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The Domestication of Derrida

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy


Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series
from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a
major contribution to the field of philosophical research.
Adornos Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan
Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno
Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nicholas Hewlett
Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson
Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert
Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, Claire Colebrook
Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan-Wortham and Allison
Weiner
Foucaults Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell
Husserls Phenomenology, Kevin Hermberg
The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas
Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler
Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Duttmann
Sartres Ethics of Engagement, T. Storm Heter
Sartres Phenomenology, David Reisman
Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms
Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert

The Domestication
of Derrida
Rorty, Pragmatism and
Deconstruction
Lorenzo Fabbri

Translated by Daniele Manni

English translation edited by


Vuslat Demirkoparan and Ari Lee Laskin
(University of California, Irvine, USA)

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Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Taking Rorty Seriously

vii
1

1. The Contingency of Being


Two Ideas of Philosophy: Kant and Hegel
The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence
Histories of Writing and Masturbation
Deconstruction as Circumvention: Envois

7
7
15
26
37

2. Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism


The Double Privacy of Deconstruction
On the Very Possibility of Biographical Writing
Rortys Hidden Reductionism
The Disposal of Philosophy

45
45
53
60
74

3. The Resistance of Theory


The Desires We are, The Languages We Speak
Casting a Maybe at the Heart of the Present
Politics of Conciliation and Politics of Monstrosity

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

Italian by Mimesis in 2006 under the title Laddomesticamento di Derrida.


Pragmatismo/Decostruzione.
RomeIrvine
November 2007

Introduction

Taking Rorty Seriously


The first time I read Richard Rortys Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity it
was 1999 and I was a sophomore in the Faculty of Philosophy at the
University of Rome I clearly felt that I was reading one of the most
influential books in contemporary philosophy: not surprisingly,
nobody on the stuffy Italian philosophical scene was talking about it.
With its at once light-hearted and corrosive irony against philosophers
egotism, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity changed the way I looked at
philosophy both as a discipline and as a faculty. And yet there was
something unsettling in Rortys attempt to strip post-Hegelian irony of
any kind of public dimension: for me, the book was a powerful critique
of the rigid organization of the programI was attending.
I started reading Jacques Derrida at the same time: Rortys interpretation of deconstruction was fundamental for orienting me in
Derridas apparently senseless writing. And yet, the more I read Derrida, the more I became aware that Rortys reading was missing
something very important. Rortys account of deconstruction as an
anti-philosophy, as merely a brilliant artistic creation, was too reductive
insofar as it completely ignored all the essays in which Derrida clearly
resisted the possibility of taking leave from the metaphysical language.
Rortys attempt to confine Derrida to prestigious yet strictly academic
venues was excessively disengaged and clashed against the Deleuzian
idea of concepts as weapons to interfere with and intervene into the
real. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity the book that changed my way
of thinking about philosophy, the book whose dancing and laughing
style is still unmatched for me eventually appeared to be profoundly
inadequate. The Domestication of Derrida also tells the story between
Rorty and me (a story of which he was informed only by a couple of
quick emails). The first chapter is marked by my initial trust in Rortys
pragmatism, the second and the third testify to my deep disappointment with it.
In the first section of this book, I will show the strong points of
Rortys reading. In order to challenge effectively his attempt to align
deconstruction with the American liberal and pragmatist traditions, I
believe it is important to take some time to get attuned to the reasons
behind Rortys interpretation of Derrida. In fact, the vast majority of
the essays that have been dedicated to the relation between

The Domestication of Derrida

pragmatism and deconstruction are so hasty to defend Derrida from


Rorty, that they end up underestimating the force of Rortys reading
protocol. I will argue that to contextualize his appropriation of
deconstruction, it is first necessary to recognize the two opposite
answers that, according to Rorty, have been given to the question: what
is philosophy? Kant gives the first type of answer in Critique of Pure
Reason, specifically in the section on Transcendental schematism.
Kants idea of philosophy was inspired by the need to define the particularity that could distinguish philosophy from empirical sciences.
While ecclesiastic institutions dominated the European intellectual
scene, philosophy found its reason for being in the alliance with
empirical sciences against ecclesiastic obscurantism. But, once the
battle against religion was won, philosophy urgently felt the need to
mark its distinctiveness from the scientific inquirers in order to avoid
being extinguished by them. Kants attempt to secure philosophys
survival consisted in identifying its essence with epistemology.
Exceeding every specific relation with things, philosophy shows the
conditions of possibility for the very knowledge of the world. Philosophy thus self-justifies its existence by affirming that it is the only
transcendental science insofar as it is the only science that reflects on
the structure of the faculty of knowledge producing judgements that
are both (i) synthetic, because their contents are not already logically
contained in the definition of the object considered, and (ii) a priori,
since they do not have any involvement with any kind of empirical or
physiological research.
The second answer to the question about the essence of philosophy
arises instead from the conviction that no epistemological discourse
can succeed in the transcendental task of unveiling the truth of the
mindworld interaction. Moreover, as Donald Davidson argues in his
On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, the very Kantian belief that
the world of phenomena would be organized by the schematic activity
of the mind is something we cannot make good sense of. Therefore, it
is impossible for a discourse to find its justification in the reference to
the schematism of the mind. For this second tradition of thought,
which for Rorty started with Hegel, the only thing that makes a sentence true is another sentence: the Truth is just what a certain historically situated community believes in. Thinking of the truth not as a
timeless being that can be discovered, but rather as a human artefact
that is constituted through the flow of history, the strong authors
belonging to the Hegelian tradition are obsessed by the desire to
create something new: by every means they want to avoid reproducing
that which already exists, because this would coincide with falling victim to another authors system. It is in the space opened up by
Hegelian philosophy that Rorty proposes to collocate Derrida: Derrida
would help us lose interest in Kantian vocabulary and in its

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

The Domestication of Derrida

passage from theory to autobiography is clearly announced and fully


accomplished, I will argue that what is at stake in these important
essays is a contamination of the private with the public. That is to say,
an intermingling of biography with philosophy, and not the reduction
of theory to literature. From a deconstructive point of view, the postphilosophical and postmodern desire of stepping beyond philosophy is
both necessary and impossible: how could it be possible to create a
language so purely singular and private that it avoids any general
claims? Rethinking the actual possibility of a passage from philosophy
to literature, of a mode of living that has no relation with reflection
and theory, Derridas operation dwells in an aporetic dimension that is
far from the euphoria that organizes Rortys gestures. I will conclude
the chapter by arguing that Rorty evades the real depth and range of
the problems addressed by Derrida, and in so doing, his neo-pragmatism falls victim to the worst contradictions.
In the third and conclusive chapter of the book, The resistance of
theory, I will question Rortys exile of deconstruction away from the
public sphere, an exile intended to save Derrida from the charges filed
against him in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Habermas, in the
twelve lectures delivered in Paris in the early 1980s, condemned poststructuralism for being politically dangerous because its radical critique of reason undermined the very possibility of a universal and
rational grounding democracy. Rorty claims, quite surprisingly, that
one should not worry about the possible effects of deconstruction
because post-structuralism does not have any public relevance at all. By
stating this, Rorty is trying to persuade us that theory and politics are
two realms totally separated from one another. Being actively and
positively a political animal, means neither thinking nor caring about
what is achieved in the activity of philosophical critique: I connect this
belief of Rortys to the distinction between the public and the private
drawn by Kant in his 1784 An answer to the question: what is
enlightenment?. My aim is to demonstrate that Rorty tries to draw a
line between university and the real world, between theory and life,
that is even more conservative and policing than the one Kant had
himself proposed. Discussing in detail Derridas essays on the institution called university and relating them to Foucaults work on
Enlightenment, I will argue that, pace Rorty, it is impossible to forge
such a strict and clear separation between theory and practice, the
private and the public. Following Derrida, I will argue that philosophy
and the Humanities are intrinsically political spaces because in the
practice of a constant and radical problematizing lies the potentiality of
favouring new possibilities of existence and of being-together: doing
theory is a matter of disjointing the presence of the present in order
to let unexpected futures come. While Derrida confirms the structural
necessity for philosophy to be critically engaged in the weakening of

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

The Contingency of Being


Two Ideas of Philosophy: Kant and Hegel
What is the discipline commonly known as philosophy concerned with?
Which fields of research must a scholar investigate in order to be
admitted in the circle of philosophy? Richard Rorty claims that for such
a question to be answered, one has to go back to Kant and understand
his mode of concerning philosophy. Once in fact the faculty that
legitimizes the discipline of philosophy is recognized, so too will
the existence of Philosophy as a faculty.1
According to Rorty, Kant had to define the specificity of philosophy
to assure its difference and autonomy from natural sciences. As long as
ecclesiastical institutions dominated the European intellectual scene,
philosophy was content with finding its raison detre in the alliance with
science against the obscurantism of the Church.
Looking backward we see Descartes and Hobbes as beginning modern
philosophy, but they thought of their own cultural role in terms of what
Lecky was to call the warfare between science and theology. They were
fighting (albeit discreetly) to make the intellectual world safe for Copernicus and Galileo.2

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

The Domestication of Derrida

and posited, philosophy posits nothing. Philosophy does not relate


positively a specific and limited domain of being, but rather investigates the activity of positing itself, and it does so immune from any
involvement with empirical-physiological inquiry. As Heidegger
explains in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: The positive positing of
any being includes within itself an a priori knowledge and an a priori
understanding of the Beings being, although the positive experience
of such a being knows nothing of this understanding (p. 52). Positive
sciences do not interrogate the pre-comprehension of the Being of
beings they are directed toward. And even if they did interrogate it,
they would not come up with anything interesting to say because their
positive inquiries can only confirm the fundamental mode of inquiry in
which they move, without being able to grasp the reason of their
manner of thematizing beings. For this reason, philosophy a totally
different science as Heidegger calls it (p. 52) reserves for itself the
task of unveiling the hidden presuppositions of the activity of knowing.
However, philosophy alleges its discourse to be distinct from sciences
not only in light of the theme it deals with, but also for the absolute
rigour that drives its investigation. By simply positing beings, positive
sciences end up leaving unseen the act of positing itself. The other
tekhnai that is to say, all the argumentative techniques besides philosophy are naive, for they cannot enlighten their own functioning.
Positive sciences are surely productive, but they can only produce
knowledge on the basis of some unquestioned presupposition. In this
vein, Heidegger states that sciences can only dream about their thematic objects since their slumbering eyes are not open enough to be
conscious of their own grounds (p. 54). Philosophy, by contrast, does
not assume anything to be obvious; in its relentless advance, it never
succumbs to spells of drowsiness. Not tolerating oversights, philosophy
boasts a clear and profound vision.
Philosophy says Rorty comes to be characterized on the basis of its
rigorous method and epistemological interest. One can only be considered a true philosopher when he awakens from the science-induced
nap and alertly reveals the assumptions of scientific positions. Philosophy is the presuppositionless and rigorous science the only true science, that is because it confronts the problem of the very possibility of
knowledge.4 Facing such a problem meant, for Kant, instituting a court
which would eventually distinguish reasons fair demands from the
groundless ones. Kant calls this activity critique rather than doctrine, since
its aim is not to expand the existing knowledges, but to rectify them.
Thereby, the critique of pure reason transforms itself into a critique of
culture. Philosophy assumes the position of choosing which areas of
culture enjoy a special relation to reality.5
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the
Kantian trial is set in motion by the distinction between intuitions and

The Contingency of Being

concepts. Looking inside us we discover that, through concepts, the


intellect synthesizes the data gathered by sensation in its original
receptiveness, making representation possible: Sensory intuitions . . .
are identified first of all as the source of knowledge of contingent
truths, and concepts as the source of knowledge of necessary truths.6
Two different kinds of knowledge, whose propositions are characterized by two different degrees of truthfulness, correspond to two genres
of beings. A fracture within the realm of the real is evident: outside,
there is a multiplicity simply given to us, from which we obtain contingent and trivial truths; inside, an inside though neither empirical nor
physical, lies a superior level of reality, which enables the world out
there to appear. The truthfulness of this unconditioned yet conditioning stratum of reality is incontestable not because of a stable
agreement on the propositions used to describe it, but because these
propositions, in their mute transparency, maintain a privileged relation
with a non-human reality. When we think philosophically we cannot
evade the sovereignty exercised upon us by such a reality. The idle
chatter fades away, leaving room for a silent observance of the truth. To
locate the place where every argument meets its end, is to reach the
foundation of knowledge.
Yet the transcendental project of knowledge foundation, which
claims itself to be presuppositionless, can take place only if the authority
of one single presupposition remains unquestioned. Rorty, in his 1979
Transcendental arguments, self-reference, and pragmatism, describes
such a transcendental presupposition as the belief that certain languages do not hopelessly depart from factual truth but accurately mirror the very structure which governs the world.7 This presupposition has
transcendental value for any transcendental argument, since the
assumption of a structural identity in the relation between logos and
reality is the only guarantee of the possibility for a statement to represent a given domain of being. Modern philosophy is held in check by
the transcendental presupposition and, with it, by the optical metaphors that connote the interaction between mind and world:
The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as
a great mirror, containing various representations some accurate, some
not and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. Without
the notion of the mind as a mirror, the notion of the knowledge as accuracy
of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion,
the strategy common to Descartes and Kant getting more accurate
representation by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to
speak would not have made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent
claims that philosophy could consist of conceptual analysis or phenomenological analysis explication of meanings or examination of the logic
of the language or of the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness would not have made sense.8

10

The Domestication of Derrida

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.

The Contingency of Being

11

c. The required further legitimation can be obtained while seated


in an armchair.12
The ironist makes a move which is considerably more anti-Kantian
than the one attempted by the relativist, for instead of contesting the
possibility of further legitimation requested in (c), he contests (a)
both to the realist and to the relativist. Rorty points to the essay On the
very idea of a conceptual scheme as paradigmatic of this anti-realist
radicalism.13 In this famous essay of 1974, Donald Davidson argues
exactly against the possibility of (a), that is, against the sustainability of
the dualism between scheme and content. Such a distinction is
essential to all those who claim (b) as true, that is, for those who believe
coherence on the side of the scheme is not sufficient to sanction the
truthfulness of a theory. For those who believe in (b), even a theory
that satisfies the justification requirements for an ideal theory (i.e., to
be simple, elegant, coherent, with perfect predictive power) could be
false. The additional legitimation (c) required to demonstrate that a
justified theory is also true can be obtained wearing slippers and a
robe, seated in an armchair next to the fireplace in the parlour. It is
evident that, once (a) is demonstrated to be unsustainable, (b) and (c)
would also automatically fall.
Following Alfred Tarski, Davidson claims that all the theory we need
for understanding the concept of truth in a certain language is contained in the assertion, made in that particular language, that the snow
is white if the snow is white. Both realists and relativists are committed to substituting Tarskian trivial principle with the more exotic
and exciting idea that there is something which organizes or adequates
to worldly experience.14 In Davidsons opinion, the idea that the
scheme (i.e., language) organizes the content (i.e., world) is unsustainable, for only pluralities can be organized: Someone who sets out
to organize a closet arranges the things in it. If you are told not to
organize the shoes and shirts, but the closet itself, you would be
bewildered.15 Furthermore, nothing is added to the banality of Tarskis principle if one claims that the scheme adequates to (or fits)
experience. If we are unable to imagine an experience not adequated
to a scheme, we also cannot conceive the schemes adequacy to
experience. Inspired by Davidson, Rorty states:
If we have no idea (as, ex hypothesis, in Kant, we do not) of what unsynthesized intuitions are like, we do not know what it is for concepts to synthesize
them. If we do not know what an un-pluralized experience is like we do not
know what it would be like to organize it. If we do not already know lots of
sentences which are true of reality, we shall not gain understanding of this
word-world relation by evaluating fit or correspondence.16

12

The Domestication of Derrida

Rorty and Davidsons distance from both relativism and realism is


underlined by the fact that their aim is not to advocate the possibility of
taking apart scheme and content (For we have found no intelligible
basis on which it can be said that schemes are different17), nor to unite
them (It would be equally wrong to announce the glorious news that
all mankind all speakers of language, at least share a common
scheme and ontology18). With Davidson, Rorty argues against the
whole problematic of legitimation created by the scheme-content distinction.19 He does not claim that the anti-transcendental arguments
reveal the intrinsic nature of reality to be either intrinsic as realism
pretends or extrinsic as relativism does but that intrinsic natures
do not exist. To say that there are no intrinsic natures, for the ironist,
is to say that the term intrinsic nature is one which it would pay us not to
use, an expression which has caused more trouble than it has been worth.
To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be
discovered is not to say that we discovered that, out there, there is no truth.
It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a
deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest.20

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

The Contingency of Being

13

until they become disgusting. Her actions are either annoying or


roguish, for instead of working in the production line enforced by
classical philosophy, she tries to interrupt its functioning. Not interested in being exploited for the construction of grand philosophical
discourses inspired by the transcendental presupposition, the ironist
spends her time proving that those discursive systems are not as
grounded as they pretend: it takes just a little effort to make them
collapse as if they were card castles. Here, sabotaging the philosophical
plant is a womans job. In fact, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty
uses the feminine pronoun to refer to the ironist, while the masculine
is reserved for that evil metaphysician. Whereas he, the metaphysician,
wishes to say how things really are, she, the ironist, never misses a
chance to underscore that philosophy is nothing else but a tired
repetition of the worn-out Platonic vocabulary, according to which the
division between appearance and reality is fundamental. The ironist is
greatly unsatisfied with such a vocabulary and wonders if the process
of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a
language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her
into the wrong kind of human being.22 The right language is the one
which would allow her to become who she wants.
Even if the ironist is a she, the history of irony is exclusively about
men. The first great ironist in Rortys manly Western philosophy is
Hegel. Instead of looking at things, Hegel looked in fact at philosophical texts; instead of philosophizing, he was engaged in writing a
history of philosophy. To map out a phenomenology of knowledge is
not to scrutinize past vocabularies in search of the one which will reveal
who we really are and what the world really is. Rather, it is to imagine
how humans from the past have behaved and what they believed in, so
as to decide if we would like to behave in a similar manner and believe
in similar things. The Hegelian dialectic begins a new genre of philosophical writing, a genre which can be compared to contemporary
literary criticism. The ironist is not too different from the critic who
confronts various poets terminologies (which equate to ways of living
in the world) to decide in whose image he should recreate himself. If
we know only the people from our own neighbourhood, we risk getting
trapped in the provincial vocabulary we were raised in. To avoid running that risk, it is necessary to get acquainted with strange people
(Alcibiades, Julien Sorel), strange families (the Karamazovs, the
Casaubons), and strange communities (the Teutonic Knights, the
Nuer, the mandarins of the Sung).23
The Phenomenology of Spirit shows how fast one can change vocabulary
and ideas, how one can get lost in a world populated by surprising
gestaltic twists, of ducks that turn out to be rabbits and vice versa. It is
not interested in trying to bridge the presumed abyss that separates the
subject from the objects. Hegels narrative demonstrates how every

14

The Domestication of Derrida

vocabulary, even those that claimed to be absolutely definitive and


impossible to overcome, is destined to become outdated and, thus,
abandoned. Every time the Kantian philosopher universalizes and
eternalizes his theories, the ironist reminds him that those are only the
world-views of a certain moment in history, and are therefore temporary and contingent.24 Hegel cautions against believing that beyond
or beneath the various changes of language and vocabulary lies
something like a common and unchanging way of being directed
toward the world. The alternative vocabularies do not inhabit the same
world, so it does not make sense to judge which of these languages
represents the world more accurately. Moreover, as Davidson persuasively claimed, it does not make sense to speak of a language and a
world at all.
Rorty feels it is productive to graft Darwins evolutionary terminology
onto the Hegelian discourse on the exchange of vocabularies. In this
way, he is confident he can produce a convincing account of how new
vocabularies are formed. Rortys version of the history of culture might
sound more or less like the following:
Once upon a time, at a certain moment in the history of a certain
community of animals, were born some elephants with long prehensile
trunks instead of regular noses. This new group of elephants with long
prehensile trunks happened to be better adapted to the surrounding
environment. It was easier for them to find food and defend themselves from predators. The other elephants faced extinction and
eventually only the ones with trunks survived. In the same way, at a
certain moment in the history of the world, a new vocabulary was
proposed. As time went by, we realized that our words were losing their
force of habit, and we were about to pick up a new language. This fight
for survival rewards the vocabulary that is most convenient, the most
useful and the most economical. As we would never claim that elephants acquired trunks because of a destiny intelligently designed for
them, Rorty thinks we should avoid thinking that the newly adopted
vocabulary is bringing us closer to the place where language and world
will be reconciled. Did we create a new language? We have forged a
new means to pursue our ends. But whereas the craftsman invents a
new tool having already in mind the goal he wants to reach, usually he
who develops a new vocabulary does not clearly foresee what he will
accomplish with it. He can only feel the need for something that does
not yet exist, something whose necessity is imposed by the inadequacy
of the present.25
Let us now go back to Hegel. According to Rorty, the history told in
the Phenomenology about a spirit that gets nearer and nearer to selfconsciousness is the mise-en-sce`ne of the eventful route that led
Romanticism to dominate European culture, eliminating the competition of other forms of language:

15

The Contingency of Being

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

In a given community, the German bourgeoisie of the eighteenth


century, a subcommunity appeared, growing larger and larger, which
did not settle for old redescriptions. Groups of young people, before
becoming adults, went through a half-dozen spiritual revolutions. The
story that Hegel tells is of an ever-faster change of social practices and
language-games. It is the story of a community that is not satisfied with
talking like everybody else, that perceives the traditional vocabulary as
a cage from which to escape towards a new and different destiny. To
sketch the features of this new social group, Rorty relies on the
reflection of the Yale critic Harold Bloom.

The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence


Youll soon create the sun and the
heavenly bodies, soon create the earth,
soon create yourself, other living creatures,
furniture, plants, and all the things
weve just been talking about.
(Plato, The Republic)

Rorty mostly relies on Blooms The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of


Misreading. In these books, Bloom attempts to define the poets psychology, to penetrate the peculiar trait that sets apart poets from other
human beings. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom describes the
Romantic poet as an individual who dwells within the space of the postCartesian tradition. This tradition accepts the dichotomy between res
cogitans and res extensa, but does not believe in the existence of the
pineal gland. Without faith in the mediation between the two spheres
of nature, it is impossible to recompose the dramatic dualism which
Descartes himself introduced; res cogitans and res extensa are infinitely
and definitively afar. Bloom thinks that the Cartesian separation
between mind and world, between a mathematic machine extended in
space and a thinking spirit without extension, caused a mutation in the
meaning of being influenced.27 Such an expression originally meant
to receive from the stars a fluid which determined ones behaviour and
character. Yet, after Descartes, it makes no sense to fear the influence
of spatial objects on thinking spirits. The anxiety of being influenced
then shifts from its originally spatial context and assumes a temporal
connotation. The threat is from that which is far away in time the past

16

The Domestication of Derrida

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

The Contingency of Being

17

Nietzsche or Heidegger) who fear being unable to be innovative and


creative. Rorty attempts to show that, from Hegel on, every ironist
(exactly like Blooms poets) has been chased by a sort of performance
anxiety. Since truth depends on time rather than on space, meaning
that truth is a human product whose fundamental traits change
through the flow of history, ironists fear not being able to produce
radically new truths and phenomena never before experienced. One
keeps hoping for a task to undertake, for a discontinuity to impose on
history, because that is what would make him special and original, in
spite of traditions majesty.
The words (or shapes, or theorems, or models of physical nature) marshaled to ones command may seem merely stock items, rearranged in
routine ways. One will not have impressed ones mark on the language but,
rather, will have spent ones life shoving about already coined pieces.31

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

The Domestication of Derrida

Thus, original work does not stem from astonishment, as Plato


wanted, but from the terror that what is about to be produced will be
nothing other than an imitation of something that already exists. The
fear is to have inherited infinitely more than what can be handed
down. He who is tormented by this anxiety of influence has the need to
design his own vocabulary. The dream of individual autonomy developed within the horizon of affirmative nihilism consists of a persons
desire to make himself with his own hands. It was Heideggers great
merit to show, in his breathtaking interpretation of The Will to Power,
that the transvaluation of all values proposed by Nietzsche is connected
with the need for a new right, a set of rules that would not come from
the outside, but which the self would impose upon itself. So this
autonomy is autonomy in its etymological meaning of autos-nomos: selflegislation. What is proposed by Nietzsche and recovered by Rorty is an
independent man as the producer of his own essence borrowing
Foucaults later jargon through the skilled work of the care of the
self. It is a demiurgic subjectivity that is imagined, a man who frees
himself from his debts to tradition, a little god able to create new
possibilities of existence. In fact, Nietzsche advocates the idea of a
subject that realizes its freedom not in self-knowledge, but in selfcreation. Who do I want to be? is the fundamental question for active
nihilism. As Pierre Klossowski writes in the forgotten gem Nietzsche and
the Vicious Circle, one of Nietzsches aims is to replace the indebted
subject governed by history with a free and autonomous one. The
desire of the creator is to become a star, to recompose his earthly body
into a celestial one so as to guide other mortals with a perennial
glimmer from an inaccessible height.
In the Myth of the cave staged by Socrates and Glauco in the
seventh book of Platos Republic, the closest star to Earth is described as
that which allows phenomena to appear.34 Similarly, the successful
creator is the sun who makes new possibilities of existence and new
truths appear with his brilliant illuminations. While traditional philosophers are busy researching the conditions of the real, the artificers
are moved by the desire to invent the impossible, something that was
not even imaginable before their lights arrival. Not interested in the
effects of other suns, the poets want to give birth to unheard-of life
forms. Makers strive to realize the unreal rather than merely unveil
what other stars have illuminated. They want to be little deities capable
of demiurgically producing worlds for the demos.
Rorty wonders where the privilege granted to the logic of creation,
rather than to the logic of discovery, will lead us. For instance, what are
the consequences of our understanding of human nature? Greek
philosophers were the first to declare they had discovered what being
human really meant; after them, it was the modern scientists, then the
German idealists. All of them anxiously made the same claim:

The Contingency of Being

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

Abandoning the will to mirror reality equates to giving up the idea of


the existence of an immortal human nature. There are no remains
which will be left untouched, notwithstanding all the things that
humanity has become; no emotional tonality can be so foundational as
to last forever. In this perspective, one can state that the Heidegger of
Being and Time is mistaken because he kept looking for the transcendental conditions of existence of man as such. This Heidegger thinks
that the guilt of thrownness which our conscience awakes in us, is not a
situation which only a few men himself, Marcel Proust and William
Blake included experience, but the fundamental condition of
humanity, the answer to the interrogation of its proper essence. Rortys
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity suggests that the answer to the question
Who is Dasein? should not be everyone on the planet. Dasein is
people like Heidegger himself, those who share his poetic interest to
invent themselves (p. 109).
On the one hand, Blooms anxiety of influence is useful in anticipating some peoples behaviours and understanding their feelings. On
the other hand, Heidegger errs through presumption since he claims
that every human being shares his own emotional tonality. Heidegger
falls back into the transcendental presupposition since he still considers self-knowledge as a matter of discovery rather than invention.
While the metaphysical tradition (in which Heidegger sometimes gets
trapped) regards the distinction between transientcontingent opinions and authenticeternal truths as fundamental, for Rorty, the
distinction between old and new, worn-out and original, is crucial. This
is not to say that we should renounce the project of understanding
ourselves: in Nietzsches perspective, knowing oneself is equivalent to
creating it. Reaching self-knowledge does not mean grasping a truth
hidden in the depths of all men. Self-consciousness coincides rather
with self-invention:
The process of coming to know oneself, confronting ones contingency,
tracking ones causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new
language that is, of thinking up some new metaphors. (p. 27)

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

The Domestication of Derrida

A metaphor, in the Platonic and positivist traditions, is acceptable


only if its meaning can be translated into a literal language. Recourse
to figurative languages is tolerated as a pedagogical means, valuable
insofar as metaphors communicate reality without facing the difficulties of adopting a radically rational language. An analogous relation
binds together art and philosophy: even if they both dwell close to
truths light, the distance that keeps them apart must be understood.
As it is suggested in Platos Republic, the artist uses images to exhibit the
essence of things. He cannot access what ought to be seen in a thing
literally, its idea without darkening it in the stuff of colors and
surfaces.36 In art, truth manifests at the cost of obfuscating and
screening its splendour. Instead, the philosopher can grasp and bring
forth the truth purely, as such, without passing through the mediation
of figurative language.
Rorty exhorts us to get rid of the conception that new metaphors
and works of art let what already exists appear. It is not a matter of
mimesis, of imitation. We have to recognize that art and metaphor are
not ways to communicate old ideas in original fashions: they institute
absolutely new meanings. To produce metaphors, to make art, means
abruptly interrupting normal conversation in an effort to revolutionize the way in which things appear. Rorty, again influenced by
Davidson, claims that, stricto sensu, new metaphors do not have
meaning. Only those expressions adopted by a community, through
use, as regulated language games, can properly mean. Consequently,
the distinction between literal and metaphorical language must be
thought of as the distinction between familiar and unfamiliar uses of
noises and marks. Artworks and metaphors have their origin in the
sentiment that the accepted vocabulary lacks something. Once the
inadequacy of vocabulary is recognized, one appeals to metaphors and
art to reach what is impossible within the truths available in the
familiar language.37
The act of candidating a truth to join the ranks of our language can
be considered a free action only if such truth does not exercise any
coercion upon us. As Wlad Godzich has argued in his Domestication
of Derrida, to accept a proposition pressured by some external
authority would undermine the freedom of deciding about the truthfulness of such a proposition.38 If the essence of truth reveals itself as
freedom, the place where such essence is manifested can only be a
choice that entails error. Truth manifests itself as a kind of deviance,
since it is only by erring from the decisions imposed by tradition that
we can prove our autonomy and our freedom. One has to wander away
from common sense to create a new one. Metaphors would be those
attempts to err which, irrupted on the scene of human dialogue and
welcomed with pleasure by many people, become more and more
present in the linguistic praxis of a given community.

The Contingency of Being

21

A metaphor cannot be judged as true or false on its first appearance.


There are no language games or rules of use that might confirm or
invalidate it. In the beginning, it makes no sense since the metaphorical utterance seeks to institute the law under which it is itself to be
judged. Only when a metaphor dies that is, when it becomes wholly
familiar does it assume a precise value which the speakers of a
determined language can easily collect and trade. It can be judged true
only when it has become worn-out, when its power to create an epoche in
the linguistic exchange has vanished. Metaphors die, and their dust
constitutes the common language games, the habitual tools of a specific vocabulary. To succeed, a metaphor needs to introduce a new
truth in language. One might call a successful metaphor poetic, since
it produces an original meaning. Rorty, with Nietzsche, claims that art
is the very positing of new truths, and the artist is the one who reacts to
the crisis of traditional values by generating new ones. This creation
can take place let me reiterate it only if one feels the necessity of
deviating from the vocabulary of the society in which one is cast, from
the system of values through which, and in which, things are judged. As
Heideggers Nietzsche. The Will to Power as Art suggests, Nietzsche, by
focusing his attention on the creative, legislative, form-grounding
aspect of art (p. 131), individuates two types of creative activity. This is
how one gets to the difference between Classic and Romantic, active
and reactive. Romantic is that modality of creation that is derived
from the impossibility of being satisfied with what there is: Here what
is properly creative is discontent, the search for something altogether
different; it is desire and hunger . . . . Creation out of discontent takes
action only in revulsion toward and withdrawal from something else
(p. 132). Heidegger on the following page continues:
Longing after Becoming, alteration, and therefore destruction too, can be
but need not necessarily be an expression of superabundant strength,
pregnant with the future. Such is Dionysian art. But longing after change
and Becoming can also spring from the dissatisfaction of those who hate
everything that exists simply because it exists and stands. Operative here is
the counterwill typical of the superfluous, the underprivileged, the disadvantaged, for whom every existing superiority constitutes in its very
superiority an objection to its right to exist. (p. 133)

For Nietzsche, Romantic artists can only be disadvantaged and


underprivileged. As in Bloom, the longing for creativity derives from
the pathological inability to accept the truths existing within common
consent: from a syndrome of assimilation without accommodation.
The artist, one might say, is the rebellious child who establishes an
unexpected time.
Paul de Man, in the chapter Rhetoric of tropes from his Allegories of

22

The Domestication of Derrida

Reading, examines the relation between figurative and literal language


in Nietzsche. De Man states that Nietzsche does not regard tropes as
being aesthetic accessories, ornaments used to communicate figuratively a sense derived from literal denomination. Nietzsche does not
consider figural language the derived, secondary, marginal or aberrant
form of language, but as the linguistic mode characterizing language as
such. Metaphoricity is the structural and necessary feature of every
form of discourse. As Samuel Wheeler III notes, de Man, inspired by
Nietzsche, recognizes the movement of signification as the calling of
one thing with a name that is necessarily allegorical as it is always other
(allos) than the thing itself.39
So, what is the truth after Nietzsche?
A moving army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms, in
short a summa of human relationships that are being poetically and rhetorically sublimated, transposed, and beautified until, after long and repeated use, a people considers them as solid, canonical, and unavoidable.
Truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten, metaphors
that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate as
mere metal, no longer as coins.40

De Mans Allegories of Reading indicates that Nietzsche condemns the


degradation of metaphor into the literal meaning not because such a
degradation amounts to a forgetting of a truth, but instead because it
forgets the un-truth, the lie that the metaphor was in the first place (p.
111). All statements are originally lies because no mode of signifying is
ever proper. Truth is a lie no longer perceived as such. It is not an
extratemporal reality that philosophy has to unveil; rather, as Rorty
states, it is a linguistic artefact whose traits are often altered.41 This is
also the chief reason why Rorty argues that the philosopher should not
think of himself as a superscientist, but as an ally of the artist. Artists
and philosophers are involved in the solar activity of creating words
and worlds, of offering new descriptions of reality.
The ironist, having renounced the hope that the clear and distinct
ideas of things themselves might become available to the minds
infallible eye, has to be content to read the texts of tradition. To
facilitate the creation of an original future, a new kind of philosopher
rereads the past of his discipline in a way that would legitimate his
claims of superiority. In this case, the past does not determine the
present; rather, the present, by revisiting the past and renarrating its
story, reconfigures it. The meaning of the events carved onto the
tabula of conscience is redescribed a posteriori, nachtraglich, on the basis
of our present necessities and desires. We are accustomed to believing
that Plato writes from Socrates dictation, that the oldest shapes the
youngest. Yet this belief is not true: it is Socrates who is subjected to

The Contingency of Being

23

Platos index, an index in which Plato shows Socrates looking forward


from behind him. The future is behind pasts back:
Poetic thought is proleptic, and the Muse invoked under the name Memory
is being implored to help the poet remember the future.42

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

The Domestication of Derrida

has a temporal character, it is always temporarily situated. Even the


truth of Being cannot be dissociated from human history.43
Once Heidegger became convinced of such a fact, he had to interrupt the transcendental project of Being and Time, which was too
metaphysical and not historical enough. He then started assigning to
thinking not the task of revealing general truths, but of preserving the
force of the metaphors fundamental for the history of the West;
metaphors which would have been otherwise destined to fall unheard
in the oblivious chatter of ordinary language. By reactivating our ability
to listen to the call of such path markers, we might be able to reach an
adequate comprehension of our present, since we are primarily the
words we speak. For this reason, Heidegger feels obligated to preserve
those GreekGerman words that have had a crucial importance in the
constitution of who we are today. But who are we?
Rorty suggests that the mistake of this Heidegger (the one after the
alleged Kehre of the 1930s) results from assuming that the words
important for him were important also for the rest of humanity. Heideggers project was thus twofold. On the one hand, he wanted to
recapture a sense of contingency, of the fragility and riskiness of any
human project.44 On the other hand, he claimed that such contingency was not so contingent after all, since some human projects
were powerful enough to have become destiny for we, the people of
Europe. Rorty refuses to accept that Heideggers list of metaphors is
entitled to claim a necessary, universal, fatal relevance. Those who do
not share his readings, who are not acquainted with Hegel, Aristotle,
Rainer Maria Rilke, will find Heideggers litany useless.
The elementariness of elementary words, in Heideggers sense of elementary, is a private and idiosyncratic matter. The list of books which Heidegger
read is no more central for Europe and its destiny than a lot of other lists of
a lot of other books, and the concept of the destiny of Europe is, in any
case, one we can do without.45

Philosophy is only one of the many literary genres of modern culture, a


genre that has influenced and influences less than other literary traditions (i.e., the novel), political ideas, utopian ambitions, solidarity, in
a word, the Bildung of Western humanity. Heideggers canon is only one
of the many canons that we can remit to.
The greatest difference that Rorty locates between ironists who write
fiction and those who write theory is the formers awareness that the
events they redescribe in original terms could have been other ones.
The latter believe that the vocabularies that follow one another are part
of a destiny an inevitable progression that reaches its pinnacle
through the vocabulary that they are trying to enforce. For this reason,
Rorty relies, paradoxically, on a novelist to overcome metaphysics.

The Contingency of Being

25

Things might have gone differently in Prousts In Search of Lost Time.


There might have been no madeleine. Marcel might have gone out to
play instead of having remained in his room reading. The Prince of
Guermantes might not have married. That events took a certain course
is a product of the unbearable contingency of Being, of casual events
that might not have happened at all. On the contrary, the ironist
theorist claims that history is not a mere casualty: Plato must give way
to Saint Paul, and Christianity to Enlightenment. A Kant must be followed by a Hegel, and a Hegel by a Marx.46 While ironists cannot
assert their vocabulary as having a special relation with a pre- and extralinguistic reality, they nonetheless suppose their own projects to be
connected with something not merely private and idiosyncratic: the
journey of the West. Each theorist therefore grounds the authenticity of
his own discourse not on a presumed spatial contact with nature, but on
a temporal alignment with destiny. The ironist theorist does not want his
redescription to be considered just one of the many possible redescriptions; on the contrary, he claims it to be inspired by the spirit of time.
Hegel was the first to lay such an unfortunate claim by organizing
the Phenomenology of Spirit around the idea that history is not a series of
events which can only be plotted together a posteriori, but a progression
with an ending a priori. While Proust, the ironist non-theorist, could
accept the fact that someone in the future, escaping his vision and his
authority, will betray his legacy and emerge with new metaphorical
arrangements, the ironist theorists just like their metaphysical forefathers hope to represent the end of redescriptions. They wish to
embody the absolute fulfilment of history, to manifest the final
metaphoric.
Proust was able to demolish the authority figures he had met, without claiming an authority different from theirs. Hegel, Nietzsche and
Heidegger insisted on incarnating a special vocabulary, not merely
contingent. Irony knows no future, just ends (end of history, of
thought, of man, of humanism), precisely because it pretends to have
found words impossible to aufheben.

26

The Domestication of Derrida

Histories of Writing and Masturbation


There is more than a touch of this
adolescent perversity in Derrida.
(Terry Eagleton, Marxism without Marxism)
Betrayal. From tender youth we are
told by father and teacher that
betrayal is the most heinous offense
imaginable. But what is betrayal?
Betrayal means breaking ranks.
Betrayal means breaking ranks and
going off into the unknown. Sabina
knew of nothing more magnificent
than going off into the unknown.
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

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

The Contingency of Being

27

a homecoming (nostos) is what gives Heideggers gestures their sense,


their orientation. As it is explained in Of Grammatology:
Orientation gives direction to the movement by relating it to its origin as to
its dawning. And it is starting from the light of origin that one thinks of the
West, the end and the fall, cadence or check, death or night.50

Thinking will eventually return to its origin. More precisely, thinking


finds its sense in the very return to its birthplace. Therefore, Heidegger
nostalgically hopes that, in a clearing of the Black Forest, the language
of authentic philosophy will shine again. But in order for that to
happen, he needed to start a revolution so thorough as to restore the
thinking that was put out with the beginning of Platonic metaphysics.
At every turn of discourse, Heidegger tries to defeat the centrifugal
force that pushes Europe far from its light. We can be saved from the
maelstrom that debases man only by returning to orbit around the one
magic name, the transparent and unmarked watchword which reveals
the secret on the difference between Dasein, Being and beings. Heidegger hopes to listen to the pure friendly language, which, buried and
preserved under idle chatter, can transport beyond the obscure contingency of mans languages. But this very desire is what consigns him
to the long hand whose influence he tried to avoid: Heidegger is a
victim of the influence of the past since he tries to flee away from the
present. He gets frozen and trapped in traditions maze because of his
attempt to be an authentic author, someone who has something
important to say, someone who is part of a bigger plan and not merely
a reader of texts. Following the Derrida of Differance and of Ends of
man, Rorty can claim that Heideggers envy for the golden age of
thinking, the age in which philosophy still dwelled near the gods, goes
hand in hand with his desire to remember the luminous home of
thinking. But to where does Heidegger hope to return? What is it that
the philosophical tradition has stealthily taken away from him?
The more Heideggers reflection advanced, the more the fundamental problems of metaphysics appeared to him as pseudo-problems:
questions to put aside rather than solve. In such a position, Heidegger
started looking for the authors of the metaphors holding him captive.
Eventually, as Rorty notes, he concluded that the problem went all the
way back to Plato. Having reached such a conclusion, Heidegger had
an ambivalent reaction.
If I am right in interpreting Seinsverstandnis as final vocabulary and Sein as
what final vocabularies are about, then one would expect Heidegger to say
that no understanding of Being is more or less an understanding of Being,
more or less true . . . than any other. No petal on a cherry blossom is more or
less a petal than any other.51

28

The Domestication of Derrida

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

The Contingency of Being

29

understood as the means of enabling those who are not present to


share ones thoughts: its goal is to communicate a sense, to represent
distant meanings in absence of their legitimate owner. Instead of books
that transparently talk about the world, Derrida introduces, more
decisively than any other ironist, a new referent for writing: Derridas
texts do not talk about the world, they write about other texts.54 This is
done in order to highlight that discourses are always and only referring
to other vocabularies, to other declinations of the world. We never
meet the pure world, we simply cannot refer to a reality that is not
already linguistic. Wherever we turn looking for the thing itself, for a
meaning that might have happened outside language, we find only
texts. Above and beyond language, there are only other languages; this
is the sense of Derridas catch-line il ny a pas de hors-texte (there is
nothing outside the text).55 Under Derridas configuration, the world
no longer suggests anything to us; it is not recognized as a possible
conversation partner because, as Rorty puts it, between ourselves and
the thing judged there always intervenes mind, language, a perspective
chosen among dozens, one description chosen out of thousands.56
The metaphorics of voice suggest that words reveal what ought to be
seen in things their idea. The idea of text, in other words, the idea of
writing which generates other writing, helps us recognize that conversation, written or oral, has no other end than conversation itself. If
one can accept that culture and knowledge are nothing else than
humanitys endless dialogue, then one can avoid the teleology still
characteristic of so many ironist thinkers.
The Kantian urge to bring philosophy to an end by solving all its problems,
having everything fall into place, and the Heideggerian urge toward
Gelassenheit and Unverborgenheit, are the same urge. Philosophical writing, for
Heidegger as for the Kantians, is really aimed at putting an end to writing.
For Derrida, writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more
just as history does not lead to Absolute Knowledge or the Final Struggle,
but to more history, and more, and still more.57

Just as it happens in the Phenomenology, truth is conceived by Derrida as


the reinterpretation of prior interpretations. The difference from
Hegel, however, is the rejection of the faith in the arrival of reinterpretation which would complete and thus terminate the movement of
thinking. Derrida maintains the ironic idea of philosophy as a horizontal succession of texts (and not as a vertical relation between words
and things), but strips it of its teleology. One can affirm that Derrida
conceives philosophy as nonsensical since it is not directed toward a
definitive meaning. The conversation among philosophers, instead of
being a means of reaching ends other than itself, is just supposed to
promote the taste for dialogue.

30

The Domestication of Derrida

Rortys remarks on deconstruction are very effective in reproducing


the texture woven by Derrida. Derrida is a writer who disappoints his
readers. Intentionally so. He is a frustrating author since he infinitely
defers the moment of truths appearance. In fact, many of his texts end
with references to other texts, recalling the necessity of further readings, or even with questions instead of answers. In Derrida, one deals
with a plot similar to that of a polyphonic fiction: a structure that has
neither head nor tail since its central and organizing fire has been
extinguished.
The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a
fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental
immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of
play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety
is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of
being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the
outset. And again on the basis of what we call the center (and which,
because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be called the
origin or end, arche or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and
permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens] that is, in a
word, a history whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may
always be anticipated in the form of presence.58

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

The Contingency of Being

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 assumption of differance the difference between a text and what


it means62 not only extends the domain and play of interpretation ad
infinitum, but also transforms the trajectories of philosophical discursivity into an adventurous wandering. The drift acted out by Derridas writing is exactly the risk that the philosophical tradition has
always wanted to avoid the philosopher, after overstrenuous inquiry
into our relation to the world, may lose his nerve, his reason, and the
world simultaneously. He does this by withdrawing into a dream world
of ideas, of representations even, God help us, of texts.63 Derridas
Of Grammatology associates this resistance toward writing with the traditional condemnation of self-eroticism. The one who plays with writing and the one who plays with himself run the same risk. What do
these two manual activities have in common? What kind of threatening
perversion do they share?
The supplement that cheats maternal nature operates as writing, and as
writing it is dangerous to life. This danger is that of the image. Just as writing
opens the crisis of the living speech in terms of its image, its painting or its
representation, so onanism announces the ruin of vitality in terms of imaginary seductions. (p. 151)

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

The Domestication of Derrida

The threat is that the blinding pleasures of writing and masturbation


would end up seducing us, abducting us from the straight and narrow
path, away from the track beaten by normal intellect.65 Writing, as
destruction and disease of presence, risks compromising the worlds
stability disjointing it. Since differance forestalls the enjoyment of the
things in themselves, we are left to play with the simulacra and the
simulations of things produced by imagination. Writing and masturbation loosen up our contact with reality, they both invoke an
absence which is contrary to the natural health of reason. To have
something to do with them means risking intoxication, being addicted
to the world of ghosts they produce and thus losing interest in reality.
Having spent too much time playing with literature, Derridas thought
ended up losing its sight on things.
To touch ones self and to carve a surface are in contrast, through a
sort of epoche, with the authenticity of embracing bodies. Suspending
the immediate presence of faces and voices, they are temptations that
can drive one insane. Estranged from the truth of reason, writing and
masturbation both risk drifting away from the thing itself. They both
venture into a realm of illusions that break free from the reality of
things in flesh and bone and inaugurate the theatre of fiction. One
gets lost in a world of phantoms and phenomena, in a universe in
which the convocation of things themselves is differed infinitely since
the very possibility of being in touch with reality is dislocated by the
imaginative faculty, which is at the ground of writing and masturbation.
As Derrida writes in Platos pharmacy, writing plays within the simulacrum, and for this reason, is considered threatening to life in a way
the living (spoken) word is not.66
Tradition looks at masturbation and writing as foreplay which one
has to practice before coming to the point: to the core of things.
Normality consists in the thrill of fitting just the right piece . . . into
just the right slot, in writing, for showing the right slots of things, in
masturbating, for getting it right.67 Anybody can confine oneself to
being normal. It simply requires following the standard path illuminated by tradition. But, argues Rorty, Derrida does not really feel like
partaking in the normal game of the past the one that teleologically
conceives writing as the act which substitutes talking in the hope of
restoring its lost presence.
According to the metaphysical tradition, the fullness of meaning
should eventually regain possession of the impropriety of writing,
whose possible virulence must be neutralized with a final presentification: writing was supposed to paint a living word.68 It should
produce copies and representatives of voice. Writings role is to serve as
a faithful mouthpiece: a docile and obedient servant, it has to place at
the disposal of ones voice an apparatus which would refer to reality as
an unequivocal index. He who abuses its pleasures will surrender

The Contingency of Being

33

himself to a tunnel, to a cave where the benefits of sunlight cannot


arrive. Just like the pharmakon to be found in the back of Platos
drugstore, writing should be used in moderation and kept out of the
reach of children in order not to corrupt them; one should turn to it
exclusively for therapeutic use. Deconstruction, instead, abuses the
stupefacient drugs called writing and plays with it in a masturbation
without end.
We are warned that to masturbate and to write opaquely are activities to be avoided because they subvert natural law: these are practices
against nature and life. By contrast, Derrida, according to Rorty, wants
to persuade us that the condemnation of writing and masturbation is
produced by human history, not by some extrahuman necessity.
Western scientific and religious discourses also stated that masturbating made shameful hair grow on ones hands. Rorty, referring to
the philosophical prejudices within which he was raised, writes:
students of analytic philosophy were encouraged to keep their reading in
literature well clear of their philosophical work and to avoid reading German philosophy between Kant and Frege. It was widely believed that reading
Hegel rotted the brain. (Reading Nietzsche and Heidegger was thought to
have even worse effects doing so might cause hair to sprout in unwonted
places, turning one into a snarling fascist beast.)69

Rorty compares Derrida to the secularists who, instead of affirming


something about God his existence or inexistence consider the
divine as a part of human history. Rather than discussing the truth of
God, they suggested how the world might look if religion got out of the
way. In the same manner, Derrida tries to make us imagine what philosophical culture might look like without the Kantian interest in the
foundations of knowledge: a culture which would no longer condemn
writing and would stop worrying about the relation between subject
and object, representations and the real.70 By highlighting the link
between masturbation and writing it is in fact easier to describe the
philosophical morals of the West as a historical contingency that can be
overcome by also learning to perceive writing in its heavy materiality
and by looking at words as words and not as means to mirror immutable essences. This is why in Derridas texts philosophy dances to the
rhythm of obscene allusions and puns, bizarre etymologies, enigmatic
allusions, phonic and graphic oddities. It is because Derrida thinks
that the ability to see writing as writing is what we need to break the grip
of the notion of representation.71 Rorty affirms that, in Derridas view,
Kantian philosophy
is a kind of writing which would like not to be a kind of writing. It is a genre
which would like to be a gesture, a clap of thunder, an epiphany. That is

34

The Domestication of Derrida

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

Instead of looking for a proper, transparent, phenomenologically pure


language, Derrida dramatically complicates his style. Kantian philosophers, fearing the threats of writing, looked for words pure enough to
reconcile things and thinking. Heidegger and the other ironist
authors, anxious about the fluids of metaphysical tradition, searched
for a metaphorics capable of terminating the movement of interpretation. Derridas writing is so perverse that it differs infinitely from
the embrace of the happy couple constituted by mind and world. But it
is also so impure that it does not expect to be the destinal redescription. One moves from text to text, from metaphor to metaphor, in an
endless play of substitutions that can never culminate in the presentation of the thing itself, nor in the manifestation of a destiny. The
circulation of signs has been going on forever. Therefore, since it does
not have a beginning neither can it have one end.
If propositions depend only on propositions instead of on worlds or
destiny, then the idea of a pure language, of a homeland for the
authentic thinking, fades. One is no longer forced to purify ones
vocabulary since a virginal vocabulary not penetrated by others vocabularies, does not exist. Husserl knew this well. The thing that happened to the Bloomian strong poet also happens to the protagonist of
Cartesian Meditations: the attempt to delimitate a pure inside which
owes nothing to the alter ego, culminates in the egos realization that
the contaminating spectre of the other, i.e., language, is exactly what
makes possible, and thus at the same time forbids, autarchy. As Bloom
convincingly explains in A Map of Misreading: despite all its effort, any
poem will always be a dyad at least and never a monad because what
terrorizes most of the fluids of the past is that one can see the flooding
only after it has already come. One cannot see it coming, thus any
preventive strike against the terrorizing menace is impossible.
Having clarified that contamination is to be recognized as the
condition of any subjectivity (consciousness) and any objectivity
(truth), it is much easier to understand the reason behind Glas, the
Talmudic pages in which Derrida monstrously mixes texts, grafts Genet
in Hegels column, disseminates hidden quotations and makes dirty
allusions. If we are able to recognize the desire for authenticity and
purity as symptomatic relapses into the metaphysical habitus that
hopes to speak without suffering from any contingent and influencing
germs, we are also able to understand the necessity of Derridas style.
Writing is helpless, cannot live in itself, is a joke and a despair,73
insofar as it cannot avoid being haunted by words that are not its own.

The Contingency of Being

35

Deconstruction assumes the form of pastiche since just like other


cultural products of late capitalism such as De Palmas movies or
Tarantinos Pulp Fiction it exhibits its own impropriety and nonindependence, the debt that makes it depend on other productions.
Rather than falling back into Heideggers GreekGerman fantasy and
thus producing nostalgic remakes of it, Derrida convenes in the present all the spectres that, speaking in his vocabulary, are speaking with
him.
Instead of yielding to the seductive cloaking device which Nietzsche
called active forgetfulness, Derrida is not ashamed of his own debts.
In his texts, he sets up a crowded symposium whose participants are the
authors of the past that have influenced him the most. On such an
occasion, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Shakespeare, Heidegger, Marx and
many more, end up talking to each other but, in contrast to the
meetings arranged by Plato, there is no Socrates there to knock out the
challengers. The dialogical skirmishes frequently result in an endless
analysis. Derridas irony derives from letting discourses play against
discourses, simulacra against simulacra, writing against writing, rather
than opposing a transparent and rigorous truth against the opinions of
the past. There is no obstinately innocent logos that sits in judgement
over philosophers conflicts in order to resolve their quarrels. The final
judgement never appears on the stage to solve, as a deus ex machina,
disputes and oppositions. The overcoming of metaphysics here does
not take place in perfecting or correcting it, but through the resolution
not to satisfy the desire for autarchy and purity that are the motors of
philosophical enterprise. According to Rorty, showing the influence
which binds him to the past is the way in which Derrida gains some
autonomy from it. Simultaneously, he evokes the spirits of philosophy
and discards their dictates: in order to be really freed from the influence of the past, one has to recover from the anxiety of influence itself.
Derridas writing demonstrates in fact a porosity and penetrability
that is the reversal of classical virtues. Perfection for a living being, and
for a written piece, is traditionally a matter of not having any relation
with the outside, in the insurmountability of the defence that immunizes it from the attacks of foreigners and parasites. A living being is
perfect if it is exclusively and purely an inside. God who does not
masturbate since he does not have hands also does not have allergies.74 Health and virtue coincide. By beating the text of metaphysics,
Derrida unveils its hidden wound, exposing how promiscuous it has
always been. This is what Geoffrey Hartman refers to when describing
deconstruction as a pinking philosophy, or as a pornosophy.75 To
paint philosophy pink means to highlight the relationship between
philosophy and sexuality, putting in the spotlight the fact that philosophy has always thought of itself in the male gender: the will to know
and to possess, the project of penetrating reality, the desire to

36

The Domestication of Derrida

inseminate, the fear of being penetrated and possessed and so forth. Is


not Derrida suggesting that metaphysics, and ironist theory as well, is
an effect of the sexism of the West? Male sexuality is the norm and the
foundation (it is enough to think of the biblical creation of Adam and
Eve), femininity is thought of on the basis of the category of lack: lack
of phallus, of virility, of penetrative sharpness, of toughness. Penis
envy. Anxiety of influence. Science, mathematics, body-building, and
martial music are destined for boys, literature and flowers are things
for girls, or for those quasi-girls and quasi-boys who are homosexuals.
After reading Derrida, one starts believing that the primacy of the voice
is just an effect of the sovereignty of the phallus; that phonocentrism a
consequence of phallocracy.76
Derridas philosophy, for the first time, recognizes as proper and
positive those so-called feminine characteristics which have always been
able to produce, at best, literature. In Structure, sign, and play in the
discourse of human sciences, Derrida, reading Levi-Strauss, individuates two different strategies of writing: writing as bricolage is the discourse that nomadically uses the tools found along its way, without
hesitating to try many, with no fear to modify them in order to adapt
them to the goals for which they had not been intended. Derrida
compares the bricoleurs practice to that of the engineer. The latter is
the one who wants to be the absolute origin of his vocabulary, the
origin of the word, the word made flesh. The one who does not tolerate being deceived by language, history, or a world. The one who
longs to start from scratch. The one who has total control over his
erections. But do engineers really exist? And what about a true male?
Has he ever existed?
If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing ones concepts from the text
of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that
every discourse is bricoleur.77

If one admits that every philosophical discourse is bound to a certain


bricolage, that the engineer is of the same gender as the bricoleur, then
one will stop believing in the existence of manly engineers, of a
transcendental science or an ironic redescription that purely and
radically breaks from the historical contingencies and presuppositions
typical of other sectors of culture.
Derrida denounces the demands of engineering for its dreamy
provenance, and dreams, as Cinderella knew well, are desires: to think
the dream of metaphysics for him is to think of metaphysics as a dream,
a dream whose overcoming is a matter of sex, insofar as philosophical
discourse is an effect of desire. Deconstructions lack of seriousness,
which Rorty praises so much, seems to be provoked by the tremendously serious attempt not to take too seriously the canonic

The Contingency of Being

37

positions with which the tradition always and continuously tempts us,
but to drive ourselves, finally, toward other passions.

Deconstruction as Circumvention: Envois


Was he cultivated enough to know this was
the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on
his small gray horse, passed under the
windows of Hegel, who recognized in him
the spirit of the world, as he wrote to a
friend? Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote to
another friend, the French pillaged and
ransacked his home. But Hegel knew how to
distinguish the empirical and the essential.
(Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death)

The history of philosophy told by Rorty is characterized by something


similar to a march toward the privatization of the means of production
of the world, and toward the acceptance of the absolute contingency of
the sense of Being. Aristotle and Plato spoke, each in his own terms, of
the essence of things: things are responsible for our understanding of
them. With Kants Copernican revolution, philosophical gaze moved to
mens universal and necessary way of knowing things. It is starting from
Kant that we can properly speak of a world posited by human beings, a
world common to the whole of humanity and to any other form of
intelligent life. Hegel happened to be the one who historicized and
thus relativized Kants categories; every epoch and every culture has its
peculiar mode of being opened to reality. And yet, like Heidegger,
Hegel too suggested that an absolute culture would come and complete the unfolding of history. The last step of the movement that Rorty
forces on philosophy occurs with Derrida: the image of the world I
have depends upon my desires. Upon the privacy and uniqueness of
the events I happened to face. Upon my life. Upon my loves. Philosophy, born as thinking of things, is overturned into thinking of the
factual and empirical I who is directed towards things. Theory blends
into autobiography since the responsibility of a philosophical discourse
is always ascribed to someone; never to Being, nature or destiny.
The paradigmatic case of such privatization of philosophy is Derridas Envois, a crucial yet relatively understudied text, often relegated
to the status of intellectualistic extravagance. In Envois, Derrida collects love letters sent by someone between 3 June 1977 and 13 August
1979. Two years of love letters that an I, always far from home on
business, sends to a thou from Oxford, Yale, London, as well as from
other academic venues. Who is the addressee of this love a woman,

38

The Domestication of Derrida

many women, many men, the sophia, Heidegger is up to the reader to


decide; it is up to you for example.78
Presumably, the I who signs the letters is Derrida himself: in the
movements to which the postcards allude, it is not difficult to recognize
the travels that the philosopher had made delivering lectures
throughout the world. The assiduous correspondence emphasizes the
privacy of the work being done in Envois.
Nothing is more private than a love letter there is nothing to which
general ideas are less relevant or more inappropriate. Everything, in a love
affair or love letter, depends upon shared private associations, as when the
traveling salesman who writes the letters in Envois recalls the day when
we bought that bed (the complication of credit and of the perforated tag in
the department store, and then one of those horrible scenes between us).79

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.

The Contingency of Being

39

[A]n interminable, disproportionate erection traversing Pariss head like a


single idea and then the copyists chair, before slowly sliding, still warm,
under Socrates right leg.81

Once again the discourse on metaphysics is transformed into sexual


innuendo. In Envois, thanks to the penis/skateboard cue, Derridas
attention focuses on the theme of procreation and lineage. Somebody
the addressee of the letters, but also the inverted couple p. and S. is
trying to force Derrida into having a child. In fact, as he writes, what
has betrayed us, is that you wanted generality: which is what I call a
child (p. 23).
Imagine the day, as I have already, that we will be able to send sperm by post
card, without going through a check drawn on some sperm bank, and that it
remains living enough for the artificial insemination to yield fecundation.
(p. 24)

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

The Domestication of Derrida

Sometimes, we can almost hear Rortys voice asking philosophy to


leave Derrida alone: philosophy should not mess with him since he
neither aspires to say anything important, nor does he want to give
birth to works which claim to a validity both general and eternal. He
wants to disperse seeds and senses via an infinity of addresses, which
speak of his private idiosyncrasies and do not aim at positing a public
truth effective for everyone. The postcards collected by Derrida are
meaningful even if or better exactly because they do not make any
public or even familiar sense. He, who writes postcards and masturbates with texts instead of giving birth to books, is not trying to be
right. He just wants to love without producing general truths. Envois
is pretty clear about it:
Reproduction prohibited, which can be translated otherwise: no child,
inheritance prohibited, filiation interrupted, sterile midwives. Between us, I
have always believed (you dont, I know) that the absence of filiation would
have been the chance. (p. 39)

Ignoring the desire for filiation the reproduction of general truths


is the way in which Derrida tries to avoid resembling the family of
metaphysics. In the colloquium with Ferraris, which I have already
referenced, Derrida states: I am not one of the family.84 Then he
explains that such a sentence must not be understood as merely stating
a fact; it also implies an oath and a commitment. While stating he is not
of the family, Derrida is also declaring that he will not be a member of
the family; that he will do his best not to be assimilated to a certain
stock. But such a promise is meaningful only if it can be broken and
not kept; only if it requires a certain effort by the promising subject. In
fact, Derridas commitment to avoid the craving for generality to
use Wittgensteins words risks being jeopardized by the temptation of
surrendering to the spectres of the metaphysical romance. The desire
for reproduction is tempting. And it is powerful. As it is confessed in
Envois, the child remains alive or dead, the most beautiful and the
most living of fantasies, as extravagant as absolute knowledge (p. 39).
In the attempt to flee from the family of Socrates and Plato the family
that promises to resolve the problematic relation between Subject and
predicate Derrida turns for support to Heidegger and Freud, two
thinkers whose glances never crossed and who, without ever receiving a
word from one another, say the same. They are turned to the same
side (p. 191). But why specifically can those two help him in stopping
the reproduction of tradition? According to Rorty, it is because
both Heidegger and Freud were willing to attach significance to phonemes
and graphemes to the shapes and sounds of words. In Freuds account of
the unconscious origins of jokes, and in Heideggers (largely fake)

The Contingency of Being

41

etymologies, we get the same attention to what most of the books of la


grande epoque have treated as inessential the material and the accidental
features of the marks and noises people use to get what they want.85

Derridas practice of multiplying word games, puns, assonances and


graphic jokes is his way of revaluating what his repudiated family always
considered the marginal aspect of a sign: its materiality. The interest in
questioning the hierarchy that reduces the sensuous to the will of the
intelligible explains the appearance in Envois of another odd couple
Fido and Fido. Fido is my dog; Fido is my dogs name. As Rorty
convincingly reconstructs, the FidoFido theory of naming was
introduced by Oxford philosophers in order to repropose an argument
already found in Platos Cratylus: all words are names since their
meaning is determined by the things to which they refer. This theory
contrasts with the view, associated with Saussure and Wittgenstein, that
words get their sense not simply by association with their referents (if
any) but by the relation of their uses to the uses of other words.86 The
Oxonian theory and let us not forget that the plato-Socrates postcard
was discovered in the famous Oxford library aims at keeping separated the necessary sense of a word from its accidental characteristics.
It is just a banal historic contingency that I, in order to call my dog,
have to recur to the signifier F-I-D-O. Derrida instead believes that the
fact that Fido actually denotes Fido is something that should be held
as relevant. The signifier Fido, its graphic appearance and its sensuousness, refers to an innumerable network of other assonant or dissonant signifiers. It is incalculable how much the materiality of the
signifier influences the determination of the sense which it should
merely point out. Envois suggests that it is not certain that Fido will
be tamed by the authority of the sense for which it is supposed to stand;
nor is it certain that Fido is going to be only an obedient example.
Allied with F-I-D-O, Derrida spreads quotation marks throughout the
text, ignoring the subtle and unwittingly metaphysical categorization of
the Oxonian philosophy of language. But this gesture, as Derrida
foresees, will provoke the anger of quite a few British and American
philosophers, who, in a unified front would scream: and quotation
marks they are not to go to the dogs! (p. 244).
Connected to the hierarchic distinction between signifier and signified, another crucial distinction for the order of metaphysical discourse is the one that distinguishes the sense that a sign has for me and
the sense in itself of the sign, the meaning it has for the whole community of speakers. To use Blanchots suggestion: one needs to keep
separated the empirical meaning from the essential meaning, as Hegel
did recognizing Napoleon as the spirit of the world, even if the French
army pillaged and ransacked his home.87 It would be very risky if an
author, in a column on the French reception of the philosopher from

42

The Domestication of Derrida

Stuttgart, began discoursing about the Napoleonic eagle: since it is not


essential, of public domain, that Hegel in France is almost pronounced aigle, the readers would have difficulties understanding the
logic of the text. The Hegel/aigle type of association is for Rorty private, insofar as it depends on the singularity of ones life experiences,
on the empiricity and factuality of his having-been. The danger is that
such an authorial mode of argumentation, insofar as it disseminates
private allusions in a public speech-act, would end up being considered
obscure, or perhaps even irrational. But the attention and respect for
the inerasable privacy of effective living, necessarily lead to the complication of the argumentative style. The private and the public, the
empirical and the essential, need to be mixed up if the concrete who
of philosophy is to step up on the scene of writing, even if this implies
the adoption of a totally different and thus unsettling order of
discourse. Such firm belief seems to be exactly what moves Derrida in
his experiment with thought.
It is not hard to recognize in Derridas interest for the who of
philosophy, for the empiric I hidden under the philosopher, Heideggers influence. Being and Time unmistakably affirms the necessity
to start every analysis from the beings that we are ourselves, or better
as Heidegger suggested in a handwritten note at the margin of paragraph nine that I myself am. For Heidegger, however, the ontic
substratum had to be transcended to reach an appropriate ontological
level of knowledge. Philosophy is historically situated; it certainly
makes its embarrassing debut in the life-world. No philosopher can
negate it. Yet the original triviality is not an irreducible obstacle for the
constitution of a transcendental or phenomenological understanding,
representing rather a necessary stage, a temporary situation to overcome. Derrida instead does not accomplish this passage; the transcendental a priori is always contaminated and infested by the stains of
autobiographical empiricity. There is no ontological gathering, no
Versammlung, which could reduce the ontic dispersion. The philosophical ego is always and still a person, as is witnessed by the fact that the
celebrated father of deconstruction once received a prank call in which
the speaker was Heideggers ghost.88
Derrida interprets his own personal interest in the concreteness of
existence as the radicalization of Nietzsches attempt to handle philosophy through a psychological perspective; that is, the attempt to show
that philosophy is always psychology and biography together.89 In A
Taste for the Secret, Derrida even recognizes the moment from which
for him it was no longer possible to divide theory from its presumed
other, from factuality and empiricity of real life. He remembers an
event that had occurred during his childhood in Algiers, the Algiers
which he used to cruise in a pedal car, stopping to play soccer in the
dirt fields encountered on the way. Derrida tells us that he was expelled

The Contingency of Being

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

The Domestication of Derrida

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

Rorty thinks that Derridas narrative about philosophy helps stop


paying attention to it. In Envois, it is written: To the devil with the
child, the only thing we ever will have discussed, the child, the child,
the child (p. 25). The lesson that Rorty gains from reading Derrida is:
forget the transcendental presupposition, leave philosophy to itself
and start caring for something else. The circumvention of philosophy
is thus the course which makes us navigate around metaphysics,
keeping us close enough to hear its familiar and seductive tune, but
then promptly veering us beyond it, away from any desire for truth and
representation.

Chapter 2

Derrida, the Transcendental and


Theoretical Ascetism

The Double Privacy of Deconstruction


I have a great deal of gratitude for the reading, at once
tolerant and generous, that he [Rorty] has given of
many of my texts.
(Jacques Derrida, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism)
I am, in fact, not at all, truly not at all in agreement with
Rorty, especially where he takes his inspiration from
my work.
(Jacques Derrida, Marx & Sons)

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.

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The Domestication of Derrida

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

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

47

of Derridas career, one is not obliged to check what actually happens


in them. Or perhaps one can read them later, after the philosophical
context in which the so-called literary texts have come to light.
In any case, Rorty could promptly agree with Gasche that a profoundly philosophical thrust is present in Derridas work, as I suppose
Gasche would concede that there is a literary and bright side to
deconstruction. What differentiates the two is the answer to the question of Derridas true tonality. What is the essential Derrida? Who is
Derrida at his best? The one who plays with philosophy, circumvents it
and helps us stop caring for it, or the one who brought to light a
conceptual system that at once belongs to and breaks from the trajectory of transcendental philosophy?
While The Tain of the Mirror considers the textualization of Heideggers ontology to be the core of deconstruction the source of
all being beyond being is generalized, or rather general, writing (p. 177)
Rorty treats it with indulgence, as a juvenile yielding to nostalgia, a
momentary falling for the metaphysical romance. According to Rorty,
Derrida describes Heideggers thought as an attempt to reach the
conditions for the possibility of the ontic world, in view of the appropriation of that which cannot be doubted, something so clear and
evident that no further insight is needed. But Derrida goes a step too
far when he believes that he can do better than Heidegger, that he can
succeed where the shepherd of Being failed. There would be something that Heidegger did not grasp, something that Derrida, in his
exorbitant effort to look into every aspect of the real, perceived.
According to Derrida, Heidegger did not see the trace, the one word
that no one can afford arguing about, the one expression of the
unconditioned which cannot be treated as the name of one more
conditioned. Such an infrastructural entity is the true and only condition of possibility for the existence of the propositions which
describe the real; the name of the Ineffable, of what can be shown but
not said . . . that in which we live and move and have our being.8 The
meta-metaphysical word trace does not allow revisions and redescriptions. It is final and inevitable since for Derrida it is the ground
which simultaneously makes possible and impossible the movement of
transcendental philosophy. As Giorgio Agamben argued: Derrida,
having restored philosophical standing to the nonpresence of signification, risks establishing an actual ontology of the trace.9
One could explain in detail what the trace is for Derrida (as Gasche
had done in a dangerously systematic fashion), but I think that this
gesture would distract attention away from the target of Rortys
polemic. What Rorty finds inadequate in Derridas early texts is less
their particular thetic content than their theoretical justification. For
example, as long as Derrida admits that trace is just a metaphor, a tool
created to unsettle the stability of transcendental arguments, then

48

The Domestication of Derrida

everything is fine. The problem arises if Derrida suggests that his


argument is true because of its contact with the very infrastructure of
reality, not because the community of readers accepted it as meaningful. Rorty questions Derrida exactly when the latter claims to have
discovered the trace, for such a claim betrays the intent to answer a
strictly transcendental question about the condition for the possibility
of Being.
The trouble with the question is that it looks like a scientific one, as if we
knew how to debate the relative merits of alternative answers, just as we
know how to debate alternative answers to the questions about the conditions for the actuality of various things.10

The hunt for conditions of possibility is an old philosophical game.


One needs just a little wit to learn its rules and play along. Kants
transcendental synthesis, Hegels self-consciousness, Heideggers Sorge,
Derridas trace: such is the never-ending story of brilliant artistic and
poetic creations posing as ultimate unveilings of reality. These are
proposals, promises, performances. Rigour and demonstration have
nothing to do with the game. Habermas has accused Derrida of being
oracular, insisting that respectable philosophers like Husserl as
opposed to Heidegger, are argumentative and logical. Nonetheless,
Rorty believes that the exhibition of oracularity is Derridas best asset.
To be argumentative means to be old, traditionalist and conservative; it
implies respecting the rules with which they talk and accepting the
demands of rational discourse. If deconstruction wants to be deceitful
and innovative, it cannot pretend also to be truthful and argumentative. One can be rigorous only by accepting the rules of communicative
action. He who doubts such dictates, who complicates the familiar
modes of argumentation, has to give up the customary criteria of
judgement. Rorty concludes: Poetic world-disclosers like Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida have to pay a price, and part of that price is the
inappropriateness to their work of notions like argumentation and
rigor.11
Derridas deconstruction is a clever creation which should not be
seduced by the pretension of being the only genuinely scientific
method. For science and its direct contact with things, one always
arrives too late. The movement towards phenomena has first to pass
through a vocabulary which necessarily stains the lens with which one
looks at the world, so any claim of having understood contingency and
grasped the condition of its existence is destined to fail. According to
Rorty one cannot step beyond the propositional level, since one is
always dealing with snow and never with snow; with traces instead of
traces. The only chance of overcoming Tarskis nominalistic tautology
would consist in explaining how a pre-linguistic reality provokes

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

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

The Domestication of Derrida

since the legacy itself is irreducibly plural, there cannot be a sole


authentic way of engaging it.
In the sixth chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes
in a passage crucial for understanding his privatization of deconstruction that Derridas greatest merit consists in transforming philosophical reflection into a private matter, therefore bridging the old
gap between philosophy and literature. Once Derrida eventually realized that it is always bad to foretell what is possible and what is not, he
left behind all the dreams of totalization and systematicity and started
experimenting with new ways of writing. He dropped theory and started wondering the mental associations produced by a thought liberated from the necessity of trying adequately to represent the structure
of the world. For Rorty, deconstruction at its best is able to reduce
philosophy to a production of fantasies which neither claim to be true
nor to have any political relevance. Since they cannot demonstrate
anything or refute anybody without falling in the much maligned
metaphysical tradition, the only endowment that Derridas texts possess is the exhibition that something original can still be performed.
Furthermore, such performances can only be private for Derrida has
abandoned the search for infrastructures as well as the Heideggerian
narcissistic idea that philosophical tradition set the course for the
history of the West.
The importance of this passage requires an unabridged citation.
Whether or not Derrida was initially tempted by the transcendental project
which Gasche ascribes to him, I suggest that we read Derridas later writings
as turning such systematic projects of undercutting into private jokes. In my
view, Derridas eventual solution to the problem of how to avoid the Heideggerian we, and, more generally, avoid the trap into which Heidegger
fell by attempting to affiliate with or incarnate into something larger than
himself, consists in what Gasche refers to disdainfully as wild and private
lucubrations. The later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking, and
thereby breaks down the tension between ironism and theorizing. He simply
drops theory the attempt to see his predecessors steadily and whole in
favor of fantasizing about those predecessors, playing with them, giving free
rein to the trains of associations they produce. There is no moral to these
fantasies, nor any public (pedagogic or political) use to be made of them;
but, for Derridas readers, they may nevertheless be exemplary suggestions
of the sort of thing one might do, a sort of thing rarely done before.14

It appears evident that Rortys interpretation ends up labelling the


later Derrida with a sort of double privacy. Deconstruction is private
because it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendental
demand, privatizing itself in a self-referential fantasizing, but it is also
private because it deprives itself of any political pretension.
I organized the first chapter around the strengths of Rortys

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

51

rearrangement of deconstruction, suggesting the directions where


pragmatism and deconstruction might converge or, better, might
almost converge. It is now time to start questioning the double privacy
that Rorty attributes to Derrida. In order to challenge Rortys attempt
to align deconstruction with the American pragmatist tradition, it will
be necessary to consider the legitimacy of the two key features of his
interpretation: on the one hand, the legitimacy of reducing 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 legitimacy of affirming that Derrida has not only dismissed but also
mocked the desire to engage philosophy with political struggle, a
desire that has deeply dominated French contemporary thought
(Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.). In the pages that follow, I
will argue that the latter kind of privacy is altogether unacceptable,
while the former eludes the problematics of deconstruction and is thus
inadequate by itself. Rorty at once expects too much anti-philosophy
and too little politics from Derrida. He generously awards Derrida the
success of having circumvented the metaphysical tradition by transforming theory into autobiography, but intolerantly claims that Derrida should be considered a thinker lacking any public dimension. In
this chapter I deal with Rortys generosity; in the next I will discuss his
intolerance. I will show that both witness Rortys desire not to take
Derrida and deconstruction seriously either from a philosophical or a
political point of view.
Before discussing the limits of the privatization of deconstruction, I
think it is useful, as anticipating the tone of my arguments, to recall
Derridas reactions to Rortys reading protocol. On the few occasions
when Derrida commented on it, his hostility was obvious. For example,
during the dialogue with Maurizio Ferraris constituting the first part of
A Taste for the Secret, Derrida defines the interpretation of someone like
Rorty as a case of repressive tolerance. What Ferraris had previously
suggested is actually true: Rorty allows deconstruction to do whatever it
wishes; he will neither denounce nor make fun of it, but only on the
condition that it gives up any pretension of being involved with the
truth. In this way, deconstruction is rescued from its most severe critics,
but at the cost of being forbidden to engage in any serious aspiration.
This gesture, which may seem to be liberal and accommodating, is in fact
repressive, insofar as it seeks to strip anyone who complicates the question
of philosophy and the relations between philosophy and literature of any
claim to deal with truth.15

The tolerance which enables Rorty to grant Derrida the right to say
whatever he wants to, actually anesthetizes deconstruction into an

52

The Domestication of Derrida

aestheticized privacy completely detached from the space of public


debates. Such is the ruse of Rortys strategy: as soon as philosophy is
reduced to literature, it is no longer important to take it seriously and
to argue about it. Rortys brand new idea of philosophy is actually not
so different from what Derrida notices in Flauberts 1868 letter to his
niece Caroline: once philosophy admits its end, recognizes the obvious
fact that it is always and already something creative (i.e., literature),
one can start to enjoy philosophers for the great artists that they are. As
art, philosophy is marvellous. 16
In another interview, Derrida opposes the widespread misunderstanding that reads in his work a declaration that there is
nothing beyond language . . . and other stupidities of that sort. Derrida clarifies that, on the contrary, [t]o distance oneself from the
habitual structure of reference, to challenge or complicate our common assumptions about it, does not amount to saying that there is
nothing beyond language.17 One last example: in Circumfession
which, according to Rorty, is one of Derridas best moments because in
this diary he gives up any transcendental claim and writes a Proustian
memorial Derrida picks on Proust himself, Rortys favourite hero, the
one he never criticizes. The cause for a moment of anger and irony is a
sentence in which Proust advocates so to speak the purification
from every philosophical stain, thus aligning with theoretical asceticism, and opposing resistance to theory. Derrida writes:
I remember having gone to bed very late after a moment of anger and irony
against a sentence of Prousts, praised in a book in this collection Les
Contemporains, which says: A work in which there are theories is like an
object on which one has left the price tag, and I find nothing more vulgar
than this Franco-Britannic decorum, European in truth, I associate with it
Joyce, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and a few others, the salon literature of that
republic of letters, the grimace of a good taste naive enough to believe that
one can efface the labor of theory, as if there wasnt any in Pr., and mediocre theory at that, . . . and I admit that I write with the price on, I display,
not so that the price be legible to the first-comer, . . . you have to pay the
price to read the price displayed.18

To believe in an unserious Derrida, a Derrida purely lacking theories, is


to avoid the effort to read him. A certain labour is required to see the
theories attached. By contrast, it looks as if Rorty thinks it is not
worthwhile to spend, or rather waste, so much time and energy on
carefully reading the philosophical texts which he writes about. His
interpretation is wilfully superficial because it does not want to look
with more patience at the relation between the playful dimension of
Derridas writing and its serious philosophical thrust. I am not willing
to go as far as Ferraris who affirms perhaps winking at Derrida that

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

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.

On the Very Possibility of Biographical Writing


Like Aher, Derrida enters into the Paradise of language,
where terms touch their limits. And, like Aher, he cuts
the branches; he experiences the exile of terminology,
its paradoxical subsistence in the isolation of all
univocal reference.
(Giorgio Agamben, Pardes: the writing of potentiality)

Before dealing in detail with Monolingualism of the Other the essay


which will prepare a general critique of post-philosophical arguments
let me start by highlighting some gaps in Rortys reading of Envois.
This bizarre collection of postcards is obviously the text upon which
Rorty grounds his thesis that Derrida switches from philosophy to
autobiography. But a more respectful reading of the text reveals a plot
very different from that described by Rorty.
Firstly, Rorty is too fast in deciding that the signer of the love letters
is Derrida himself. In fact, it is important to underline that there is no
textual evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the signer
of The Post Card is the author of the dispatches that compose Envois.
We do not even know if the sender is always the same (You are right,
doubtless we are several),21 just as we do not know if the thou to
whom the cards are addressed changes in time. As Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak indicates, both the sender(s) and the receiver(s) remain

54

The Domestication of Derrida

unidentifiable.22 Derrida himself warns of this complication in the


reading instructions which precede the collection of sendings: That
the signers and the addressees are not always visibly and necessarily
identical from one envoi to the other . . . you will have the experience of
all this, and sometimes will feel it quite vividly, although confusedly
(p. 5). Once the impossibility of identifying the invisible author of the
postcards has been recognized, another undecidability steps in. If one
cannot be sure that Envois speaks of Derrida and his private life, one
has no way of deciding if the postcards refer to actual persons and
events. Since addressor(s) and the addressee(s) cannot be identified,
since we cannot know if they are real existing beings or merely fictional
characters, it is impossible to conclude that the events and facts to
which the postcards allude exist beyond the fictive space of the recit.
Without taking into serious consideration Derridas opening disclaimers, Rorty hastens to affirm that Envois finds its poignancy in the
reference to real-life events and people.23 That such events and
people are real, that Derrida himself is the protagonist of the love story
told in the postcards, is something not provable. Recalling in a footnote the passage I quoted above on the difficult identificability of the
signatures in the envois, Rorty is well aware of the fact that the life
which organizes the postcards can be Derridas or someone elses, real
or imaginary. However, he stubbornly proceeds to highlight the
autobiographical character of Envois. So basically, Rortys compliments to Derrida for having ended philosophy and embraced autobiography are based on a text whose status is not clear, something
which might or might not refer to Derridas private life.
Moreover, the fact that autobiographies deal with real lives is an
assumption much questioned in literary studies. As de Man argued in
the opening remarks of his Autobiography as de-facement, autobiographies seem to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events
more clearly than other literary genres.24 Autobiographies function on
the basis of a true reference to life, and even if they contain phantasms,
dreams and deviations, their meaning would still remain rooted in the
identity of a subject who lived the narrated experiences. But and the
point de Man makes about autobiographies whose proper name is
readable is even more evident in Envois where the author withdraws
from the scene of writing can we be certain that autobiography
depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a
(realistic) picture on its model? Since the genre of autobiography is
in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture, the life
that apparently produces the autobiography can be said with equal
justice to be itself produced and determined by the autobiographical
genre and its conventions.25 If Envois is a work of fiction a redescription to put it in Rortys terms then the claim that it finds its
poignancy in Derridas private and real life does not hold, for one

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

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)

The secret persists, and its remnants produce the never-ending


movement of reading. One has to accept that the blanks which allow a
text to be interpreted simultaneously make its deciphering impossible.
Multiplying and disseminating the destinations, Derrida seems to
exclude the possibility of finding a single hermeneutical end for his
dispatches. Why does Socrates hat, on the postcard that surprises
Derrida, look like an umbrella? Why are Socrates and Plato inverted?
Why the small p? The reading of the postcards should take into
account the impotence of solving their meaning, the same sort of
powerlessness one experiments when facing the fragment in which

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The Domestication of Derrida

Nietzsche declared I have forgotten my umbrella.26 Rorty instead is


too anxious to decide where the postcards are coming from and where
they are going. He is sure he knows what is going on, underestimating
the exile from univocal reference that disorganizes Derridas sendings.
He believes Envois to be the moment in which Derrida starts forgetting about transcendental philosophy and everything that has ever
been linked to it. But no matter how hard Rorty tries to derive a
strategy of forgetfulness from an author obsessed by the necessity of
remembering, Derrida simply cannot forget about philosophy as the
liberated slave forgets his master.27 Not even in his most private
moments. Discussing some passages from Derridas autobiographical
Monolingualism of the Other, I will show that the language of philosophy
makes itself remembered even when Derrida is telling stories about the
ups and downs of his private life.
During a colloquium at Louisiana State University, Derrida tells the
problematic story of his belonging to France, his so-called native
country. The childhood he spent in Algiers makes him, in fact, paradoxically and aporetically French. French is Derridas mother tongue,
the language his mother and father spoke, the language spoken in the
family and at school, in the privacy of the home as in the publicity of
the market. But, in spite of such familiarity, French cannot be considered his language: I only have one language; it is not mine.28
Derrida speaks only one language, he is monolingual. Nonetheless, his
only language is not really his since he is not able to acknowledge it as
his own:
Yet it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to
speak, as long as speech is possible for me in life and death; you see, never
will this language be mine. And, truth to tell, it never was. (p. 2)

Derrida recognizes himself to be a French product, a production of


Frances school system, of the classics one reads in school as the
foundations of Frenchness. Nonetheless, such closeness, such communion with a nation, a language and a culture is not pacific. It is
continuously bothered and disturbed by a small but infinite distance,
by the expanse of the sea which separates a non-observant Jew born in
Algiers from the capital Paris. To live on board of the French language
does not exclude being at the border of France. Feeling not at home in
it, but exiled on its shores.
One should not forget that Derrida learned how to speak in Algeria,
in the colony, in a place that, before French colonization invaded it
with its language and culture, was naturally crossed first by Berber
languages from Maghreb, then by Arabic. At the time when Derrida
was still a child, French was in the process of completely replacing
Arabic as the official, everyday, administrative language (p. 37).

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

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.

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The Domestication of Derrida

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

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

59

ever be possible. Speaking of the colonizing French from Louisiana (a


territory that, as Algeria, had gone through French colonization),
Derrida seems to say that a certain colonizing violence is always present. Why? Because there is no experience which is not already subjected to language, to the law of the other, the law coming from
abroad. Just as any Dasein can exist only outside itself, since its own
possibilities are not posited by itself but inherited from history, so too
culture is never natural, native or peaceful. Derrida notes: This
structure of alienation without alienation, this inalienable alienation, is
not only the origin of our responsibility, it also structures the peculiarity [le propre] and property of language (p. 25).
In the manner in which colonial rape might be acknowledged as an
embodiment of a more general and ontological violence, Derridas
uncommon life ends up appearing nothing else but the actualization
of the transcendental infrastructure that made its happening possible
in the first place. The feeling of never being at home, Derridas private
emotional tonality, bears vivid witness to that public ontological
structure called Unheimlichkeit: what holds for him, also applies to all
human beings. Derrida thus wonders if just the fact of being heard and
understood does not makes him the universal hostage (p. 20). But
what does it mean to be the universal hostage?
I think it means two things at once. First, the universal hostage is the
one who is the most representative case of being held hostage: if we
want to understand what a hostage is, we just need to learn about that
one hostage par excellence, the one who serves as the form or archetype of all present, past, and future hostages. Second, the universal
hostage also refers to the fact that any particular event can be considered as the mere realization of a universal law. Therefore, Derrida is
the universal hostage since he is the ideal example of being held
hostage and also because everything that he as anybody has lived
falls hostage to generality. Derridas personal case appears nothing
more than a revelatory example, perhaps even an exemplary revelation, of the transcendental structure that everyone, whether consciously or not, acts out.
One can also, of course, try to reverse the terms of the argument. For
instance, one might want to state as Rorty does that the existentiality
of Dasein is only Heidegger or Derridas generalization of their own
private situation and feeling. However, even in this way, one cannot
avoid being held hostage by a generalizing and transcendental tone,
that is, being held captive by the structure of philosophical discursivity.
The result of rendering-contingent philosophy or rendering-philosophical contingency is nevertheless the confirmation of philosophys
jargon. The reasons for the impossibility of a passage from theory to
autobiography can be drawn from two of Derridas essays which deal
with declarations of philosophys death. Rereading some passages from

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The Domestication of Derrida

White mythology and On an newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy, it will be clearer why Rortys circumvention of philosophy is
impossible to accomplish.

Rortys Hidden Reductionism


Philosophy, that is, the set of abstract notions produced by theory, has
hidden in itself sensible figures drawn from the language human
beings naturally use every day. To succeed, philosophy does not only
have to produce concepts, it also has to erase the sources of its own
discourse. In fact, if the quotidian and the contingent which contaminate the purity of the concepts were not overlooked, the attempts
to pass philosophy for the science of sciences would fail. Since philosophy claims to be the purest mode of argumentation, it has to make
its relation with the naive life-world disappear. Consider the following
passage:
I was thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language for
themselves, are like [image, comparison, a figure in order to signify figuration] knife-grinders, who instead of knives and scissors, should put
metals and coins to the grindstone to efface the exergue, the value and the
head. When they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crownpieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they
say: These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about
them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not
worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their
exchange value is extended indefinitely. They are right in speaking thus. By
this needy knife-grinders activity words are changed from a physical to a
metaphysical acceptation.31

It is with this long extract from Anatole Frances dialogue between


Polyphilos (who is speaking above) and Aristos, a dialogue subtitled
On the language of metaphysics, that Derrida begins his 1971 White
mythology. Derrida treats Frances scepticism as an example of the
typical arguments against the labour of theory: to the transcendental
projects that aim at unveiling the conditions of the possibility of
experience, one can always contest the universality of the categories
magically discovered, affirming the contingency of any conceptual
operation. As Rorty concludes: There is nothing done within the
Kantian tradition which the dialectical tradition cannot treat as the
description of the practices of a certain historical moment.32 While
the Kantians the Metaphysicians in Frances dialogue are busy
concealing the mundane origins of their production to increase its
value, the ironists, more honestly, protest that all discourses are
marked by a time and a space, a date and a place.

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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.

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The Domestication of Derrida

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

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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

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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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65

In Derrida and the philosophical tradition Rorty argues that


Benningtons accusation of transcendental contraband which is, by
the way, the same charge that Rorty himself has been directing against
Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche and others is both dangerous and
weak. It is dangerous since it risks reintroducing the belief in a transcendental science which could grasp the unconscious presuppositions
of all other discourses. It is weak since one cannot put finitude in a
transcendental position with respect to transcendence for there is no
such thing as transcendence. What one can do is putting the finite in
a casual position with respect to the invention and use of the word transcendence. 44 Rorty admits to having argued that transcendence,
similar to all other words, is a human invention conceived to realize
determinate goals. This is just a way of reciting the argument that
Feuerbach used against God. Even better, it is a way of repeating with
Kierkegaard that the inventor of the Absolute Spirit is a poor existing
individual, or with Judy Garland that the wizard of Oz is neither a
wizard nor a superman but just a nerd with a gimmick (p. 347). If
Marx was right to be exasperated by people saying to the atheists, well,
then, atheism is your religion, then we should stop annoying pragmatists with the accusation of being just lame philosophers (p. 335,
note 11). Rorty wonders if being nominalist or historicist like Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Dewey and Davidson means belonging to the
transcendental gang: do all of them push transcendence without realizing it? In Rortys opinion, those philosophers did not offer conditions for the possibility of transcendence; they only explained the
causal conditions of the word transcendence.
Rorty looks not for what has made transcendence possible, but for
what has caused the word transcendence. Basically, he tries to escape
from Kant by going back to Hume. However, Derrida and Bennington
are not the only ones who consider the move from the non-causal
transcendental arguments to causal empiricist explanations afflicted by
the worst contradictions. From the very beginning of his philosophical career let us think for example of his 1971 Transcendental
argument, self-reference, and pragmatism Rorty himself has sanctioned the sceptic attack against philosophy as self-refuting. His selfdefence in Derrida and the philosophical tradition is therefore both
surprising and puzzling since such an account of pragmatism is quite
different from the one he usually gives of it.
Rorty has always tried to avoid inconsistencies by claiming that
pragmatism does not look for what is behind representations, what is
their cause or their condition. Pragmatism stops taking seriously the
quest for truth. It changes the topic of the conversation. It does not
argue but multiplies the rhetorical questions to undermine the confidence in the transcendental presupposition. Thus, after having
affirmed that any account of a fact is just performance, it is not clear

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The Domestication of Derrida

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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67

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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The Domestication of Derrida

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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69

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)

The pragmatist trust in a post-philosophical future has the same


structure which Derrida demystifies in Kants progressivism. The ironist will expose metaphysics as incapable of apokaluptein, literally, of
unveiling; he will recognize its limits and the metaphors which sign its
body. Only then will philosophy flourish as the very human and endless
conversation that has always been. Derridas position is more cautious
and less optimistic. Surely deconstruction participates in the closing of
metaphysics. It is even a prominent accomplice to such an event: We
are the worst criminals in history.53 Yet, while the other discourses
around the end seem euphoric for thinking that they succeeded in the
projected murder, Derrida indicates that the apocalyptic craving,
which longs to bury philosophy, also exhumes it. Philosophy has always
wanted to be the apocalypse since the very structure of its argumentation is organized by the desire for revelation. Any discourse
around and about the end shares the apocalyptic structure of philosophy, and for this reason, participates in its desires. This is also what

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happens in Rorty. During the funeral he organizes for philosophy,


exactly when the funeral knell starts counting the hours of Platonism,
of Kant and Hegel, the remains of what he thought had deceased, from
the casket where he deposited them, regain consciousness. They do
not pass away. Moreover, all the talking about the end of metaphysics
seems to be the sign that such enterprise is not as dead as one imagines. On the contrary, metaphysics must be full of vitality if it is still
able to produce so many attempted disposals, including Rortys. To kill
philosophy, obsessed by the desire of privacy, is at the same time to
preserve it from disappearing: And right here I kill you, save, save, you,
save you run away [sauve-toi], the unique, the living one over there
whom I love.54
In this context, it is easy to grasp Derridas distinction between closure and end. The discourses which claim that the present is the time
after philosophy (La filosofia dopo la filosofia is the Italian title for Rortys
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), believe that the age of truth and
representation has come to an end, disappeared, and is now dead and
buried. Pointing out the closure in which philosophy is setting implies
affirming that one sees the limit of the light of a given logic structure.
But the desires and gestures it produces perhaps cannot, at least in the
present, be transcended. Envois or Monolingualism of the Other do not
find their poignancy as Rorty believes in their overcoming of
metaphysics, but rather in their impossible step beyond it. In this
consists the discord, the drama between us: not to know whether we
are to continue living together (think of the innumerable times of our
separation, of each auto-da-fe), whether we can live with or without the
other.55 The passage beyond is at once promised, awaited and banned.
Without the philosophical axiomatic, it would be impossible for us to
think at all. Once philosophical texts have been read in a certain
manner, the ivory authority of metaphysics is not left untouched, but
its vocabulary, even if crossed out or in quotation marks, continues to
shape all our experiences. For this reason, in order to enlarge the
crevice through which one glances at the glimmer of the beyond-closure, one has to protest the authority of philosophical terminology
while using it.56
In fact, Derrida does not try to equalize the different modalities of
participating in philosophys guilt. He aims to emphasize that any
attempt to contest the language of tradition and open a future independent from it needs to begin by first recognizing the complicity with
such a language. As Derridas Structure, sign, and play states, [t]he
quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relation to the history of metaphysics and to
inherited concepts is thought (p. 282). There are different ways of
being caught in the circle of metaphysics, ways that are more or less
ingenuous, more or less conscious, more or less productive.

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71

For example, at the beginning of this chapter, I tried to bring Rorty


closer to Husserl. However, Husserl was perfectly aware that life-world
is a philosophical concept and that only philosophy can think the nonphilosophical origin of sciences and philosophy itself. Instead, Rorty
believes that to recall the sensible origin of every theoretical concept is
the post-philosophical move which would allows us to be finished with
the traditional order of discourse. According to Husserl, philosophy
has to react against the crisis that torments it by reaffirming the
necessity of a transcendental reflection and by avoiding the sirens of
scepticism. But Husserls move is marked by a certain ambiguity: while
claiming the reactivation of the origin of theoretical concepts (their
non-theoretical origin), Husserl also affirms that the meaning of the
life-world can be grasped only by the we that we are today. Thinking
needs to be rescued from the critical situation in which it lies. But,
paradoxically, it is exactly thoughts present weariness that allows for
the reactivation of its past and, with it, of a renovated future.
Thus we find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of the
beginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given in its
present-day form, looking back at its development. But in the absence of an
understanding of the beginnings the development is mute as a development of
meaning. Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward and
backward in a zigzag pattern; the one must help the other in an interplay.57

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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One keeps walking up and down, trying to make an impossible step


toward something other than metaphysics. As Heidegger might have
said, one is stuck in a Holzweg. The track is not beaten, it is impossible
to proceed along it since the obstacles encountered are impassable.
From Derridas perspective, it is not easy to find the therapy that would
allow the realities of life to rise and the nonsense of metaphysics to set.
The aporia that no eu-phoros no good passage can avoid is determined by the fact that all the steps that seem to be the best in overcoming the aporia throw us back again into the depths of the regime
which we were trying to get rid of.
Rorty himself is too well read to be unaware of the difficulties in
taking the step beyond. For example, in Deconstruction and circumvention, he affirms that we may (as Foucault put it) be doomed to
find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel (even
if we walk backwards).59 Yet, instead of lingering on the dangers
connected with the circumvention of philosophy, he tries to shoulder
away the question by affirming that Derridas treatment of the literary
genre called philosophy eventually has allowed us to forget about it.
The point is made, in slightly different terms, in the introduction to
Consequences of Pragmatism. The problem that pragmatists face consists
in the need to make anti-philosophical points in a non-philosophical
language. So either they stop using the language of philosophy and
prove that one can do well without it, or they prove that philosophy
cannot make the points it wants to make. In order to do the latter,
pragmatists need to rely on assumptions drawn from the philosophical
tradition. The choice is thus between reaching the conclusion, or
stating it. It is impossible to do both.
It is not the case that a therapeutic silence steps up at the end of the
Tractatus Philosophicus as the consequences of the demystification of
philosophical meaningless propositions. Rather, the consequences of
pragmatism are anything but quiet. It is true that Rorty approvingly
and often alludes to the ladder thrown away at the conclusion of the
Tractatus. Yet, Wittgenstein did not hesitate to put the ladder away
when he was convinced that he was done with it; he set it aside once he
thought he reached the point where he wanted to be. Rorty, on the
other hand, keeps climbing up and down, and at the same time, suggests that everybody everybody else maybe should let the ladder go.
Frederic Jameson is surely right in affirming that Rortys project is far
more radical than Derridas in his attempt to destroy philosophy itself
as a history and a discipline.60 But I doubt that Rorty can effectively
destroy philosophy without also reinforcing the effects of its sovereignty and dignity. Even the fact that he himself has been saying for
thirty years that he is done with philosophy should be taken as the
symptom that it is not so easy or convenient61 for him to let go of
philosophy.

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

73

At the end of Derrida and the philosophical tradition, Rorty comes


close to admitting that all his expostulations against philosophy are a
little too metaphysical. Reading Benningtons account of Derrida has
increased his tolerance for deconstruction and made him finally
realize that
I cannot get away with my stance of tough-minded, hypostatization-bashing
empiricism without falling a bit too much under the sway of the metaphysical logos, the one that tells you that it just isnt logical to treat one thing as if
it were something else and that it just isnt rational not to try to figure out
which is the allegory and which the allegorized. (p. 349)

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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Pierce whose definition of reality as that which remains at the end of


inquiry is fishy because we have no idea what it would be for inquiry to
have an end. He was therefore only half-way on the path of the
destruction of the epistemological debates.64 And surely not Wittgenstein: the conclusion of the Tractatus even if Rorty borrows its parable
of the ladder is an undigested residue of Schopenhauer, while the
sections of the Philosophical Investigations dedicated to metaphilosophy
are unfortunate left-overs from Wittgensteins early positivistic period.65 Who is left? Davidson? Almost. In his imaginary debates with the
sceptic,
Davidson was a bit misleading in suggesting that he was going to show us
how coherence yields correspondence. It would have been better to have
said that he was going to offer the skeptic a way of speaking which would
prevent him from asking his question, than to say that he was going to
answer that question.66

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.

The Disposal of Philosophy


Lerection tombe.
(Geoffrey Bennington, Derridabase)

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

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75

work. On the contrary, his production might look pretty monotonous,


always stating the necessity for philosophy to be contaminated by
something other than itself such other being natural language or life
promising an absolute elsewhere while highlighting the inevitability
for the now to call forth its other and its elsewhere in the language of
philosophy. Starting from Derridas analysis and Benningtons
remarkable exposition of the law of the transcendental contraband, I
have pointed to the inconsistencies in Rortys dismissal of philosophy as
a grey and sad fable that has forgotten its constitutive contingency.
But maybe I have been too stingy with Rorty, surely less generous
than he has been with deconstruction in stressing its force toward the
imminent circumvention of philosophy. After all, Rorty at his best
would defend his reading of deconstruction, denying that he has ever
wanted to show what Derrida is really all about. Unveiling secrets is
something which Gasche might claim to be doing, but it is certainly not
for a pragmatist. A true pragmatist and actually we saw there are none
would claim that his only intention is to sneak some arguments into
the philosophical scene to make it easier for philosophy to leave its
myths behind. Rorty is trying to make from Derrida a device powerful
enough to exhaust metaphysics. The ironist does not pretend to
observe or show anything; his discourses have a performative aim, not a
constative one.
What makes Rorty to use Dennets Lexicon incorrigible, is his
ability to hijack the discussion away from philosophy. When he tries to
answer his critics, when he starts looking for causal origins, Rorty
becomes an easy target.68 Pragmatism is most effective when it talks
not about what is, but about what might be in the future. You cannot
argue against a premonition, can you? Nonetheless, affirming that the
chosen vocabulary or reading is the most suited for reaching given
goals that it is a performance, a doing rather than a showing is it
enough to bypass the transcendental presupposition?
A pure performative, an action not grounded on an implicit constative, is as impossible as a pragmatism uncontaminated by the
structure of transcendental arguments. As Heidegger argued when
discussing the idealistic interpretation of Nietzsches will to power,
every practice is in fact always accompanied by representations, which
means that any performance is at the same time a theorein.69 The
commerce that deals with pragmata is not blind but has its own insights
insofar as the determining ground, the arche of proceeding practically,
can be found only in the will. And already in Aristotles De Anima,
willing is structurally representing. Action is possible only because the
will represents that which is willed in the willing. This is why Kant
affirms that the will is the faculty of desire which works in accordance
with concepts, that is to say, in such a way that what is represented as
willed is determinant for the action itself. The desire that originates a

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performance is the representation of a fact, a reality; without the


representation of a state of things, there would be no motive to act or
to refrain from acting. Since every action is moved by will and this
does not imply that every action is conscious but only that every action
is determined by a desire but since no will or desire can exist independently from representations, no performative can avoid being
accompanied by a constative. Moreover, a practice has its end in the
actual transformation of reality so it would be impossible for the action
to have an end if whatever position of reality is to be avoided. How can
one recognize the achievement of a goal without claiming to mirror
the reality of a situation? How might one justify a decision to act if one
cannot support such a decision with any fact? The exile from the will to
represent would make acting itself meaningless and arbitrary since no
reason would be given for its opportunity or legitimacy. To say that the
truth is what a given community believes to be true, and that it is useful
to think of the truth in such a way, nevertheless implies the necessity of
referring to realia in this case, the reality of consent and convention,
and the reality of utility. Every discourse that claims to have ended the
mirroring referentiality of the transcendental presupposition the
belief that not all discourses or practices are arbitrary since some are
grounded on raw facts as things themselves indeed heavily relies on
it. It is not the case that Derrida speaks of pragrammatology rather
than of pragmatism: the decision to act or not is always bound to the
necessity (and the limits) of calculating, of reflecting upon the situation and the context in which one is situated. 70
Rorty proclaims: No more metaphysics, no more unmasking.71 Yet,
it is unclear what such an announcement states or promises, since even
pragmatism ends up repeating, willing or not, consciously or not, the
unmasking gestures of metaphysics. Rortys attempt brutally to change
terrain appears only as pseudo-euphoria, because while it declares that
it leads us beyond the metaphors of insight and mirroring, it makes us
dwell at the centre of the land we wanted to desert. The outside turned
out to be more inside than the inside itself; the after we were so
anxious to access was merely the restoration of the present. All the
blind spots and inconsistencies that I am charging Rorty with are
induced by the fact that, while he proudly promises a way out of the
history of philosophy, his arguments lack any serious consideration of
the structural impossibility for pragmatism to simply step away from
theory. Every time he notices a transcendental tone in anti-transcendental philosophers (Dewey and Heidegger, Davidson and Derrida,
himself and Nietzsche), Rorty treats it as a mere mistake, as something
that should not have and could not have happened. The problem is
that this frenzy for a pure and autonomous non-metaphysical discourse
is precisely what holds Rorty captive to the tradition which he
announces to have shut down.

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

77

As a typical example of how metaphysics if something like a


metaphysics indeed exists has always proceeded, let me briefly recall
what happens in the beginning of Husserls 1913 Ideas I.72 In what was
intended as a general introduction to phenomenology, Husserl starts
noticing that empirical experience, i.e., perception, gives to consciousness objects as beings which exist individually and spatiotemporally, having a temporal and spatial collocation as well as a peculiar
physical shape. However, the perceived beings might have happened
elsewhere, otherwise and in another time. Husserl thus concludes that
every kind of individual being is contingent: It is so-and-so, but essentially it could be other than it is (p. 47). It is clear that, for Husserl, the
totality of what is perceived in an individual being does not properly
belong to such being. The objects of possible experience are essentially
contingent; they can vary without producing a mutation in the objects
own essence. An object can be otherwise and still be that object as long
as its structural core is left untouched. In fact, not all the objects
characteristics might vary: the predicates which necessarily belong to
the thing set insurmountable limits to contingency that is, to the
possibility for the thing of being different from how it is. The idea
Eidos in Husserls phenomenological translation of Plato is the
image that delimits the individual objects idion, the representation of
what is proper to it. Husserls project is to let the very properties of
things shine; yet in order to accomplish this goal, he needs the phenomenological language to be a pure idiom, a jargon uncontaminated
by empirical experience.
The level of idiomaticity is reached through the work of ideation. It
is a matter of transforming the sensory intuition of something individual into an insight of what is essential to that particular object. The
contingency of the individual must be overcome in the determination
of the objects necessities. In this way, one raises from empirical natural
cognition to the vision of essences. Notably, in the third paragraph of
the first book of Ideas I Essential insight and individual intuition in
W. R. Boyce Gibsons translation Husserl affirms that the perception
of what is contingent and the insight of what is essential are structurally
intertwined, one being the condition of possibility of the other. In
particular, the grasping of essences is grounded on what is given in the
intuition of something individual, but the individual is meaningful
only insofar as it appears as the specific materialization of an idea.
Husserl writes:
Consequently it is certain that no essential intuition is possible without the
free possibility of directing ones glance to an individual counterpart and of
shaping an illustration; just as contrariwise no individual intuition is possible
without the free possibility of carrying out an act of ideation and therein
directing ones glance upon the corresponding essence which exemplifies
itself in something individually visible. (p. 50)

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The two genres of cognition are surely different in principle, but in


principle, they are also intrinsically bound to one another. Or, at least,
they appear so for a blink of an eye. To begin with, Husserl admits that
both kinds of intuition the one perceiving an object in its contingent
existence and the other grasping it in its necessary essence are
required for the constitution of a valid account of the object itself. It
appears that factual perception is as essential for the intuition of an
idea as the eidetic intuition is indispensable for the understanding of a
fact. Yet immediately after concluding the paragraph by suggesting the
necessary link between the transcendental and the empirical, Husserl
revokes the co-implication previously introduced. It would be a problem for phenomenology to admit that the impure world of natural
cognitions is the condition of phenomenological knowledge. How
could the empirical be the ground of transcendental idiom without at
the same time compromising the status of the transcendental itself? In
order to avoid the degrading contamination of essential insight with
the existential insight, Husserl is forced to take shelter in the purely
fantastic world of eidetic variation. It is not necessary to base the
process of ideation upon the impure flow of factual experience since it
is possible to utilize also non-empirical intuitions, intuitions that do not
apprehend sensory existence, intuition rather of a merely imaginative order
(p. 51). One does not need to rely on the data of perception to reach
the eidetic space since, in our imagination, we can imagine hearing a
melody, perceiving bodies, having experiences and, thanks to ideation,
grasp the essences of the simulated phenomena. In such a way, the
theatre of conscience produces without any contact with the realm of
the empirical and the existential the truth of ideas: the non-truth of
fiction is responsible for the truth of phenomenology. One is in fact
able to know essences whose existence was never experienced, whether such things have ever been given in actual experience or not.
Phenomenology does not simply reject natural insight and the naive
vocabulary derived from it. It is more complex than that. Husserl has to
admit that, in order to constitute adequate essential intuitions, one
must exploit that which is foreign to eidetic idiom, that is, natural
cognition. But, at the same time, Husserl must dismiss natural insight
as unnecessary for the process of ideation. Just like writing in Platos
Phaedro, the non-phenomenological insight is a pharmakon, at once a
vital constituent and deadly poison. It is that which allows the institution of the realm of idealities, and that which must be immediately
banned in order to hide the instability of the eidetic.
But if the naivety of natural cognition is a key component in essential
insight, one should conclude that phenomenology is always in crisis
because its system to function properly needs that which forbids it to
function autonomously. The ideological burden that phenomenology
cannot escape is provoked by its relieving belief that the spectres of

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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

can then only be restored if the charges are brought


as a supplement, inessential yet harmful to the
ought never to have come to be added to the
the inside. (p. 128)

Phenomenology needs natural cognition but at the same time, in order


to be a pure phenomenology, it needs to get rid of it. The phenomenological system tries to constitute its stability by expelling from its
body, through the refuge into fancy, the contamination of what it
ought not need. The exact same thing happens in Rortys pragmatism.
On the one hand, Rorty has a desperate need for transcendental
arguments, for all the tricks of philosophical tradition, because he
would otherwise not have any means of attacking the legitimacy of the
transcendental presupposition itself. He needs philosophy to argue
against itself in order to promote the awareness of the contingency on
which all philosophical systems are erected. On the other hand, Rorty
does not want to have anything to do with philosophy and its concepts,
otherwise it would impossible for him to claim that he has bypassed
philosophical tradition. He needs to think of philosophy as something
alien to pragmatism, something that can be circumvented and put
aside because it is of little use. Without philosophy, there would be no
pragmatism whatsoever. Yet with philosophy, no pure pragmatism can
exists.
If transcendental arguments are as crucial for the existence of
pragmatism as the banality of natural insight is a key component for
phenomenology, then the transcendental is not a noise that happens
to pragmatism nor a noise that it can avoid. Pragmatism is always more
or less than what it wants to be because it needs philosophy to

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The Domestication of Derrida

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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81

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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The Domestication of Derrida

in order to be erected, it needs to be grounded on something which


remains inassimilable, indigestible, ungovernable by the system itself.
As Caputos On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental puts it:
Derrida does not deconstruct something by means of his facile and
inventive capacity for redescription or recontextualization (p. 163).
Rather, placing himself on the scene of a silent dispute, he reports the
tensions and the fissures, the underground conflict at work under the
apparent perpetual peace of the philosophical. Furthermore, this very
report is not just a passive report as Caputo almost suggests. By saying
yes and responding to the call of the distant roar of the battle rising
from the field of philosophy, Derrida gets attuned to events already in
place and actively accelerates fractures which would otherwise risk
being overlooked, denegated or sedated. For example, reading Husserl, Derrida shows that the edification of a purely transcendental
idiom cannot succeed since the very condition of (im)possibility of the
phenomenological ego is a passivity that no reduction can suspend.
But for the very same reason, Rortys pragmatism cannot really be what
he wishes it to be. There is no pure contingent language, a pragmatic
language which is not already and always contaminated by its other, by
the structure of transcendental arguments. Rorty is not mistaken in
pointing out two different tonalities in Derridas works: one playful and
deconstructive, the other serious and transcendental. But he is wrong
in believing that one of these two sorts of noises might exist without the
other. This is why Rortys reading of Derrida is inadequate by itself: the
emphasis on Derridas anti-transcendental moves should always be
accompanied by an analysis of his philosophical gestures; Rortys
approach should be completed by Gasches patient reading. And vice
versa.
From Husserl in particular and from the other great figures of the
history of philosophy, Derrida affirms having inherited the necessity of
posing transcendental questions in order not to be held within the
fragility of an incompetent empiricist discourse.81 To avoid the naivety
of empiricism, positivism and psychologism, it is crucial for Derrida to
renew transcendental questioning. But at the same time, such transcendental questioning, to be truly serious and not give in to any simplification, needs to take into account the possibility of accidentality
and contingency, the possibility of everything that ironically makes
wobble the serious claims of transcendental questioning.
The serious elevation of transcendental philosophy falls because,
during the movement upward in search of conditions of possibility,
one realizes that the very condition of transcendence, that which is
higher than height, is empirical and contingent. The movement up is
thus brought down to the plane of immanence. Yet slipping back on
contingency as the condition of possibility of transcendence, the
unstable elevation is relaunched again.82 It is hard to deny that there is

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83

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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discipline, and in the worst case an institution with its legitimating


orthodoxy (p. 88).
Derrida suggests that Gasches The Tain of the Mirror runs the risk of
reconstituting the deconstructive jetty as a philosophy of deconstruction, with its infrastructures and its systematicity. The very use of the
term infrastructure in relation to deconstruction is troubling and,
although Derrida understands the strategic role that plays in Gasches
argumentation, it should be avoided. In my understanding of the
passage, this it to say that Derrida is afraid that Gasches tone which
kills, as Caputo notes, all of Derridas jokes84 might give the idea that
all deconstruction really is, is the stabilizing jetty. Deconstruction is the
theory of theories, a supertheory; the one and only hypertranscendental critique (p. 89).85 But, of course, opposite risks also
exist. It amounts to thinking as Rorty does that deconstruction is
only the destructive jetty; that it can or should speak only in a destabilizing pitch. However, one has to remember that the two kinds of
jetties or tones are interdependent and uneasy to dissociate, if not
completely indissociable. The position of a proposition, the time for
the thesis, is shaken by the jetty which dismantles the bridges trying to
reach a transcendental height. Yet the contrary is also true; toppling
down bridges to transcendence is also erecting new ones toward it.
Transcendence is taken down and reproduced: the erection falls.
Being marked by the empirical, deconstruction cannot be a serious
ideological demystification. It cannot rise up without at the same time
falling down, and falling down without at the same time rising up.86
For this reason, the ladder as it happens for the transcendental
cannot be set aside.
In this infinite limping is that quasi-transcendental tone which
Derrida cannot and does not want to circumvent. The complicity and
the contamination with the transcendental is, in fact, needed to
remark that a disorganization of the axiomatics of philosophy has been
produced not by some regional discipline, from sociology, history or
psychology; not from a Kuhnian redescription of their procedures; not
from literature. It is something nourished within the edifice of philosophy that has managed to favour the undermining of the discursive
order in which it was raised. As Derrida puts it: an element in the series
of philosophical discourses, deconstruction, no longer simply belonged to the series, and introduced into it an element of perturbation,
disorder, or irreducible turmoil that is, a principle of dislocation
(p. 84). Deconstruction is not a viral act of terrorism which, in the
name of foreign and more sovereign powers, falls on the order of the
philosophical. It is rather a patient internal negotiation with the legacy
of tradition negotiation that, born in the very centre of the empire
and using its logos, tries to provoke and suspend the laws of the home.
Deconstructions scandal consists of suggesting that nothing is more

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85

philosophical than the demolition of philosophy itself, that is to say, of


its radical critique. But, if deconstruction really is this patient and
paradoxical critique of philosophical conceptuality, then we still have
to understand why for Derrida it is crucial to work the fundamental
axiomatics of tradition and eat away its authority, instead of leaving, as
Rorty does, metaphysics to itself and silently reinforcing its sovereignty.
As I will trace in the next chapter, by denying deconstruction any
political or ethical relevance the second kind of privacy he attributes
to Derrida Rorty fails to grasp the profound interests of Derridas
experiment with thought.

Chapter 3

The Resistance of Theory


The Desires We Are, the Languages We Speak
After having discussed in the previous chapter the anti-transcendental
character praised in the authentic Derrida, it is now time to analyse
the second kind of privacy which Rorty assigns to deconstruction. The
circumvention of philosophy is in fact twofold. It consists not only in
the (impossible) abstinence from generality, but also in accepting that
the courses sailed around the shore of metaphysics will be only of
interest for those severely infected by philosophical germs. The project
of overcoming tradition is doomed to remain totally irrelevant to
anyone who is not involved with the axiomatics organizing the philosophical. Nonetheless, it will be germane for those macho-metaphysicians ironist theory is a male business even in Rortys use of the
feminine pronoun who, after suffering from the anxiety of influence
for so long, are looking for a make-over. Derridas genealogies would
provide, to use Foucaults words, the confused and anonymous Western man who no longer knows himself or what name he should
adopt, the possibility of alternate identities, more individualized and
substantial than his own.1 Rorty uses Derridas work to supply exactly
what, for Foucault, a genealogy should not: des identites de rechange. And
yet, the sublime style that Rorty deduces from Derrida is not appropriate for every occasion. It is useful while ironists are playing with
themselves, but should be dropped when one is taking care of the
needs of the people uninterested in self-recreation.
I take Derridas importance to lie in his having had the courage to give up
the attempt to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring
together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonance
and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his
predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful.2

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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begins with Trotsky, the wild orchids and their disappointing


irreconcilability.
In his 1992 autobiographical essay Trotsky and the wild orchids,
Rorty reconstructs the causes that brought him to the privatepublic
split in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.3 Rorty recalls growing up in a
family whose sacred texts were The Case of Leon Trotsky and Not Guilty,
books believed to offer everlasting leftist commandments on morality
and truth. Anxious to exhibit his liberal-progressive credentials, Rorty
continues to evoke other scenes from his childhood: his father had
almost accompanied Dewey to Mexico where the latter chaired the
commission which cleared Trotsky from Stalins charges; a collaborator
of the Russian revolutionary hid in Rortys home on the Delaware
River; Carlo Tresca, the famous Italian anarchist gunned down on a
New York sidewalk in 1943, was a family friend to whom Rorty served
sandwiches during a Halloween party. Young Richard, whose parents
had been branded as Trotskyites by the Daily Worker, grew up believing that decent people had to be at least socialists if not Trotskyites all
the way. By the time he was twelve, Rorty already understood that the
point of being human was to spend ones life fighting social injustice
(p. 6). The rigour of his political commitments, however, began to be
disturbed by unspeakable private passions: first, the interest in the
Dalai Lama, a fellow eight-year-old who had made good, and then the
tragic and fatal encounter with the wild orchids on the mountains of
north-western New Jersey. Rorty was proud to be the only kid around
who knew the places of origin, Latin names and blooming seasons of
the forty different species of wild orchids growing in New Jersey.
How to justify such an overwhelming and apolitical passion for
orchids before the voice who perhaps spoke English with a Ukrainian
accent from Yanovka of his conscience? Is not the esoteric pastime of
picking orchids an unforgivable distraction from the commitment to
constitute a system that would guarantee the right to happiness for
citizenry as a whole? I was afraid that Trotsky (whose Literature and
Revolution I had nibbled at) would not have approved of my interest in
orchids (p. 7). Barely fifteen, Rorty decided that his personal mission
consisted in reconciling Trotsky with his wild orchids public justice
and private desires. The University of Chicago College, where Mrs and
Mr Rorty sent their overachieving child to save him from a wild bunch
of high-school bullies, had to be the place for such a powerful reconciliation. For Rorty, philosophy was the mirage of a dimension where
his interest in flowers would enjoy an ethical-political justification.
Although he later abandoned orchids for Proust and Hegel, Rorty
continued to be concerned by the same questions: is it possible to
reconcile what is important for oneself with what is important for
society? Is the time dedicated to literature and philosophy a time taken
away from politics? Thirty years after his departure from Chicago, Rorty

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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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thinker like Rorty who does not believe in an immutable essence


preserved at the heart of humankind. The essentialist divisions taste
conscience and beautytruth, are thus regenerated in proper pragmatic terms by the ironist: certain works can be used to revolutionize
the private sphere, while others are useful to reform the public space.
The former vocabularies obey ones personal equivalent to Trotskys
voice; the latter are seduced by something similar to the scent of the
wild orchids scent. There is no point in trying to grade these different
interests on a single scale. The books in search of a sublime autonomy
from tradition, an autonomy that only a lucky few can pursue, have the
same dignity as the books which speak of beautiful feelings (such as
respect, solidarity or friendship) to which anyone can relate.
Rorty believes that accepting the necessity to speak several languages
on the basis of the goals we pursue is the only effective strategy to
satisfy our diverse and contrasting desires. The needs dictated by the
obligation of achieving our country and those organized around the
desire of self-achievement each require a distinct vocabulary. We need
a language in the private, when we take care of ourselves and create
who we want to be, and another language in the public, when we are
concerned with our fellow human beings, their urgencies and their
desires. This is not to say that private and public desires are always in
conflict. Many people are happy with who they are and devote themselves entirely to the common good. Many others devote themselves
only to personal perfection. Whoever is attracted to both kinds of
desires, however, must learn to make both speak.
The reasons behind Rortys firm distinction between public and
private demands become clearer in the fourth chapter of Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity.5 The arguments in Private irony and liberal hope,
are motivated by the observation that ironic intellectuals increasingly
dominate world culture. More and more books can be traced to the
ProustNietzscheHeidegger canon. Ever more often, the intelligentsia discusses autonomy and individual perfection, anxiety of influence
and private ecstasy; ever less do leftist intellectuals devote their work to
diffusing progressive ideas in the social body. The vigour of renewed
accusations of irresponsibility against leftist intellectuals depends on
this very cultural logic. The blame does not only come from dullminded conservatives, Christian fundamentalists or retro-scientists:
people who have not read the books against which they warn others,
and are just instinctively defending their own traditional roles (p. 82).
Even respectable men like Jurgen Habermas have brought such charges against the so-called ironists.
Rortys dangerous defence of ironist theory an alibi perhaps even
more dangerous than Habermas indictment relies on the enforcement of the privatepublic separation. Here is what Rorty writes:

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91

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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The Domestication of Derrida

debates that lit up the Berlinische Monatschrift. In 1784 the philosophical


arguments were only available within limited academic circles. Such
innocuousness allowed Kant at least in theory to speak freely when
addressing his colleagues, whereas when undertaking a more public
role, he was obliged to control his critical attitude. Rortys privatization
of deconstruction is based on a strikingly similar argument: philosophy
is a private matter since it interests only a few people. However, how
can we establish nowadays, at a time when archives and libraries are
becoming virtual and thus more accessible, when the interest in theory is larger than ever, the line which separates a publication which is
private and specialized from the one reaching a broader audience?
How is it possible to determine a priori the destination of theory? To
decide who will be the addressees that an envoi will end up reaching?
Quite brutally, Rorty divides authors in two categories: there are
those who are moved by the commitment to fighting injustice, and
those like Derrida who are writing to stimulate themselves and their
readers. The former write for the common welfare while the latter for
renewing and amusing a few chosen people. Actually, beyond its platitudinous common sense, it is very difficult to understand where Rorty
is going with his argument. The belief that Derridas fantasies cannot
be used for any public, political or pedagogical means but can nevertheless function as examples of what might be done, seems to be driven
by an internal tension. If Derridas gestures can be exemplary, if they
are extremely important for one group of people, it follows that they
undoubtedly have a pedagogical function. What is more public and
concretely political than the irony offering new descriptions to look at
reality and renew the we to which one belongs? To publish texts on
flowers or masturbation, for example, rather than on seemingly more
immediate political questions, is a public and a political decision. To
make ones private life public by publishing love envois is to engage in
public acts with public effects. As a matter of fact, in Habermas,
Derrida, and the functions of philosophy an essay included in the
1998 collection Truth and Progress but initially intended to be a part of
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty admits the relevance of Heidegger and Derrida in the quest for social justice. They are politically
relevant for they show the kind of private autonomy any individual
should be able to pursue in a utopic democracy. And yet, their discourses whose creativity proves that the realm of possibility can be
enlarged do nothing concrete to justify or hasten (but not, despite
what Habermas believes, to forestall, discredit or delay) the arrival of
such utopia.7 The first difficulty of this argument is that it is unclear
whether Rorty believes discourses presumably more argumentative and
accessible to the people Habermas or Rawlss for example to be
actually relevant for public life. The second difficulty is that the relation between philosophy and politics is put in different terms in

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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

Since Derrida is whispering to us an alternative to the system of values


promoted by philosophy, Rorty appoints him as an advocate for the
possibility of changing vocabulary. The project which would link
American pragmatism to European post-structuralism comes from
their mutual desire to influence common sense in order to free it from
the metaphysical ground on which it is based. The people will eventually believe that no human nature really exists: they will come to
accept the fact that we are contingent through and through, products
of the histories we lived and the vocabularies we spoke.12
And yet, such regeneration is not something urgent. Only in an
affluent and fully democratic society would there be space and time for
the sublimity of such a project. In a moment of economical crisis and
global instability, it does not make sense to pass the deconstruction of
actuality as the primary social mission. There are other urgencies for
society. Rortys target is not in this case Derrida himself, but those
members of the so-called Cultural Left who, influenced by the critique
of humanism and Enlightenment, rolled back from all progressive
movements which tried to reform the American society because of
their naive i.e., metaphysical presuppositions. While, according to
Rorty, Derrida underlined the necessity of negotiating with the present, and thus was not suspicious or diffident in regards to progressive
political actions, some of his admirers demanded a Left so radically
and purely anti-metaphysical that they deprived themselves of the
opportunity to give a concrete contribution to politics. In avoiding any
complicity with the axiomatics of tradition, they became self-exiled in
the ivory tower of philosophical critique. Rorty, in this case, denounces
the double bind of filiation: Derrida is among those responsible for a
frantic tone recently adopted in politics, without being complicit with it
himself.
In Achieving Our Country, Rorty describes the demobilization which
has transformed the strategies, the objectives and the language of the
American Cultural Left starting from the late 1960s. Gradually substituting Marx with Freud, the Capital with contemporary apocalyptic
French philosophy, progressive intellectuals stopped being interested
in the economy and started holding the unconscious responsible for
the illnesses of society. This new academic Left thinks more about

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95

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)

The Cultural Left ended up ignoring the process of proletarization,


which ruined the United States. Rorty reproaches the Cultural Left for
having worried too much about superstructures and ideologies, and
too little about the reform of the economic infrastructure. The changes that can be obtained in public consciousness without a transformation of the economic dynamics in which such a consciousness is
placed are superficial and ephemeral. Critique and critical theories are
not sufficient. How can the reform of libidinal economy or political
unconscious resist the project of impoverishing 75 per cent of the
American population and 95 per cent of the world population?
Rorty strongly believes that all the transformations of common sense
which developed in the American public scene during the last decades
are doomed to be revoked once another recession makes the middle
class even poorer. The Left failed in fact to channel the rage of an
always poorer middle class, letting it be played by the populist and
reactionary forces of the Right. White resentment and hostility will be
directed against those minorities who seem to benefit from the politically correct attitude which sprout from academic centres, or against
let me add the enemy fabricated after 9/11: the Muslim.
Rortys general position on the privatization of deconstruction and
philosophy is now clearer. Rorty does not really refute that Derridas
work has some bearing on public life. What he contests is the delusional belief that exclusively by passing through theory, one can be
productively engaged with the political life of a given community. As

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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)

It is a blunder to think that we can terminate the suffering caused by


late capitalism if we just succeeded in bypassing metaphysics. One does
not need elaborate critiques of society for its injustices are obvious.
Rorty does not see the exigency for more critical theory. What is
necessary is a new reformist project able to win the majority of the
voters. Only professors in the Humanities can claim that deconstruction is the only means of being an effective political animal, as only an

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expert in antisubmarine mines would think of them as central to


modern warfare: History is not a conspiracy of essentialist intellectuals
(p. 136). Believing so is a self-justificatory excuse from Trotskys protests against the wild orchids.
According to Rorty, leftist intellectuals are ashamed because the
economic infrastructure diagnosed on the ground of social injustice is
also what enables them to pursue their passions. Thus, this limited
number of privileged individuals overcharges its private interests with
political significance and public functions. The Humanities crown
themselves as the main body of faculties for the fight against exploitation. In saying that metaphysics spreads from Plato to NATO, professors try to defeat the occupational alienation haunting their bad
consciousness. Closed in libraries or participating in sit-ins, they
attempt to persuade each other that their professional competences
have a decisive political relevance. In this way, the sense of guilt provoked by their social inutility is silenced. Literary theory becomes an
indispensable tool for the debunking of ideological discourses. A certain Cultural Left gets to the point of affirming that the problems of
ideology and politics can be approached only on the basis of criticallinguistic analysis. By repeating a much-quoted jibe by Irving Howe,
Rorty writes: These people dont want to take over the government;
they just want to take over the English Department.15 It almost appears
as if Rorty is suggesting that taking over academia is not enough.
Rorty criticizes his colleagues not because their political goals would
have outweighed their intellectual honesty as the flourish of
panicking conservatives screamed. He rather targets the alibi that, by
being a professor, one has automatically satisfied his duty toward civil
society. Pragmatism sees itself as allied with all those long-term
attempts which aim at changing the rhetoric, the common sense, the
self-awareness of that portion of mankind which is the West. Deconstruction and pragmatism might work together against logocentrism
and essentialism. That which divides them at least in Rortys reading
is the very way in which each understands the relation between critical theory and leftist politics:
I want to save radicalism and pathos for private moments, and stay reformist
and pragmatic when it comes to my dealings with other people.16

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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philosophical critique and social engagement, Derrida would have


been decent enough to keep philosophy within the boundaries of
private life. In the next section, I will show how Derrida, through a
close dialogue with Kant, arrives at concerning philosophy as a political
practice of civil disobedience. Reading the 1980s Mochlos, or the
conflict of the faculties and The principle of reason: the university in
the eyes of its pupils, and the 1999 The university without condition,
I will show that Foucault and Derridas ideas of philosophy are not as
distant as Rorty would like them to be.

Casting a Maybe at the Heart of the Present


O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely, were too long,
If life did ride upon a dials point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
And if we live, we live to tread on kings.
(William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I)
On the first evening of fighting, it so happened
that the dials in the clocktowers were being
fired at simultaneously and independently
from several locations in Paris.
(Walter Benjamin, On the concept of history)

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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critique and not a discipline falls, philosophy is erected as the most


private of all disciplines, the faculty where people indulge in the
pleasures of irony.
The three essays by Derrida that I will deal with in this section are
inspired by the same problematics organizing Rortys work. These
essays were originally offered by Derrida to the pupils of prestigious
American institutions (Columbia, Cornell and Stanford). From such
private and inaccessible premises, Derrida questions the purposes and
reasons of philosophy, its place in relation to the city and in relation to
other academic disciplines.
To have a raison detre, a reason for being, is to have a justification for
existence, to have a meaning, a purpose [finalite], a destination. It is also to
have a cause, to be explainable according to the principle of reason, as it is
sometimes called in terms of a reason that it is also a cause (a ground, ein
Grund), that is to say also a footing and a foundation, ground to stand on. In
the phrase raison detre, this causality takes on above all the sense of final
cause.17

Derridas The principle of reason: the university in the eyes of its


pupils, tackles exactly the grounds justifying the sectorization of the
institution called university the division within academia of different
faculties, some of them with a public purpose, others with a merely
private destination. In particular, Derrida investigates the existence of
Philosophy as a distinct and separate faculty. Why does the Faculty of
Philosophy exist? In view of what? With what views?
End-orientation is what justifies the authority of the so-called technosciences, of those disciplines whose research can pay off, be economically applied or utilized. Against the utilitarian self-justification of
applied sciences, the vocabulary of transcendental philosophy opposed
the purity of authentic knowledge, a knowledge whose sole business is
the truthful and disinterested use of reason. Thus, one ends up having,
on the one hand, positive sciences which produce knowledges in view
of pragmatic drop-outs (the technological); and on the other hand, the
fundamental research which is immune from pragmatic purposes (the
theoretical). It is on the basis of this fracture that the modern paradigm of university has been constituted. This model is not older than
three hundred years, since its instauration as a universal example can
be dated between 1798 and 1810, between the Kantian The Conflict of
the Faculties and the institution of the University of Berlin.18
Yet, the German-universal idea of university is nowadays disturbed by
a certain finitude. It is not that the university is dead and buried, but
that the presuppositions organizing its structure are perceived as
belonging to the past, unsecured in the here and now. A certain
paradigm for the disciplinary division the one that from Konigsberg

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arrives at the rectorship of Freiburg passing through Berlin is in crisis


due to the shaky authority of its grounding.
Kant intended to draw a line which could delimit the universitys
place within society; a border within the academic territory, dividing
one faculty from all others. Such a lay-out is neither an empirical
arrangement nor just a clever systematization. It has to be based, says
Derrida, on a pure transcendental deduction: Kants principal concern is legitimate for someone intending to make the right decisions: it
is to trace the rigorous limits of the system called university.19 The
organization of the university, its architecture, is not for Kant an
empirical or accidental fact. The academic topology is an artificial
institution which has at its basis the very structure of reason. Derrida is
interested above all in the reasons Kant offered to justify the division
between higher faculties and the lower one. What is ultimately questioned is the possibility of maintaining strictly separate constative and
performative languages.
The disciplines which cultivate officials to serve in the government
belong to the higher faculties. As Kant explains in The Conflict of the
Faculties, a university does not exclusively raise scholars and scientists
but also a professional class in the service of State interests.20 These
people are trained inside the university with the view that they will
assume civil duties outside it, as government agents, diplomatic aides,
instruments of sovereign power. As tools of governance, their role is to
have a certain influence on the public, and precisely for this very
motive, they can only act under strict governmental supervision. It
seems fair to conclude that the task of such higher faculties for Kant is
to develop and help enforce what is now called the art of governance.
As Foucault notes in his 1979 What is critique?, from the fifteenth
century onwards, Europe witnessed an explosion of knowledges concerned with the question of how to govern the multitude of people
forming a nation: how to govern children, how to govern the poor and
beggars, how to govern a family, a house, how to govern armies, different groups, cities, States.21 The demographic boom of the fifteenth
century was one of the main reasons why the art of governing shifted
from a religious practice to a political project, getting displaced from
the Church to the State. Since the population was increasing exponentially, the State needed new and more effective methods of taking
care of its multiplied and diversified body. Let us not forget that the
interest in governmentality coincided with the birth of the territorial,
administrative and colonial modern States. The demands of the postfeudal formations with their vast territories and diverse subjects
required a new way of being sovereign. Punishing was not enough.
Techniques were needed to shape the citizens lives in order to control
their natural indocility and exploit their potentiality in view of a presumed common good. The State assumed as its responsibility the care

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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

Kant assigns a titanic responsibility to philosophy. It should screen


every position expressed by the people both governing and governed;
evaluate all the assumptions on which they ground their practices;
decide which ones are true and false, which moral and immoral, which
just and unjust. Of course, one could not imagine the existence of such
a faculty either in Kants epoch or today. In theory, nobody could say

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or do anything without going through philosophy, this gigantic critical


agency lacking any concrete means for enforcing its findings. Kant
does not imply that the lower faculty should replace the higher ones in
the government of the State. Rather, The Conflict of the Faculties suggests
that the fundamental modalities upholding and determining a community as a social reality should be anchored on the transcendental
inquiries of the lower faculty. The difficulty at the heart of this Kantian
idea of university is not hard to grasp.
To defend the autonomy of philosophical criticism, Kant needs to
claim that critique has nothing to do with the dimension of performativity. Philosophy is only interested in saying the truth; action is not
its business for its role is purely critical. If its inquiries overstepped the
academic space, if critique became a public practice rather than
remaining an intra-academic quarrel, then State powers would have
the right, if not the justice, to intervene against it. Only the people
educated in the higher faculties are competent enough to respond to
public demands. Therefore, to defend it from the aggression of those
interested in governance, Kant reduces the critical attitude of the lower
faculty to a private practice irrelevant to the governmentalization
project. Kants act of barricading critique away from social reality
authorizes the most contradictory evaluations. As Derrida argues,
Kant defines a university that is as much a safeguard for the most totalitarian
of social forms as a place for the most intransigently liberal resistance to any
abuse of power, a resistance that can be judged in turns as most rigorous or
most impotent. In effect, its power is limited to a power-to-think-and-judge,
a power-to-say, though not necessarily to say in public, since this would
involve an action, an executive power denied the university.24

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

Critical thought needs to be kept secret and confined within the


boundaries of academia. In fact if scholars can think freely, obeying only
their own conscience and knowledge, they cannot publicly expound what
they think. Those who are appointed to teach the people are bound to
teach what the sovereign power sanctions and authorizes as true. The
transcendental critique on the mechanics of knowledge must be constituted as private research, because the public utterances of theory are
subjected to the censoring eye of the higher faculties and the crown they
represent. Theory does not undergo State control; its publication does.
This amounts to saying that even if the scholars of the lower faculty are
physically in touch with the community, their relation with it is mediated
by the decisions of the sovereign power. Between the public and the
private, there is the State. The task of teaching consists in having the
pupils adopt certain regulated behaviour and beliefs through the process of interacting within the closely structured setting of the learning
environment. In this process, the teacher, as the legitimate representative of the community, regulates the behaviour of his audience to
be in tune with the one of the community itself. But since only the
higher faculties have the right to decide what the legitimate practices of
a given community are, teaching ends up being the means of producing
a harmonious and homogeneous community. This is why Kant assigns
to the lower faculty a language which is purely constative. Without the
possibility of stripping critical thought from its immediate political
thrust, philosophy would lose its place. Privacy is the cost that Kant had
to pay to ensure the existence of the lower faculty before the authority
of governmentalization.
It is not difficult to notice how the confidentiality agreement, so to
speak, that Kant signed with Frederick William II in the 1798 Conflict of
the Faculties is a violation of the Enlightenment project developed
fourteen years earlier. In An answer to the question: what is enlightenment? Kant suggests that sovereign power cannot and should not
prevent subcommunities from assuming a set of beliefs conflicting with
the truths enforced by governing agencies. The act of thinking, of
reflecting upon what is imposed by the guardians of the State, is not
restrained to academia. The easiness of care-free immaturity of

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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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It was once possible to believe that pure mathematics, theoretical physics,


philosophy (and, within philosophy, especially metaphysics and ontology)
were basic disciplines shielded from power, inaccessible to programming by
the agencies or instances of the State or, under cover of the State, by civil
society or capital interest. The sole concern of such basic research would be
knowledge, truth, the disinterested exercise of reason, under the sole
authority of the principle of reason.28

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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107

others, history, geography, mathematics and geometry can serve State


reason. And for this very reason, the barrier that Kant drew between
truth and power is washed away forever (if it was not always and already
lost). Those in philosophy, pupils and teachers, cannot bring forth a
self-legitimation of a Kantian type, and moreover, they cannot be
proud to occupy a field of inquiry which is safe from the intertwining of
power and knowledge. Arresting critical thought in the golden prisons
of critical theory institutes and releasing it into academic quarrels can
be an inexpensive yet elegant manner of maintaining the socio-political order in force. It can even be a strategy for a government to
advertise its care for free thought. The State can pay counter-power
forces and allow them free expression, yet not because democracy has
already arrived, but indeed to prevent it from ever coming. One can
freely criticize, insofar as critique does not disturb the force of laws. As
Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morality recalls,
It is not impossible to imagine a society so conscious of its power that it could
allow itself the noblest luxury available to it, that of letting its malefactors
go unpunished. What do I care about my parasites, it could say, let them
live and flourish: I am strong enough for all that!.30

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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compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operation, which consists


in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a
sudden put a transit route out of commission, making the enemys movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think
differently.42

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

The right to critique requires infinite responsibility. If the critical


forces that have their primary field of action within the university want
to be effective in their resistance, they should discontinue indulging in
the cushions of their iv(or)y leagues. They should exit the citadel
Stanford, Cornell or Columbia which grants them freedom to the
extent that they do not bother or upset a given order. Academic
resistance needs in fact to ally itself with extra-academic forces in
order to organize an inventive resistance, through its oeuvres, its work,
to all attempts at reappropriation (political, juridical, economic, and so
forth), to all the other figures of sovereignty.53 By referring through its
gestures and accounts to the possibility of a different happening, the
resistance at once theoretical and practical revokes the necessity of the
now. By casting a maybe in the heart of the present, deconstruction
can help disarticulate the presents solidarity and annul its undisputed
authorities. What changes in such a process of disjointment? Everything and yet, nothing at all. Even if the reality (Realitat) of the present
remains unaltered, its manner of being becomes modified. To be
disarticulated is the presents actuality (Wirklichkeit).
Following Heidegger, who is writing in Kants wake to accelerate his
own thought, reality is the thingness of a determinate being, the
totality of predicates which determine its essential kernel. Such predicates are not affected by deconstructive critique; deconstruction does
not unrealize time by producing counter-discourses that claim to
grasp the essence of the world itself better. The oeuvres Derrida talks
about are not primarily meant to depict the present differently. The
labour of deconstruction aims to modify not the what of the now, but
its how that is, the way of being of time itself. When Kant asserts that
being is not a real predicate, he means that the actuality of a thing is
not a determination which belongs to the conceptual core of that thing
itself. Actuality is the manner in which we are directed towards a thing,
in our case, the present. The different modalities of being directed
towards it do not alter its essence. A hundred actual thalers and a
hundred possible thalers do not differ in their reality, since existence
does not belong to the reality of the thing, to its conceptual determinations.54 Thus, if deconstruction is interested in actuality, its resistance does not modify reality, the essence of the present but, in a

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Husserlian fashion, it suspends the manner in which we are directed


toward it. The contents of the world do not change; what changes is the
way the world is lived. The deconstruction of actuality weakens the
being-in-force of the present, its necessity. The presence of the present
starts appearing only as a possibility, not as a transcendental necessity.
It begins to emerge in its avoidability, in its potency of being otherwise,
in its contingency.
It is possible, in assuming a certain faithful memory of democratic reason
and reason tout court I would even say, the Enlightenment of a certain
Aufklarung (thus leaving open the abyss which is again opening today under
these words) not to found, where it is no longer a matter of founding, but
to open out to the future, or rather, to the come, of a certain democracy?55

In the concentrationary universes which yesterday and today today in


a more discreet fashion than yesterday are born everywhere in the
world, is the to come of the possible that is being suppressed. The
only possibilities allowed are the ones which confirm, rather than
contest, the infrastructure of the real. Under the towers delimiting the
scope of concentration there is no perhaps, there is no future, there is
no past. There is only the dictatorship of the present. Thus, it is this
king the present that we must be tread on, if we want to engage in
the emancipation of that which might come. The possibility of the
future should not be adored in the silence of a sort of negative
theology; it should be cultivated in order to negotiate the exit from the
same. It is not a matter of enlightening the limits which one knows a
priori that one cannot overcome. It is a matter of tracing and opening
up the thresholds, those narrow gates through which unexpected
futures might come.
The explosiveness of the maybe, the peut-etre, is that which philosophy today has the duty to safeguard. Deconstructive critique says yes to
the spectres of other forms of communities and of being together. It
suspends the necessity of the present not in order to inculcate as
Rorty would like a utopian future, community and politics which
eventually might put an end to time. Rather, it revokes the now with
the aim of allowing spaces where the present would be lived as the field
of an unconditioned and transformative critique, thus ineluctably
immersed in the becoming without destiny of history.

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Politics of Conciliation and Politics of Monstrosity


This is the Western democratic, popular conception of
philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner
conversations at Mr. Rortys. Rival opinions at the dinner
table is this not the eternal Athens, our way of being Greek
again?
(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?)
Richard Rorty points out that in these analyses I do not appeal
to any we to any of those wes whose consensus, whose
values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a
thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated.
But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually
suitable to place oneself within a we in order to assert the
principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it
is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a
we possible by elaborating the question. Because it seems
to me that we must not be previous to the question; it can
only be the result and the necessary temporary result of
the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one
formulates it.
(Michel Foucault, Polemics, politics, and problematizations)

Why is Richard Rorty so afraid of deconstruction? Surely he must feel


threatened by it, otherwise if it were obvious that philosophy does not
have any significance in the space of contemporary society he would
not be so anxious to avert critical theorys publicity in his Achieving Our
Country.
In the preceding sections, I first clarified Rortys distinction between
public and private, then demonstrated how Derrida in his lectures
about and from the university one of which was delivered in front of
Rorty himself 56 questions the isolation of the Humanities from the
public sphere, localizing in them a potentiality for political resistance.
In this final section, I will discuss in detail Rortys attempt to aestheticize deconstruction in order to safeguard the present from any
radical critique of its authority.
As it should be evident by now, a strange duality binds Rorty to
Derridas work. While praising its anti-philosophical originality, Rorty
fears that deconstructive attitude will stop being the exclusive property
of the cultural avant-garde and will start pouring out of academias
protected and protective walls. I do not believe in fact that Rorty is
really concerned with the presumed non-publicity of deconstruction,
that he is worried by the spectatorial attitude it might induce in its
readers. On the contrary, I am convinced that Rortys apprehension is

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provoked by deconstructions intrinsic political commitment. If


deconstruction attempts to create spaces for an unpredictable otherwise, who can grant that what is to come will not be a monstrous
catastrophe, something much worse than what we enjoy today? After
affirming the theoretical legitimacy of the ironist theory descending
from Hegel, Rorty begins to estimate its political desirability. The focus
shifts from the aporetic epistemic privilege of deconstruction to its
ethico-political usefulness. Assuming that deconstruction leads us far
from the tracks beaten by the traditional axiomatic, one begins to
wonder if it is worth for critique to be as anachronistic with respect to
the present.
Language as politics can be conceived as a battlefield traversed by
two opposite tensions. One pushes toward innovation and transformation, the other toward invariance and conservation. While the first
movement aims to produce zones in which the habitual language
games are suspended, the second tends to safeguard the grammatical
norms in force.57 Rorty believes that only intellectuals can venture
along the path of transformative experimentation; the masses should
not participate in the language game that asserts the unconditional
right to question the structures constituting and regulating our practices. Pragmatism is in fact generously willing to liberate common sense
from some of its metaphysical presumptions. In the ideal liberal
society (as Rorty calls it), all intellectuals will be ironists: they will enjoy
questioning the grammar of their form of life. The non-intellectuals,
on the other hand, will only be nominalists and historicists.58 We, the
people outside the Humanities, will be aware that we are contingent
beings produced by historical vocabularies. Yet we will not doubt the
contingencies we happened to become. We will not care to understand
the normalizing discourses that transformed us into the subjects that
we are today, nor would we try to break free from those devices and
invent something new. At best, the intellectuals will propose to us
alternatives modalities of being in the world. We would not be able to
produce by ourselves such new modes of living because we were not
trained in the language game of doubting the grammar that shapes our
being. Luckily, intellectuals, poets and those others who could afford
acquiring such language games (perhaps at Stanford, under Rortys
supervision) will do the work for us, and social engineers will help
resolve the more concrete problems which trouble us. To put it in
another way: we will let ourselves be governed by the authors of discourses and norms, while the intellectuals will be allowed to deconstruct the authority of the language games ruling over the present.
Politics for Rorty is not a matter of acting in order to desubjugate
everyone from the condition of minority; it is not a matter of letting
those minoritized speak for themselves. As Rorty candidly affirms in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, I cannot imagine a culture which

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socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious


about their own process of socialization (p. 87). The only form of
socialization Rorty seems to concede us is the one that to say it with
Wittgenstein makes us blind to alternatives. Rortys liberalism bans
the non-intellectuals from the right to dispute the discursive practices
that shaped their selves. This right is granted only to intellectuals and
only on the condition that they do not abuse the privilege by being too
radical in public: irony can only be a private matter, an activity only few
can indulge in. The whole business of separating the public and the
private as two distinct and insurmountable spheres starts to materialize
as the policing action that it really is. Once theory has been extracted
from the body of the city, it is not that hard to reduce philosophy into a
private hobby, into ones own wild orchids. Critical thought is first
exiled from the public, then it is argued to lack publicity. Rorty even
affirms that it is in the interest of the public that irony should be
restrained into the private: most people do not want to be redescribed.
They want to be taken on their own terms taken seriously just as they
are and just as they talk.59 Rorty hopes that critical thinkers will
eventually leave the people alone. The people will be taken in the
terms they were trained to use; they will just be as they are and talk as
they do. But is not the attempt to separate intellectuals from the
community a way of preventing the desire for not being governed as we
are governed from ever acquiring some public relevance? The ideal
liberal society indeed is the one imagined by Rorty.
Rorty cannot take seriously Habermass claim that to protect the
institutes of Western democracies, one has to disclose the universalistic
elements of human experience as such. It is flawed to assume that
democracy is the one very political model that is attuned to the essence
of humanity, that any other political regime would alienate the communicative essence of man: humanity does not have an essence.
Democracy does not have to be anchored on the essence of man in
general, but only on our own essence; the fact that democracy works
for us is enough to justify its existence. Liberal politics cannot aspire to
any sort of transcendental deduction for it can only be grounded on
our present form of life. However, since the way we live now is the sole
assurance for our democratic tastes, in order to protect liberal society,
we need to dismiss many alternatives to our we. What binds liberal
societies are not philosophical grounds, but common vocabularies and
common hopes. 60 If one wants to support democracy, then one
should try to consolidate exactly such common hopes and vocabularies. For this reason, Rortys approval of French post-Nietzschean
philosophy comes to an end when it stops being an academic critique
of Habermas theory of communicative action and starts undermining
the soundness of the political hopes which informs it. At one extreme
of the philosophical scene is Lyotard, who advocates the idea of the

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revocability of any political narrative; on the other is Habermas, who


argues that it is fundamental for a democratic societys self-image to
maintain a universalistic dimension.
Anything that Habermas will count as retaining a theoretical approach will
be counted by an incredulous Lyotard as a metanarrative. Anything that
abandons such an approach will be counted by Habermas as more or less
irrationalist because it drops the notions which have been used to justify the
various reforms which have marked the history of the Western democracies
since the Enlightenment, and which are still being used to criticize the
socioeconomic institutions of both the Free and the Communist worlds.
Abandoning a standpoint which is, if not transcendental, at least universalistic, seems to Habermas to betray the social hopes which have been
central to liberal politics. So we find French critics of Habermas ready to
abandon liberal politics in order to avoid universalistic philosophy, and
Habermas trying to hang on to universalistic philosophy, with all its problems, in order to support liberal politics.61

As if to compromise the two positions, Rorty suggests that democracy


does not need to be grounded on a universalistic position; nonetheless,
one should avoid ungrounding it too much. When Rorty proposes to
the Cultural Left a moratorium on theory, he hopes that the leftist
theorists would set aside their foolish critical attitude.62 He wants them
to participate in the public discussion on how to reinforce the binding of the present rather than fall for the discreet charm of radical
emancipations whose outcome cannot be predicted. As Ernesto Laclau
commented, Rortys disagreement with French post-structuralism
(Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and so forth) is essentially political, while
with Habermas it is merely philosophical and let me add strategic.63
The Left, for Rorty, should try to kick its philosophy habit so as to
contribute to public welfare.
Putting aside the theoretical habit for Rorty coincides with embracing
an ideological use of literature. As I argued earlier, Foucault and Derrida consider fictional discourse as a critical lever (mochlos) to unsettle
the solidity of our current we. Rorty assigns it the opposite function.
Responsible intellectuals should not produce works which exhibit the
radical contingency of the current now. A new political wisdom should
be organized around the necessity of producing fictions that would
protect the social body from the possible disarticulation of its solidarity:
in the interests of ones own community as a certain Kant would say
intellectuals should shield principles to which they would not themselves subscribe with full conviction. By depoliticizing and privatizing
deconstruction, Rorty is able to safeguard the political goals inspiring
his pragmatism. His primary intent is in effect to make liberal institutions outlive the demise of the discursive apparatus on which they were
grounded. Since the narratives that powerfully justified the liberal

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society ended up inoperative, new narratives become necessary for


accomplishing the same legitimizing task. It is not a matter of finding
new philosophical grounds for democracy and even less a matter of
taking seriously how the critique of Western reason should affect the
very structure of democracy. Since we are sure that Western liberalism is
the best thing that can ever happen to us, we just need to come up with
a new rhetoric to let it (and us) prosper. Literature and literary studies,
affirms Rorty, are political insofar as they inculcate democratic values
in their readers.64 It is true that, as Foucault remarked, the mode of
governance characteristic of liberal societies has imposed on their
members a variety of constraints which premodern societies could not
imagine. However, contrary to Foucault, Rorty thinks that these modern
constraints have been compensated by the benefits they produced, and
even if not, democracy has in itself the means of adjusting its mechanisms and achieving its dream.
Strikingly, Rorty does not pay too much attention to the discomforts provoked by the Western dream on those who do not participate to it. As Achieving Our Country reveals, Rorty is perfectly aware of
the fact that the existence of the West is grounded on the scientific and
capillary destruction of the Other World a world that is not simply
abroad but also at the very hearth of the liberal modernity on the
exploitation of its raw men and materials. We can survive only by forbidding the Third Worlds inhabitants all the comforts we enjoy.
Nonetheless, Rortys biggest concern remains how to defend Americas
middle class from impoverishment. But one should not be surprised by
such an attitude; after all Rorty has proudly and ethnocentrically
declared that we must, in practice, privilege our own group.65 There
is no reason for him to care about the not-we.
The privilege of being ourselves is so comfortable that we cannot
even consider breaking out from our current way of living. The benefits we enjoy have eventually made us blind and deaf to alternatives.66
Yes, the ironist reads books about strange people, strange families and
strange communities, but it is less a matter of using such books to
divert himself effectively from the self that he was trained to be, than of
getting a temporary private excitement out of such exotic instances, or
of acquiring topics to converse wittingly about at dinner. As far as
autonomy is conceived as a mere intellectualistic game against philosophical tradition, it is no longer a political resistance to State governmentality. As long as irony is a private practice, it does not
effectively mark the political body; on the contrary, under the pretext
of disconcerting, it plays the game of the established political
mechanism. Reducing irony and autonomy to inherently private matters is Rortys way of blocking deconstructive attitude from deactivating
the established social order and promoting the formation of alternative we.67

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Significantly, Rortys proposal of putting a moratorium on theory is


intertwined with the exigency of mobilizing what remains of the pride
in being Americans. Theory is in fact denounced with an ethic of
reading one would expect from Allan Bloom as one of the major
obstacles to the reactivation of American pride. With its abstract and
barren explanations of even the most concrete and simple things (a
current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal)68 theory
understands politics as the problematization of familiar concepts.
These problematizations these stories about hegemony and power
work for the Left as the myth of the blue-eyed devil has worked for
Black Muslims. As usual, Rorty here does two things at once: on the
one hand, he denounces theory for it produces a retreat from activism and a disengagement from practice; and on the other hand, he
subtly suggests that the labour of theory risks generating the same antiAmerican separatism that one is supposed to find among members of
a controversial formation. Interested in the well-being of this community, Rorty needs to ward off any discourses that could promote a form
of community against the grain of the present. We Americans need to
go about our public business. We Americans should not be displaced
by Foucauldian discourses. Therefore, theory cannot be right. If one
became convinced that the war in Vietnam or the endless humiliation
inflicted on African-Americans were not just mistakes correctable by
reforms, but rather, signs of something structurally wrong with the
United States, then one would have the responsibility of revolutionizing that very structure. But since a radical intervention in the real is
what needs to be avoided in the first place, the United States cannot be
an evil empire. Rorty does not say that our country is not an evil
empire, that the configuration of the American society does not
resemble an Orwellian dictatorship. But since such accounts would
endanger the present of the United States, their heavy objectivity needs
to be bracketed. Rorty accomplishes this task mainly by following two
strategies. First, he denigrates the groups, specifically the New Left,
who believe there is something profoundly wrong with the West. Secondly, he very subtly falsifies the events denounced by the 1960s
radical leftism by resorting to all sorts of rhetorical mediation. The
New Leftists started to become convinced that the United States was not as
pure as described by their parents and their teachers, because they
wanted to believe so maybe for a sort of adolescent rebellion against
authority figures and on the basis of some clues like the Vietnam War
and State racism (p. 66). This is not to say that the New Left, convinced
that the dystopic Oceania was not so far from Washington DC, did not
accomplish great things then (It may have saved our country from
becoming a garrison state). Rather, it is to affirm that for the sake of
our now, the radicalism of its critique should be now put aside. To save
the trust in the United States present and future, its past must be

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121

forgotten circumvented, if you will for such history might fire up


discontent against the institutes and the values which shape our selves.
To participate in the political life of ones community, for Rorty,
amounts to partaking in the presents mechanics, and not, as Derrida
has argued, to questioning such mechanisms in name of the exploited
others. If it were not like this, it would be impossible to understand
why Rorty suggests that there is something wrong in being more
interested in the wretched of the earth than in the proletarization of
American white bourgeoisie (p. 89). When humanitys welfare and
homeland security clash as it does quite often Rorty always chooses
to privilege the latter. But for this very reason, it is really difficult to
comprehend how he can reconcile the Christian ecumenism organizing Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity with the frankly ethnocentric
patriotism in Achieving Our Country.
With its sublime critique, does not theory end up risking the very
belief that the different countries to which we belong is achieving a
great dream?
Rorty hopes that the quasi-religious tone assumed by the movement
crowding both Atlantic coasts becomes a private cult. Some venerate
God, others Being, others the Superhuman and still others, the power
of critique and the critique of power. All these sects should be granted
the right to believe in what they prefer. Everyone seeks individual
perfection as he desires. But when one is engaged in the public space,
excessively sophisticated languages become merely nuisances (p. 97).
In an interesting manner, Rorty suggests that part of the disturbance
produced by theory is determined by its emphasis on unrepresentability and the unrepresentable. Taking into serious consideration the
mechanisms of exclusion from representability and the production of
unrepresented voices, groups and communities would of course
require a radical reconfiguration of the so-called Western representative liberalisms. Twisting Derridas position upside down, Rorty insists
that considering democratic politics as inadequate would amount to
apathy. If one believes that power is everywhere, that everyone is to a
certain degree guilty, then why should one persist in the attempt to
make as just as possible the time in which one lives?
Rorty thinks that it would be better if leftist intellectuals worked for
the promise of concrete reforms rather than get stuck in post-structuralist critiques. In Rortys opinion, we do not need Derridas
deconstruction and philosophical critique to be aware of the lacerations which wound the contemporary world. For instance, Derridas
Specters of Marx lists ten plagues which can bury the democratic dream:
the growing rate of unemployment; the exclusion of homeless people
from political life; economical and trade wars which oppose States to
States, groups of States to groups of States; the contrasts between the
free market and the rights of labourers; the blackmail of foreign debt

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The Domestication of Derrida

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

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123

be religiously democratic. That is to say, not completely and radically


democratic. Democracy must be able to limit philosophy even if, doing
so, it becomes a limited democracy, even if it gives up Enlightenments
demand for a criticizability without conditions: When the two come
into conflict, democracy takes precedence over philosophy (p. 192).
As Toni Negri and Michael Hardt have argued in the Labor of Dionysus,
the sanity of democratic institutions is grounded on the denial of
philosophys relevance to public life. 72 Rorty intends to keep not only
religious beliefs distant from the political sphere as Jefferson wanted
but also philosophical problematizations. Within democracy, philosophical and religious beliefs should not be granted any influence on
political issues. Religious or philosophical convictions are allowed in
private so long as such beliefs do not interfere with the regular workings of the social order. When the private either aspires to become
public, or conflicts in a too radical manner with the presumed public
common sense, then the State is legitimized in using force against
individual conscience. The quite enlightened 1988 The priority of
democracy to philosophy eventually shows the dark side of Rortys
contingent, ironic and solidaire liberalism.
A liberal democracy will not only exempt opinions on such matters from
legal coercion, but also aim at disengaging discussions of such questions
from discussions of social policy. Yet it will use force against the individual
conscience, just insofar as conscience leads individuals to act so as to
threaten democratic institutions. (p. 183)

Nothing can claim the right to bother democratic institutions. If the


proposal of a moratorium against theory and of a limitation to the
range of critique is not enough to safeguard the present, Rorty clearly
asserts the possibility of resorting to violence in order to eradicate the
philosophical threats to democracy. What is at the same time most
interesting and shocking in Rortys position is that he does not try to
justify theoretically the legitimacy of such eventual repression. The
exercise of violence has its sufficient justification in the fact that violence is a means of consolidating the very existence of democracy.
Within the economy of Rortys arguments, the defence of democracy
or better, the defence of the now of democracy distinguished from its
to come is the supreme value, unquestionable and indubitable as
God, which justifies even violent interventions in the private realm in
order to prevent any threat on the well-being of the present. The only
arguments that are admitted in the public space but after all, also in
the private are those that are aligned with the profound structures
which are not to be challenged. The private must not only be distinguished from but also attuned to the public in order to assure a
pacified society. The assumption of the contingency of human history

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The Domestication of Derrida

does not coincide in Rorty with the recognition of the unconditional


questionability of all its institutes, as it happens in Derrida. On the
contrary, the very contingency of democracy its weakness, so to speak
requires the deployment of violence to protect it.
When literature is not enough in assuring the solidarity of the socius
and of the we, when theory nearly creates counter-communities both
within and without the public space, belonging to the same physical
space but organized around a different time, then the police step in. In
the best tradition of American literary studies, Rorty thinks of literature
as primarily a normative way of guaranteeing the integrity of a certain
social and historical self. Critique, focusing on the modalities of production and reception of meaning and value, is ultimately perceived as
a threat against the form of life which literature is presumed to build.73
Since theory is not able to tell stories, if it is not willing to help enforce
such stories, it should be distanced from actual politics. The questions
that those who spend their lives on philosophy books should ask
themselves is whether they want to lose time with disputes such as the
spectacular one exploded between John Searle and Derrida. Bennington wonders:
How could we agree to remain shut up in a library poring over old philosophers, who, for the most part, moreover, encourage us to put the books
away and to go out and do something?74

Rorty would answer with such an ease that borders on populism


that it is not important at all to remain shut up in libraries forging new
concepts which can lacerate the present. What matters is to be actively
engaged in politics. However, that which is important to underscore is
that the modality of such engagement is strictly and pre-emptively
policed: for Rorty, private are all those modes of being together that do
not share the hegemonic articulation of the real. Public sphere is the
harmonious space in which consensus in created; not the dimension in
which different projects conflict one against the other. Since it is evident who we should be, since we are certain of the values and principles in which we want to believe, the identity to which we belong
cannot be examined radically and publicly. Thus one needs to exclude
from the public space all those struggles which aspire to favour
antagonistic ways of living the now. The only way to participate in
politics is, for Rorty, being cautiously reformist.
The kind of weak postmodern liberalism advocated by Rorty is not so
weak after all: it does not imply any disarmament towards the other and
towards critique, that is towards the transformation of the present and
the exposedness to what the current system cannot represent. We are
only to find the most suitable means for enhancing our own form of
community and thought. And for this very reason, we have the

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125

responsibility to intervene against the dissemination of the anarchic


conviction that any institution and any law can be criticized. One has to
delimit a private area to prevent the contagious epidemic of countercommunities. It seems that Rortys discourse aspires to be institutionalized as a tool for protecting society from any danger that can stem
from contemporary French philosophys monstrosity and from anything which can be even remotely related to it. Being interested in the
solidarity of the social body as if it were an indivisible unity, Rorty, as a
perfect political epidemiologist, implies that the goal of politics is to
harmonize tensions so as to avoid radical changes. And philosophy and
narrative need to collaborate in order for this goal to be achieved.
Philosophers should either be contained in their private distractions,
or they should favour social pacification and expel any desire of conflict from the social-democratic public environment. Rorty does not
immediately prohibit the possibility for a polemic or a debate even
though they appear sterile and useless. For a start, he attempts to
convince us, mainly through a preemptive argumentative war, that it
is dangerous for us to renounce the comforts of todays security. As
usual, Rorty tries to change the topic of conversation and isolate in a
spiral of silence those who do not comply with his agenda. But such a
resistance to theory is not merely verbal and argumentative. Critique is
tolerated so long as the political indocility on which it is anchored and
which it promotes does not constitute an effective threat against the
governmentalization project. As soon as critique compromises the
bond through which a community is tied to itself, Rorty does not
hesitate to summon the brutal intervention of the police to enforce the
social status quo. As Hardt and Negri have highlighted, the benign
practice of avoiding critical problems in order to preserve social harmony can only be grounded on the violent intervention of the police.
In this sense, the thin State of postmodern liberalism appear, in effect, as a
refinement and extension of the German tradition of the science of the
police. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction and isolation: the thin blue line delimits the boundaries of what will be accepted as
inputs in the system of rule. Rorty says that the State will discard or set aside
elements of difference and conflict, but when we pose the operation of
discarding and setting aside on the real field of power it can only be
understood as the preventive deployment of force, or rather the threat of
ultimate force in the final instance. . . . The Disneyland of a fictional social
equilibrium and harmony, the simulacrum of the happiest place on earth, is
necessarily backed up by the LAPD.75

Ultimately, Rortys liberal societies are not founded on good feelings


and solidarity, but on police. Terrorized by what might happen to it,
the West needs to terrorize its citizenry and render them docile. In

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The Domestication of Derrida

Rortys fear of deconstruction and critique, in his resistance to theory,


it is easy to recognize the liberal disapproval for an ethics committed to
increasing the chance of events explosive enough to transgress the
grammar we are now. It is mandatory to avoid the production of the
traumatic awareness that the normality which we live the we to
which literature should reduce any other is radically contingent and
unconditionally revocable. For such reasons, it is vital to condemn
deconstruction with a double privacy: privacy to prevent disjointment
of the public space, and privacy as isolation of the occurred outbreak in
order to avert further damage.
It was in 1966, during a symposium in the United States we were both
participating in. After some friendly remarks about the talk I had just given,
Jean Hyppolite added: That said, I really dont see where you are going. I
think I answered him more or less like this: If I saw clearly, and beforehand,
where I was going, I really think I would not take even one more step to get
there.76

It looks as though Rorty endeavours in any way to shield himself from


the unpredictability of deconstructions anarchic and responsible
engagements. He needs to have assurance that at the end of the day he
will return to the exact same form of life from where he moved in the
morning. And when such a happy ending cannot be guaranteed, the
fear of the unpredictable makes him create protective barriers that
ensure the security of his home. Both from a political and a philosophical point of view, Rorty is not able nor willing really to contest
the authority of the axiomatics organizing the present. By circumventing tradition, Rorty can preserve its sovereignty and its grip on
us. He can make the metaphysical norms outlive its demise. He can
ethnocentrically enjoy its benefits without caring for their grounding.
From this perspective, Rortys privatization of deconstruction eventually appears as a powerful attempt to domesticate Derrida and to make
him pacific, restrained, inoffensive. To turn a monster into a pet. A
puppy. Rortys attempt to privatize Derrida eventually appears as a
defensive discourse which contains the risks of deconstruction by
passing it for a gratuitous play devoid of scientific or theoretical seriousness, as well as of political or ethical thrust.77 What Rorty fears the
most is the monstrosity of critique: the discursive monsters produced
by deconstruction might force the people to become aware of the
history of normality, of the normalization process which made them
the good citizens they are. As Derrida writes, faced by a monster one
may become aware of what the norm is and when this norm has a
history which is the case with discursive norms, philosophical norms,
socio-cultural norms, they have a history any appearance of monstrosity in this domain allows an analysis of the history of the norms.78

The Resistance of Theory

127

But a monster is always alive, is a living being, and so one cannot


foresee where it will end up bringing itself (and us).
The necessity of security is exactly what marks the infinite distance
separating Rorty from Derrida. The former is locked within the
boundaries of a given theoretical and political community, confiding
in narratives and philosophy to prevent the coming of monsters.
Deconstruction, instead, plays in blindfolds. It bids on possibilities for
an existence to come. An unpredictable, multiple, unnamable existence, which recalling the 1996 symposium that opened United
States to Jacques Derridas work is proclaiming itself and which can
do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the
species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying
form of monstrosity.79

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

Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, p. 99.


Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 8.
21
See Rorty, Science as solidarity, pp. 2134.
22
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 75.
23
Ibid., p. 80.
24
See Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing: an essay on Derrida, in
Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 1039.
25
Rorty, Dewey between Hegel and Darwin, in Truth and Progress, pp. 301
6. See also Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1213.
26
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 7.
27
See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), pp. 2639.
28
Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),
p. 49. Bloom is here quoting Derridas Freud and the scene of writing,
quoting Freuds Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.
29
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 60. Here Bloom is quoting Giambattista
Vicos On the Study Methods of Our Time.
30
Ibid., p. 61.
31
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 24.
32
Rorty, Introduction: pragmatism and philosophy, p. xix.
33
See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 47.
34
See Plato, The Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
Book VII, 514a 2517a 7.
35
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 26. Further reference will be
given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
36
Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume I: The Will to Power as Art (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1991), p. 184.
37
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1722.
38
See Godzich, The domestication of Derrida, in The Yale Critics, ed. J.
Arac, W. Godzich and W. Martin (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), pp. 207.
39
Wheeler III, Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man, in Redrawing
the Lines, ed. R. Dasenbrock (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), pp. 1268. See de Man, Allegories of Reading (Yale: Yale University Press,
1982), pp. 11931.
40
Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense, quoted (and translated
directly from German) by de Man in Allegories of Reading, pp. 11011.
41
See Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, pp. 902.
42
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 5960.
43
Being (not entities) is something which there is only in so far as truth
is. And truth is only in so far and as long as Dasein is: Heidegger, Being and
Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 272.
44
Rorty, Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 34.
45
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 119.
20

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

Rorty, Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, p. 681,


note 12.
77
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play, p. 285.
78
See Derrida, Envois, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 5.
79
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1267.
80
Ibid., p. 128.
81
Derrida, Envois, p. 18. Further reference will be given in the main body
of the text in parenthesis.
82
Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, in A Taste for the
Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 29.
83
See Derrida, Envois, p. 26.
84
Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, p. 27.
85
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 131. On the basis of Rortys own
account of cultural history as a succession of redescriptions, it is hard to
understand what would make an etymology fake.
86
Ibid.
87
See Blanchot, The Instant of My Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
88
See Derrida, Envois, p. 21.
89
Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, p. 35. Further
reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
90
Heidegger, Time and being, in On Time and Being (New York: Harper &
Row, 1972), p. 24. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 97, note 1. The
same quotation returns in Consequences of Pragmatism (p. 50) and a couple of
times in Essays on Heidegger and Others. Heideggers sentence can function as
the slogan for the circumvention of philosophy only by artfully isolating it
from its context.

Chapter 2
1

Rorty, Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?, in Essays on Heidegger


and Others (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 119.
2
Jonathan and Cynthia were standing near me next to the glass case, the
table rather, where laid out, under glass, in a transparent coffin, among
hundreds of displayed reproductions, this card had to jump out at me. I saw
nothing else, but that did not prevent me from feeling that right near me
Jonathan and Cynthia were observing me obliquely, watching me look. As if
they were spying on me in order to finish the effects of a spectacle they had
staged (they have just married more or less): Derrida, Envois, in The Post
Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 17.
3
Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982),
p. 28.
4
See Rorty, Deconstruction and circumvention, in Essays on Heidegger and
Others, p. 86.

Notes
5

133

Rorty, Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?, pp. 11920 and


Deconstruction and circumvention, p. 105.
6
Norris, Philosophy as not just a kind of writing: Derrida and the claim
of reason, in Redrawing the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), p. 192.
7
See Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986), p. 5. For a detailed critical account of Gasches project and an
indispensable discussion of some interpretations of Derrida in the mid-1980s,
see Bennington, Deconstruction and the philosophers (the very idea), in
Legislations (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1160. According to Bennington,
Gasche tries to situate Derrida in terms of (a particular reading of) the
philosophical tradition, and specifically in terms of a particularly powerful
modern inflection of that tradition in terms of reflection (p. 20). One of the
problems connected with this approach is that it presupposes the very idea of
linear history that Derrida has contested. Bennington suggests in fact that
Gasches contextualization of Derrida ends up thinking history as filiation: first
there was Descartes, then Kant, then the two lesser-known Fitche and Schelling, then the very important Hegel and eventually Derrida (p. 21). After
reading Bennington, one wonders if Rorty and Gasche are so distant after all:
they both produce a history of mirrors in which Derrida would play the role of
the last man, the one that radicalizes the mirroring to the point of breaking
(with) it.
8
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, in Consequences of Pragmatism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 102.
9
Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2005), p. 102.
10
Rorty, Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?, pp. 1223.
11
Ibid., p. 124.
12
Davidson, On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (19734), p. 16, quoted by
Rorty in Is natural science a natural kind?, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 50. Emphasis added.
13
Wheeler III, Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man, in Redrawing
the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 117.
14
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 125.
15
See Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, in A Taste for the
Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 9.
16
Derrida, An idea of Flaubert: Platos letter , MLN, 99(4) (September
1984), pp. 74868.
17
Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 124.
18
Derrida, Circumfession, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, Jacques Derrida
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 623.
19
See Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, p. 62.
20
See Gasche, The Tain of The Mirror, pp. 767. Gasche introduces the
expression theoretical ascetism to discuss Ernst Tugendhats critique of

134

Notes

reflection. Gasche concludes that Tugendhats position is self-defeating.


Rorty defends Tugendhat from Gasche in Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?. In doing so, Rorty of course is also defending himself and his Derrida from Gasche.
21
Derrida, Envois, p. 6. Further reference will be given in the main body of
the text in parenthesis.
22
See Chakravorty Spivak, Love me, love my ombre, Elle, Diacritics, 14(4)
(Winter 1984), pp. 1936.
23
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 127.
24
See de Man, Autobiography as de-facement, MLN, 94(5) (December
1979), pp. 91930.
25
Ibid., p. 920.
26
See Derrida, Spurs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 123
7.
27
Rorty, Deconstruction and circumvention, p. 93.
28
Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998), p. 1. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text
in parenthesis. For a study on Derridas NostAlgeria see D. Carroll,
Remains of Algeria: justice, hospitality, politics, MLN, 121(4) (2006),
pp. 80227.
29
But of course neither is the actual mother really a natural mother.
Derrida in fact affirms that that which Joyce argued on the topic of paternity is
also true for motherhood. They are both naturalized legal fictions. See
Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 93.
30
Renvois dailleurs /Echoes from Elsewhere is the bilingual title of the
conference that originated Monolingualism of the Other.
31
Derrida, White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy, in
Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 210.
Derrida is here quoting a passage from Anatole Frances Garden of Epicurus.
32
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 104.
33
Derrida, White mythology, p. 211.
34
See Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 359.
35
See Derrida, White mythology, p. 213. Further reference will be given in
the main body of the text in parenthesis.
36
Jurgen Habermas has described, from a different perspective and with
different goals, Rortys philosophy as a Lebensphilosophie in The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 205.
37
See Ferraris, La svolta testuale (Milan: Unicopli, 1986), p. 38.
38
See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979), p. 12.
39
de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979),
p. 120.
40
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 17.
41
Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, in
Transcendental Arguments and Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), p. 77.

Notes
42

135

Bennington, Derridabase, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, Jacques


Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 122.
43
Ibid., p. 281.
44
Rorty, Derrida and the philosophical, in Truth and Progress (Cambridge:
CUP, 1998), p. 334. Further reference will be given in the main body of the
text in parenthesis.
45
Guignon and Hiley, Richard Rorty and contemporary philosophy, in
Richard Rorty, ed. C. Guignon and D. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), p. 32.
46
See Bennington, Derridabase, p. 281.
47
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 17, and his Wittgenstein
and the linguistic turn, in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 174.
48
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play, in Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 288.
49
See Foucault, Nietzsche, genealogy, and history, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. D. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
p. 161.
50
See Derrida, Cogito and the history of madness, in Writing and Difference,
pp. 3163. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in
parenthesis.
51
See Derrida, On a newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy, in
Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. P. Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), pp. 11771. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
52
I think that the perhaps which breaks the rhythm of Foucaults
announcement has been too often overlooked. It would be interesting to start
from this perhaps a rereading of the relationship between Foucaults
ontology of the present and Derridas politics of the to come.
53
Derrida, Envois, p. 33.
54
Ibid.
55
Derrida, Envois, p. 47.
56
Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), p. 13.
57
Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 58.
58
Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror, p. 111.
59
Rorty, Deconstruction and circumvention, p. 96.
60
Jameson, Marxs purloined letter, in Ghostly Demarcations, ed. M. Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), p. 34.
61
See Bell, Rorty on Derrida: a discourse of simulated moderation, in
Ethics in Danger, ed. A. Dallery, C. E. Scott and P. Roberts (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 283300.
62
Norris, Philosophy as not just a kind of writing , p. 191.
63
See Rorty, Dewey between Hegel and Darwin, in Truth and Progress,
p. 292.

136
64

Notes

See Rorty, Pragmatism, Davidson and truth, in Objectivity, Relativism, and


Truth, pp. 1267.
65
Rorty, Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn, p. 164.
66
Rorty, Pragmatism, Davidson and truth, p. 138.
67
Rorty, Hilary Putnam and the relativist menace, in Truth and Progress,
p. 45.
68
Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 156.
69
See Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume I: The Will to Power as Art (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1991), pp. 5468.
70
See Derrida, My chances/Mes chances: a rendezvous with some Epicurean
stereophonies, in Taking Chances, ed. J. Smith and W. Kerrigan (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 278.
71
Rorty, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, in Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, ed. C. Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 14.
72
See Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York:
Collier, 1967), pp. 4650. Further reference will be given in the main body of
the text in parenthesis.
73
Derrida, Platos pharmacy, in Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1981), p. 122.
74
See J. Caputo, On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental: the case
of Rorty and Derrida, in Working Through Derrida, ed. G. Madison (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 14769.
75
In a quite merciless move, one could set up Rortys Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity against Judith Butlers Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
76
See Rorty, Pragmatism, Davidson and truth, p. 128, note 9.
77
Caputo, On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental, p. 164.
78
Derrida, To speculate on Freud , in The Post Card, p. 264, note 10. I
will apply what Derrida says about Freuds declared avoidance of Nietzsche and
philosophy to Rorty.
79
See Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978). An account of the similarities between Rortys irony and Foucaults care of the self would of course deserve more attention.
80
I am grateful to R. John Williams for letting me consult his notes of this
last seminar by Derrida. In this seminar, given in Paris (2002) and in Irvine
(2003), Derrida elaborates the deconstruction of sovereignty which is already
at work in Rogues. The most original part of the seminar seems to be the one in
which Derrida reads Agambens distinction between bios and zoe, as promised
in a footnote in Rogues. For some quick remarks on the relation between
Agamben and Derrida, see my interview with Jean Luc-Nancy (Philosophy as
chance) in Critical Inquiry, 33(2) (Winter 2007), pp. 42740.
81
Derrida, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, in Deconstruction
and Pragmatism, p. 81.
82
See Bennington, Derridabase, p. 279.
83
Derrida, Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms,
postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms, in The States of Theory, ed. D.

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

Consequences of Pragmatism (Rorty) 66,


72
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
(Rorty) 1, 3, 13, 19, 43, 46, 48, 50,
63, 69, 889, 116, 121
contingent 77
Cratylus (Plato) 41
critique 1078, 112, 1246
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 2
Critique of violence (Benjamin) 110
Culler, Jonathan 456
Darwin, Charles 14
Dasein 19, 23, 27, 589, 80
Davidson, Donald 2, 1112, 14, 20,
49, 74
De Man and the American Cultural
Left (Rorty) 97
De Man, Paul 212, 30, 54, 63
deconstruction 1, 34, 33, 35, 367,
4553, 623, 67, 75, 835, 914,
968, 10914, 11516, 11819,
1212, 126, 136n.80, 139n.47
Deconstruction and circumvention
(Rorty) 72
democracy 1234
Derrida and the Philosophical
Tradition (Rorty) 65
Derridabase (Bennington) 64, 66
Derridadaism 45
Derridas deconstruction of
authority (Newman) 111
Descartes, Rene 15
Dewey, John 73
differance 312, 49, 95
Eagleton, Terry 91
ego 34, 36
eidetic variation 789

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

Republic (Plato) 18, 20


Romanticism 1416, 22
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 31
Sartre, Jean-Paul 89
Savonarola, Girolamo 89
Searle, John 124
self-legislation 18
sexuality 356
socialization 117
Socrates 18, 223, 39
sovereign power 110
Specters of Marx (Derrida) 121
Speech and Phenomena (Derrida) 30
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 53, 108
State, the 1018
Tain of the Mirror, The (Gasche) 467,
84, 133n.7
Tarski, Alfred 11, 48
textual 49
The Crisis of European Sciences
(Husserl) 61
theorein 75
theory 120
thinking 27
trace 478
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Wittgenstein) 72, 734
transcendence 47, 53, 59, 645,
7982, 84
Tresca, Carlo 88
Trotsky, Leon 88, 98
Trotsky and the wild orchids (Rorty)
67, 88
truth 2, 11, 21, 30, 64, 1078
Truth and Progress (Rorty) 923
Tugendhat, Ernest 53, 1334n.20
Unheimlichkeit 59
United States 956, 120, 138n.29
universal hostage 59
What is critique? (Foucault) 109
What Is Enlightenment? (Kant)
105
Wheeler, Samuel 22
White Mythology (Derrida) 60, 74

150
wild orchids 67, 88, 901, 98, 117
Will to Power, The (Heidegger) 18

Index
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72, 74
writing 326, 40

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