poses an even bigger problem for Rorty
because he cannot any longer maintain that with Envois Derrida has
distanced himself from any desire of mimetic referentiality, of truth
and representation. Briefly, one of the problems with Rortys use of
Envois is that the difficulties of defining the genre of autobiography
undo his attempt to distinguish a referential (philosophical) and a
post-referential (literary) Derrida.
The genreless Envois i.e., the impossibility of deciding about its
real meaning, of knowing what the postcards refer to, who they are
from, to whom they are destined, if they are genuine letters or just
parodies of the epistolary diary, if they are philosophy or literature is
also marked by the fact that the stream of writing is often interrupted
by fifty-two blank spaces. Derrida uses such a sign, such an absence of
signs, to indicate that part of the correspondence has been destroyed.
The eroded surface might either hide a proper name, just punctuation
marks or even the text of one or more letters. Reading the postcards,
one should be aware of the fact that the secrets hidden by the blank
spaces will always be kept unsolved. And for this very reason, one
should give up the impatience of the bad reader (p. 4): the presumption of knowing what the text is all about. When we read the
postcards, we are never sure if we should take them seriously, if they are
jokes or if they are symbols to decipher. The postcards bear witness to
their secrecy: exposed to the indiscreet eyes of curious postmen, and
yet remaining intrinsically illegible. Derrida writes that he himself has
forgotten the secret code which governed the erasing.
9 May 1979
. . . The secret of the postcards burns the hands and the tongues it
cannot be kept, q.e.d. It remains secret, what it is, but must immediately
circulate, like the most hermetic and most fascinating of anonymous and
open letters. I dont cease to verify this. (p. 188)
56
57
French was becoming the mother tongue of Algeria to the point that
Arabic in the lycee was taught as an optional foreign language. Arabic: a
foreign language one might choose among others (English, Spanish,
German; Latin was required). In Algeria, French, which came from far
away, not autochthonous but imported by an intimidating Paris,
dominated the scene of culture. The home called Algeria depended on
the super-home that was France; a mother on another mother; a
metropolis, Algiers, on the authentic mater-polis, Paris. At school, one
would have learned by heart Frances history and geography, the
names of every districts capital and all of its rivers. But not a word
about Algeria, not a single note on its history and its geography,
whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany and the Gironde estuary
with our eyes closed (p. 44). To understand Derridas problematic
relation to France better, we should also recall that in 1943 under
Petain, with an occupation that did not even bring to Algeria a single
German uniform, the government revoked French citizenship from
Jews, citizenship granted to them but not to Muslim Algerians by the
Cremieux Decree of 1870 with the aim of assimilating them to
Frenchness.
Growing up in the colony, in the dimension organized around a
spectral centre located elsewhere, Derrida recognizes the impossibility
of belonging without doubts or dissonance to any country, to any
homeland, to any language. He does not claim that another nation or
community, a different existing symbolic place would make him feel
more at home and at ease. On the contrary, Derrida suggests that the
production of speaking individuals from mute infants always and
inevitably involves a violence, and that the identification with a certain
language and the nation it represents is thus the effect of a constitutive
dressage. No one is ever a native or a native speaker because no nation
and no language can ever claim to have a natural right over a certain
land. Language does not naturally grow on a piece of land. It is never
autochthonous but always imported. That is why the mother tongue
should not be considered a natural mother at all.29 Derrida, in fact, is
not linked to French by some sort of an organic connection. He had to
learn how to speak it. He was trained to act as if it were natural to
speak such determined language. If French were innate, Derridas
mother would not have had to teach it to her speechless son. But since
the earth does not have a nomos, a linguistic second nature to use a
term common to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche had to be imposed by
Georgette on her little Jackie.
So, how can French belong to Derrida and thus Derrida to France
if such a primary property (the property over a language) had been
assigned to him by external authorities? His own origin assumes the
configuration of an alien colonization. It functions as a ban from the
possibility of speaking a very proper language, of truly being himself.
58
Derrida does not hesitate to affirm that his own linguistic identity
has always been problematic to him because he perceives it not as his
own but as an effect of renvois from elsewhere. 30 Being always already
an other, he declares himself to be incapable of saying without
hesitation je, I.
These are Derridas memories, the anamnesis through which he
attempts to remember, recall and reconstruct why for him French had
always been the language of, and from, the other. However, against
someone like Rorty who would rush to sanction this text as autobiographical, it is important to underscore that Monolingualism of the
Other is not solely a private diary, a memoir neglectful of the philosophical language. In fact, it constantly shifts from autobiographical
remembering to a reflection on the very possibility of writing the self.
The problem Derrida faces is that any account of a contingent and
singular situation, a situation with an exclusively private value, mine,
for example (p. 19), has to be expressed in terms that overcome the
privacy of life. These terms end up attributing a general value to life, a
validity in some way structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological (p. 20). Insofar as it can only be said in the vocabulary that one
was taught no private language is possible every event that can be
told exists only within the horizon of expectations of a mother tongue.
Does not the account of a unique and unrepeatable event such as ones
life fall victim to generality as soon as one talks about it? Does not
public language always contaminate the privacy of memory? Or better,
even before being expressed linguistically, an event, in the very
moment in which it is lived, has a dimension which is not purely private
since one can live experiences (Erleben) only within a linguistic constellation. There is a sort of inertia in the language in which we live,
think and speak, that reduces the event to an example, to a case of
general law, thus denying its private character.
It is evident that Derrida, to give an account of himself, is forced to
use a French vocabulary influenced by Heideggers conceptual web,
especially by the notion of Dasein as the being whose peculiarity is to
be given to impropriety. The contamination of such jargon provokes
the impossibility of writing a pure biography, to live a pure real life
immune to theoretical and universal germs. The confession, I only
have one language; it is not mine, assumes the value of a philosophical
position, a demonstrable truth, simply because it is possible as thought
and statement. One comes to wonder if the personal and private
alienation experienced by Derrida is not the ontic realization of the
necessary and ontological alienation, which does not take away anything from anybody since being situated before and on this side of
any subjectivity, of any ipseity, of any consciousness it is the a priori
condition for the existence of an anybody to steal from. Without such
inalienable alienation, no alienation historically determined would
59
60
White mythology and On an newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy, it will be clearer why Rortys circumvention of philosophy is
impossible to accomplish.
61
Rortys positions are clearly in syntony with Frances sceptical dismissal of philosophy. In fact, he approvingly quotes Polyphilos discourse in a note of Philosophy without mirrors the concluding
chapter of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For France and Rorty,
on the grounds of philosophical systems there is the everyday language
camouflaged as something special. Philosophy would then be nothing
other than the skilful process through which contingent words are
erased of their imprints. In fact, such traces would disclose an
embarrassing connivance with the sensible world that metaphysics
pretends to have surpassed.
The criminal business of philosophy is to make one lose track of its
theoretical coins and peddle them as pure concepts. Worldly productions ascend to the hyperuranium as long as philosophers recycle the
corrupted natural language in theorys heaven. Constitutionally, philosophical culture will always have been an obliterating one.33 It will be
mortuary and mortal because it wears out the vital force of the terrain
on which it originated and, at the same time, acts as if it has no bond
with such a field. Philosophy needs to make its origin disregarded to
succeed in the project in which it is involved. However, the ironist
resists metaphysics conspiracy of silence by reactivating the material
origin of the theories produced by transcendental philosophers. As a
good debunker, he highlights the evidence to nail down philosophy. In
the Crisis, Husserl subjects European sciences to a similar investigation:
to the disciplines that forgot or never knew their limits, those which live
in dreams, one has to show the concrete contingency of their provenance.34 Philosophy (Rorty) and sciences (Husserl) must be challenged
for they do not bear memory of their contamination with the interested
and practical dimension of the life-world. In order to reactivate the
proper meaning of the great products of spirit, one must acknowledge
that ideality has its ground in a non-theoretical approach to the world.
Husserl claims that the meaning-fundament of pure geometry is in
the art of land surveying: if such original meaning-giving practice is
ignored, geometry would be condemned to a perpetual crisis. In a
similar fashion, Rorty tries to rescue philosophy from its disappointing
delusions by recalling that no philosophy can ever succeed. Failure is
inevitable because, whatever precautions one might take, the mark of
the natural world would still block the elevation of the ego beyond lifes
contingencies. It is thus a matter of finding evidences to bring to court,
in a trial before a judge, and remind the suspected discourses in a
Kantian attitude indeed of their genealogy and their grounds.
Metaphysics is charged with being white mans mythology, the mythos
which tries to remove from its logos every sensible stain and consequently rule in the name of Reason.35 Such Western mythology, at least
until the ironists appeared on the scene of history, was able to disguise
itself as candid, just and reasonable.
62
Philosophy is considered the fog, the sad veil shrouding the living
meaning of life. But now the time is right for the veil to fall, for life to
expose its full productivity. Rorty appreciates Derrida exactly for
exhibiting life-world as the source of the meaningfulness of his envois.
Deconstruction avoids the dishonesty of transcendental philosophy
admitting that its ultimate reason, its deepest ground, is in Derridas
own actual life, in the concreteness of his unphilosophical being-in-theworld. Growing out of the life of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction
always needs to be conjugated in the first-person singular. Deconstruction for Rorty is the ultimate Lebensphilosophie.36
Rorty uses deconstruction as if it were a ladder built by Derrida to
climb over philosophers claim to speak for a we and to access an
epoch that can serenely accept the idiosyncrasy of any theoretical system. Nevertheless, Derrida had himself already clarified almost forty
years ago in White mythology that the ascetic project of escaping from
metaphysics to inaugurate an afterwards is not feasible. If deconstruction is that which Rorty wishes it to have become in the latter phase of
Derridas career, then deconstruction is impossible.
[L]et us rather attempt to recognize in principle the condition for the
impossibility of such a project. In its most impoverished, most abstract
form, the limit would be the following: metaphor remains, in all its
essential characteristics, a classical philosopheme, a metaphysical concept. (p. 219)
Discourses which look for metaphors (i.e., the trace of natural language) in the philosophical system in order to criticize its legitimacy
are nothing but variations of philosophy itself, since they unconsciously
employ the conceptual outcomes of that very tradition with which they
want to break. As Derrida puts it: metaphor seems to involve the usage
of philosophical language in its entirety, nothing less than the usage of
so-called natural language in philosophical discourse, that is, the usage
of natural language as philosophical language (p. 209). But if pragmatism can menace the system of metaphysics only from within and
not attack it from abroad, one should conclude that every endeavour to
unmask philosophys presumed purity is troubled by a constitutional
aporia. The hermeneutics of suspicion, following Nietzsche, claim that
truths are illusions whose deceptive nature has been forgotten; metaphors which are exhausted and without sensuous power; coins which
have lost their pictures and count now only as pure value, no longer as
coins. But such thoughts are not as weak as they want to be. Acknowledge
your contingency, I will recognize mine, is for Derrida a commandment
complicit, in a deep and constitutive manner, with the history of
metaphysics.37
If one decides for instance on the basis of the belief that metaphors
63
rather than statements determine most of our philosophical convictions38 to detect the metaphors which sign the body of the philosophical. In order to do so, one must first, argues Derrida, produce a
rigorous concept of metaphor, distinguishing its structure from all the
other turns of speech with which metaphor is too often confused
(p. 220). In order to look for metaphors, one must know what a
metaphor essentially is. The problem is that the search for metaphors
is inspired by the same desires which organize the very tradition whose
authority one is trying to dismantle. It appears that one cannot speak
about the metaphorical without at the same time reinforcing the rule
of the transcendental. Of course Rorty does not employ the concept of
metaphor produced by the metaphysical tradition, because first of all
as I have argued in the first chapter he tries to get rid of the
dichotomy between the literal and the figural. However, the very
reduction of philosophy to metaphors, which for Rorty equates to the
reduction of theory to life, is a gesture which can occur only within the
bounds of metaphysic. Rortys discussion of the presumed merits of
Envois and Circumfession locates theorys condition of possibility in
the practice from which it stems, showing that any philosophy is an
autobiography. But in doing so, Rorty himself gets involved in philosophys business.
The critiques I am directing against Rortys pragmatism, as one
might have already figured out, are inspired by de Mans account of
Nietzsches rhetoric of persuasion. The point de Man makes is that
Nietzsches overcoming of the distinction between philosophy and
literature is based on his deconstruction of the principle of noncontradiction. According to Nietzsche, the axioms of logic cannot be
said to adequate to reality. To claim so, one would need to know reality
before logic schemes adequate to it. For this reason, one should
conclude that the principle of non-contradiction contains no criterion
of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as
true.39 The problem with this claim is that while it ultimately suggests
that logic is not grounded on the correspondence to reality but on
pragmatic reasons, at the same time, it proposes an irrevocable conclusion on what logic really is. As de Man comments in Allegories of
Reading: The text deconstructs the authority of the principle of contradiction by showing that this principle is an act, but when it acts out
this act, it fails to perform the deed to which the text owed its status as
act (p. 125).
Rorty is well aware of the risks of inconsistency in arguing that
constative language is not really a constatation but rather a performance. The second note of his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity states
that Nietzsche (along with Derrida) is liable to the charges of selfreferential inconsistency, for he infers from the premiss truth is not a
matter of correspondence to reality the conclusion what we call
64
truths are just useful lies. Yet all the critiques Rorty directs against
transcendental philosophy are clearly informed by the Nieztschean
intuition that redescriptions do not mirror meaning but, rather, they
institute it. In other words, Rorty bases his arguments on the very
inference which he previously discarded as generated by confusion.
Just eight pages after stating that Nietzsche is inconsistent in claiming
to know what he himself claims cannot be known i.e., the truth on
truth Rorty buys without hesitation Nietzsches reversal of Platonism,
declaring that his own account of intellectual history chimes with
Nietzsches definition of truth as a mobile army of metaphors.40
Rorty accuses Nietzsche and the bad Derrida of poaching. They
hunt in the terrain which they previously prohibited and declared out
of bounds. The irony is that Rorty himself cannot help but commit the
exact same crime. The entirety of Rortys work is in fact studded with
definitions of truth. Let me give another example of such self-referential inconsistency. In an earlier essay, Rorty states: truth is simply the
most coherent and powerful theory, and no relation of correspondence to reality need[s] to be invoked to clarify true or knowledge.41 The point is that since Rorty is incapable of avoiding a
hidden reference to something extratextual here, power or coherence he ends up playing the very part he denounced in Nietzsche and
Derrida. He wears the costume of a bandit who traffics in transcendental presupposition, precisely what he has banned and forbidden.
Rortys most elaborate attempt to defend himself against the charge
of inconsistency is to be found in his review of Geoffrey Benningtons
Derridabase the essay floating above Derridas Circumfession. By
reconstructing the movement of White mythology, Bennington argues
that an etymological critique of philosophy which tries to bring abstract
notions back to the sensory and a-philosophical world is grounded on
the persuasion that philosophical discourse, in its apparent seriousness,
is merely forgotten or worn-out metaphors, a particularly gray and sad
fable, mystified in proposing itself as the very truth.42 Since Rorty
admits to thinking of philosophy in exactly those terms, and even if
Bennington does not mention him in this passage, Rorty feels compelled to defend his pragmatist account of philosophy as a gray and sad
fable against the charge of being self-refuting, of being closer to Kant
than it realizes. It is obvious in fact that the point Bennington makes
about Habermas and Foucault also concerns Rorty. The critique of
transcendental discourse in the name of the concrete realities of life
would be unconsciously Kantian because, quite simple, such a discourse puts life in the transcendental position in regard to the transcendental itself.43 The law of the transcendental contraband consists in
this: the act of claiming to have turned the page on transcendental arguments,
silently turns back to them. So, while Rorty denounces the transcendental
as a grey and sad fable, the structure of his argument restores it.
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66
how Rorty can approve Deweys empirical inquires into the causal
conditions of certain actual events namely, the uses of certain words in
certain ways, the origins of certain terms around which certain social
practices crystallized (p. 334, emphasis added). Are events really something actual? Are they something at all? And most importantly: can
Rorty reintroduce the reference to the origins of certain language
games without also betraying the refusal of the dualism between beings
and representations? As Charles Guignon and David Harley might
suggest: the whole notion of objects and their causal powers existing
distinct from and independent of our ways of speaking and giving
reasons should be ruled out by Rortys position.45
In the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty insists that
pragmatists are with regards to transcendental argument in the same
position that nineteenth-century secularists were with regards to God:
it is less a matter of whether God and transcendence exist as facts or as
products of human mind, than about finding the means to avoid the
vocabulary of theology and philosophy. Alternatively, in Derrida and
the philosophical tradition, while embracing Feuerbach and Deweys
positions, Rorty clearly goes for sociological explanations of philosophy, as Bennington would call them.46 This is how Rorty comments on
Circumfession:
The effect of Circumfession is to rub ones nose in the fact that all the
quasi-transcendental, rigorous philosophizing that Bennington describes is
being done by a poor existing individual, somebody who thinks about certain things in certain ways because of certain weird, private contingencies.
(p. 347)
It is true that Derrida highlights the fact that the philosopher is always
an empirical, factual ego; that philosophy is always occasioned and
occasional. But, if I am not mistaken, he never suggests that one thinks
in certain ways about certain things because of the contingencies of
private life that one happened to experience, nor that philosophical
concepts are the result of some odd episodes in childhood or of
uncommon form of obsessional neurosis.47 To mark ideas with a date
and a place does not coincide with reducing texts and theories to mere
effects of such a date and a place. Contaminating philosophy with what
has always been considered its other does not equate to circumventing philosophy.
All the attempts to unsettle philosophy from some regional domain
(sociology, psychology, or economy for instance) are as self-contradictory as scepticism because, says Bennington in Derridabase, they
can only replace in the final instance something which will play the
part of philosophy without having the means to do so (p. 283). While
attempting to criticize deadly transcendental discourse in name of the
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living reality of life, they only confirm the power of the distinction
between actual phenomena and transcendental laws, the particular
and the general, the conditioned and the unconditional. To put it even
more directly: they reinforce the authority of philosophical conceptuality. The reduction of philosophy is reduced once again to
philosophy. In fact, without an account of the structural bond between
philosopheme and theorem, between the conceptualization that
belongs to the philosophical discourse and that of other logoi, one is
doomed to transform the alleged transgression of philosophy into an
unnoticed fault within the philosophical realm. Empiricism would be
the genus of which these faults would always be the species. Transphilosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical
navites.48
The different value that Derrida and Rorty attribute to real life
clearly emerges if one confronts Derridas autobiographical writings
to Rortys. In Trotsky and the wild orchids an essay from his Philosophy and Social Hope which I will discuss at length in the next chapter
Rorty treats his own childhood passions as the unquestioned cause of
his entire philosophical position. By contrast, Derrida, in the Monolingualism, states that deconstructions first interest relies on the critique of the axiom of purity, that is, the critique of the presumed
existence of something like a simple and pure origin:
the first impulse of what is called deconstruction carries it toward this
critique of the phantasm of the axiom of purity, or toward the analytical
decomposition of a purification that would lead back to the indecomposable simplicity of the origin. (p. 46)
While Rorty tries to shed himself of all the philosophical veils in order
to rip the curtain aside and grasp the reality beyond it, Derrida more
cautiously affirms that the recit produces the memory of something that
perhaps never was. The history he tells has never happened as such.
Tracing the traces of the phantasmatic events of his childhood, an as
if history is produced. In the epilogue of Monolingualism, Derrida
unequivocally states in fact that the book should not be considered as
the beginning of a future autobiography. The book does not expose
Derrida; it gives an account of the obstacles preventing auto-exposition. The ultimate unveiling cannot take place so the truth of what I
have lived: the truth itself beyond memory is always to come (p. 73).
The paths followed in the attempt to write a genealogy of what did not
happen were surely influenced by Derridas Judeo-French-Maghrebian
background (p. 61). But the account of his individual journey can exist
only within the bounds of the philosophical language and culture into
which he came to be exiled (p. 71). Hence, giving an account of
oneself is never a private act. On the contrary, it is a gesture which is
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always haunted by the spectres of philosophical conceptuality. Derridas genealogy does not lead to the discovery of his original self, to who
he was before philosophy and who he could be after it. As Foucault
puts it, the effect of genealogy is to recognize the fact that countless
spirits dispute the possession over our own selves.49 But such recognition and Derrida notes this with a force hardly found in Foucault
cannot avoid the veils weaved by metaphysics. It is precisely in discussing Foucaults enterprise that Derrida, already affirmed in 1963
(maybe for the very first time) the impossibility of purely bypassing
philosophy.50
In his review of Foucaults The History of Madness, a book admirable
in so many respects, powerful in its breadth and style (p. 31), Derrida
underscores that Foucaults project is to evade the force which would
trap any writing about madness in the policing language of reason.
Foucault does not want to write the history of madness caught in the
nets of classical reason. He aims to write a history of madness itself, to
hear its scream before it got silenced in the discourses that were produced around it. According to Derrida, the obstinate determination to
avoid the ambush of the restraining and restrained language of reason,
is at once the most seductive, audacious and maddest aspect in
Foucault.
All our European languages, the language of everything that has participated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason all this is the
immense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the rubric of
capture or objectification of madness. Nothing within this language, and no
one among those who speak it, can escape the historical guilt if there is
one, and if it is historical in a classical sense which Foucault apparently
wishes to put on trial. But such a trial may be impossible, for by the simple
fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly
reiterate the crime. (p. 35)
The case against metaphysics that Foucault prepares for trial appears as
brave as unwary. His will to bypass reason to contourner la raison
in Derridas French is as uneasy as Rortys determination to circumvent metaphysics. A similar point was made in 1980 in On a newly
arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy.51 Derrida gave this lecture,
contemporary with Envois, at the first Cerisy-la-Salle encounter
dedicated to his work. This seminar in particular, organized by JeanLuc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was to start with The ends
of man, an essay introduced by Foucaults announcement that the end
of man was perhaps near.52 In his address, Derrida reflected upon the
tonality of the verdicts on philosophys end. Laden with euphoria, they
announce that it will not be too long before the liberating disappearance of philosophy from the world. Such discourses want us to
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believe that the end of the old world and a new beginning are near;
that the coming of a world not mystified by philosophys grey fable is
imminent. The veils will fall and the real world will expose itself.
Eschatology seems to be the Stimmung shared by the different variations on the theme the death of philosophy. And every turn of discourse launches itself into a surplus of eschatological eloquence
(p. 145).
Derrida urges to take note of the fact that an apocalyptic tone is not
something which newly emerges sometime and somewhere in philosophy. The apocalyptic tone does not happen to philosophy, for philosophy as such has always existed only in the horizon of the
apocalypse. Every philosopher has in fact always aspired to be the last
one that is the first, the one who eludes the influence of worn-out
metaphors and succeeds in putting an end to the philosophical nonsense. He who believes to be truthful dwells in the apocalypse, since the
truth stands for the end, for what comes after the final judgement. The
tone of truth would thus always be apocalyptic. Derrida discusses the
example of Kant, whose 1796 On a newly arisen superior tone in
philosophy attacked those who, in a very lofty tone, preached the
death of philosophy in the name of some kind of a supernatural
revelation. But
if Kant denounces those who proclaim that philosophy has been at an end
for two thousand years, he has himself, in marking a limit, indeed the end of
a certain type of metaphysics, freed another wave of eschatological discourses in philosophy. His progressivism, his belief in the future of a certain
philosophy, indeed of another metaphysics, is not contradictory to this
proclamation of ends and of the end. (pp. 1445)
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71
As Gasche suggests: Husserls method of dismantling enables a retrogression to something that cannot in principle be given as such.58
The origins as such in my argument, the contingent and
untheoretical premisses of theory will remain concealed because they
can only be mediated to us by our actual mode of reflection, by our
present language.
It is strange. Rorty does not hesitate calling himself ethnocentric on
the grounds of the belief that it is radically impossible to abandon the
language we speak, the tradition in which we live. Yet at the same time,
he assumes that one can create, without too many difficulties, a vocabulary capable of circumventing metaphysics and reaching an autonomous time before and beyond it. Rortys euphoria euphoria that is
not alien to a certain Foucault is caused by the persuasion of having
found the right way of turning the page on metaphysics and of
accessing the contingent, ironic and solidaire epoch of post-philosophical democracy. This is exactly the opposite of the aporia that
organizes the pace of Derridas work. Euphoria in Greek means easy
solution, easiness, absence of doubt, and it indicates the possibility to
overcome smoothly an awkward situation. If one is in an aporia, one
cannot see the passage which would wriggle out of the fix. There is no
safe exit, no easy escape. One is at an impasse; the path is a dead end.
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73
But this whispered confession does not lead Rorty to a general revision
of his privatization of deconstruction. One would expect at this point a
sincere analysis of the limits of pragmatism and its complicity with
metaphysics. One would hope that Rorty would expand on the passage
I discussed above from the introduction of Consequences of Pragmatism
It is impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to
reach and admit that once philosophy has been defined as the
activity grounded on the transcendental presupposition, on the belief
that some discourses genuinely refer to reality, then it is impossible to
produce a discourse which would not participate in such presupposition. Instead, Rorty changes the topic and puts Derrida under the
spotlight. With a sympathetic attitude, he sort of forgives Derrida for
not being able to forget Plato and Kant after reading them. He concludes that maybe non-Jewish kids who go to school in exotic places
like California or Indonesia, places where few have ever heard of Plato
and Kant, can forget about philosophy and metaphysics, but Derrida
cannot. Derrida cannot. Again, Rorty reduces the impossibility of
overcoming the philosophical order as a idiosyncratic and personal
matter. Far from acknowledging that every argument structurally produces a little apocalypse, he makes it sound as if it were Derridas fault
for not having been able to circumvent philosophy.
The truth is that, as Christopher Norris noted, Rorty counts Derrida
as a useful but suspicious ally, some kind of a half-way pragmatist
having deconstructed a great deal of surplus ontological baggage but
then fallen victim to the lure of his own negative metaphysics or systematized anti-philosophy.62 The point is that no one so far has been
capable of being pragmatist and a-transcendental all the way. In fact,
who is a true pragmatist? No one, according to Rorty. Not even the
founding fathers of pragmatism. Not Dewey, since he fell victim to the
seduction of radical empiricism and panpsychism.63 Not James, who
unfortunately did not confine himself to declaring the quest for a
successful theory of truth as hopeless, but had moments in which he
as Nietzsche tried to infer what the truth consists of. Certainly not
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It would be (too) easy to say that Rorty finds inadequate all the other
critics of the metaphysical tradition in order to be recognized as the
first true and authentic pragmatist/ironist. Yet, he arrives at the point
of admitting that he sounded too much like Carnap in the denounce
of the pseudo-problems provoked by unreal philosophical distinctions
and in the fervent physicalism of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.67 I
hope to have demonstrated that in a certain sense, Rorty has never
stepped away from physicalism. His treatment of Derrida in fact shows
how Rorty tries to reduce Derridas philosophical positions to mere
effects of Derridas physical life. One might be tempted to describe
Rortys pragmatism as a sort of reductive vitalism for he assumes private
life to be the causal origin of any given theory.
Maybe I have not been generous enough with Rorty. Against his
reading, I have suggested that a solid continuity binds Derridas early
and latter works, the apparently more transcendental and the apparently more autobiographical ones. For instance, I have shown that both
White mythology and Monolingualism of the Other, following different
discursive strategies, testify to the incapacity of getting philosophy out
of ones mind, of breaking up with metaphysics and theory. It does not
therefore seem legitimate to claim that there is a first and a second
Derrida, that a Kehre intervened and modified the trajectory of his
75
76
77
78
79
contingency and existence will quietly rest segregated outside the city
walls once their services are no longer needed inside. Nonetheless,
imagination is still haunted by natural cognition. Without an originary
relation with the natural world, fancy would not have at its disposal the
raw material necessary to start the process of eidetic variation. Eidetic
variation needs to labour the empirical data, and thus the spectres of
the empirical will have always and already infected the work of ideation. The logos as reassurance stands against the terror provoked by the
bogeyman, the black man, the adumbration which might disturb the
white domain of the transcendental. Philosophy consists of offering
reassurance to children.73 There is, there must be, an insight not
haunted and stained by naivety. For such reason, Husserl first states
that the insight of that which exists is necessary to essential insight, and
then backs away from the consequences of his statement. In Ideas I, the
third paragraph is sacrificed by the fourth. As Derrida comments in
Platos pharmacy:
The purity of the inside
home against exteriority
essence, a surplus that
untouched plenitude of
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configure itself as the powerful argument that it is. For this very reason,
Rorty claims that philosophy must be forgotten as soon as one is done
using it to overstep the stories of metaphysics. In this impossible
attempt to break away from the structure and the logic of transcendental arguments, Rorty winds up repeating Husserls moves. Husserl
first writes that natural insight and essential insight imply each other,
that one is the condition for the possibility of the other; but then, in
the quick turning of a page, he declares the possibility of reaching
essences without passing through individual perceptions. In the same
fashion, Rorty exploits philosophy to argue against the possibility of
any type of transcendental deduction, and then tries to forget the very
tradition which allowed him to perform his critique of metaphysics. For
phenomenology as for pragmatism, it is a matter of hiding the conditions for the possibilities of their own tricks: the ontic is made to
disappear once the ontological has been reached; philosophy disappears once irony has been installed.
Pragmatism dreams of a time and a language that would have ended
their dependence on all that philosophy has ever stood for. As John
Caputo has argued in On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental:
the case of Rorty and Derrida,74 it is this craving for autonomy which
most distinguishes Rorty from Derrida. Rortys recourse to the feminine pronoun to talk about the ironist (she, the ironist against he, the
metaphysician) is not enough to conceal the fact that his entire project
of self-creation is nothing else than a hypermasculine attempt to erase
the debt that binds every language to the other.75 Instead of admitting
that pragmatism needs transcendental philosophy, at least as much as
phenomenology needs contingency, Rorty thinks he can do better than
Husserl. He thinks he can create a language which would avoid the
influence of what has made it possible in the first place. Or at least,
Rorty hopes it is possible to bag it for disposal.76 Clinging onto a
Romantic metaphysics of the subject, Rorty insists on ignoring that the
debt with the other, the necessity of depending on the other in one
word, heteronomy is not something that happens and thus might be
avoided: it is the constitutive infrastructure of every language, and
therefore, of any existing being.77 As Derrida unmistakably states in the
second part of The Post Card:
The existential analytic of Dasein situates the structure of originary Schuldigsein (Being-responsible, Being-forewarned, or the capacity-to-be-responsible, the possibility of having to answer-for before any debt, any fault, and
even any determined law at all) on this side of any subjectivity, any relation
to the object, any knowledge, and above all any consciousness.78
Rorty cannot not know it, but for this very reason, he needs to forget
about it. He is so at ease in such an embarrassing situation, he declines
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the debt with such a hurried assurance, such an imperturbable lightheartedness, that one asks: if it is so obvious that the debts with
transcendental philosophy have been cleared, then why does Rorty
keep repeating his long finished business with philosophy? Why should
one forget about philosophy if one no longer has anything to do with
it?
Rortys anxiety of being influenced by philosophy is analogous to the
metaphysical anguish of contamination. It is nothing different from
the fear of the other who comes or better, who has always already
come to invade and destroy the possibility of a pure autos. What is in
fact metaphysics if not the craving for an aseptic and immune self, for a
vital body which owes its existence to nothing else than itself? In this
perspective, as suggested by the Anti-Oedipus, let us remember Marxs
great declaration on Feuerbach. He who denies Gods existence does
only a secondary thing, since he denies God in order to put Man in
Gods place. Should we not affirm that Rorty does as well a secondary
thing because he contests the supremacy of external authorities in
order to affirm the authenticity of his own laws? Rorty critiques Heidegger for having claimed that his theory was grounded on something
bigger than himself. Let us call this Europe, the West or History. Yet,
rereading some passages and discreet footnotes, it almost seems that
Rorty is not disappointed with Heidegger for having wanted to be too
much, but for having settled on being too little: a thought which
depends on something else than itself, is not autonomous enough for
Rorty. Authenticity does not consist of opening up to the other, but of
creating ones own system and avoiding dependency on whatever
comes from the other. Freedom from tradition is understood by Rorty
in light of the ascetic category of self-control. To resist the temptation
of acquiring traditional fixations, he needs in fact to master himself
with unfailing skill and severity. The genre of active subject dreamt by
Rorty, and sometimes by Foucault, would not let anything happen to
himself because he is what makes things happen.79
Unfortunately, no one has control over his own erection. Derrida
showed the links between the figure of the phallus and that of the
sovereign in the unpublished sessions of the seminar The beast and
the sovereign. But at the same time, he also argued that since erection
is a reflex, something automatic and independent from ones will, the
ground of manhood is a radical passivity which unworks any dream of
absolute mastery and autonomy. 80 Reacting against the frenzy of
constituting a pure and autonomous self which would not be upset by
the spectres of passivity and heteronomy, Derrida, in his respectful and
inventive reading of philosophys great texts, tried to demonstrate how
all the attempts to construct a close and autarchic totality fail. They fail,
not because an external force intervenes to deconstruct an otherwise
solid structure. Any given system is essentially self-deconstructing, since
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something comical in this movement. Is there not something ridiculous in being forced into this infinite movement up and down which
constantly reminds us that the conditions for the possibility of a phenomenon make such a phenomenon impossible? Is it not ironic that
the discipline we try to get rid of keeps coming back to our hands, in an
annoying Fort and Da? If Destiny (Geschick) keeps repeating itself, if it is
parodized into destinies (envois), it loses the greatness and austerity of
Heideggers. It is banalized and vulgarized; a tragedy becomes a farce.
The attempted elevation of metaphysics appears to be, after Envois, a
fearful and trembling erection.
The silliness of deconstruction is provoked by the fact that the
movement against the possibility of producing a pure transcendental
theory, in its resistance to theory, still produces theory and theories.
This is why deconstruction is at the same time two very different kinds
of jetties or tones, as Rorty would say. On the one hand, there is the
jetty which throws itself forward and backwards without any intention
of erecting, stating or posing anything stable. On the other hand, there
is the movement which tries to produce a system, institutionalizing and
protecting it from violent and new waves. Following Derridas Some
statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms, let us call
the first jetty the destabilizing jetty or even more artificially the devastating
jetty, and the other one the stabilizing, establishing, or simply stating jetty
in reference to the supplementary fact that at this moment of stasis, of
stanza, the stabilizing jetty proceeds by predicative clauses, reassures with
assertory statements, with assertions, with statements such as this is that: for
example, deconstruction is this or that.83
The destabilizing jetty resists the stabilizing one, not since it is against
theory or because it proclaims a theoretical asceticism; but rather,
because it opposes the possibility of building a system, an organized
totality not always and already worked by an underground seism. The
devastating jetty leaps against the possibility of stating a thesis without
doubts, hesitations, uncertainties, and blind points. It does not posit
anything. It just opposes the dreams of a pure transcendence not
contaminated by contingency. However, both paradoxically and predictably, deconstructive attacks settle on producing a number of theorems, theories, thematics, themes, theses which come to shape the
conceptual core of deconstructionism. The resistance is formalized
into a method. The devastating jetty is institutionalized into the stabilizing one. Deconstruction becomes deconstructionism, a school
with its teachable technical rules, procedures, and principles. It creates
fortifications and outposts, networks within the academic world which
are in contrast with other theories, spreads a system, a method, a
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Chapter 3
In order better to understand Rortys attempt to work Kants distinctions between public and private, beautiful and sublime, and to make
them consistent with his own anti-Kantian layout, it is necessary to go
back to the moment in which Rorty realized that public duties and
privates desires cannot be fulfilled by the same language. Everything
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89
was still searching for a language which might make compatible the
sublimity of the orchids with the beauty of the socialist revolution.
After having published in 1979 his first philosophical best-seller,
Rorty slowly began to realize that the pleasures derived from the
satisfaction of private desires are inconsistent with the moral imperative of social engagement. Consequently, he started abandoning the
search for a vocabulary which could resolve the differend between
Trotsky and the orchids. Duties to oneself and duties to others are
destined to be fulfilled in two different and irreconcilable linguistic
spaces, albeit both with the same right to exist. One cannot indulge in
mere hedonism or total militancy. At least two vocabularies are
necessary. To satisfy the galaxy of desires that we are, we need to speak
at least two languages.
Rorty thinks of Sartre and Savonarola as two aberrant examples of
the monolingual attempt to judge human activities on the basis of a
single paradigm. While Sartre criticized Proust as an insignificant
writer and man was insignificant for the struggle against capitalisms
violence, the heretic Dominican condemned art as mere vanity. Proust
was probably irrelevant for the socialist dream, and perhaps it is also
pointless to look for the moral in the artworks that Savonarola censured. Rorty does not discuss this matter. He claims rather that it is
wrong to measure with the meter of political or moral utility, works that
were only produced to satisfy their authors creative urge and promote
recreation for their consumers. Sartre and Savonarola were mistaken
since they evaluated the quest for private autonomy with a language
inappropriate for grasping its ends. Their mistake consisted in
affirming that the private is public. A long quotation from Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity will now provide further clarification of Rortys
position.
Books relevant to the avoidance of either social or individual cruelty are often
contrasted as books with a moral message with books whose aims are,
instead, aesthetic. Those who draw this moral-aesthetic contrast and give
priority to the moral usually distinguish between an essential human faculty
conscience and an optional extra faculty, aesthetic taste. Those who draw
the same contrast to the advantage of the aesthetic often presuppose a
distinction of the same sort. But for the latter the center of the self is assumed
to be the ironists desire for autonomy, for a kind of perfection which has
nothing to do with his relations with other people. This Nietzschean attitude
exalts the figure of the artist, just as the former attitude exalts those who
live for others. It assumes that the point of human society is not the general
happiness but the provision of an opportunity for the especially gifted those
fitted to become autonomous to achieve their goal.4
The proposal to divide books on the basis of the faculties they were
produced by (conscience or taste), cannot be taken seriously by a
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Whereas Habermas sees the line of ironist thinking which runs from Hegel
through Foucault and Derrida as destructive of social hope, I see this line of
thought as largely irrelevant of public life and to political questions. (p. 83)
The results obtained by the Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons or by the
gay awareness actions in which Foucault was involved are witness to his
invaluable influence on contemporary political life. Moreover, Foucault has been a key figure in anti-psychiatric struggles, in student
movements both in the United States and across Europe, and in the
Italian 1977 Autonomia among others. Foucault did not only offer his
thought to the service of micro-physical revolutions and knowledges in
revolt, but he also put his body on the line. It is undeniable that
Foucault is one of the most valuable public intellectuals for post-war
society, so much so that I will focus on the danger of the alibi offered
by Rorty to Derrida. The stakes are clear: instead of opposing Habermass thesis, of highlighting how and why deconstruction is or might
be politically relevant, Rorty reduces philosophy as a whole to an
equivalent of his own private search for wild orchids. After spending so
much time depicting Derrida as a perverse and genial adolescent as
Terry Eagleton put it6 it is easy for Rorty silently to suggest a connection between deconstruction and the passion for wild orchids, the
sexual flowers par excellence. By reducing deconstruction to a private
pastime, Rorty is able to save it from Habermas, but at the same time,
he arrests philosophy to the privacy of personal self-enjoyment, exiled
light years away from any public sphere. Habermas believes that the
critiques of rationality and universality are irresponsible and dangerous
since they oppose the project of finding a social glue able to be a
substitute for religion, a project which can be exclusively grounded on
the Enlightenment concepts of rationality and universality. Thus Derrida would appear as a corrupter of the young and helpless, making
them indifferent to their duties before democracy. In Rortys opinion,
Habermas should not bother blaming post-structuralism since it did
not and cannot have any influence on modern societys public life.
Ironists in search of personal autonomy as Foucault or Derrida are
invaluable for those who are involved in regenerating a private identity
distinct from traditional canons. But they are pretty much useless
when it comes to politics (p. 83). Once again, here is an instance of
that repressive tolerance which Derrida attributes to Rortys defence.
Once it has been skimmed of any political and ethical thrust, what
remains of deconstruction?
One problematic aspect of Rortys thesis is that a clear-cut division
between what is influential in private philosophical circles and what is
relevant in the public domain is difficult to maintain. In Fredericks
century as Kant dubs the Age of Enlightement in homage to
Frederick the Great there were not so many readers with access to the
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another essay from Truth and Progress. In Is truth the goal of inquiry?
Rorty does not defend pragmatism from the charges of being a form of
irresponsible quietism by saying that pragmatism does not have anything to do with politics. Rorty claims that pragmatists should not bow
their heads to those severe critics who think that dismissing the idea of
Truth is rash, nor should they become convinced that the only reasonable thing that philosophy can do is to survey the universals which
shape our form of life. Pragmatists instead should see themselves as
involved in a long-term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common
sense, and the self-image of their community, a community whose
present Rorty believes is structured also, but not only, by Greek
metaphysics.8
In this case, Rortys position seems to coincide with what Derrida
suggests regarding the Socratesplato couple in a postcard dated 6
June 1977:
Do people (I am not speaking of philosophers or of those who read Plato)
realize to what extent this old couple has invaded our most private domesticity,
mixing themselves up in everything, taking their part of everything, and
making us attend for centuries their colossal and indefatigable
anaparalyses?9
Thus, for Derrida and at times even for Rorty one could describe
metaphysics as an axiomatic which is not merely contingent nor purely
necessary, but simultaneously both necessary and contingent. Necessary, because all the attempts to circumvent it have so far failed. Contingent, because we cannot believe there is something fatal or natural
in a vocabulary which forbids us to make it inoperative and thus,
somehow, work our way out of it. We need at once to talk and contest
the vocabulary which snuck out of the walls of academia and contaminating and contaminated by the events it encountered along its
way arrived to shape our mode of being in the world. Deconstruction
and pragmatism are public acts which aim to interrupt such vocabulary, though in order to create a new future rather than, as Heidegger
wanted, to restore the Heraclitean adobe where Gods and humans
once dwelled together.
During a conference in Paris in 1993 on the relationship between
deconstruction and pragmatism, Rorty claimed that what distinguishes
Derrida from those other contemporary continental thinkers, from
Foucault for example (and what is it that makes Foucault the monster
who Rorty has always to condemn?), is that Derrida is a sentimental,
hopeful, romantically idealistic author, someone who believes in the
future and in utopia. Derrida, upon hearing such a statement, jumped
on his chair, and in despair, grabbed his head in his hands. Soon after,
however, Derrida had to admit to himself and to others that Rorty was,
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at least in part, right.10 It is a fact that Rorty was one of the first to point
out the profound promise informing the structure of deconstruction.
Already by 1978, even before the attention to Derridas so-called ethical
turn in 1980s, Rorty argued that Derrida
is suggesting how things might look if we did not have Kantian philosophy built into
the fabric of our intellectual life, as his predecessors suggested how things might look if
we did not have religion built into the fabric of our moral life.11
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stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual
motivation than about shallow and evident greed.13 The leftist turmoil
moved from Social Sciences departments to Humanities buildings; the
public enemy number one was a mental attitude rather than the economical system. People were no longer worried about finding an
alternative to market economy; the one and only true chance was in
the psychic revolution, the liberation of the conscience. The recognition of the otherness of the others, of their difference perhaps even
of their differance is the only way to access the reign of Justice. This is
why, starting from 1968, in the United States, scholarships whose area
of focus are the sacrificial victims of the system (Critical Race Theory,
Womens Studies, Post-Colonialism, Chicano Studies and so forth)
started to blossom.
Rorty acknowledges that the influence of the Cultural Left on academic programs diminished the tolerance to sadism and cruelty
against minorities: The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at
as politically correct has made America a far more civilized society
than it was thirty years ago (p. 81). The act of accusing teachers with
irresponsibility relies on the consciousness that in educating youth,
one is also moulding a future community. School is the one place
where it is harder to separate languages constitutive role and its performativity. And yet, why are (especially) those in the Humanities
labelled as corruptors?
It was already clear to Kant that philosophy as a discipline and as a
faculty could exist only in antagonism with the powers of tradition and
socio-political-cultural conservation. In The Conflict of the Faculties, the
higher faculties, those closer to practical necessities and doing, are
controlled by the government. Thus, they sit in the right wing of the
academic senate, closer to the King, and defend the reasons of the
State. The lower faculty, the faculty of philosophy, is only interested in
and responsible for critique. Philosophy is, or should be, in fact the
place where students are encouraged to doubt every pre-established
truth and to venture into reality with their own light. Conservative and
pro-governmental powers intervene to prevent this emancipation of
minors. Unfortunately, nowadays, the system of policing critique needs
to be attuned to democratic rhetoric. One can no longer rely on good
old methods like censorship and open threats as used for instance by
Frederick William II. One has to find new, more sophisticated and less
evident ways of controlling critical thought. For example, one can limit
the audience of students to which philosophy is offered. Only a certain
type of high school, a certain kind of social group, can access it.
Moreover, the age at which students are exposed to philosophy can be
delayed. And one can revoke funding if, for example, the appointed
Dean to a newly established Southern Californian law school turns out
to be too liberal. The right to philosophy and critical thought is always
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in danger because the attitude favoured by the lower faculty resists the
sovereigns desire to dominate and govern.
For Rorty, unlike liberal-bashing commentators, the problem at
least so it seems at first glance is not that the Humanities are naturally
leftist hubs for social protest. The problem is that the intellectuals from
the Cultural Left have not done enough to help realize the social
reforms necessary for saving the United States from the steady increase
of economic inequality and instability. While the Humanities taught
good feelings and good manners through critical theory, social injustice devoured the American dream: that is the problem.
If husband and wife each work 2,000 hours a year for the current average
wage of production and nonsupervisory workers ($7.50 per hour), they will
make that much [$30,000 a year]. But $30,000 a year will not permit
homeownership or buy decent daycare. In a country that believes neither in
public transportation nor in national health insurance, this income permits
a family of four only a humiliating, hand-to-mouth existence. Such a family,
trying to get by on this income, will be constantly tormented by fears of wage
rollbacks and downsizing, and of the disastrous consequences of even a brief
illness. (p. 84)
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Rorty argues in De Man and the American Cultural Left, by conquering academic departments, the Cultural Left imposed a rewriting
of curricula such that, in a generation or two, the conventional wisdom
inculcated into young Americans will change.14 Deconstruction or
pragmatism can have a positive political thrust, yet the fight against
social injustice does not have to care about the deconstruction of the
metaphysics of presence, or about the circumvention of Platonic
vocabulary.
After all, a lot of such repression is so blatant and obvious that it does not
take any great analytic skills or any great philosophical self-consciousness to
see what is going on. It does not, for example, take any critical-linguistic
analysis to notice that millions of children in American ghettos grew up
without hope while the U.S. government was preoccupied with making the
rich richer with assuring a greedy and selfish middle class that it was the
salt of the earth. Even economists, plumbers, insurance salesman, and
biochemists people who have never read a text closely, much less
deconstructed it can recognize that the immiseration of much of Latin
America is partially due to the deals struck between local plutocracies and
North America banks and governments. (p. 135)
The real target of Rortys polemics is the ridiculous belief though any
statement can sound ridiculous once skilfully isolated from its context
that the millennium of universal peace and justice among men and
women would come once we all become ethical readers.
It is not just the case that one has to have a Saussurian-WittgensteinianDerridean understanding of the nature of language in order to think clearly
and usefully about politics. One does not have to be an antiessentialist in
philosophy in order to be politically imaginative or politically useful. Philosophy is not that important for politics, nor is literature. Lots of people
who accept theocentric or Kantian logocentric accounts of moral obligation
unconsciously and uncritically starting with Kant himself have done very
well at political thinking. They have been invaluable to social reform and
progress. The same can be said of lots of essentialists for example, all those
people who still think that either natural or social science can change our
self-image for the better by telling us what we really, essentially, intrinsically,
are. (p. 135)
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Radicalism and philosophy in the privacy of self-achievement; reformism and common sense in public engagement. This is Rortys solution to the intricate relationship between theory and practice, thought
and politics. Derrida handles the same topic in a totally different way,
connecting the radical questioning of a certain philosophical practice
with the engagement toward a democracy to come.
While Foucault has monstrously confused the private and the public,
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I studied philosophy in a rather interesting place. The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rome is not located with the other faculties
in the university town. Philosophy has chosen as its residence the
ancient Villa Mirafiori on the edge of Via Nomentana. From the roof of
the mansion, one can enjoy the panoramic view of the city beneath. Is
it possible to observe from a distance, on a clear and serene day, the
structures of the other faculties? It would be quite striking if, from the
height of philosophy, one could actually spot the foundations on which
the other academic disciplines rest. But if from that roof one cannot
grasp the bases of other knowledges, then why should a prospective
student even consider philosophy? With what perspective?
Rortys answer to the question is easy: philosophers just want to have
fun. As I argued in the first chapter, once philosophy had given up the
self-legitimation of being the sole transcendental critique and admitted
its own failure, the only thing left for philosophy was to be a discipline,
which, as other positive discourses as art for example was interested
in positing new truths. Yet the very isolation of the faculty of philosophy from the social body of the city makes it almost irrelevant for the
people. To put it briefly: once the Kantian claim that philosophy is the
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of the lives of its citizens. But in doing so, it takes away from the citizens
the possibility of caring for themselves. Putting the multitude under its
lifelong tutelage, the State makes it careless, incapable of care. Eventually the people cannot survive without the States caring and paternal
superintendence. Power for Foucault becomes biopower precisely
when it starts assuming life as its object and objective.
The task of the higher faculties law, medicine and theology was to
produce more apt knowledges to take care of and govern the bodies of
the citizens and the social body successfully, and to provide the State
with an apparatus able to sustain the new mode of governance. It is not
only a matter of determining what the nation must believe, but also of
making the community comply with such principles: governmentalization as Foucault defines it is the movement through
which individuals are subjugated into the reality of a social practice by
mechanisms of power that appeal to a truth.22
Finding their arche in the reason of the State, the higher faculties
occupy a powerful and threatening place within the academic cartography. The State itself should protect the lower faculty from the
parasitism of such departmental centres of power, whose prestige is
determined by their looking beyond academia, that is, to the government of society. Within the university there should be a guaranteed
counter-power, which, as opposed to the higher faculties, would not
have any concrete role in enforcing the governmentalization of citizenry. It would instead be granted the right to decide freely the truth
and falseness of the discourses and practices enforced by the higher
faculties and analyse their pragmatism. Kant assigns the authority of
critique to philosophy, the lower faculty. Such a faculty is inferior not
only because it is the furthest from State force and interests, but also
because it is closest to the mechanics of knowledge. As Derrida
reconstructs Kants discourse:
The government and the forces it represents, or that represent it (civil
society), should create a law limiting their own influence and submitting all
its statements of a constative type (those claiming to tell the truth) and even
of a practical type (insofar as they imply a free judgment) to the jurisdiction of university competence and, finally, we will see, to that within it which
is most free and responsible in respect to the truth: the Faculty of
Philosophy.23
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Both Kant and Rorty seem to agree that philosophers cannot have a
public role since their discussions are limited to academic circles.
However, Kants distinction between the public and private which still
motivates our own academic topology is anchored on the transcendental separation of the constative and the performative. Rorty, by
contrast, insists that it is merely for empirical reasons that philosophy
has almost no function in public reality. Nevertheless, Kant, in
defending Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone from the charges of
being a seditious text, had to settle on arguments strikingly similar to
the ones Rorty adopted in his defence of Derrida from Habermas.
Philosophy cannot constitute a political harm to the government of
men because it is out of public reach. Philosophy, for Kant and Rorty
alike, is an unintelligible, closed book, only a debate between scholars
of the faculty, of which the people take no notice.25
The question Derrida asks, in his confrontation of Kant, is whether
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deciding on truth and falseness is not always and already a public, and
therefore, a political, act.
The element of publicity, the necessarily public character of discourse, in
particular in the form of archive, designates the unavoidable locus of
equivocation [between the language of theoretical statements and of performatives] that Kant would like to reduce. Whence the temptation: to
transform, into a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language, the
discourse, precisely, of universal value that is that of philosophy.26
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having a book that thinks for me, a pastor who functions as my conscience, a doctor who decides my diet needs to be disturbed. For now,
says Kant, only a few are using their own minds, but that the public will
enlighten itself is indeed nearly inevitable, if only freedom is granted.
And quite surprisingly if one has in mind what Kant will say in The
Conflict of the Faculties, the avant-garde, which has already broken from
the spell of immaturity, is morally obliged to help fellow human beings
find the courage and means of thinking for themselves. Independent
thinkers, even among the appointed guardians who have seemingly
internalized the role of superintendence, have the responsibility to
disseminate mans potency of being autonomous and of caring for
himself.27
It is in this perspective that Foucault, collapsing Aufklarung on critique, claims that Enlightenment consists less in learning about truth
and falsity from others, than in learning to question the borders which
the different authorities declare impassable. But the requisite for the
maturation of mankind is the public and free use of reason. If not the
art of practical insubordination, critique at least involves the right to
argue publicly. Each man, as a public officer, needs to obey the
guidelines received by the highest power and its representatives.
However, at the same time, as a part of the entire commonwealth
which is transnational since Kant talks about a cosmopolitan society
every human being has the duty to question the opportunity of the
commands which one nevertheless obeys for the time being. Kant does
not restrain the free use of reason within the walls of the university. On
the contrary, critical thinking is a responsibility which humankind as
such needs to assume. Kants What is Enlightenment? suggests that,
for the moment, the social body is in the hands of the higher faculties
artful leaders, who pretend to respond to public demands while diffusing the idea that philosophy is a nonsense to be cast away. Yet Kant
also notices signs indicating that the present is opening up toward a
general liberation from the authoritative discourses produced in the
interest of governance. Kants enlightenment, in the hope that the
public will gain total access to free and autonomous use of reason,
finds its raison detre in the urgency of emancipating the public from the
yoke which subjects it to the truths and practices enforced by State
officials. It is this sort of Foucauldian critical attitude that I was glad to
recognize in Derridas essays on Kant and the idea of the university.
For Derrida as for Foucault, critical philosophy is not a matter of
reinforcing the line which separates constative language interested
only in truth from performative discourses whose sole interests are of a
pragmatic nature. Seeming to agree with Rortys anti-transcendental
arguments, Derrida affirms that it no longer makes sense to contrast
fundamental research to goal-oriented inquiries:
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In The principle of reason Derrida shows that the border between the
noble ends pursued by basic research and the utilitarian empirical
goals of applied sciences cannot be maintained. No pure science is
untouched by economico-political interests. It is evident that the fundamental research undertaken, for example, by theoretical physicists,
chemists or biologists also pursues empirical ends. These ends are, of
course, most of the time military. This is not new; but never before has
so-called basic scientific research been so deeply committed to ends
that are at the same time military ends (p. 143). It is said that each
minute two million dollars are spent on armaments, but presuming
that this total covers only the manufacturing expenses to such an
amount, one should add the funding for research programmes, the
expenses for the maintenance of their structures, the salaries of the
professors, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate students salaries and so
forth.
Apparently less dangerous and more pacific disciplines can also serve
the war machine. For instance, according to Derrida, military reason
profits from the sciences dealing with the field of language (communication studies, semiotics, semantics, linguistics, translation studies).
It is not outrageous to claim that in a time of permanent warfare one
can exploit the sciences which decode texts as hermeneutics, or the
ones which study linguistic pragmatics and rhetoric.29 Poetry, literature, film and fiction in general can be useful tools for ideological war.
Through psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis, one can refine the
force of psychological action, which is an alternate method of torture
as witnessed in the wars in Algeria and Indochina. Thus,
a military budget can invest in anything at all, in view of deferred profits:
basic scientific theory, the humanities, literary theory, and philosophy.
(p. 144)
When Kant thought of the academic centres whose services were more
suited to pursue States practical ends, he had in mind theology, law
and medicine the Bible, right and science, in Foucaults words.
Today, it is even more difficult to limit the faculties and departments
whose truths and knowledges cannot be employed as power-making or
power-enforcing tools. Even the lower faculty which includes, among
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Even if all the differences among departments and faculties have seemingly levelled down in the light of their economical exploitability, in
the light of the fact that they all posit truths exploitable by coercive
powers, we should consider how to assume today, here and now, the
indocility Kant described as the fundamental trait of critique, and in
particular, of philosophy. As Derrida affirms in The principle of reason it is a matter of awakening or of resituating a responsibility, in the
university or in face of the university, whether one belongs to it or not
(p. 146). At once inside and outside the boundaries of academia,
within and without philosophy, Derrida professes the urgency to
relaunch the legacy of a certain Kantian attitude and to safeguard the
university as the ultimate place of critical resistance against hegemonic
powers.31 But, what does this critical resistance consist of? Derrida has
in mind something very similar to the resistance to authority which
constitutes as Judith Butler writes the hallmark of the Enlightenment for Foucault.32
In his lectures on Kant, Foucault objects to reducing critique to a
mere theoretical activity. Critique should not be understood as the
desire to police the domain of truth in order to restore a legitimate use
of knowledge anchored on the structure of reason. By profession, the
critical attitude professes something related to virtue. State power, by
secularizing the Christian pastoral, supported the idea that in order to
live a good life, to avoid guilt and conquer salvation, a human being,
whatever his age or status, from the beginning to the end of his life,
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had to be governed and had to let himself be governed.33 Challenging the identification of virtue with obedience, when the project of
governing souls and bodies became more aggressive and invasive, a
movement of resistance emerged. How to govern: this is the question
State apparatus and its academic prosthesis were anxious to answer.
The social multitude or at least a part of it had in mind the opposite
question: how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those
principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such procedure, not like that, not for that, not by them? (p. 43). If governmentalization is the movement which tries to subjugate citizens to a
certain politics of truth, critique is the art of voluntary inservitude
through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of
truth. In brief,
to not to want to be governed is of course not accepting as true . . . what an
authority tells you is true, or at least not accepting it because an authority
tells you it is true, but rather accepting it only if one considers valid the
reasons for doing so. (p. 46)
The indocility of critique identified by Foucault with virtue in general limits, questions, challenges and escapes the art of governing
and its praise for obedience. It criticizes the legitimacy of the laws
imposed upon the people in the name of universal and indefeasible
rights to which any sovereign power needs to submit. Significantly,
Foucault does not necessarily imply the actual existence of human
rights grounded on an immutable natural law. Critique does not
attempt to discover what is true and what is false, founded or
unfounded, real or illusionary, scientific or ideological, legitimate or
abusive (p. 59). Critique is inspired by the problem of the how, not of
the what. It is not in search of a transcendental deduction which might
justify the desire not to be governed through an inquiry of the essence
of human nature. Rather, critique looks for a way of reinvigorating
such will to disobedience. The act of opposing indefeasible natural
rights to the ruling agencies is therefore a way of limiting the right of
the sovereign power itself. The invention of human rights can be a
means of confronting authority, of strengthening the subaltern revolts
against governmentality, even if a natural humanity does not exist at
all. As Spivak has highlighted, a strategic essentialism is crucial in
Foucaults project of resistance against hegemonic discourses.34 Foucault makes it clear in fact that critique is not a disinterested activity for
it does not intend to protect the purity of transcendental or quasitranscendental inquiries from the pragmatism of the politics of truth.
Critique is an attitude and, as such, it has its own pragmatic interests.
The critic has a double task, comments Butler: he not only denounces
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the bond between truth and power, but also tracks down the breaking
points of the power/truth mechanism. What this means is that one
looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted,
but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they
point up their contingency and their transformability.35
In What is critique? Foucault decisively states that his idea of critique is not to be confused with reflection on the quasitranscendantal
that fixes knowledge. I am not sure if this 1978 cryptic reference to the
quasi-transcendental can be read as an oblique attack against Derrida
whose notion of ecriture was with a similar discretion accused of still
being too transcendental in What is an author? a lecture which
Foucault gave at another meeting of the Societe francaise de philosophie
ten years earlier.36 But even if he did intend to distinguish his work
from Derridas, Foucaults idea of critique, which inspires his project of
an ontology of actuality, chimes with Derridas quasi-transcendental
gestures. Describing the conditions of possibility which make a system
function amounts to mapping the fissures which unwork it; the slippages and the cracks in which a critical intervention can find the
necessary space to resist or at least negotiate a given regime of truth.
Eventually, Foucault recovers the idea of critique he seemed to reject at
the beginning of his What is critique?: that critique itself is a means,
an instrument that has other goals in mind. A mochlos, to use Derridas
term: The mochlos could be a wooden beam, a lever for displacing a
boat, a sort of wedge for opening or closing a door, something, in
short, to lean on for forcing and displacing.37 This sort of leverage that
one needs in order to sabotage the minoritizing machine is also a work
of fiction. The truths that the art of governing attempts to naturalize
and render hegemonic are in fact displaced by the historical philosophical labour which fabricates resisting counter-discourses.38 These
oeuvres and in using this term, I am approaching Derridas The
university without condition are purported to suspend the grip that
the governmentality project has on the real, and give back to the present its eventness: the possibility of happening otherwise.
The fictive opposition to actuality, in view of what might come in
the future, is located by Derrida at the heart of a university without
condition. Such a university would be one of the centres of unconditional resistance against any exercise of power because it would grant
itself the right to question all the figures of sovereignty. The Humanities in particular should be the place where one could discuss and
doubt the truths of State powers, of economic powers, of religious and
cultural powers. Deconstruction has its privileged position in this
context, in the Humanities as the place of irredentist resistance or
even, analogically, a sort of principle of civil disobedience, even of
dissidence in the name of a superior law and a justice of thought.39
Acting in the name of something other than what is presently imposed
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on the social body, strategically invoking human rights and denouncing crimes against humanity (while other times denouncing the limits
of humanism), deconstruction is not only involved in protecting the
universitys autonomy from the invasiveness of the various exercises of
power. It also aspires to transform the disciplinary structure of the
university in order to establish academia as the place from where to
sabotage all the attempts of reducing the present to an immutable
totality. In other words, while governance aims at closing the field of
what is actually possible which equates to expelling the possibility of
becoming from the realm of the real the deconstruction of actuality,
as Foucaults ontology of it, seeks to open the crevices of the present to
the possibilities which exceed it.
Walter Benjamin showed in Critique of violence that sovereign
power imposes on its citizens a life deprived of the faculty of contesting
the laws forced upon them. A State of right tries to ward off, with
any means necessary, the possibility of suspending the form of life
that rules over the present.40 The life that sovereign power cares to
protect in its citizens is not life in general. It is not a whatever life, but
their present life, the way in which life is lived after the enforcement of
the governmentality project. The possibility of interrupting such a way
of living is considered a menace, and the scope of this menace appears
directly proportional to the force required to put the present in play, to
assume time as the stake of its action. Sovereign power pretends to
defend its citizens (defending in reality only itself) from the possibility
of the de(con)struction of actuality. The threat to those who rule over
the present always comes from the future. Indeed, it is the future itself.
Invested in making the present a datum, a fact, sovereign power can
rule the present only by regulating the future. Why? Only by controlling the future the maybe of what might happen, is it possible to
immunize the present from the possibility of the future. Real and
rational coincide when the tension between what is and what might be
fades, when the present is immunized to the risk of the perhaps. In the
process of immunization, a sovereign power, in its authoritarian
munificence, creates a disarmed community, a community which is not
munitioned with the force necessary to resist the closing of the
present.41
Naturally my heroic phantasms I think this is true for many Frenchmen
and Frenchwomen of my generation usually have to do with the period of
the Resistance, which I did not experience firsthand; I wasnt old enough,
and I wasnt in France. When I was very young and until quite recently I
used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by night, plants bombs
on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action
device and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmic
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Against the hostile attempts to close and control the field of actuality,
deconstructions unconditional resistance tries to open the space of
counter-power; to reinvigorate within the multitude the possibility of
contesting the present in name of the futures. It enables exceptions
simultaneously inside and outside the dominated space: the opposition
against the exercise of power tries in fact to create liberated places,
temporary anomic zones in which different forms of life and thought
could happen. One way in which the Humanities may assume the
responsibility of critique and struggle against unjust institutions and
institutes is by producing events which have the force to unwork the
solidity of the discursive practices regimenting the present. Such discourses and their axiomatics would be interrupted, disjointed, opened
up to the spectres of the otherwise which always haunts their domain.
The claims of absolute sovereignty on the real are disturbed by the
unconditioned right to contest any authority. This is why John Caputos
1988 Beyond aestheticism: Derridas responsible anarchy and Saul
Newmans 2001 Derridas deconstruction of authority, have noticed
the presence of an anarchic strive in deconstructive operations: a
politics in which no arche, no command, dogma, ground or principle is
immune to the possibility of being critiqued and disobeyed, is anarchic
by definition.43 The anarchism of deconstruction does not coincide
with the anarchists dream of an absolute absence of every authority
and hierarchy (and for this reason Derrida says I am not an anarchist). Resistance always end up erecting centres of power as we saw
in the previous chapter regarding deconstructions jetties. Yet deconstruction is undoubtedly anarchic as Derrida specified in the same
interview where he declared himself not to be an anarchist because it
engages with the constitutions of spaces where no hierarchy or
authority would be stable and immutable.44 It is hard not to hear an
anarchic tonality, for instance, in Derridas acknowledgment that the
reason of the strongest is always the best and that, therefore, any
exercise of sovereignty is also a roguish abuse of power. Critique itself
has to be related to a fundamental anarchism for as Foucault says
and does not say simultaneously it is linked with the historic practice
of revolt, with the refusal of being governed.
For Derrida, the Humanities can take some steps toward an originary anarchy45 because of their relation to the literary dimension.
Under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge,
critical thought can produce oeuvres which interrupt halt the force
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of economical discourses that put women and men to work and settle
them in stable and identified places.46 Striking against this exploitation, the labour of theory commits itself to a different form of community to use a word that Derrida does not like but nevertheless uses
in his writings on the university. What is in fact deconstruction if not
the general strike which reclaims the right to contest and not only
theoretically47 the legitimate authorities and all their discursive
norms? As if for a new form of politics to begin, for a radical democracy
to start coming, it would be necessary to bracket the governance
actually at work on the present. It is as if the world begins when and
where work ends.
But this new world cannot be founded by critique. Founding requires
foundational myths; one needs to gather a multitude around a unique
fire and compose it into a people as one.48 On the contrary, critique
as Benjamins general proletarian strike does not replace the existing
system with a different one. It aims to make inoperative the discourses
which arrest humanity in fixed places and fixed roles. Critique is
destructive because it does not impose a destiny on the living, regulating and ordering its time through the schedule of the workday.
Deconstructive critique cannot have any power (which does not mean
that it does not have any force: a force of the weak, a weak force does
indeed exist) for otherwise it would repeat the traditional dream of the
philosopher, that is to teach and at the same time to direct, steer,
organize, the empirical work of the laborers.49 Critique should not
dismantle the power of higher faculties and governance in order to
make philosophy acquire more power over the present. There is no
revival of Platos Philosopher-Kings here, nor the interest in a new
socio-political hierarchization of disciplines and groups. The risk that
needs to be avoided is turning critique from a mode of resistance to
sovereign power, into a superpower itself, reconstituting in such a
fashion the powers of a given caste, class or corporation. The antiauthoritarian force of critique needs to be maintained as dissociated as
possible from the figure of sovereignty, even if sometimes it is strategically necessary to challenge given sovereign powers by evoking a
higher sovereign law for example, contesting the roguish attitude of
so-called Western democracies in the name of international human
rights. Challenging the sovereign powers mastery over the real,
deconstruction cannot enforce a different order of things and therefore fall for the phantasms of sovereignty. The time of reflection is
another time, for its ultimate goal is to deactivate the rigid organization
of the present by exposing it to its futures. This is to say, from my point
of view, that critiques only business is to help create a radically
democratic space, a public space where time itself would be public: the
authority over the present would not be alienated from the social, but
would rather be shared by the plurality of different communities and
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identities forming a people.50 Since it wants to explode the continuum of this time, its calendar and its clocks, critique cannot avoid
being untimely anachronistic.51 As Foucault admits,
critique only exists in relation with something other than itself: it is an
instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen
to be, it is a gaze on a domain that it would want to police but that is
incapable of ruling.52
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which starves a large portion of the planet; the increasing power of the
arms industry; the uncontrolled spreading of nuclear weapons; interethnic wars; mafias and drug cartels which have become phantom
states; a powerless international law.69 The problem is that the
deconstruction of the distinction use-exchange or the phenomenology
of the unrepresentable are not useful tools for resolving such problems. Rorty has Derrida in such a high esteem that he awaits practical
suggestions for acting, but all he can get is the usual unfamiliarization
of everything one believed to be familiar. It is as if Rorty got a little
annoyed with deconstructive practice. Ironist frivolity and suspicion
have grown old.
Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was real, but now you see that its only a social
construct! You thought it was just a familiar object of sense-perception, but
look! It has a supersensible, spectral, spiritual, backside!70
Nowadays the monstrosity of deconstruction has exhausted its subversive power. Deconstruction should not be satisfied with being an
exclusively critical force; besides undermining the authority and the
credibility of the enemy, it should also help establish a credible
alternative. It is time to dismiss its patient and infinite questioning and
start devising answers: Rorty would concede a public value to deconstruction only if it became a normative practice, interested in inculcating democratic values and safeguarding the established political
order. If Derrida does not want to pick up such a role, then deconstruction should be excluded from participating in public life.
The public sphere as imagined by Rorty would be a place sheltered from deconstructing parasites; a domain where critiques too
radical are not welcome.
What Rorty has in mind is a sort of gentlemens agreement. Since
only a very limited circle of people holds critical interventions in high
account, when one is dealing with the real, concrete and urgent needs
of those who do not read philosophy, who do not have time to read,
who do not know how to read, one has to accept happily the naivety of
the common senses vocabulary. Only by compromising with it, can
one reach a social-economical improvement. The privileged ones, the
cultured, pot-bellied, sophisticated ones will have time to criticize
privately. Publicly it would be better to avoid it as a form of education
and out of respect for the exigency of the others.
And what about those who insist on producing critique? In Rortys
opinion, the democratic spirit of accommodation and tolerance should
not reach the point of taking every question introduced into the public
sphere seriously.71 Even if such an attitude denotes a certain disdain
for the very tolerance on which the institutes of democracy pretend to
be grounded, in order to save democracy from critique, one has not to
123
124
125
126
127
Notes
Chapter 1
1
See Rorty, Keeping philosophy pure: an essay on Wittgenstein, in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1982), pp. 1936. Rorty uses the German word Fach to describe philosophy as
an autonomous discipline (a faculty in my own terms).
2
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 131.
3
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1982), p. 11. Further reference will be given in the main body
of the text in parenthesis.
4
Rorty, Keeping philosophy pure, p. 19.
5
See Rorty, Introduction: pragmatism and philosophy, in Consequences of
Pragmatism, p. xxxix.
6
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 155.
7
See Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, in
Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. P. Bieri, R. Hortsman and L. Kruger
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 77103.
8
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 12.
9
See Rorty, The contingency of philosophical problems, in Truth and
Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 27489.
10
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), pp. 7394.
11
See Rorty, Science as solidarity, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 224.
12
Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, p. 79.
13
See Davidson, On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (19734), pp. 520.
14
Actually Davidson, referring to Quines two dogmas of empiricism, talks
about a fitting of the scheme to the content rather than of its adequation; see
On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, p. 14.
15
Davidson continues: How would you organize the Pacific Ocean?
Straighten out its shores, perhaps, or relocate its islands, or destroy its fish (p.
14).
16
Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, p. 97.
17
Davidson, On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, p. 20.
18
Ibid.
130
19
Notes
Notes
46
131
Ibid., p. 101.
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 93.
48
Besides Philosophy as a kind of writing, see Rortys Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, The Journal of Philosophy, 74(11)
(1977), pp. 67381.
49
Derrida, Differance, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 267.
50
Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), p. 216.
51
Rorty, Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism, pp. 389.
52
Derrida, Ends of Man, in Margins of Philosophy, p. 128.
53
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 14.
54
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 95.
55
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 29.
56
Rorty, Professionalized philosophy and transcendentalist culture, in
Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 67.
57
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 94.
58
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of human sciences, in
Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 279.
59
See Derrida, Speech and phenomena: introduction to the problem of
signs in Husserls phenomenology, in Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104.
60
Wheeler III, Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man, p. 128.
61
Derrida, Differance, p. 27.
62
Rorty, Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, p. 677.
63
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 96.
64
This is done with a Foucauldian erudition by Jean Stengers and Anne van
Neck in Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
65
Blind tactics is one of the ways the other being empirical wandering
in which Derrida describes the mode of the thought of differance (Differance,
p. 7).
66
See Derrida, Platos pharmacy, in Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1981), p. 108.
67
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 106.
68
Derrida, Platos pharmacy, p. 137.
69
Rorty, Deconstruction and circumvention, in Essays on Heidegger and
Others, p. 87.
70
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 98.
71
Rorty, Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, p. 678.
72
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 105.
73
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 272. Derrida is here quoting a passage from
Kafkas diaries.
74
Derrida, Platos pharmacy, p. 84.
75
See Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 4551.
47
132
Notes
76
Chapter 2
1
Notes
5
133
134
Notes
Notes
42
135
136
64
Notes
Notes
137
Carroll (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 84. Further reference will be given in
the main body of the text in parenthesis.
84
See Caputo, On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental, p. 157.
85
See also Derridas comments on Gasche and the quasi-transcendental in
his interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge,
1992), pp. 702.
86
See Bennington, Derridabase, pp. 26879.
Chapter 3
1
Foucault, Nietzsche, genealogy, and history, in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 160.
2
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 125.
3
See Rorty, Trotsky and the wild orchids, in Philosophy and Social Hope
(New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 320. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
4
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1412.
5
Ibid., pp. 7395. Further reference will be given in the main body of the
text in parenthesis.
6
See Eagleton, Marxism without Marxism, in M. Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly
Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 837.
7
See Rorty, Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy, in Truth
and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 30726.
8
Rorty, Is truth a goal of inquiry?, in Truth and Progress, p. 41.
9
Derrida, Envois, in The Post Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), p. 18. Emphasis added.
10
See Rorty, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, p. 13, and
Derrida, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, pp. 7788, both in C.
Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
11
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, in Consequences of Pragmatism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 98.
12
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87.
13
Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 77. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in
parenthesis.
14
See Rorty, De Man and the American Cultural Left, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 12939. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
15
Rorty, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, p. 15.
16
Ibid., p. 17.
17
Derrida, The principle of reason, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 12930.
18
See Derrida, Mochlos, or the conflict of the faculties, in Eyes of the
University, pp. 83112.
19
Ibid., p. 93.
138
20
Notes
See Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. Der Streit Der Fakultaten (New York:
Abaris Books, 1979), pp. 239.
21
Foucault, What is critique?, in The Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 44.
22
Ibid., p. 47. Translation slightly modified.
23
Derrida, Mochlos, p. 96.
24
Ibid., p. 97.
25
Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 15.
26
Derrida, Mochlos, p. 98.
27
See Kant, What is Aufklarung, in The Politics of Truth S. Lotringer (ed.)
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007) pp. 2937.
28
Derrida, The principle of reason, pp. 1412. Further reference will be
given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
29
In the United States, for example (and it is not just one example among
the others), without even mentioning the economic regulation that allows
certain surplus value through the channel of private foundations, among
others to sustain research or creative projects that are not immediately or
apparently profitable, we also know that military programs, especially those of
the Navy, can very rationally subsidize linguistic, semiotic, or anthropological
investigations. These in turn are related to history, literature, hermeneutics,
law, political science, psychoanalysis, and so forth. Ibid., p. 145.
30
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 478.
31
See Derrida, The university without conditions, in Without Alibi, ed. P.
Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 204.
32
Butler, What is critique? An essay on Foucaults virtue, in The Political,
ed. D. Ingram (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 217.
33
Foucault, What is critique?, p. 43. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
34
See Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen,
1987), p. 205.
35
Butler, What is critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, p. 222.
36
See Foucault, What is an author?, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,
pp. 11338.
37
Derrida, Mochlos, p. 110.
38
Butler, What is critique? An essay on Foucaults virtue, p. 221. Butler
does a great job in pointing out the relation between the fiction of critiques
and the genealogic practice.
39
Derrida, The university without condition, p. 208.
40
See Benjamin, Critique of violence, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913
1926, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004),
pp. 23652.
41
See Lyotard, Sensus communis, in Judging Lyotard, ed. A. Benjamin (New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 125; see also R. Espositos important Communitas:
Origine e destino della comunita` (Turin: Einaudi, 1998) and Immunitas: Protezione e
negazione della vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).
Notes
42
139
Derrida and Ferraris, A taste for the secret, in The Taste for the Secret
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 512.
43
See Caputo, Beyond aestheticism: Derridas responsible anarchy,
Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988), pp. 5973; Newman, Derridas deconstruction of authority, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 27(3) (2001), pp. 120.
44
See Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, ed. E. Rottenberg
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 22.
45
Derrida, The principle of reason, p. 153.
46
See Derrida, The university without condition, pp. 2045
47
Derrida, Force of law: the mystical foundation of authority , in Acts of
Religion, ed. G. Anidjar (New York: Routledge 2002), p. 242.
48
See Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 4370 (Myth interrupted).
49
Derrida, The principle of reason, p. 152.
50
On this point the obvious reference is to the remarkably GramscianDerridianHegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(London: Verso, 2001) by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe. See also Laclaus review of
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Community and its paradoxes: Richard Rortys liberal utopia , in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 10623.
51
Here I can only obliquely allude to the similarity between Derridas
deconstruction of actuality and Benjamins messianic materialism as it appears
in On the concept of history (which I quoted as an epigraph of this section).
See Benjamin, On the concept of history, in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938
1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2003), pp. 389400. See also M. Fritschs The Promise of Memory: History and
Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2005), pp. 10356.
52
Foucault, What is critique?, p. 42. Translation slightly modified.
53
Derrida, The university without condition, p. 236.
54
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1982), p. 38.
55
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 306.
56
As we can read in Peggy Kamufs preface to Derridas Without Alibi, The
university without condition was introduced by a warm and wry welcome by
Rorty, who was at the time Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative
Literature at Stanford.
57
See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New
York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 15965.
58
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87.
59
Ibid., p. 89.
60
Ibid., p. 86.
61
Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others, pp. 1645.
62
See Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 91.
63
See Laclau, Community and its paradoxes: Richard Rortys liberal
utopia , pp. 11011.
140
64
Notes
See Rorty, De Man and the American Cultural Left, pp. 12939.
Rorty, Solidarity or objectivity?, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 29.
66
See Geertz, The uses of diversity, in Available Light (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), pp. 6873.
67
In the famous 1968 Cerisy-la-Salle decade on Nietzsche aujourdhui
Derrida, commenting on Klossowskis lecture, tried to distinguish between a
parodic practice which under the pretext of disconcerting, plays the game of
the established order and an other which would effectively deconstruct it. For
an account of the relation between deconstruction and parody, see S. Weber,
Upping the ante: deconstruction as parodic practice, in Deconstruction Is/In
America, ed. A. Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995),
pp. 607.
68
Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 93. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
69
See Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 814.
70
Rorty, A spectre in haunting the intellectuals: Derrida on Marx, in
Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 217.
71
See Rorty, The priority of democracy to philosophy, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 190. Further reference will be given in the main body of
the text in parenthesis.
72
See Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 2358.
73
See de Man, The resistance to theory, in The Resistance to Theory, ed. W.
Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 36.
74
Bennington, Derridabase, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 99.
75
Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, p. 238.
76
Derrida and Ferraris, I have a taste for the secret, pp. 467.
77
See Derrida, Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms,
postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms, in The States of Theory, ed. D.
Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 7580.
78
Derrida, Passages from traumatism to promise, in Points . . . Interviews,
19741994, ed. E. Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995),
pp. 3856.
79
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play, in Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 293.
65
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Index
A Taste for the Secret (Derrida) 43
Achieving Our Country (Rorty) 94, 115,
119, 121
actuality 113
Agamben, Giorgio 47
Algeria 567
Allegories of Reading (De Man) 22, 63
Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 15
apocalypse 69
aporia 712
Aristotle 37, 39
autobiographies 54
autochthonous 57
Basic Problems of Phenomenology, The
(Heidegger) 8
Being 78, 248, 37, 479
Being and Time (Heidegger) 42
Benjamin, Walter 110, 112, 139n.51
Bennington, Geoffrey 646, 75, 124
Beyond aestheticism: Derridas
responsible anarchy (Caputo)
111
Blanchot, Maurice 41
Bloom, Harold 1520, 23, 34
Bonaparte, Napoleon 41
Boyce Gibson, W. R. 77
bricolage 36
Butler, Judith 1078, 138n.38
Caputo, John 80, 82, 111
Carnap, Rudolf 74
Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 34
Cerisy-la-Salle encounter 68
Circumfession (Derrida) 43, 52, 66
come 114
Conflict of the Faculties, The (Kant) 95,
101, 1035
148
Index
engineers 36
Enlightenment, the 104
Envois (Derrida) 378, 401, 435,
536, 62, 70, 83, 132n.2
erection 81, 834
essentialism 98
Faculty of Philosophy, University of
Rome 99100
femininity 36, 45
Ferraris, Maurizio 51, 52
Feuerbach, Ludwig 81
Fido 41
filiation 40
Flaubert, Gustave 52
Foucault, Michel 68, 72, 81, 87, 91,
93, 99102, 1059, 111, 113,
11819, 135n.52, 136n.79
France 569, 134n.29
France, Anatole 6
Freud, Sigmund 40
Gasche, Rodolphe 3, 467, 50, 53, 71,
75, 84, 1334n.20
God 35, 81, 121, 123
Godzich, Wlad 20
Guignon, Charles 66
Habermas, Derrida and the
functions of philosophy (Rorty)
92
Habermas, Jurgen 4, 48, 901, 11718
Hardt, Michael 123, 125
Harley, David 66
Hartman, Geoffrey 35, 45
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
1315, 245, 29, 37, 42, 48, 72
Heidegger, Martin 78, 1821, 249,
34, 38, 414, 478, 50, 589, 72,
75, 81, 923
hermeneutics 106
historicists 116
History of Madness, The (Foucault) 68
Howe, Irving 98
Humanities 109, 111, 11516
Husserl, Edmund 30, 34, 48, 61, 71,
7780
I 378, 423
idea 77
Ideas I (Husserl) 77, 79
ideation 778
In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 25
intuition 9
irony 10, 1213, 23, 25, 901,
11617, 119
James, William 73
Jameson, Frederic 72
jetty 834
Kamuf, Peggy 139n.56
Kant, Immanuel 2, 78, 34, 37, 60, 69,
75, 87, 912, 95, 99107, 118
Klossowski, Pierre 18
knowledge 107
Labor of Dionysus (Negri/Hardt) 123
Laclau, Ernesto 118
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 68
language 1718, 22
Lebensphilosophie 62
liberalism 1236
life-world 71
logic 63
logocentrism 98
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 11718
Map of Misreading, A (Bloom) 15, 34
Marx, Karl 65, 81
masturbation 313
metaphors 1924, 623
metaphysics 35, 434, 61, 71, 93
mind 910
mochlos 109, 118
Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida)
53, 56, 58, 70, 74
Myth of the Cave (Socrates) 18
Nancy, Jean-Luc 68
Negri, Tony 123, 125
New Leftists 1201
Newman, Saul 111
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 1719,
21, 22, 25, 35, 42, 56, 624, 107
Index
Nietzsche. The Will to Power as Art
(Heidegger) 21
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
(Klossowski) 18
nominalists 116
Norris, Christopher 46, 73
Of Grammatology (Derrida) 31
On the Genealogy of Morality
(Nietzsche) 17, 107
On the very idea of a conceptual
scheme (Davidson) 2
Paris, Matthew 38
Phenomenology 779
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 1315,
25
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, The
(Habermas) 4
Philosophical Investigations
(Wittgenstein) 74
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Rorty) 89, 61, 74
Pierce, Charles Sanders 74
Plato 23, 379, 41, 78, 112
Platos pharmacy (Derrida) 79
Poetry 16
politics 1235
pornosophy 35
Post Card, The (Derrida) 535, 80, 93
post-Cartesian tradition 15
post-Nietzschean philosophy 117
post-structuralism 118
pragmatism 46, 51, 65, 723, 75, 79,
82, 93, 978, 116
principle of reason 100, 107
privacy 501
proletarization 96
Proust, Marcel 25, 52, 889
quasi-transcendental 109
realism 1012, 76, 113
redemption 17
relativism 10, 12
religion 7
Religion within the Limits of Reason
Alone (Kant) 103
149
150
wild orchids 67, 88, 901, 98, 117
Will to Power, The (Heidegger) 18
Index
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72, 74
writing 326, 40