The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction

The Domestication of Derrida

Continuum Studies in Continental PhilosophySeries Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph seriesfrom Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research mono-graphs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes amajor contribution to the field of philosophical research.

Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair MorganBadiou and Derrida, Antonio CalcagnoBadiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nicholas HewlettDeconstruction and Democracy, Alex ThomsonDeleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay LampertDeleuze and the Meaning of Life, Claire ColebrookDeleuze and the Unconscious, Christian KerslakeDerrida and Disinterest, Sean GastonEncountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan-Wortham and AllisonWeinerFoucault’s Heidegger, Timothy RaynerHeidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael LewisHeidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael LewisHeidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason PowellHusserl’s Phenomenology, Kevin HermbergThe Irony of Heidegger, Andrew HaasLevinas and Camus, Tal SesslerMerleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. BesmerThe Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia DuttmannSartre’s Ethics of Engagement, T. Storm HeterSartre’s Phenomenology, David ReismanRicoeur and Lacan, Karl SimmsWho’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert

The Domesticationof Derrida

Rorty, Pragmatism andDeconstruction

Lorenzo Fabbri

Translated by Daniele Manni

English translation edited byVuslat Demirkoparan and Ari Lee Laskin

(University of California, Irvine, USA)

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# Lorenzo Fabbri 2008

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Taking Rorty Seriously 1

1. The Contingency of Being 7Two Ideas of Philosophy: Kant and Hegel 7The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence 15Histories of Writing and Masturbation 26Deconstruction as Circumvention: ‘Envois’ 37

2. Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 45The Double Privacy of Deconstruction 45On the Very Possibility of Biographical Writing 53Rorty’s Hidden Reductionism 60The Disposal of Philosophy 74

3. The Resistance of Theory 87The Desires We are, The Languages We Speak 87Casting a Maybe at the Heart of the Present 99Politics of Conciliation and Politics of Monstrosity 115

Notes 129

Bibliography 141

Index 147

Acknowledgements

Many people have been close to this book in the different phases of itsrealization. My warmest gratitude goes to my family for having sup-ported me in all my endeavours. Donatella Di Cesare had the patienceof following and encouraging my work from its very beginning. I amgrateful to Ari Lee Laskin, Arianna Lodeserto, Daniele Manni andNicola Zippel, who provided extensive and lively comments to earlierdrafts. I would also like to thank David Carroll, Ellen Burt, FrancaHamber, Gol Bazargani and my friend James Chiampi for theirimpeccable hospitality in the department of French and Italian at theUniversity of California, Irvine. Many thanks also to Ngugı wa Thiong’oand the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvinefor the generous financial support to this project.

Without Vuslat Demirkoparan, this book would have never come tolight. While I take full responsibility for its weaknesses, she should becredited 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 ofBeing; Cambridge University Press for the permission to quote fromRichard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Fata Morgana for thepermission to quote from Maurice Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort (#1994); Les Editions de Minuit for the permission to quote from GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari’s Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (# 1991);Random House Inc., for the permission to quote from Michel Fou-cault’s ‘Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview withMichel Foucault’ (in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow);Routledge for the permission to quote from Jacques Derrida’s‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’ (in Deconstruction andPragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe); Stanford University Press forthe permission to quote from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Pardes: the writing ofpotentiality’ (in Potentialities, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen); Versofor the permission to quote from Jacques Derrida’s ‘Marx & Sons’ andTerry Eagleton’s ‘Marxism without Marxism’ (both in Ghostly Demar-cations, edited by Michael Sprinker).

An earlier and very different version of this project was published in

Italian by Mimesis in 2006 under the title L’addomesticamento di Derrida.Pragmatismo/Decostruzione.

Rome–IrvineNovember 2007

Introduction

Taking Rorty Seriously

The first time I read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – itwas 1999 and I was a sophomore in the Faculty of Philosophy at theUniversity of Rome – I clearly felt that I was reading one of the mostinfluential 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 atphilosophy both as a discipline and as a faculty. And yet there wassomething unsettling in Rorty’s attempt to strip post-Hegelian irony ofany kind of public dimension: for me, the book was a powerful critiqueof the rigid organization of the programI was attending.

I started reading Jacques Derrida at the same time: Rorty’s inter-pretation of deconstruction was fundamental for orienting me inDerrida’s apparently senseless writing. And yet, the more I read Der-rida, the more I became aware that Rorty’s reading was missingsomething very important. Rorty’s account of deconstruction as ananti-philosophy, as merely a brilliant artistic creation, was too reductiveinsofar as it completely ignored all the essays in which Derrida clearlyresisted the possibility of taking leave from the metaphysical language.Rorty’s attempt to confine Derrida to prestigious yet strictly academicvenues was excessively disengaged and clashed against the Deleuzianidea of concepts as weapons to interfere with and intervene into ‘thereal’. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – the book that changed my wayof thinking about philosophy, the book whose dancing and laughingstyle is still unmatched for me – eventually appeared to be profoundlyinadequate. The Domestication of Derrida also tells the story betweenRorty and me (a story of which he was informed only by a couple ofquick emails). The first chapter is marked by my initial trust in Rorty’spragmatism, the second and the third testify to my deep disappoint-ment with it.

In the first section of this book, I will show the strong points ofRorty’s reading. In order to challenge effectively his attempt to aligndeconstruction with the American liberal and pragmatist traditions, Ibelieve it is important to take some time to get attuned to the reasonsbehind Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida. In fact, the vast majority ofthe essays that have been dedicated to the relation between

pragmatism and deconstruction are so hasty to ‘defend’ Derrida fromRorty, that they end up underestimating the force of Rorty’s readingprotocol. I will argue that to contextualize his appropriation ofdeconstruction, it is first necessary to recognize the two oppositeanswers that, according to Rorty, have been given to the question: whatis philosophy? Kant gives the first type of answer in Critique of PureReason, specifically in the section on ‘Transcendental schematism’.Kant’s idea of philosophy was inspired by the need to define the par-ticularity that could distinguish philosophy from empirical sciences.While ecclesiastic institutions dominated the European intellectualscene, philosophy found its reason for being in the alliance withempirical sciences against ecclesiastic obscurantism. But, once thebattle against religion was won, philosophy urgently felt the need tomark its distinctiveness from the scientific inquirers in order to avoidbeing extinguished by them. Kant’s attempt to secure philosophy’ssurvival consisted in identifying its essence with epistemology.Exceeding every specific relation with things, philosophy shows theconditions of possibility for the very knowledge of the world. Philoso-phy thus self-justifies its existence by affirming that it is the onlytranscendental science insofar as it is the only science that reflects onthe structure of the faculty of knowledge producing judgements thatare both (i) synthetic, because their contents are not already logicallycontained in the definition of the object considered, and (ii) a priori,since they do not have any involvement with any kind of empirical orphysiological research.

The second answer to the question about the essence of philosophyarises instead from the conviction that no epistemological discoursecan succeed in the transcendental task of unveiling the truth of themind–world interaction. Moreover, as Donald Davidson argues in his‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, the very Kantian belief thatthe world of phenomena would be organized by the schematic activityof the mind is something we cannot make good sense of. Therefore, itis impossible for a discourse to find its justification in the reference tothe schematism of the mind. For this second tradition of thought,which for Rorty started with Hegel, the only ‘thing’ that makes a sen-tence true is another sentence: the Truth is just what a certain his-torically situated community believes in. Thinking of the truth not as atimeless being that can be discovered, but rather as a human artefactthat is constituted through the flow of history, the strong authorsbelonging to the Hegelian tradition are obsessed by the desire tocreate something new: by every means they want to avoid reproducingthat which already exists, because this would coincide with falling vic-tim to another author’s system. It is in the space opened up byHegelian philosophy that Rorty proposes to collocate Derrida: Derridawould help us lose interest in Kantian vocabulary and in its

The Domestication of Derrida2

adjournments (i.e., analytic philosophy) and get interested in experi-menting of new ways of thinking; he would make the metaphysicalquest for truth look trivial and idiosyncratic. But if the ‘true’ Derrida,the one that starts after The Post Card, refuses the projects of digging upthe infrastructure of the real, then how does one have to understandhis work?

In the sixth chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes –in a passage crucial for understanding the whole pragmatist rearran-gement of deconstruction – that Derrida’s greatest merit consists intransforming philosophical reflection into a private matter, thereforebridging the gap between theory and literature. When Derrida realizedthe inconsistencies of any epistemological project, he got rid of thecraving for generality that still haunted his earlier works. He droppedtheory and started exploring the mental associations produced by athought liberated from the necessity of representing the structure ofthe mind or of the world. According to Rorty, Derrida at his best playswith philosophy without yielding to the nostalgia for a time in whichwords pretended to exhibit the conditions of Being, and without thehope of selling out the possibilities of thinking. In other words:deconstruction is able to reduce philosophy to a production of fanta-sies which do not claim to have any epistemological or public rele-vance. I will argue that Rorty’s reading ends up assigning to thedeconstructive operations two kinds of privacy: deconstruction is pri-vate because it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendentaldemand, privatizing itself in the autobiographical genre, but it is alsoprivate because it deprives itself of any political pretension.

It is precisely this double privacy that I will challenge in The Domes-tication of Derrida. After tracking the context and tone of Rorty’s prag-matism, I will confront the two key features of his privatization ofdeconstruction: on the one hand, the reduction of deconstructivewriting to a sort of autobiographical drift, an activity liberated from thepresuppositions on which the whole philosophical tradition, fromDescartes to Kant and beyond, is grounded; on the other hand, thebelief that Derrida dismisses the endeavour to engage philosophy withpolitical struggle, a concern that has deeply dominated French con-temporary thought (Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.).

In the second chapter, ‘Derrida, the transcendental, and theoreticalascetism’, I question the legitimacy of attributing to Derrida the sort of‘theoretical ascetism’ – to use a fortunate expression coined byRodolphe Gasche – which one can see at work in Ernst Tugendhat: isDerrida really a hero in the virtuous and strenuous resistance to thetemptation of falling back into the much maligned presuppositions oftranscendental philosophy? To answer such a question, I comment ontwo of Derrida’s texts that Rorty heavily relies on. While Rorty gives theidea that ‘White mythology’ and ‘Envois’ are the places where the

Introduction 3

passage from theory to autobiography is clearly announced and fullyaccomplished, I will argue that what is at stake in these importantessays is a contamination of the private with the public. That is to say,an intermingling of biography with philosophy, and not the reductionof theory to literature. From a deconstructive point of view, the post-philosophical and postmodern desire of stepping beyond philosophy isboth necessary and impossible: how could it be possible to create alanguage so purely singular and private that it avoids any generalclaims? Rethinking the actual possibility of a passage from philosophyto literature, of a mode of living that has no relation with reflectionand theory, Derrida’s operation dwells in an aporetic dimension that isfar from the euphoria that organizes Rorty’s gestures. I will concludethe chapter by arguing that Rorty evades the real depth and range ofthe problems addressed by Derrida, and in so doing, his neo-pragma-tism falls victim to the worst contradictions.

In the third and conclusive chapter of the book, ‘The resistance oftheory’, I will question Rorty’s exile of deconstruction away from thepublic sphere, an exile intended to save Derrida from the charges filedagainst him in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Habermas, in thetwelve lectures delivered in Paris in the early 1980s, condemned post-structuralism for being politically dangerous because its radical cri-tique of reason undermined the very possibility of a universal andrational grounding democracy. Rorty claims, quite surprisingly, thatone should not worry about the possible effects of deconstructionbecause post-structuralism does not have any public relevance at all. Bystating this, Rorty is trying to persuade us that theory and politics aretwo realms totally separated from one another. Being actively andpositively a ‘political animal’, means neither thinking nor caring aboutwhat is achieved in the activity of philosophical critique: I connect thisbelief of Rorty’s to the distinction between the public and the privatedrawn by Kant in his 1784 ‘An answer to the question: what isenlightenment?’. My aim is to demonstrate that Rorty tries to draw aline between university and the ‘real’ world, between theory and life,that is even more conservative and policing than the one Kant hadhimself proposed. Discussing in detail Derrida’s essays on the institu-tion called ‘university’ and relating them to Foucault’s work onEnlightenment, I will argue that, pace Rorty, it is impossible to forgesuch a strict and clear separation between theory and practice, theprivate and the public. Following Derrida, I will argue that philosophyand the Humanities are intrinsically political spaces because in thepractice of a constant and radical problematizing lies the potentiality offavouring new possibilities of existence and of being-together: doing‘theory’ is a matter of disjointing the presence of the present in orderto let unexpected futures come. While Derrida confirms the structuralnecessity for philosophy to be critically engaged in the weakening of


actuality, Rorty – in essays such as ‘The priority of democracy to phi-losophy’ – suggests that everything must be done to enforce the ‘now’and defend it from any radical modification. For Rorty, philosophyshould not try to disturb what we are today: it is surely true that thepattern of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies has imposedon its members many different constraints, but the advantages pro-voked by this pattern compensate by far for the constraints. The onlypolitical task philosophy should thus assume is to reinforce the solidityand the solidarity of the form of life we were trained to be. Working forthe security and the sanity of the social body as a perfect epidemiologistwould do, Rorty believes in a politics whose sole objective is to managesocial tensions in order to sustain our actual form of life.

The Domestication of Derrida might at first appear as a hostile critiqueof pragmatism. But I hope that one will recognize in it the signs of myadmired and grateful homage to the late Richard Rorty.

Introduction 5

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 beadmitted in the circle of philosophy? Richard Rorty claims that for sucha question to be answered, one has to go back to Kant and understandhis mode of concerning philosophy. Once in fact the faculty thatlegitimizes the discipline of philosophy is recognized, so too willthe existence of Philosophy as a faculty.1

According to Rorty, Kant had to define the specificity of philosophyto assure its difference and autonomy from natural sciences. As long asecclesiastical institutions dominated the European intellectual scene,philosophy was content with finding its raison d’etre in the alliance withscience against the obscurantism of the Church.

Looking backward we see Descartes and Hobbes as ‘beginning modernphilosophy,’ but they thought of their own cultural role in terms of whatLecky was to call ‘the warfare between science and theology.’ They werefighting (albeit discreetly) to make the intellectual world safe for Coperni-cus and Galileo.2

It was only after the battle against religion was won that philosophystarted feeling the exigency of claiming a significant difference fromthe sciences: once the mission of clearing the path for scientific revo-lution had been accomplished, philosophy risked being left without apurpose. Kant was the first consciously to identify the essence of phi-losophy as ‘theory of knowledge’, thus allowing for the survival ofphilosophy and securing it as an autonomous discipline.

The self-understanding of philosophy as the science able to evaluatethe legitimacy of other scientific discourses is not a characteristic lim-ited to modern philosophy; this self-understanding continues, forexample, all the way until modern phenomenology. The influence ofthe Kantian identification of philosophy as epistemology is especiallyclear in Martin Heidegger’s claim that Being is the proper and sole theme ofphilosophy.3 Whereas positive sciences have a positional character, that is,they deal with beings or domains of beings that are given, determined

and posited, philosophy posits nothing. Philosophy does not relatepositively a specific and limited domain of being, but rather investi-gates the activity of positing itself, and it does so immune from anyinvolvement with empirical-physiological inquiry. As Heideggerexplains in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: ‘The positive positing ofany being includes within itself an a priori knowledge and an a prioriunderstanding of the Being’s being, although the positive experienceof such a being knows nothing of this understanding’ (p. 52). Positivesciences do not interrogate the pre-comprehension of the Being ofbeings they are directed toward. And even if they did interrogate it,they would not come up with anything interesting to say because theirpositive inquiries can only confirm the fundamental mode of inquiry inwhich they move, without being able to grasp the reason of theirmanner of thematizing beings. For this reason, philosophy – a ‘totallydifferent science’ as Heidegger calls it (p. 52) – reserves for itself thetask of unveiling the hidden presuppositions of the activity of knowing.

However, philosophy alleges its discourse to be distinct from science’snot only in light of the theme it deals with, but also for the absoluterigour that drives its investigation. By simply positing beings, positivesciences end up leaving unseen the act of positing itself. The othertekhnai – that is to say, all the argumentative techniques besides phi-losophy – are naive, for they cannot enlighten their own functioning.Positive sciences are surely productive, but they can only produceknowledge on the basis of some unquestioned presupposition. In thisvein, Heidegger states that sciences can only dream about their the-matic objects since their slumbering eyes are not open enough to beconscious of their own grounds (p. 54). Philosophy, by contrast, doesnot assume anything to be obvious; in its relentless advance, it neversuccumbs to spells of drowsiness. Not tolerating oversights, philosophyboasts a clear and profound vision.

Philosophy – says Rorty – comes to be characterized on the basis of itsrigorous method and epistemological interest. One can only be con-sidered a true philosopher when he awakens from the science-inducednap and alertly reveals the assumptions of scientific positions. Philoso-phy is the presuppositionless and rigorous science – the only true sci-ence, that is – because it confronts the problem of the very possibility ofknowledge.4 Facing such a problem meant, for Kant, instituting a courtwhich would eventually distinguish reason’s fair demands from thegroundless ones. Kant calls this activity critique rather than doctrine, sinceits aim is not to expand the existing knowledges, but to rectify them.Thereby, the ‘critique of pure reason’ transforms itself into a critique ofculture. Philosophy assumes the position of choosing which areas ofculture enjoy a special relation to reality.5

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that theKantian trial is set in motion by the distinction between intuitions and


concepts. ‘Looking inside us’ we discover that, through concepts, theintellect synthesizes the data gathered by sensation in its originalreceptiveness, making representation possible: ‘Sensory intuitions . . .are identified first of all as the source of knowledge of contingenttruths, and concepts as the source of knowledge of necessary truths.’6

Two different kinds of knowledge, whose propositions are character-ized by two different degrees of truthfulness, correspond to two genresof beings. A fracture within the realm of the real is evident: outside,there is a multiplicity simply given to us, from which we obtain con-tingent and trivial truths; inside, an inside though neither empirical norphysical, lies a superior level of reality, which enables the world ‘outthere’ to appear. The truthfulness of this unconditioned yet con-ditioning stratum of reality is incontestable not because of a stableagreement on the propositions used to describe it, but because thesepropositions, in their mute transparency, maintain a privileged relationwith a non-human reality. When we think ‘philosophically’ we cannotevade the sovereignty exercised upon us by such a reality. The idlechatter fades away, leaving room for a silent observance of the truth. Tolocate the place where every argument meets its end, is to reach thefoundation of knowledge.

Yet the transcendental project of knowledge foundation, whichclaims itself to be presuppositionless, can take place only if the authorityof one single presupposition remains unquestioned. Rorty, in his 1979‘Transcendental arguments, self-reference, and pragmatism’, describessuch a ‘transcendental presupposition’ as the belief that certain lan-guages do not hopelessly depart from factual truth but accurately mir-ror the very structure which governs the world.7 This presupposition hastranscendental value for any transcendental argument, since theassumption of a structural identity in the relation between logos andreality is the only guarantee of the possibility for a statement to repre-sent a given domain of being. Modern philosophy is held in check bythe transcendental presupposition and, with it, by the optical meta-phors that connote the interaction between mind and world:

The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind asa great mirror, containing various representations – some accurate, somenot – and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. Withoutthe notion of the mind as a mirror, the notion of the knowledge as accuracyof representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion,the strategy common to Descartes and Kant – getting more accuraterepresentation by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so tospeak – would not have made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recentclaims that philosophy could consist of ‘conceptual analysis’ or ‘phenom-enological analysis’ ‘explication of meanings’ or examination of ‘the logicof the language’ or of ‘the structure of the constituting activity of con-sciousness’ would not have made sense.8

The Contingency of Being 9

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 lan-guage reflects reality, or did they fail? If we are unsatisfied with the wayin which philosophy has tried thus far to legitimize the transcendentalpresupposition, we can choose among three options:

1. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way todemonstrate the transcendental presupposition. In this case, wewould engage with the Kantian question on the possibility ofknowledge.

2. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way todemonstrate the fallaciousness of the transcendental pre-supposition. In this case we would still be engaged with theKantian question on the possibility of knowledge.

3. We can decide that it is a waste of time either to attempt tolegitimize or to invalidate the transcendental presupposition.9

The first two options share the belief that philosophy’s goal is toenlighten the true structure of knowledge, the relation between factualreality and propositions. The third one instead concludes that it doesnot pay to keep working within the sophists–Plato–Hume–Kantmechanism, and hopes for a philosophy that will not be a theory ofknowledge. This third track leads, according to Rorty, to ironisttheory.10

What clearly differentiates irony from traditional philosophicalthought is that the former does not acknowledge the vocabulary used tocriticize the Kantian approach as closer to the structure of reality thanother vocabularies. Thus, irony should not be confused with the rela-tivistic position: Rorty argues that relativism is self-refuting because itclaims that all beliefs have the same value, and that such a belief is not asrelative as the other beliefs.11 Since any attempt to demonstrate cor-rectly and clearly the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposi-tion is inconsistent, one is therefore left with two of the three previouslymentioned possibilities: either one tries to demonstrate the transcen-dental presupposition along with the advocates of realism, or one juststops 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, suchas the one between concepts and intuitions, representations andobjects, language and world.

b. The internal coherence of the elements on the side of the‘scheme’ is not sufficient to assure that genuine knowledge hasbeen reached; further legitimation is necessary.


c. The required ‘further legitimation’ can be obtained while seatedin an armchair.12

The ironist makes a move which is considerably more anti-Kantianthan the one attempted by the relativist, for instead of contesting thepossibility of ‘further legitimation’ requested in (c), he contests (a)both to the realist and to the relativist. Rorty points to the essay ‘On thevery idea of a conceptual scheme’ as paradigmatic of this anti-realistradicalism.13 In this famous essay of 1974, Donald Davidson arguesexactly against the possibility of (a), that is, against the sustainability ofthe dualism between scheme and content. Such a distinction isessential to all those who claim (b) as true, that is, for those who believecoherence on the side of the scheme is not sufficient to sanction thetruthfulness of a theory. For those who believe in (b), even a theorythat satisfies the justification requirements for an ideal theory (i.e., tobe simple, elegant, coherent, with perfect predictive power) could befalse. The additional legitimation (c) required to demonstrate that ajustified theory is also true can be obtained wearing slippers and arobe, seated in an armchair next to the fireplace in the parlour. It isevident 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 needfor understanding the concept of truth in a certain language is con-tained in the assertion, made in that particular language, that ‘ ‘‘the snowis white’’ if the snow is white’. Both realists and relativists are com-mitted to substituting Tarskian trivial principle with the more exoticand exciting idea that there is something which organizes or adequatesto worldly experience.14 In Davidson’s opinion, the idea that thescheme (i.e., language) organizes the content (i.e., world) is unsus-tainable, for only pluralities can be organized: ‘Someone who sets outto organize a closet arranges the things in it. If you are told not toorganize the shoes and shirts, but the closet itself, you would bebewildered.’15 Furthermore, nothing is added to the banality of Tars-ki’s principle if one claims that the scheme adequates to (or fits)experience. If we are unable to imagine an experience not adequatedto a scheme, we also cannot conceive the scheme’s adequacy toexperience. Inspired by Davidson, Rorty states:

If we have no idea (as, ex hypothesis, in Kant, we do not) of what unsynthe-sized intuitions are like, we do not know what it is for concepts to synthesizethem. If we do not know what an un-pluralized experience is like we do notknow what it would be like to organize it. If we do not already know lots ofsentences which are true of reality, we shall not gain understanding of thisword-world relation by evaluating ‘fit’ or ‘correspondence’.16


Rorty and Davidson’s distance from both relativism and realism isunderlined by the fact that their aim is not to advocate the possibility oftaking apart scheme and content (‘For we have found no intelligiblebasis on which it can be said that schemes are different’17), nor to unitethem (‘It would be equally wrong to announce the glorious news thatall mankind – all speakers of language, at least – share a commonscheme and ontology’18). With Davidson, Rorty argues ‘against thewhole problematic of legitimation created by the scheme-content dis-tinction’.19 He does not claim that the anti-transcendental argumentsreveal the intrinsic nature of reality to be either intrinsic – as realismpretends – or extrinsic – as relativism does – but that intrinsic naturesdo 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 touse, 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 bediscovered 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 adeep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest.20

The ironist, unlike the realist, does not believe that the credibilitydemonstrated by certain beliefs is granted by their different relationwith a presumed reality. Rather, he trusts certain beliefs to have a moreremarkable authority since we are not willing to challenge them: theyare necessary to our form of life because they are very useful and arelargely agreed upon. Rorty considers the realist charge of being of thesame species as the relativists absolutely unacceptable. It is not truethat everything is relative, insofar as there are alternatives to our cul-tural perspective so distant from our own way of thinking that wecannot 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 ingiving up the dualism of scheme and content one does not give up theworld but only the presupposition that what makes our opinions true istheir correspondence to reality rather than to history and language.Rorty thus wishes for his argument to be recognized as a form ofethnocentrism. His intent is not the relativization of truth but itsbanalization: the snow is indisputably white if the proposition ‘thesnow is white’ is true for the particular historical linguistic communityin which we find ourselves speaking.21

For Rorty, the ironist is convinced that anything can look good orbad depending on how it is ‘redescribed’. Accordingly, she keepsplacing the vocabularies which she does not approve in a negative lightso that her proposal to switch vocabularies becomes more seducingand less indecent. She is substantially a parasite who devours the greattexts of the philosophical tradition, nibbling and chewing on them


until they become disgusting. Her actions are either annoying orroguish, for instead of working in the production line enforced byclassical philosophy, she tries to interrupt its functioning. Not inter-ested in being exploited for the construction of grand philosophicaldiscourses inspired by the ‘transcendental presupposition’, the ironistspends her time proving that those discursive systems are not asgrounded as they pretend: it takes just a little effort to make themcollapse as if they were card castles. Here, sabotaging the philosophicalplant is a woman’s job. In fact, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rortyuses the feminine pronoun to refer to the ironist, while the masculineis reserved for that evil metaphysician. Whereas he, the metaphysician,wishes to say how things really are, she, the ironist, never misses achance to underscore that philosophy is nothing else but a tiredrepetition of the worn-out Platonic vocabulary, according to which thedivision between appearance and reality is fundamental. The ironist isgreatly unsatisfied with such a vocabulary and wonders if ‘the processof socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her alanguage may have given her the wrong language, and so turned herinto the wrong kind of human being’.22 The right language is the onewhich would allow her to become who she wants.

Even if the ironist is a ‘she’, the history of irony is exclusively aboutmen. The first great ironist in Rorty’s manly Western philosophy isHegel. Instead of looking at things, Hegel looked in fact at philoso-phical texts; instead of philosophizing, he was engaged in writing ahistory of philosophy. To map out a phenomenology of knowledge isnot to scrutinize past vocabularies in search of the one which will revealwho we really are and what the world really is. Rather, it is to imaginehow humans from the past have behaved and what they believed in, soas to decide if we would like to behave in a similar manner and believein similar things. The Hegelian dialectic begins a new genre of philo-sophical writing, a genre which can be compared to contemporaryliterary criticism. The ironist is not too different from the critic whoconfronts various poets’ terminologies (which equate to ways of livingin the world) to decide in whose image he should recreate himself. Ifwe know only the people from our own neighbourhood, we risk gettingtrapped in the provincial vocabulary we were raised in. To avoid run-ning that risk, it is necessary to ‘get acquainted with strange people(Alcibiades, Julien Sorel), strange families (the Karamazovs, theCasaubons), and strange communities (the Teutonic Knights, theNuer, the mandarins of the Sung)’.23

The Phenomenology of Spirit shows how fast one can change vocabularyand ideas, how one can get lost in a world populated by surprisinggestaltic twists, of ducks that turn out to be rabbits and vice versa. It isnot interested in trying to bridge the presumed abyss that separates thesubject from the objects. Hegel’s narrative demonstrates how every


vocabulary, even those that claimed to be absolutely definitive andimpossible to overcome, is destined to become outdated and, thus,abandoned. Every time the Kantian philosopher universalizes andeternalizes his theories, the ironist reminds him that those are only theworld-views of a certain moment in history, and are therefore tem-porary and contingent.24 Hegel cautions against believing that beyondor beneath the various changes of language and vocabulary liessomething like a common and unchanging way of being directedtoward the world. The alternative vocabularies do not inhabit the sameworld, so it does not make sense to judge which of these languagesrepresents the world more accurately. Moreover, as Davidson persua-sively claimed, it does not make sense to speak of a language and aworld at all.

Rorty feels it is productive to graft Darwin’s evolutionary terminologyonto the Hegelian discourse on the exchange of vocabularies. In thisway, he is confident he can produce a convincing account of how newvocabularies are formed. Rorty’s version of the history of culture mightsound more or less like the following:

Once upon a time, at a certain moment in the history of a certaincommunity of animals, were born some elephants with long prehensiletrunks instead of regular noses. This new group of elephants with longprehensile trunks happened to be better adapted to the surroundingenvironment. It was easier for them to find food and defend them-selves from predators. The other elephants faced extinction andeventually only the ones with trunks survived. In the same way, at acertain moment in the history of the world, a new vocabulary wasproposed. As time went by, we realized that our words were losing theirforce of habit, and we were about to pick up a new language. This fightfor survival rewards the vocabulary that is most convenient, the mostuseful and the most economical. As we would never claim that ele-phants acquired trunks because of a destiny intelligently designed forthem, Rorty thinks we should avoid thinking that the newly adoptedvocabulary is bringing us closer to the place where language and worldwill be reconciled. Did we create a new language? We have forged anew means to pursue our ends. But whereas the craftsman invents anew tool having already in mind the goal he wants to reach, usually hewho develops a new vocabulary does not clearly foresee what he willaccomplish with it. He can only feel the need for something that doesnot yet exist, something whose necessity is imposed by the inadequacyof the present.25

Let us now go back to Hegel. According to Rorty, the history told inthe Phenomenology about a spirit that gets nearer and nearer to self-consciousness is the mise-en-scene of the eventful route that ledRomanticism to dominate European culture, eliminating the compe-tition of other forms of language:


What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather thanreason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent forspeaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument ofcultural change.26

In a given community, the German bourgeoisie of the eighteenthcentury, a subcommunity appeared, growing larger and larger, whichdid not settle for old redescriptions. Groups of young people, beforebecoming adults, went through a half-dozen spiritual revolutions. Thestory that Hegel tells is of an ever-faster change of social practices andlanguage-games. It is the story of a community that is not satisfied withtalking like everybody else, that perceives the traditional vocabulary asa cage from which to escape towards a new and different destiny. Tosketch the features of this new social group, Rorty relies on thereflection of the Yale critic Harold Bloom.

The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence

You’ll soon create the sun and theheavenly bodies, soon create the earth,soon create yourself, other living creatures,furniture, plants, and all the thingswe’ve just been talking about.

(Plato, The Republic)

Rorty mostly relies on Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and A Map ofMisreading. In these books, Bloom attempts to define the poet’s psy-chology, to penetrate the peculiar trait that sets apart poets from otherhuman beings. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom describes theRomantic poet as an individual who dwells within the space of the post-Cartesian tradition. This tradition accepts the dichotomy between rescogitans and res extensa, but does not believe in the existence of thepineal gland. Without faith in the mediation between the two spheresof nature, it is impossible to recompose the dramatic dualism whichDescartes himself introduced; res cogitans and res extensa are infinitelyand definitively afar. Bloom thinks that the Cartesian separationbetween mind and world, between a mathematic machine extended inspace and a thinking spirit without extension, caused a mutation in themeaning of ‘being influenced’.27 Such an expression originally meantto receive from the stars a fluid which determined one’s behaviour andcharacter. Yet, after Descartes, it makes no sense to fear the influenceof spatial objects on thinking spirits. The anxiety of being influencedthen shifts from its originally spatial context and assumes a temporalconnotation. The threat is from that which is far away in time – the past


– rather than the distant in space, for time is the means through whichspirits influence each other.

The poet is terrorized by the fear that the tradition has beenimplanted so deeply in him as to deny him any possibility of differingfrom how he is. This anxiety does not derive from perceiving someworldly beings as fearsome. Rather, the absorption in worldlinessprovides precisely the means of turning away, getting distracted, fromanxiety. The peculiarity of the anxiety of influence is that the onlyentities that are truly threatening, those that provoke anxiety and notjust fear, are those who share our mode of Being. The threateningcharacter belongs, therefore, not to things (res extensa), but to thinkingspirits (res cogitans) since ‘they’ are of our own genre. We flee awayfrom others of our own kind because we fear we will become just likethem. We do not want to be – to put it with Heidegger’s Being and Time– as ‘they are’.

Bloom argues that the faces by which the poet feels threatened arethose of the great authors of the past. Since writing has acquired thesymbolic meaning of coitus – as an act which ‘consists in allowing afluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper’28 – the fear isof insemination by the liquids spilled into the muses of Poetry. Havingconquered the Muses with their creations, tradition’s strongest poetscast their spell on us, obliging us to speak with their voice, to persist intheir language, to live in their vocabulary. The capacity of foretellingthe future – ‘Poets were properly called divine in the sense of diviners,from divinari, to divine or predict’29 – would have, in fact, grantedthem the authority to rule us in the present. And the threateningcharacter of the ghosts from the past grows with the Muses’ age. This isbecause the more time that passes from the birth of ‘poetry’, the moreplausible is the assumption that such a literary genre has exhausted itstask; that all which needed to be said has been said. If one arrives fivehundred years after Shakespeare, it is not likely that Calliope would stillbe available. With so many suitors already taken and deceived, amongso many flirts she ‘whored’ with – as Bloom says30 – why should I bespecial for her? The presence of other poetical egos wounds the youngauthor’s narcissism since his uncontaminated solitude is disturbed bythe discovery that he is not alone, and even less that he is not the one.

Broadening the scope of Bloom’s inquiry, transforming his theory ofpoetry into a theory of poiesis, Rorty claims that not only the poet, butanyone engaged in a poiein, in a production, in the activity that aims toposit an unexpected event, is terrorized by the demon of belonging tothe continuum of history. Modern man’s fear is to be belated, to havecome afterwards, to have been thrown in that bankruptcy of time inwhich no original task can be undertaken because debts have imposedthemselves as unclearable.

Thus the expression ‘poet’ should refer to all those men (such as


Nietzsche or Heidegger) who fear being unable to be innovative andcreative. Rorty attempts to show that, from Hegel on, every ironist(exactly like Bloom’s poets) has been chased by a sort of performanceanxiety. Since truth depends on time rather than on space, meaningthat truth is a human product whose fundamental traits changethrough the flow of history, ironists fear not being able to produceradically new truths and phenomena never before experienced. Onekeeps hoping for a task to undertake, for a discontinuity to impose onhistory, because that is what would make him special and original, inspite of tradition’s majesty.

The words (or shapes, or theorems, or models of physical nature) mar-shaled to one’s command may seem merely stock items, rearranged inroutine ways. One will not have impressed one’s mark on the language but,rather, will have spent one’s life shoving about already coined pieces.31

Rorty insists that language is the privileged means through which thepast enforces its aggression. The vocabulary inherited from traditioncan be conceived as a vast cemetery haunted by ghosts. If one cannotallow oneself to be possessed by such spectres, then one needs to forgea language capable of liberating oneself from the eternal return of thesame. It is impossible to break out of the language in which we arecontained, 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 tomodify it according to our will. If we are terrorized by the angst ofbeing influenced by the spectres of language possessing us, we have toelaborate strategies to exorcize them. The intention of the maker is tocreate his own language, a language which would free him from beingthe heir of any tradition. As Bloom would put it: he wants to be his ownfather.

The original sin, whose burden some men feel, is to be, from thevery moment of conception, indebted. As Nietzsche suggests in thesecond essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the feelings of guilt andshame connected with this debt have their mundane origin in the mostancient and original relationship between people: the relation betweenseller and buyer, creditor and debtor. One feels guilt (Schuld) if onecannot settle the debts (Schulden) incurred with others.33 Rorty, fol-lowing Nietzsche, believes that it is through poetic creation that suchindebtedness can be overcome: the poet is he who owns himself, hewho has liberated himself from every mortgage and thus owes nothingto tradition. If one could switch from ‘this is how I was thrown’ to ‘thisis how I throw myself’, the bills of the past would be paid off and nojury could pass a verdict of guilty. Redemption is not a matter ofreproducing a past model; redemption is the creation of somethingradically original. One is saved if an absolute new future is instituted.


Thus, original work does not stem from astonishment, as Platowanted, but from the terror that what is about to be produced will benothing other than an imitation of something that already exists. Thefear is to have inherited infinitely more than what can be handeddown. He who is tormented by this anxiety of influence has the need todesign his own vocabulary. The dream of individual autonomy devel-oped within the horizon of affirmative nihilism consists of a person’sdesire to make himself with his own hands. It was Heidegger’s greatmerit to show, in his breathtaking interpretation of The Will to Power,that the transvaluation of all values proposed by Nietzsche is connectedwith the need for a new right, a set of rules that would not come fromthe outside, but which the self would impose upon itself. So thisautonomy is autonomy in its etymological meaning of autos-nomos: self-legislation. What is proposed by Nietzsche and recovered by Rorty is anindependent man as the producer of his own ‘essence’ – borrowingFoucault’s later jargon – through the skilled work of the care of theself. It is a demiurgic subjectivity that is imagined, a man who freeshimself from his debts to tradition, a little god able to create newpossibilities of existence. In fact, Nietzsche advocates the idea of asubject that realizes its freedom not in self-knowledge, but in self-creation. ‘Who do I want to be?’ is the fundamental question for activenihilism. As Pierre Klossowski writes in the forgotten gem Nietzsche andthe Vicious Circle, one of Nietzsche’s aims is to replace the indebtedsubject governed by history with a free and autonomous one. Thedesire of the creator is to become a star, to recompose his earthly bodyinto a celestial one so as to guide other mortals with a perennialglimmer from an inaccessible height.

In the ‘Myth of the cave’ staged by Socrates and Glauco in theseventh book of Plato’s Republic, the closest star to Earth is described asthat which allows phenomena to appear.34 Similarly, the successfulcreator is the sun who makes new possibilities of existence and newtruths appear with his brilliant illuminations. While traditional philo-sophers are busy researching the conditions of the real, the artificersare moved by the desire to invent the impossible, something that wasnot even imaginable before their light’s arrival. Not interested in theeffects of other suns, the poets want to give birth to unheard-of lifeforms. Makers strive to realize the unreal rather than merely unveilwhat other stars have illuminated. They want to be little deities capableof 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 arethe consequences of our understanding of human nature? Greekphilosophers were the first to declare they had discovered what beinghuman really meant; after them, it was the modern scientists, then theGerman idealists. All of them anxiously made the same claim:


They were going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature ofreality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would therebyinform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers notourselves. They would exhibit the stamp which had been impressed on all ofus.35

Abandoning the will to mirror reality equates to giving up the idea ofthe existence of an immortal human nature. There are no remainswhich will be left untouched, notwithstanding all the things thathumanity has become; no emotional tonality can be so foundational asto last forever. In this perspective, one can state that the Heidegger ofBeing and Time is mistaken because he kept looking for the transcen-dental conditions of existence of man as such. ‘This’ Heidegger thinksthat the guilt of thrownness which our conscience awakes in us, is not asituation which only a few men – himself, Marcel Proust and WilliamBlake included – experience, but the fundamental condition ofhumanity, the answer to the interrogation of its proper essence. Rorty’sContingency, Irony, and Solidarity suggests that the answer to the question‘Who is Dasein?’ should not be ‘everyone on the planet’. Dasein ispeople like Heidegger himself, those who share his poetic interest toinvent themselves (p. 109).

On the one hand, Bloom’s anxiety of influence is useful in antici-pating some people’s behaviours and understanding their feelings. Onthe other hand, Heidegger errs through presumption since he claimsthat every human being shares his own emotional tonality. Heideggerfalls back into the transcendental presupposition since he still con-siders self-knowledge as a matter of discovery rather than invention.While the metaphysical tradition (in which Heidegger sometimes getstrapped) regards the distinction between transient–contingent opi-nions and authentic–eternal truths as fundamental, for Rorty, thedistinction between old and new, worn-out and original, is crucial. Thisis not to say that we should renounce the project of understandingourselves: in Nietzsche’s perspective, knowing oneself is equivalent tocreating it. Reaching self-knowledge does not mean grasping a truthhidden in the depths of all men. Self-consciousness coincides ratherwith self-invention:

The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency,tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a newlanguage – 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 samemanner. Some people, instead of politely following the rules of tradi-tional language, challenge the continuity of time and try to make newmetaphors break out.


A metaphor, in the Platonic and positivist traditions, is acceptableonly if its meaning can be translated into a literal language. Recourseto figurative languages is tolerated as a pedagogical means, valuableinsofar as metaphors communicate reality without facing the difficul-ties of adopting a radically rational language. An analogous relationbinds together art and philosophy: even if they both dwell close totruth’s light, the distance that keeps them apart must be understood.As it is suggested in Plato’s Republic, the artist uses images to exhibit theessence of things. He cannot access what ought to be seen in a thing –literally, its ‘idea’ – without darkening it ‘in the stuff of colors andsurfaces’.36 In art, truth manifests at the cost of obfuscating andscreening its splendour. Instead, the philosopher can grasp and bringforth the truth purely, as such, without passing through the mediationof figurative language.

Rorty exhorts us to get rid of the conception that new metaphorsand works of art let what already exists appear. It is not a matter ofmimesis, of imitation. We have to recognize that art and metaphor arenot ways to communicate old ideas in original fashions: they instituteabsolutely new meanings. To produce metaphors, to make art, meansabruptly interrupting ‘normal’ conversation in an effort to revolutio-nize the way in which things appear. Rorty, again influenced byDavidson, claims that, stricto sensu, new metaphors do not havemeaning. Only those expressions adopted by a community, throughuse, as regulated language games, can properly ‘mean’. Consequently,the distinction between literal and metaphorical language must bethought of as the distinction between familiar and unfamiliar uses ofnoises and marks. Artworks and metaphors have their origin in thesentiment that the accepted vocabulary lacks something. Once theinadequacy of vocabulary is recognized, one appeals to metaphors andart to reach what is impossible within the truths available in thefamiliar language.37

The act of candidating a truth to join the ranks of our language canbe considered a free action only if such truth does not exercise anycoercion upon us. As Wlad Godzich has argued in his ‘Domesticationof Derrida’, to accept a proposition pressured by some externalauthority would undermine the freedom of deciding about the truth-fulness of such a proposition.38 If the essence of truth reveals itself asfreedom, the place where such essence is manifested can only be achoice that entails error. Truth manifests itself as a kind of deviance,since it is only by erring from the decisions imposed by tradition thatwe can prove our autonomy and our freedom. One has to wander awayfrom common sense to create a new one. Metaphors would be thoseattempts to err which, irrupted on the scene of human dialogue andwelcomed with pleasure by many people, become more and morepresent in the linguistic praxis of a given community.


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 orinvalidate it. In the beginning, it makes no sense since the metapho-rical utterance seeks to institute the law under which it is itself to bejudged. Only when a metaphor dies – that is, when it becomes whollyfamiliar – does it assume a precise value which the speakers of adetermined language can easily collect and trade. It can be judged trueonly when it has become worn-out, when its power to create an epoche inthe linguistic exchange has vanished. Metaphors die, and their dustconstitutes the common language games, the habitual tools of a spe-cific vocabulary. To succeed, a metaphor needs to introduce a newtruth in language. One might call a successful metaphor ‘poetic’, sinceit produces an original meaning. Rorty, with Nietzsche, claims that artis the very positing of new truths, and the artist is the one who reacts tothe crisis of traditional values by generating new ones. This creationcan take place – let me reiterate it – only if one feels the necessity ofdeviating from the vocabulary of the society in which one is cast, fromthe system of values through which, and in which, things are judged. AsHeidegger’s Nietzsche. The Will to Power as Art suggests, Nietzsche, byfocusing his attention on the ‘creative, legislative, form-groundingaspect of art’ (p. 131), individuates two types of creative activity. This ishow one gets to the difference between Classic and Romantic, activeand reactive. ‘Romantic’ is that modality of creation that is derivedfrom the impossibility of being satisfied with what there is: ‘Here whatis properly creative is discontent, the search for something altogetherdifferent; 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 changeand Becoming can also spring from the dissatisfaction of those who hateeverything that exists simply because it exists and stands. Operative here isthe counterwill typical of the superfluous, the underprivileged, the dis-advantaged, for whom every existing superiority constitutes in its verysuperiority an objection to its right to exist. (p. 133)

For Nietzsche, Romantic artists can only be disadvantaged andunderprivileged. As in Bloom, the longing for creativity derives fromthe pathological inability to accept the truths existing within commonconsent: from a syndrome of assimilation without accommodation.The artist, one might say, is the rebellious child who establishes anunexpected time.

Paul de Man, in the chapter ‘Rhetoric of tropes’ from his Allegories of


Reading, examines the relation between figurative and literal languagein Nietzsche. De Man states that Nietzsche does not regard tropes asbeing aesthetic accessories, ornaments used to communicate figura-tively a sense derived from literal denomination. Nietzsche does notconsider figural language the derived, secondary, marginal or aberrantform of language, but as the linguistic mode characterizing language assuch. Metaphoricity is the structural and necessary feature of everyform of discourse. As Samuel Wheeler III notes, de Man, inspired byNietzsche, recognizes the movement of signification as the calling ofone 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, inshort a summa of human relationships that are being poetically and rhet-orically sublimated, transposed, and beautified until, after long and repe-ated use, a people considers them as solid, canonical, and unavoidable.Truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten, metaphorsthat have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate asmere metal, no longer as coins.40

De Man’s Allegories of Reading indicates that Nietzsche condemns thedegradation of metaphor into the literal meaning not because such adegradation amounts to a forgetting of a truth, but instead because ‘itforgets 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 isever proper. Truth is a lie no longer perceived as such. It is not anextratemporal reality that philosophy has to unveil; rather, as Rortystates, it is a linguistic artefact whose traits are often altered.41 This isalso the chief reason why Rorty argues that the philosopher should notthink of himself as a superscientist, but as an ally of the artist. Artistsand philosophers are involved in the solar activity of creating wordsand worlds, of offering new descriptions of reality.

The ironist, having renounced the hope that the clear and distinctideas of things themselves might become available to the mind’sinfallible eye, has to be content to read the texts of tradition. Tofacilitate the creation of an original future, a new kind of philosopherrereads the past of his discipline in a way that would legitimate hisclaims of superiority. In this case, the past does not determine thepresent; rather, the present, by revisiting the past and renarrating itsstory, reconfigures it. The meaning of the events carved onto thetabula of conscience is redescribed a posteriori, nachtraglich, on the basisof our present necessities and desires. We are accustomed to believingthat Plato writes from Socrates’ dictation, that the oldest shapes theyoungest. Yet this belief is not true: it is Socrates who is subjected to


Plato’s index, an index in which Plato shows Socrates looking forwardfrom behind him. The future is behind past’s back:

Poetic thought is proleptic, and the Muse invoked under the name Memoryis being implored to help the poet remember the future.42

Rorty believes that the truth of a story should not be evaluated on thebasis of how much such a narrative reflects a presumed reality existingbefore the recit. It must be evaluated on the basis of its capacity to makethe future arrive. Bloom defines this sort of relation with the past as aform of misreading: every historical redescription is a misreading, anaberration, since it is the attempt to walk away from our commonunderstanding and open a new horizon towards which moving. Centralto the activity of giving an account of a fact, is the moment of appli-cation: to remember is to donate a sense that enables the possibility ofthe present to become otherwise. The stories told about the past aremeant to clear the debt that binds one to it. Thus, every revisionism is a‘perversion’ since its appearing is a protest against the alleged natur-ality of standard historiography. As art and metaphor, ironist theoriz-ing was born as clinamen, as an unexpected detour from normalhistory: the young thinker throws himself on the vocabulary of hisauthoritative precursors, he devours them to the point of imposing onthem a deficiency in which he can find space to say something original.The redescribed tradition looks like a sequence of self-liberating car-icatures, for only by demonstrating that the past has failed, can onebelieve there is still a mission to accomplish in the present. The Musedid not give herself to anybody else: chaste and pure, she waited solong for me to come.

The past of the ironist is constituted by that literary genre whichattests, with a straight face, the existence of a vocabulary that noredescription will ever alter, of a language so sacred that it is immuneto irony. Shaped within the tradition of metaphysics, ironists are boundto it by an uncanny familiarity. They know they are products of tradi-tional philosophy, but at the same time they are somehow foreign to itas well. Thus, ironists feel the need to understand the will to truth(their past) without becoming a victim of its fascination. If they man-age to avoid being caught in the compulsion to repeat possibilitiesalready lived by others, they might escape from the rules of the homeand autonomously construct new laws for thinking.

The ironists’ new history of philosophy shows that the attempts toinvent a final vocabulary are just clever and historically determinedways of substituting worn metaphors with original ones. When Hei-degger 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 onhumanity, not on something that stands independently from it. Truth


has a temporal character, it is always temporarily situated. Even thetruth of Being cannot be dissociated from human history.43

Once Heidegger became convinced of such a fact, he had to inter-rupt the transcendental project of Being and Time, which was toometaphysical and not historical enough. He then started assigning tothinking not the task of revealing general truths, but of preserving theforce of the metaphors fundamental for the history of the West;metaphors which would have been otherwise destined to fall unheardin the oblivious chatter of ordinary language. By reactivating our abilityto listen to the call of such path markers, we might be able to reach anadequate comprehension of our present, since we are primarily thewords we speak. For this reason, Heidegger feels obligated to preservethose Greek–German words that have had a crucial importance in theconstitution of who we are today. But who are ‘we’?

Rorty suggests that the mistake of this Heidegger (the one after thealleged Kehre of the 1930s) results from assuming that the wordsimportant for him were important also for the rest of humanity. Hei-degger’s project was thus twofold. On the one hand, he wanted ‘torecapture a sense of contingency, of the fragility and riskiness of anyhuman project’.44 On the other hand, he claimed that such con-tingency was not so contingent after all, since some human projectswere powerful enough to have become destiny for ‘we’, the people ofEurope. Rorty refuses to accept that Heidegger’s list of metaphors isentitled to claim a necessary, universal, fatal relevance. Those who donot share his readings, who are not acquainted with Hegel, Aristotle,Rainer Maria Rilke, will find Heidegger’s litany useless.

The elementariness of elementary words, in Heidegger’s sense of ‘elemen-tary,’ is a private and idiosyncratic matter. The list of books which Heideggerread is no more central for Europe and its destiny than a lot of other lists ofa lot of other books, and the concept of ‘the destiny of Europe’ is, in anycase, one we can do without.45

Philosophy is only one of the many literary genres of modern culture, agenre that has influenced and influences less than other literary tra-ditions (i.e., the novel), political ideas, utopian ambitions, solidarity, ina word, the Bildung of Western humanity. Heidegger’s canon is only oneof the many canons that we can remit to.

The greatest difference that Rorty locates between ironists who writefiction and those who write theory is the former’s awareness that theevents they redescribe in original terms could have been other ones.The latter believe that the vocabularies that follow one another are partof a destiny – an inevitable progression that reaches its pinnaclethrough the vocabulary that they are trying to enforce. For this reason,Rorty relies, paradoxically, on a novelist to overcome metaphysics.


Things might have gone differently in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.There might have been no madeleine. Marcel might have gone out toplay instead of having remained in his room reading. The Prince ofGuermantes might not have married. That events took a certain courseis a product of the unbearable contingency of Being, of casual eventsthat might not have happened at all. On the contrary, the ironisttheorist claims that history is not a mere casualty: ‘Plato must give wayto Saint Paul, and Christianity to Enlightenment. A Kant must be fol-lowed by a Hegel, and a Hegel by a Marx.’46 While ironists cannotassert their vocabulary as having a special relation with a pre- and extra-linguistic reality, they nonetheless suppose their own projects to beconnected with something not merely private and idiosyncratic: thejourney of the West. Each theorist therefore grounds the authenticity ofhis own discourse not on a presumed spatial contact with nature, but ona temporal alignment with destiny. The ironist theorist does not want hisredescription to be considered just one of the many possible redescrip-tions; 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 organizingthe Phenomenology of Spirit around the idea that history is not a series ofevents which can only be plotted together a posteriori, but a progressionwith an ending a priori. While Proust, the ironist non-theorist, couldaccept the fact that someone in the future, escaping his vision and hisauthority, will betray his legacy and emerge with new metaphoricalarrangements, the ironist theorists – just like their metaphysical fore-fathers – hope to represent the end of redescriptions. They wish toembody the absolute fulfilment of history, to manifest the finalmetaphoric.

Proust was able to demolish the authority figures he had met, with-out claiming an authority different from theirs. Hegel, Nietzsche andHeidegger insisted on incarnating a special vocabulary, not merelycontingent. Irony knows no future, just ends (end of history, ofthought, of man, of humanism), precisely because it pretends to havefound words impossible to aufheben.


Histories of Writing and Masturbation

There is more than a touch of thisadolescent perversity in Derrida.

(Terry Eagleton, ‘Marxism without Marxism’)

Betrayal. From tender youth we aretold by father and teacher thatbetrayal is the most heinous offenseimaginable. But what is betrayal?Betrayal means breaking ranks.Betrayal means breaking ranks andgoing off into the unknown. Sabinaknew of nothing more magnificentthan going off into the unknown.

(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

It is now the moment to answer the question which opened the firstsection of the present chapter: what determines the existence of phi-losophy as a discipline and as a faculty? According to Rorty, it is neithera methodology, nor a privileged relation with things. It is not even acircumscribed and homogeneous set of epistemological topics. Philo-sophy, by being just one of the many literary families of modernity,cannot assume to be the only sector of culture that lets us rigorouslygrasp the unseen presuppositions of positive sciences. Philosophers‘are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects ormethods but in the ‘‘family resemblance’’ way in which latecomers in asequence of commentators on commentators are connected with oldermembers of the same sequence’.47 In this perspective, one can finallyunderstand the reasons behind Rorty’s interest in the work of JacquesDerrida. Rorty’s attraction to Derrida – an attraction whose firstimportant signs are two of Rorty’s essays from the late 1970s48 – arisesfrom the firm belief that the Jewish-Franco-Algerian philosopher allowsus to recognize the continuity of the philosophical tradition from Platoto Heidegger, and thus to read philosophy as a kind of family romance.What still links Heidegger to the metaphysical family is a certain pas-sion for light.

In the final pages of ‘Differance’, in what has by now become afamous passage, Derrida, confronting ‘The saying of Anaximander’,tracks the ambiguity which organizes the questions posited by Hei-degger and destines him to be placed in Plato’s light. Heidegger’smovement stems from the desire to respark the fire of a purely properand appropriate language; a flame which might illuminate the path forthinking’s nostalgic return to its lost native country: Greek logos.49 Such


a homecoming (nostos) is what gives Heidegger’s 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 toits dawning. And it is starting from the light of origin that one thinks of theWest, the end and the fall, cadence or check, death or night.50

Thinking will eventually return to its origin. More precisely, thinkingfinds its sense in the very return to its birthplace. Therefore, Heideggernostalgically hopes that, in a clearing of the Black Forest, the languageof authentic philosophy will shine again. But in order for that tohappen, he needed to start a revolution so thorough as to restore thethinking that was put out with the beginning of Platonic metaphysics.At every turn of discourse, Heidegger tries to defeat the centrifugalforce that pushes Europe far from its light. ‘We’ can be saved from themaelstrom that debases man only by returning to orbit around the onemagic name, the transparent and unmarked watchword which revealsthe secret on the difference between Dasein, Being and beings. Hei-degger hopes to listen to the pure friendly language, which, buried andpreserved under idle chatter, can transport beyond the obscure con-tingency of man’s languages. But this very desire is what consigns himto the long hand whose influence he tried to avoid: Heidegger is avictim of the influence of the past since he tries to flee away from thepresent. He gets frozen and trapped in tradition’s maze because of hisattempt to be an authentic author, someone who has somethingimportant to say, someone who is part of a bigger plan and not merelya reader of texts. Following the Derrida of ‘Differance’ and of ‘Ends ofman’, Rorty can claim that Heidegger’s envy for the golden age ofthinking, the age in which philosophy still dwelled near the gods, goeshand in hand with his desire to remember the luminous home ofthinking. But to where does Heidegger hope to return? What is it thatthe philosophical tradition has stealthily taken away from him?

The more Heidegger’s reflection advanced, the more the funda-mental problems of metaphysics appeared to him as pseudo-problems:questions to put aside rather than solve. In such a position, Heideggerstarted looking for the authors of the metaphors holding him captive.Eventually, as Rorty notes, he concluded that the problem went all theway back to Plato. Having reached such a conclusion, Heidegger hadan ambivalent reaction.

If I am right in interpreting Seinsverstandnis as ‘final vocabulary’ and Sein aswhat final vocabularies are about, then one would expect Heidegger to saythat 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 orless a petal than any other.51


Heidegger was not satisfied with dismantling the authority of philoso-phy’s heritage by historicizing it. He hoped that on the ruins producedby his destruction of tradition, a totally other construction could beerected; something not only different from the usual house of philo-sophy, but also more authentic. The authority of metaphysical pre-sence was surely deconstructed, but only in order to affirm thesovereignty of thinking’s possible future, that is to say, of its past.

As Derrida concludes, Heidegger was guided by ‘a kind of reeva-luation and revalorization of the essence and dignity of man’, whichculminated in his effort to restore a ‘natural’ nearness of man with thatwhich an authentic vocabulary unveils.52 Derrida suggests that Hei-degger was not content with consuming, like a parasite, the grip ofother theories. Rather, he wanted to ground his own discursive edificeinto some kind of authority external to such vocabulary. In a word, forHeidegger, not every philosophical discourse is equal to another.Heidegger’s quest for the forgotten Seinsverstandnis, for the vocabularywhich might properly be called an ‘understanding of Being’, attests tohis acceptance that: (1) a particular vocabulary is indeed moreauthentic and authoritative than all the others and substantially dif-ferent 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 finalshelter of the fire of Being. ‘Today, when philosophizing is so bar-barous, so much like a St. Vitus’ dance’,53 we can actually save ourselvesfrom the vortex of philosophical tradition, which pulls us deeper anddeeper, solely by rising up on our feet in the open of a luminousclearing. Proper to man, his property, is the possibility of erectinghimself and gathering in the light of Being. As Derrida notes in ‘Endsof man’: ‘The near is the proper; the proper is the nearest (prope,proprius)’ (p. 133).

Instead of trying to reactivate the original and authentic philoso-phical fire as Heidegger did, Derrida endeavours to overcome Hei-degger’s problematic completely by revaluing what could not findplace within a philosophical scenario organized by the lust for light.And it is primarily through the appreciation of writing that Derridaopposes 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 hopethat philosophy might mutate into a rigorous science, are convincedthat putting a theory in writing is an unfortunate necessity. They seekwords so discreet that they will allow a reader to hear the voice of theirwriter with perfect isomorphic correspondence and transparency. Inthis way, the world will be displayed and explained to the reader. Thefullness of vision will end all need of further clarification; no othercomments, no glosses, no notes will be necessary. Writing is thus


understood as the means of enabling those who are not present toshare one’s thoughts: its goal is to communicate a sense, to representdistant meanings in absence of their legitimate owner. Instead of booksthat transparently talk about the world, Derrida introduces, moredecisively than any other ironist, a new referent for writing: Derrida’stexts do not talk about the world, they write about other texts.54 This isdone in order to highlight that discourses are always and only referringto other vocabularies, to other declinations of the world. We nevermeet the pure world, we simply cannot refer to a reality that is notalready linguistic. Wherever we turn looking for the thing itself, for ameaning that might have happened outside language, we find onlytexts. Above and beyond language, there are only other languages; thisis the sense of Derrida’s catch-line ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (‘there isnothing outside the text’).55 Under Derrida’s configuration, the worldno longer suggests anything to us; it is not recognized as a possibleconversation partner because, as Rorty puts it, ‘between ourselves andthe thing judged there always intervenes mind, language, a perspectivechosen among dozens, one description chosen out of thousands’.56

The metaphorics of voice suggest that words reveal what ought to beseen in things – their idea. The idea of text, in other words, the idea ofwriting which generates other writing, helps us recognize that con-versation, written or oral, has no other end than conversation itself. Ifone can accept that culture and knowledge are nothing else thanhumanity’s endless dialogue, then one can avoid the teleology stillcharacteristic 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 towardGelassenheit and Unverborgenheit, are the same urge. Philosophical writing, forHeidegger 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 asthe reinterpretation of prior interpretations. The difference fromHegel, however, is the rejection of the faith in the arrival of reinter-pretation which would complete and thus terminate the movement ofthinking. Derrida maintains the ironic idea of philosophy as a hor-izontal succession of texts (and not as a vertical relation between wordsand things), but strips it of its teleology. One can affirm that Derridaconceives philosophy as nonsensical since it is not directed toward adefinitive meaning. The conversation among philosophers, instead ofbeing a means of reaching ends other than itself, is just supposed topromote the taste for dialogue.


Rorty’s remarks on deconstruction are very effective in reproducingthe texture woven by Derrida. Derrida is a writer who disappoints hisreaders. Intentionally so. He is a frustrating author since he infinitelydefers the moment of truth’s appearance. In fact, many of his texts endwith references to other texts, recalling the necessity of further read-ings, or even with questions instead of answers. In Derrida, one dealswith a plot similar to that of a polyphonic fiction: a structure that hasneither head nor tail since its central and organizing fire has beenextinguished.

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on afundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamentalimmobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach ofplay. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxietyis invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, ofbeing caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from theoutset. 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 theorigin or end, arche or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations, andpermutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens] – that is, in aword, a history – whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end mayalways be anticipated in the form of presence.58

Derrida’s texts are footnotes for other footnotes, and each one of thesenotes contains many others. There is no original and fundamentalcentre around which the various senses of Derrida’s writing can beorganized. One of the three epigraphs opening Speech and Phenomena isa passage from Ideas I, which is worth looking at since it gives a goodidea of Derrida’s complicated style. Here is the scene that Husserlstages: somebody happens to say something which reminds me of mylast visit to the Dresden painting gallery. Memory teletransports meinto the corridors of that gallery. Before me stands a portrait repre-senting a gallery of paintings. Now I find myself wandering in thepaintings of that gallery. On some of these pictures are epigraphs. Iread them. Who knows where these epigraphs will lead me. For Der-rida, we are always in the gallery. There is no memory or promise of thebroad daylight’s kiss. Contrary to what our desire cannot not want tobelieve, the thing itself always withdraws.59

The disappointment that one feels when reading Derrida’s essays isdue to the fact that his writings do not end with a vision that offers thethings in themselves, nor with a final redescription; rather, theyinconclusively and endlessly relaunch the movement of con-ceptualization, which coincides – as we saw in de Man – with the callingof things with inappropriate names.60 Derrida’s philosophy is a kind ofwriting, for it is not ‘the primary prescription or the propheticannunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination’.61 It


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 wemust think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purelymaternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On thecontrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirma-tion 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 whatit means’62 – not only extends the domain and play of interpretation adinfinitum, but also transforms the trajectories of philosophical dis-cursivity into an adventurous wandering. The drift acted out by Der-rida’s writing is exactly the risk that the philosophical tradition hasalways wanted to avoid ‘the philosopher, after overstrenuous inquiryinto our relation to the world, may lose his nerve, his reason, and theworld simultaneously. He does this by withdrawing into a dream worldof ideas, of representations – even, God help us, of texts’.63 Derrida’sOf Grammatology associates this resistance toward writing with the tra-ditional condemnation of self-eroticism. The one who plays with writ-ing and the one who plays with himself run the same risk. What dothese two manual activities have in common? What kind of threateningperversion do they share?

The supplement that ‘cheats’ maternal ‘nature’ operates as writing, and aswriting it is dangerous to life. This danger is that of the image. Just as writingopens the crisis of the living speech in terms of its ‘image,’ its painting or itsrepresentation, so onanism announces the ruin of vitality in terms of ima-ginary seductions. (p. 151)

The ‘West’ has been dominated by the belief that masturbatory praxisis not only an improper pastime, but also a habit that predisposes oneto a great number of illnesses. Derrida deals specifically with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but a broader and still circumscribed account of thegrounding of masturbation as a self-destructive practice would requiremuch further investigation.64 To give some other examples from‘Rousseau’s epoch’ (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), Tissot’sL’onanisme, Debray’s Hygiene et physiologie du mariage, Larousse’s GrandDictionnaire Universel, as well as Proudhon, Mandeville and Littre, alldescribe at length the fatal results of the solitary act of pleasure.Attuned with such a (pseudo)science, Western popular traditionaffirms that the practice of masturbation causes the obfuscation ofsight; it makes young men go blind, making them unable to see howthings really are. Writing, according to some philosophical experts,provokes the same effects.


The threat is that the blinding pleasures of writing and masturbationwould end up seducing us, abducting us from the straight and narrowpath, away from the track beaten by normal intellect.65 Writing, asdestruction and disease of presence, risks compromising the world’sstability – disjointing it. Since differance forestalls the enjoyment of thethings in themselves, we are left to play with the simulacra and thesimulations of things produced by imagination. Writing and mas-turbation loosen up our contact with reality, they both invoke anabsence which is contrary to the natural health of reason. To havesomething to do with them means risking intoxication, being addictedto the world of ghosts they produce and thus losing interest in reality.Having spent too much time playing with literature, Derrida’s thoughtended up losing its sight on things.

To touch one’s self and to carve a surface are in contrast, through asort of epoche, with the authenticity of embracing bodies. Suspendingthe immediate presence of faces and voices, they are temptations thatcan drive one insane. Estranged from the truth of reason, writing andmasturbation both risk drifting away from the thing itself. They bothventure into a realm of illusions that break free from the reality ofthings in flesh and bone and inaugurate the theatre of fiction. Onegets lost in a world of phantoms and phenomena, in a universe inwhich the convocation of things themselves is differed infinitely sincethe very possibility of ‘being in touch with reality’ is dislocated by theimaginative faculty, which is at the ground of writing and masturbation.As Derrida writes in ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, writing plays within the simu-lacrum, and for this reason, is considered threatening to life in a waythe living (spoken) word is not.66

Tradition looks at masturbation and writing as foreplay which onehas to practice before coming to the point: to the core of things.Normality consists in the thrill of fitting ‘just the right piece . . . intojust the right slot’, in writing, for showing the right slots of things, inmasturbating, for ‘getting it right’.67 Anybody can confine oneself tobeing normal. It simply requires following the standard path illumi-nated by tradition. But, argues Rorty, Derrida does not really feel likepartaking in the normal game of the past – the one that teleologicallyconceives writing as the act which substitutes talking in the hope ofrestoring its lost presence.

According to the metaphysical tradition, the fullness of meaningshould eventually regain possession of the impropriety of writing,whose possible virulence must be neutralized with a final pre-sentification: ‘writing was supposed to paint a living word.’68 It shouldproduce copies and representatives of voice. Writing’s role is to serve asa faithful mouthpiece: a docile and obedient servant, it has to place atthe disposal of one’s voice an apparatus which would refer to reality asan unequivocal index. He who abuses its pleasures will surrender


himself to a tunnel, to a cave where the benefits of sunlight cannotarrive. Just like the pharmakon to be found in the back of Plato’sdrugstore, writing should be used in moderation and kept out of thereach of children in order not to corrupt them; one should turn to itexclusively for therapeutic use. Deconstruction, instead, abuses thestupefacient drugs called writing and plays with it in a masturbationwithout end.

We are warned that to masturbate and to write opaquely are activ-ities to be avoided because they subvert natural law: these are practicesagainst nature and life. By contrast, Derrida, according to Rorty, wantsto persuade us that the condemnation of writing and masturbation isproduced by human history, not by some extrahuman necessity.Western scientific and religious discourses also stated that mas-turbating made shameful hair grow on one’s hands. Rorty, referring tothe philosophical prejudices within which he was raised, writes:

students of analytic philosophy were encouraged to keep their reading inliterature well clear of their philosophical work and to avoid reading Ger-man philosophy between Kant and Frege. It was widely believed that readingHegel rotted the brain. (Reading Nietzsche and Heidegger was thought tohave even worse effects – doing so might cause hair to sprout in unwontedplaces, turning one into a snarling fascist beast.)69

Rorty compares Derrida to the secularists who, instead of affirmingsomething about God – his existence or inexistence – consider thedivine as a part of human history. Rather than discussing the truth ofGod, they suggested how the world might look if religion got out of theway. In the same manner, Derrida tries to make us imagine what phi-losophical culture might look like without the Kantian interest in thefoundations of knowledge: a culture which would no longer condemnwriting and would stop worrying about the relation ‘between subjectand object, representations and the real’.70 By highlighting the linkbetween masturbation and writing it is in fact easier to describe thephilosophical morals of the West as a historical contingency that can beovercome by also learning to perceive writing in its heavy materialityand by looking at words as words and not as means to mirror immu-table essences. This is why in Derrida’s texts philosophy dances to therhythm of obscene allusions and puns, bizarre etymologies, enigmaticallusions, phonic and graphic oddities. ‘It is because Derrida thinksthat the ability to see writing as writing is what we need to break the gripof the notion of representation.’71 Rorty affirms that, in Derrida’s view,Kantian philosophy

is a kind of writing which would like not to be a kind of writing. It is a genrewhich would like to be a gesture, a clap of thunder, an epiphany. That is


where God and man, thought and its object, words and the world meet, wewant speechlessly to say; let no further words come between the happy pair.Kantian philosopher would like not to write, but just to show. They wouldlike the words they use to be so simple as to be presuppositionless.72

Instead of looking for a proper, transparent, phenomenologically purelanguage, Derrida dramatically complicates his style. Kantian philoso-phers, fearing the threats of writing, looked for words pure enough toreconcile things and thinking. Heidegger and the other ironistauthors, anxious about the fluids of metaphysical tradition, searchedfor a metaphorics capable of terminating the movement of inter-pretation. Derrida’s writing is so perverse that it differs infinitely fromthe embrace of the happy couple constituted by mind and world. But itis also so impure that it does not expect to be the destinal redescrip-tion. One moves from text to text, from metaphor to metaphor, in anendless play of substitutions that can never culminate in the pre-sentation of the thing itself, nor in the manifestation of a destiny. Thecirculation of signs has been going on forever. Therefore, since it doesnot have a beginning neither can it have one end.

If propositions depend only on propositions instead of on worlds ordestiny, then the idea of a pure language, of a homeland for theauthentic thinking, fades. One is no longer forced to purify one’svocabulary since a virginal vocabulary not penetrated by others’ voca-bularies, does not exist. Husserl knew this well. The thing that hap-pened to the Bloomian strong poet also happens to the protagonist ofCartesian Meditations: the attempt to delimitate a pure inside whichowes nothing to the alter ego, culminates in the ego’s realization thatthe contaminating spectre of the other, i.e., language, is exactly whatmakes possible, and thus at the same time forbids, autarchy. As Bloomconvincingly explains in A Map of Misreading: despite all its effort, anypoem will always be a dyad – at least – and never a monad because whatterrorizes most of the fluids of the past is that one can see the floodingonly after it has already come. One cannot see it coming, thus anypreventive strike against the terrorizing menace is impossible.

Having clarified that contamination is to be recognized as thecondition of any subjectivity (consciousness) and any objectivity(truth), it is much easier to understand the reason behind Glas, theTalmudic pages in which Derrida monstrously mixes texts, grafts Genetin Hegel’s column, disseminates hidden quotations and makes dirtyallusions. If we are able to recognize the desire for authenticity andpurity as symptomatic relapses into the metaphysical habitus thathopes to speak without suffering from any contingent and influencinggerms, we are also able to understand the necessity of Derrida’s 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.


Deconstruction assumes the form of pastiche since – just like othercultural products of late capitalism such as De Palma’s movies orTarantino’s Pulp Fiction – it exhibits its own impropriety and non-independence, the debt that makes it depend on other productions.Rather than falling back into Heidegger’s Greek–German fantasy andthus producing nostalgic remakes of it, Derrida convenes in the pre-sent all the spectres that, speaking in his vocabulary, are speaking withhim.

Instead of yielding to the seductive cloaking device which Nietzschecalled ‘active forgetfulness’, Derrida is not ashamed of his own debts.In his texts, he sets up a crowded symposium whose participants are theauthors of the past that have influenced him the most. On such anoccasion, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Shakespeare, Heidegger, Marx andmany more, end up talking to each other but, in contrast to themeetings arranged by Plato, there is no Socrates there to knock out thechallengers. The dialogical skirmishes frequently result in an endlessanalysis. Derrida’s irony derives from letting discourses play againstdiscourses, simulacra against simulacra, writing against writing, ratherthan opposing a transparent and rigorous truth against the opinions ofthe past. There is no obstinately innocent logos that sits in judgementover philosophers’ conflicts in order to resolve their quarrels. The finaljudgement never appears on the stage to solve, as a deus ex machina,disputes and oppositions. The overcoming of metaphysics here doesnot take place in perfecting or correcting it, but through the resolutionnot to satisfy the desire for autarchy and purity that are the motors ofphilosophical enterprise. According to Rorty, showing the influencewhich binds him to the past is the way in which Derrida gains someautonomy from it. Simultaneously, he evokes the spirits of philosophyand discards their dictates: in order to be really freed from the influ-ence of the past, one has to recover from the anxiety of influence itself.

Derrida’s writing demonstrates in fact a porosity and penetrabilitythat is the reversal of classical virtues. Perfection for a living being, andfor a written piece, is traditionally a matter of not having any relationwith the outside, in the insurmountability of the defence that immu-nizes it from the attacks of foreigners and parasites. A living being isperfect if it is exclusively and purely an inside. God – who does notmasturbate since ‘he’ does not have hands – also does not have aller-gies.74 Health and virtue coincide. By beating the text of metaphysics,Derrida unveils its hidden wound, exposing how promiscuous it hasalways been. This is what Geoffrey Hartman refers to when describingdeconstruction as a pinking philosophy, or as a ‘pornosophy’.75 Topaint philosophy pink means to highlight the relationship betweenphilosophy and sexuality, putting in the spotlight the fact that philo-sophy has always thought of itself in the male gender: the will to knowand to possess, the project of penetrating reality, the desire to


inseminate, the fear of being penetrated and possessed and so forth. Isnot Derrida suggesting that metaphysics, and ironist theory as well, isan effect of the sexism of the West? Male sexuality is the norm and thefoundation (it is enough to think of the biblical creation of Adam andEve), femininity is thought of on the basis of the category of lack: lackof phallus, of virility, of penetrative sharpness, of toughness. Penisenvy. Anxiety of influence. Science, mathematics, body-building, andmartial music are destined for boys, literature and flowers are thingsfor girls, or for those quasi-girls and quasi-boys who are homosexuals.After reading Derrida, one starts believing that the primacy of the voiceis just an effect of the sovereignty of the phallus; that phonocentrism aconsequence of phallocracy.76

Derrida’s philosophy, for the first time, recognizes as proper andpositive those so-called feminine characteristics which have always beenable to produce, at best, literature. In ‘Structure, sign, and play in thediscourse of human sciences’, Derrida, reading Levi-Strauss, individu-ates two different strategies of writing: writing as bricolage is the dis-course that nomadically uses the tools found along its way, withouthesitating to try many, with no fear to modify them in order to adaptthem to the goals for which they had not been intended. Derridacompares the bricoleur’s practice to that of the engineer. The latter isthe one who wants to be the absolute origin of his vocabulary, theorigin of the word, the word made flesh. The one who does not tol-erate being deceived by language, history, or a world. The one wholongs to start from scratch. The one who has total control over hiserections. But do engineers really exist? And what about a true male?Has he ever existed?

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the textof a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said thatevery discourse is bricoleur.77

If one admits that every philosophical discourse is bound to a certainbricolage, that the engineer is of the same gender as the bricoleur, thenone will stop believing in the existence of manly engineers, of atranscendental science or an ironic redescription that purely andradically breaks from the historical contingencies and presuppositionstypical of other sectors of culture.

Derrida denounces the demands of engineering for its dreamyprovenance, and dreams, as Cinderella knew well, are desires: to thinkthe dream of metaphysics for him is to think of metaphysics as a dream,a dream whose overcoming is a matter of sex, insofar as philosophicaldiscourse is an effect of desire. Deconstruction’s lack of seriousness,which Rorty praises so much, seems to be provoked by the tre-mendously serious attempt not to take too seriously the canonic


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 wasthe famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, onhis small gray horse, passed under thewindows of Hegel, who recognized in himthe ‘spirit of the world,’ as he wrote to afriend? Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote toanother friend, the French pillaged andransacked his home. But Hegel knew how todistinguish the empirical and the essential.

(Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death)

The history of philosophy told by Rorty is characterized by somethingsimilar to a march toward the privatization of the means of productionof the world, and toward the acceptance of the absolute contingency ofthe sense of Being. Aristotle and Plato spoke, each in his own terms, ofthe essence of things: things are responsible for our understanding ofthem. With Kant’s Copernican revolution, philosophical gaze moved tomen’s universal and necessary way of knowing things. It is starting fromKant that we can properly speak of a world posited by human beings, aworld common to the whole of humanity and to any other form ofintelligent life. Hegel happened to be the one who historicized andthus relativized Kant’s categories; every epoch and every culture has itspeculiar mode of being opened to reality. And yet, like Heidegger,Hegel too suggested that an absolute culture would come and com-plete the unfolding of history. The last step of the movement that Rortyforces on philosophy occurs with Derrida: the image of the world Ihave depends upon my desires. Upon the privacy and uniqueness ofthe events I happened to face. Upon my life. Upon my loves. Philo-sophy, born as thinking of things, is overturned into thinking of thefactual and empirical ‘I’ who is directed towards things. Theory blendsinto autobiography since the responsibility of a philosophical discourseis always ascribed to someone; never to Being, nature or destiny.

The paradigmatic case of such privatization of philosophy is Derri-da’s ‘Envois’, a crucial yet relatively understudied text, often relegatedto the status of intellectualistic extravagance. In ‘Envois’, Derrida col-lects love letters sent by someone between 3 June 1977 and 13 August1979. Two years of love letters that an ‘I’, always far from home onbusiness, sends to a ‘thou’ from Oxford, Yale, London, as well as fromother academic venues. Who is the addressee of this love – a woman,


many women, many men, the sophia, Heidegger – is up to the reader todecide; it is up to you for example.78

Presumably, the ‘I’ who signs the letters is Derrida himself: in themovements to which the postcards allude, it is not difficult to recognizethe travels that the philosopher had made delivering lecturesthroughout the world. The assiduous correspondence emphasizes theprivacy of the work being done in ‘Envois’.

Nothing is more private than a love letter – there is nothing to whichgeneral ideas are less relevant or more inappropriate. Everything, in a loveaffair or love letter, depends upon shared private associations, as when the‘traveling salesman’ who writes the letters in ‘Envois’ recalls ‘the day whenwe bought that bed (the complication of credit and of the perforated tag inthe department store, and then one of those horrible scenes between us)’.79

The letters which constitute this collection talk about and are theeffects of Derrida’s desires. They witness a private and personal Strebenthat does not necessarily apply to the whole of humanity. While Hei-degger ended up trying to ground philosophy on something biggerthan himself, Derrida quite honestly shows that theory is just the pro-duct of the contingencies of one’s own private life.

The key event in ‘Envois’ is the discovery of a book on divination bythe medieval chronicler Matthew Paris. What, however, strikes theauthor of the postcards – and let’s just call such a textual persona‘Derrida’ – is not the topic of the book, but rather, Paris’s illustrationdisplayed on its cover. The portrait shows two characters: one sits at ascribe’s desk writing, while the other, holding up his index, urges theformer from behind. Above the head of the one sitting is written‘Socrates’, and above the other, ‘plato’, with a small ‘p’. ‘Derrida’ goescrazy over the picture that reverses the canonic story between Plato andSocrates, 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 ismediated through the flipside of the Socrates–plato postcard.

‘Derrida’ fantasizes with his ‘thou’ about the ‘S-p’ picture. In fact,alongside the case of mistaken identities due presumably to the inat-tentive copyist, something else catches his attention. ‘For no clearreason, there is a big something (looking a bit like a skateboard)sticking out from between Socrates’ rear end and the chair he is sittingin.’80 What is that strange tool that almost stabs Socrates in the back?‘Derrida’ seizes the opportunity to interpret the situation in the mostobscene way. It is an overbearing erected penis that Plato is handlingbehind the impotent Socrates.


[A]n interminable, disproportionate erection traversing Paris’s head like asingle idea and then the copyist’s chair, before slowly sliding, still warm,under Socrates’ right leg.81

Once again the discourse on metaphysics is transformed into sexualinnuendo. In ‘Envois’, thanks to the penis/skateboard cue, Derrida’sattention focuses on the theme of procreation and lineage. Somebody– the addressee of the letters, but also the inverted couple p. and S. – istrying to force ‘Derrida’ into having a child. In fact, as he writes, ‘whathas betrayed us, is that you wanted generality: which is what I call achild’ (p. 23).

Imagine the day, as I have already, that we will be able to send sperm by postcard, without going through a check drawn on some sperm bank, and that itremains 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 ofmechanical 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 traceof one’s self. The illusion of philosophers is that the works theybrought to life will always conform to the intentions of those whooriginated them. Behaving as faithful representatives, the texts pro-duced will speak with their authors’ voice, in their stead. Unfortu-nately, texts, just like children when they grow up, are not infants(speechless); they have their own voice (p. 25). If it is true, as Aristotlesuggested, 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 andpainful experience of the fact that one is not the father – that a son ordaughter is someone one does not answer for, or who answers forthemselves, who can speak for themselves’.82 Texts and children alwaysend up being, in one way or another, parricides because they are trulyalive only when they put in question the authorial sovereignty of thefather. In this perspective, one can affirm that writing is a matter ofbeing exposed to death, for the texts signed off will travel without anyregard for their author’s original will. Once they are gone one has nocontrol over them. Derrida is conscious of the fact that without the riskof dying, there would be no writing. Yet, accepting the temporarynature of any author and authority, he decides not to do anything toprevent the works he signs, sends, addresses, from turning againsthimself. Of course such a decision is killing ‘Derrida’, but it would beworse otherwise.83 Worse than death for Rorty would be to give in tothe male desires with which the philosophical tradition is temptingDerrida.


Sometimes, we can almost hear Rorty’s voice asking philosophy toleave Derrida alone: philosophy should not mess with him since heneither aspires to say anything important, nor does he want to givebirth to works which claim to a validity both general and eternal. Hewants to disperse seeds and senses via an infinity of addresses, whichspeak of his private idiosyncrasies and do not aim at positing a publictruth effective for everyone. The postcards collected by Derrida aremeaningful even if – or better – exactly because they do not make anypublic or even familiar sense. He, who writes postcards and mas-turbates with texts instead of giving birth to books, is not trying to beright. 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, Ihave always believed (you don’t, I know) that the absence of filiation wouldhave 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 ofmetaphysics. In the colloquium with Ferraris, which I have alreadyreferenced, Derrida states: ‘I am not one of the family.’84 Then heexplains that such a sentence must not be understood as merely statinga fact; it also implies an oath and a commitment. While stating he is notof the family, Derrida is also declaring that he will not be a member ofthe family; that he will do his best not to be assimilated to a certainstock. But such a promise is meaningful only if it can be broken andnot kept; only if it requires a certain effort by the promising subject. Infact, Derrida’s commitment to avoid ‘the craving for generality’ – touse Wittgenstein’s words – risks being jeopardized by the temptation ofsurrendering to the spectres of the metaphysical romance. The desirefor reproduction is tempting. And it is powerful. As it is confessed in‘Envois’, the child remains ‘alive or dead, the most beautiful and themost living of fantasies, as extravagant as absolute knowledge’ (p. 39).In the attempt to flee from the family of Socrates and Plato – the familythat promises to resolve the problematic relation between Subject andpredicate – Derrida turns for support to Heidegger and Freud, ‘twothinkers whose glances never crossed and who, without ever receiving aword from one another, say the same. They are turned to the sameside’ (p. 191). But why specifically can those two help him in stoppingthe reproduction of tradition? According to Rorty, it is because

both Heidegger and Freud were willing to attach significance to phonemesand graphemes – to the shapes and sounds of words. In Freud’s account ofthe unconscious origins of jokes, and in Heidegger’s (largely fake)


etymologies, we get the same attention to what most of the books of lagrande epoque have treated as inessential – the ‘material’ and the ‘accidental’features of the marks and noises people use to get what they want.85

Derrida’s practice of multiplying word games, puns, assonances andgraphic jokes is his way of revaluating what his repudiated family alwaysconsidered the marginal aspect of a sign: its materiality. The interest inquestioning the hierarchy that reduces the sensuous to the will of theintelligible explains the appearance in ‘Envois’ of another odd couple– Fido and ‘Fido’. Fido is my dog; ‘Fido’ is my dog’s name. As Rortyconvincingly reconstructs, the Fido–‘Fido’ theory of naming wasintroduced by Oxford philosophers in order to repropose an argumentalready found in Plato’s Cratylus: all words are names since theirmeaning is determined by the things to which they refer. This theory‘contrasts with the view, associated with Saussure and Wittgenstein, thatwords get their sense not simply by association with their referents (ifany) but by the relation of their uses to the uses of other words’.86 TheOxonian theory – and let us not forget that the plato-Socrates postcardwas discovered in the famous Oxford library – aims at keeping sepa-rated 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 thefact that ‘Fido’ actually denotes Fido is something that should be heldas relevant. The signifier ‘Fido’, its graphic appearance and its sensu-ousness, refers to an innumerable network of other assonant or dis-sonant signifiers. It is incalculable how much the materiality of thesignifier influences the determination of the sense which it shouldmerely point out. ‘Envois’ suggests that it is not certain that ‘Fido’ willbe 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 thetext, ignoring the subtle and unwittingly metaphysical categorization ofthe Oxonian philosophy of language. But this gesture, as Derridaforesees, will provoke the anger of quite a few British and Americanphilosophers, who, in a unified front would scream: ‘and quotationmarks – they are not to go to the dogs!’ (p. 244).

Connected to the hierarchic distinction between signifier and sig-nified, another crucial distinction for the order of metaphysical dis-course is the one that distinguishes the sense that a sign has for me andthe sense in itself of the sign, the meaning it has for the whole com-munity of speakers. To use Blanchot’s suggestion: one needs to keepseparated the empirical meaning from the essential meaning, as Hegeldid recognizing Napoleon as the spirit of the world, even if the Frencharmy pillaged and ransacked his home.87 It would be very risky if anauthor, in a column on the French reception of the philosopher from


Stuttgart, began discoursing about the Napoleonic eagle: since it is notessential, of public domain, that ‘Hegel’ in France is almost pro-nounced ‘aigle’, the readers would have difficulties understanding thelogic of the text. The Hegel/aigle type of association is for Rorty pri-vate, insofar as it depends on the singularity of one’s life experiences,on the empiricity and factuality of his having-been. The danger is thatsuch an authorial mode of argumentation, insofar as it disseminatesprivate allusions in a public speech-act, would end up being consideredobscure, or perhaps even irrational. But the attention and respect forthe inerasable privacy of effective living, necessarily lead to the com-plication of the argumentative style. The private and the public, theempirical 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 impliesthe adoption of a totally different – and thus unsettling – order ofdiscourse. Such firm belief seems to be exactly what moves Derrida inhis experiment with thought.

It is not hard to recognize in Derrida’s interest for the ‘who’ ofphilosophy, for the empiric ‘I’ hidden under the philosopher, Hei-degger’s influence. Being and Time unmistakably affirms the necessityto start every analysis from the beings that we are ourselves, or better –as Heidegger suggested in a handwritten note at the margin of para-graph nine – that I myself am. For Heidegger, however, the onticsubstratum had to be transcended to reach an appropriate ontologicallevel of knowledge. Philosophy is historically situated; it certainlymakes its embarrassing debut in the life-world. No philosopher cannegate it. Yet the original triviality is not an irreducible obstacle for theconstitution of a transcendental or phenomenological understanding,representing rather a necessary stage, a temporary situation to over-come. Derrida instead does not accomplish this passage; the trans-cendental a priori is always contaminated and infested by the stains ofautobiographical empiricity. There is no ontological gathering, noVersammlung, which could reduce the ontic dispersion. The philoso-phical ego is always and still a person, as is witnessed by the fact that thecelebrated father of deconstruction once received a prank call in whichthe speaker was Heidegger’s ghost.88

Derrida interprets his own personal interest in the concreteness ofexistence as the radicalization of Nietzsche’s attempt to handle philo-sophy through a psychological perspective; that is, the attempt to showthat philosophy is always ‘psychology and biography together’.89 In ATaste for the Secret, Derrida even recognizes the moment from which –for him – it was no longer possible to divide theory from its presumedother, from factuality and empiricity of real life. He remembers anevent that had occurred during his childhood in Algiers, the Algierswhich he used to cruise in a pedal car, stopping to play soccer in thedirt fields encountered on the way. Derrida tells us that he was expelled


from school at the age of eleven for being Jewish (p. 87). To thatwound, dated 1942, Derrida ascribes his inability to distinguishbetween the materiality of the empirical ‘I’ and the ideality of thetranscendental ego. The ambient of culture, of theory, of knowledge,was not alien to the concreteness of Europe’s and little Jacques’s his-tory. ‘Envois’, like ‘Circumfession’, expresses the necessity to show thatit is always an ‘I’, this ‘I’, who writes, thinks, in a determinate place, ona specific occasion.

For metaphysics, the date on which a thought was elaborated, itshour, its place, its language, the mood and the gender of the one whoconceived it, all these aspects belong to the sphere of the inessentialand of the frivolous. The imposition of a distinction between thetranscendental ego that philosophizes and the empirical ‘I’ interestedin the world implies that one can ascend from the worldly and banalreign of idiosyncratic factuality to the transcendental heaven ofessential meanings and truths. But Derrida, instead of describing Geist’strip in search of Absolute Knowledge, is interested in a phenomenol-ogy of Witz which tries to remember and preserve everything (sig-nifiers, contingency, language) metaphysics considered of littleaccount. As he puts it in A Taste for the Secret: ‘philosophy, or academicphilosophy at any rate, for me has always been at the service of thisautobiographical 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 whohad 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 thetheorein, brought back to the horizon of love, is never disinterested, butalways contaminated by the desires that every narrative – for beingoriented towards the moment of application – chases. The ‘dirty Jew’(p. 38) of Spanish origin from Algiers with fantasy and effort has ela-borated a new manner of writing and thinking of philosophy. What isthe purpose of writing in such a way? None, if we expect from philo-sophy answers and demonstrations. A lot, if, sharing some of Derrida’sexperiences, especially his tensions of desire, his orexis, the books heread, we consider somehow relevant the problem of how to leavemetaphysics behind. By creating a new canon, Derrida is able to forgethe tools to circumvent philosophy, to navigate around its coasts withoutrunning aground on them. Of metaphysics, Derrida made a compen-dium, treating it allusively and carelessly.

Rorty often recalls a certain passage from Heidegger. He approvinglyquotes it also in a note from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity defining itas the ‘slogan’ of ironist theorizing:


Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcomemetaphysics. Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leavemetaphysics to itself.90

Rorty thinks that Derrida’s narrative about philosophy helps stoppaying attention to it. In ‘Envois’, it is written: ‘To the devil with thechild, 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 itselfand start caring for something else. The circumvention of philosophyis thus the course which makes us navigate around metaphysics,keeping us close enough to hear its familiar and seductive tune, butthen promptly veering us beyond it, away from any desire for truth andrepresentation.


Chapter 2

Derrida, the Transcendental andTheoretical Ascetism

The Double Privacy of Deconstruction

I have a great deal of gratitude for the reading, at oncetolerant and generous, that he [Rorty] has given ofmany of my texts.

(Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’)

I am, in fact, not at all, truly not at all in agreement withRorty, especially where he takes his inspiration frommy work.

(Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx & Sons’)

In 1989, Richard Rorty commented that for years a quarrel had beensimmering among the American admirers of Derrida: ‘On the one sidethere are the people who admire Derrida for having invented a new,splendidly ironic way of writing about the philosophical tradition. Onthe other side are those who admire him for having given us rigorousarguments for surprising philosophical conclusions.’ 1 The firstskirmishes had already broken out at the beginning of the 1980s. Forexample, Jonathan Culler – perhaps the Jonathan who staged theencounter between Derrida and the Socrates–plato postcard in‘Envois’2 – declared that using the term ‘Derridadaism’ to label Der-rida’s work is ‘a witty gesture by which Geoffrey Hartman blots outDerridian argument’.3 Defending Hartman’s light-hearted tone, Rortydeemed Culler’s interpretation of deconstruction as too old-fashionedto grasp Derrida’s originality. Either Derrida is a rigorous thinker,someone who has complied with the argumentative procedures ofphilosophy and thus proved his conclusions to be right, or he hasaltogether distanced himself from the ‘philosophical machismo’ whichinspires the quest for accurate representations.4 In a manner ofspeaking, one cannot have both: the choice is between becoming awoman by betraying the norms of tradition, or staying a man byarguing rigorously. It should by now be clear that ‘femininity’ is thequality that Rorty appreciates the most in Derrida.

By the time that Rorty released Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – oneof the smartest and most energetic books in recent contemporaryphilosophy – the line-ups were pretty clear. Rorty was anxious toexplain why pragmatism and deconstruction might, or should, go handin hand. The ‘American Derrideans’ (Jonathan Culler, RodolpheGasche, Christopher Norris) kept affirming that between deconstruc-tion and pragmatism there could be no ‘we’. Some of the Americanadmirers of Derrida – and one wonders why Rorty defines suchadmirers ‘American’ or ‘North American’5 when among his primaryreferences only Culler is from the USA – accused Rorty’s ironistpragmatization of Derrida as being too frivolous for them, it dismissesDerrida’s serious philosophical work by focusing, instead, almostexclusively on word games, jokes, vulgar allusions and private mem-ories. According to Culler, thinking of deconstruction as a protestagainst the serious claims of classic philosophy would mistake it for aplayful celebration of the irrational and unsystematic. Pragmatism, asNorris argues, would reduce philosophy ‘into a species of appliedrhetoric’.6 In Rorty’s opinion, deconstruction and pragmatism shouldin fact work together to blur the distinction between literature andphilosophy and advocate the idea of a text that is not interested indetermining its own genre but only in producing effects. After all,Derrida himself suggested that genres should not go unmixed. Butphilosophy is not just a kind of writing, nor can it simply be cir-cumvented. For this reason – as the ‘American’ Derrideans arguedaccording to Rorty’s self-understanding of the debate – deconstructiondeserves more seriousness than Rorty is willing to concede it.

Yet it would be ungenerous to define Rorty’s interpretation of Der-rida as a case of misreading (Norris) or misunderstanding (Gasche),for he is well aware that a serious philosophical endeavour is somehowpresent in Derrida. The first pages of the chapter dedicated to Derridain Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity make it clear that Derrida’s earlierworks legitimate Gasche’s (quasi-)transcendentalizing account ofdeconstruction. Nonetheless, the problem with The Tain of the Mirror isthat, in order to function, it needs to overlook Derrida’s latter work.Gasche himself admits that his book, aiming to expose the essentialtraits and the philosophical thrusts of deconstruction, is based onDerrida’s production prior to 1979.7 As a matter of fact, Gasche’sselection excludes not only The Post Card (first published in 1980), butalso Glas (first published in 1974). Despite recognizing the limitationof his book, Gasche still insists that the motifs found in earlier works‘continue to inform and direct Derrida’s more ‘‘playful’’ texts’. Yetsuch playful texts declared to fit easily in the reading protocol of TheTain of the Mirror do not even appear in the book’s bibliography. This isno mere oversight: once one suggests that these playful texts are pri-marily the application of ‘infrastructures’ discovered in the first phase


of Derrida’s career, one is not obliged to check what actually happensin them. Or perhaps one can read them later, after the philosophicalcontext in which the ‘so-called literary texts’ have come to light.

In any case, Rorty could promptly agree with Gasche that a pro-foundly philosophical thrust is present in Derrida’s work, as I supposeGasche would concede that there is a literary and bright side todeconstruction. What differentiates the two is the answer to the ques-tion of Derrida’s true tonality. What is the essential Derrida? Who isDerrida at his best? The one who plays with philosophy, circumvents itand helps us stop caring for it, or the one who brought to light aconceptual system that at once belongs to and breaks from the tra-jectory of transcendental philosophy?

While The Tain of the Mirror considers the textualization of Hei-degger’s ontology to be the core of deconstruction – ‘the ‘‘source’’ ofall being beyond being is generalized, or rather general, writing’ (p. 177)– Rorty treats it with indulgence, as a juvenile yielding to nostalgia, amomentary falling for the metaphysical romance. According to Rorty,Derrida describes Heidegger’s thought as an attempt to reach theconditions for the possibility of the ontic world, in view of the appro-priation of that which cannot be doubted, something so clear andevident that no further insight is needed. But Derrida goes a step toofar when he believes that he can do better than Heidegger, that he cansucceed where the shepherd of Being failed. There would be some-thing that Heidegger did not grasp, something that Derrida, in hisexorbitant effort to look into every aspect of the real, perceived.According to Derrida, Heidegger did not see the trace, the one wordthat no one can afford arguing about, the one expression of theunconditioned which cannot be treated as the name of one moreconditioned. Such an infrastructural entity is the true and only con-dition of possibility for the existence of the propositions whichdescribe the real; ‘the name of the Ineffable, of what can be shown butnot said . . . that in which we live and move and have our being’.8 Themeta-metaphysical word ‘trace’ does not allow revisions and rede-scriptions. It is final and inevitable since for Derrida it is the groundwhich simultaneously makes possible and impossible the movement oftranscendental philosophy. As Giorgio Agamben argued: Derrida,having restored philosophical standing to the nonpresence of sig-nification, risks establishing ‘an actual ontology of the trace’.9

One could explain in detail what the trace is for Derrida (as Gaschehad done in a dangerously systematic fashion), but I think that thisgesture would distract attention away from the target of Rorty’spolemic. What Rorty finds inadequate in Derrida’s early texts is lesstheir particular thetic content than their theoretical justification. Forexample, as long as Derrida admits that ‘trace’ is just a metaphor, a toolcreated to unsettle the stability of transcendental arguments, then

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 47

everything is fine. The problem arises if Derrida suggests that hisargument is true because of its contact with the very infrastructure ofreality, not because the community of readers accepted it as mean-ingful. Rorty questions Derrida exactly when the latter claims to havediscovered the trace, for such a claim betrays the intent to answer astrictly transcendental question about the condition for the possibilityof Being.

The trouble with the question is that it looks like a ‘scientific’ one, as if weknew how to debate the relative merits of alternative answers, just as weknow how to debate alternative answers to the questions about the condi-tions 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. Kant’stranscendental synthesis, Hegel’s self-consciousness, Heidegger’s Sorge,Derrida’s trace: such is the never-ending story of brilliant artistic andpoetic creations posing as ultimate unveilings of reality. These areproposals, promises, performances. Rigour and demonstration havenothing to do with the game. Habermas has accused Derrida of beingoracular, insisting that respectable philosophers like Husserl asopposed to Heidegger, are argumentative and logical. Nonetheless,Rorty believes that the exhibition of oracularity is Derrida’s best asset.To be argumentative means to be old, traditionalist and conservative; itimplies respecting the rules with which ‘they talk’ and accepting thedemands of ‘rational’ discourse. If deconstruction wants to be deceitfuland innovative, it cannot pretend also to be truthful and argumenta-tive. One can be rigorous only by accepting the rules of communicativeaction. He who doubts such dictates, who complicates the familiarmodes of argumentation, has to give up the customary criteria ofjudgement. Rorty concludes: ‘Poetic world-disclosers like Hegel, Hei-degger and Derrida have to pay a price, and part of that price is theinappropriateness to their work of notions like ‘‘argumentation’’ and‘‘rigor’’.’11

Derrida’s deconstruction is a clever creation which should not beseduced by the pretension of being the only genuinely scientificmethod. For science and its direct contact with things, one alwaysarrives too late. The movement towards phenomena has first to passthrough a vocabulary which necessarily stains the lens with which onelooks at the world, so any claim of having understood contingency andgrasped the condition of its existence is destined to fail. According toRorty one cannot step beyond the propositional level, since one isalways dealing with ‘snow’ and never with snow; with ‘traces’ instead oftraces. The only chance of overcoming Tarski’s nominalistic tautologywould consist in explaining how a pre-linguistic reality provokes


linguistic entities, how the world gear moves the language gear. If onewere able to do so, one could finally justify a belief by exhibiting itsextratextual conditions. However, it is impossible to explain the way inwhich the world provokes the words we use to talk about it. Unfortu-nately, as Davidson puts it, ‘no thing makes sentences and theories true:not experience, not surface irritations, not the world, can make asentence true’.12

Davidson suggests that our beliefs can be justified only on the basisof other beliefs, and our propositions on other propositions. Theprobatory vectors do not run vertically from the mind to the world butthey redirect us horizontally to other mind products. Therefore Der-rida, to be coherent with his own anti-transcendental therapy, cannotprofess that the structures he introduced on the philosophical scenehave a dignity which other metaphors lack. He cannot silently enforcethe presupposition that certain special ‘non-words’ are somehow ableto mirror something beyond and behind the propositional truths,something that is not already textual. But if the structure is alreadytextual – which for Rorty means historical, contingent, exposed tofalsification, in one word, finite – it cannot avoid being recontextua-lized and transformed into a totally different infrastructure. Anystructure that is in fact marked by finitude must imply the possibility ofbecoming other than itself. For this reason, Derrida cannot state thatany discursive formation (present, past or future) necessarily works onthe ground of differance. Only by being the God-like entity which onecannot be, would it be possible to lay such a general claim. Yet, in acertain sense, it is not wrong to understand Derrida’s metaphors asinfrastructures. For sure, they are the conditions of the possibility ofdeconstruction, the devices that allowed its discourses to be produced.Without them, Derrida would not be who he is. But in order to beconsistent with the Davidsonian intuition that ‘any level of meaningmust be language-like’,13 that no magic language or name can ever beproper and final, Derrida has to dismiss the belief that there exists ahidden logical space from where to anticipate the structure of anypossible utterance. Instead of foreclosing what might be, of offeringtranscendental insights on the conditions for the possibility of Being assuch, Derrida should be content in playing with the vocabularies hefinds on his way in order to keep the future coming – the only ‘beyond’he should take care of. Derrida’s need to find new metaphors once hiscurrent ones lose their poignancy suggests that he is less interested insystematizing the structure of the real, in showing the infrastructureswhich ground it, than in shaking it up in order to promote its after-wards. Given this interest, Rorty concludes that Derrida should besatisfied with having given a response to the tradition that is influentialto the present of philosophy. A response and not the response because,


since the legacy itself is irreducibly plural, there cannot be a soleauthentic way of engaging it.

In the sixth chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes –in a passage crucial for understanding his privatization of decon-struction – that Derrida’s greatest merit consists in transforming phi-losophical reflection into a private matter, therefore bridging the oldgap between philosophy and literature. Once Derrida eventually rea-lized that it is always bad to foretell what is possible and what is not, heleft behind all the dreams of totalization and systematicity and startedexperimenting with new ways of writing. He dropped theory and star-ted wondering the mental associations produced by a thought liber-ated from the necessity of trying adequately to represent the structureof the world. For Rorty, deconstruction at its best is able to reducephilosophy to a production of fantasies which neither claim to be truenor to have any political relevance. Since they cannot demonstrateanything or refute anybody without falling in the much malignedmetaphysical tradition, the only endowment that Derrida’s texts pos-sess is the exhibition that something original can still be performed.Furthermore, such performances can only be ‘private’ for Derrida hasabandoned the search for infrastructures as well as the Heideggeriannarcissistic idea that philosophical tradition set the course for thehistory of the ‘West’.

The importance of this passage requires an unabridged citation.

Whether or not Derrida was initially tempted by the transcendental projectwhich Gasche ascribes to him, I suggest that we read Derrida’s later writingsas turning such systematic projects of undercutting into private jokes. In myview, Derrida’s eventual solution to the problem of how to avoid the Hei-deggerian ‘we,’ and, more generally, avoid the trap into which Heideggerfell by attempting to affiliate with or incarnate into something larger thanhimself, consists in what Gasche refers to disdainfully as ‘wild and privatelucubrations.’ The later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking, andthereby breaks down the tension between ironism and theorizing. He simplydrops theory – the attempt to see his predecessors steadily and whole – infavor of fantasizing about those predecessors, playing with them, giving freerein to the trains of associations they produce. There is no moral to thesefantasies, nor any public (pedagogic or political) use to be made of them;but, for Derrida’s readers, they may nevertheless be exemplary – suggestionsof the sort of thing one might do, a sort of thing rarely done before.14

It appears evident that Rorty’s interpretation ends up labelling thelater Derrida with a sort of ‘double privacy’. Deconstruction is privatebecause it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendentaldemand, privatizing itself in a self-referential fantasizing, but it is alsoprivate because it deprives itself of any political pretension.

I organized the first chapter around the strengths of Rorty’s


rearrangement of deconstruction, suggesting the directions wherepragmatism and deconstruction might converge or, better, mightalmost converge. It is now time to start questioning the double privacythat Rorty attributes to Derrida. In order to challenge Rorty’s attemptto align deconstruction with the American pragmatist tradition, it willbe necessary to consider the legitimacy of the two key features of hisinterpretation: on the one hand, the legitimacy of reducing decon-structive writing to a sort of autobiographical drift, an activity liberatedfrom 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 alsomocked the desire to engage philosophy with political struggle, adesire that has deeply dominated French contemporary thought(Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.). In the pages that follow, Iwill argue that the latter kind of privacy is altogether unacceptable,while the former eludes the problematics of deconstruction and is thusinadequate by itself. Rorty at once expects too much anti-philosophyand too little politics from Derrida. He generously awards Derrida thesuccess of having circumvented the metaphysical tradition by trans-forming theory into autobiography, but intolerantly claims that Der-rida should be considered a thinker lacking any public dimension. Inthis chapter I deal with Rorty’s generosity; in the next I will discuss hisintolerance. I will show that both witness Rorty’s desire not to takeDerrida and deconstruction seriously either from a philosophical or apolitical point of view.

Before discussing the limits of the privatization of deconstruction, Ithink it is useful, as anticipating the tone of my arguments, to recallDerrida’s reactions to Rorty’s reading protocol. On the few occasionswhen Derrida commented on it, his hostility was obvious. For example,during the dialogue with Maurizio Ferraris constituting the first part ofA Taste for the Secret, Derrida defines the interpretation of someone likeRorty as a case of ‘repressive tolerance’. What Ferraris had previouslysuggested is actually true: Rorty allows deconstruction to do whatever itwishes; he will neither denounce nor make fun of it, but only on thecondition that it gives up any pretension of being involved with ‘thetruth’. 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 factrepressive, insofar as it seeks to strip anyone who complicates the questionof philosophy and the relations between philosophy and literature of anyclaim to deal with truth.15

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


aestheticized privacy completely detached from the space of publicdebates. Such is the ruse of Rorty’s strategy: as soon as philosophy isreduced to literature, it is no longer important to take it seriously andto argue about it. Rorty’s ‘brand new’ idea of philosophy is actually notso different from what Derrida notices in Flaubert’s 1868 letter to hisniece Caroline: once philosophy admits its end, recognizes the obviousfact that it is always and already something creative (i.e., literature),one can start to enjoy philosophers for the great artists that they are. Asart, philosophy is marvellous. 16

In another interview, Derrida opposes the widespread mis-understanding that reads in his work ‘a declaration that there isnothing beyond language . . . and other stupidities of that sort’. Der-rida clarifies that, on the contrary, ‘[t]o distance oneself from thehabitual structure of reference, to challenge or complicate our com-mon assumptions about it, does not amount to saying that there isnothing beyond language’.17 One last example: in ‘Circumfession’ –which, according to Rorty, is one of Derrida’s best moments because inthis ‘diary’ he gives up any transcendental claim and writes a Proustianmemorial – Derrida picks on Proust himself, Rorty’s favourite hero, theone he never criticizes. The cause for a moment of anger and irony is asentence in which Proust advocates – so to speak – the purificationfrom every philosophical stain, thus aligning with theoretical asceti-cism, and opposing resistance to theory. Derrida writes:

I remember having gone to bed very late after a moment of anger and ironyagainst a sentence of Proust’s, praised in a book in this collection ‘LesContemporains,’ which says: ‘A work in which there are theories is like anobject on which one has left the price tag,’ and I find nothing more vulgarthan this Franco-Britannic decorum, European in truth, I associate with itJoyce, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and a few others, the salon literature of thatrepublic of letters, the grimace of a good taste naive enough to believe thatone can efface the labor of theory, as if there wasn’t any in Pr., and med-iocre 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 theprice to read the price displayed.18

To believe in an unserious Derrida, a Derrida purely lacking theories, isto avoid the effort to read him. A certain labour is required to see thetheories attached. By contrast, it looks as if Rorty thinks it is notworthwhile to spend, or rather waste, so much time and energy oncarefully reading the philosophical texts which he writes about. Hisinterpretation is wilfully superficial because it does not want to lookwith more patience at the relation between the playful dimension ofDerrida’s writing and its serious philosophical thrust. I am not willingto go as far as Ferraris who affirms – perhaps winking at Derrida – that


the inquisitor who burns books, and sometimes even their authors, ismore respectful of their theses than the ironist in the contingent,solidaire and ironic republic of ideas.19 However, it is clear that Rorty’sreading is too quick to grasp deconstruction without betraying its spirit.

As Derrida’s comments quoted above reveal, he is explicitly resistantto the kind of interpretation Rorty proposes of his work. Derrida is notat all happy about the theoretical ascetism – to use a fortunateexpression coined by Gasche in referring to Ernst Tugendhat20 – withwhich Rorty labels him.

Is it not too generous to assume that Derrida, at a certain point of hisphilosophical career, starts avoiding the urge for transcendentality andconfines his thought to a propositional and linguistic conception oftruth? Is it true that Derrida moves in a hermitage sheltered from anytheoretical and transcendental temptation? Does he actually stopreferring to the public world and take refuge in a post-philosophicaland post-transcendental privacy? In order to answer these questions, itwill not suffice to rely on Derrida’s reaction. The only way of judgingthe validity of Rorty’s interpretation is by paying close attention to whathappens in Derrida’s 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 ‘cutsthe branches’; he experiences the exile of terminology,its paradoxical subsistence in the isolation of allunivocal reference.

(Giorgio Agamben, ‘ Pardes: the writing of potentiality’)

Before dealing in detail with Monolingualism of the Other – the essaywhich will prepare a general critique of post-philosophical arguments –let me start by highlighting some gaps in Rorty’s reading of ‘Envois’.This bizarre collection of postcards is obviously the text upon whichRorty grounds his thesis that Derrida switches from philosophy toautobiography. But a more respectful reading of the text reveals a plotvery different from that described by Rorty.

Firstly, Rorty is too fast in deciding that the signer of the love lettersis Derrida himself. In fact, it is important to underline that there is notextual evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the signerof 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’ towhom the cards are addressed changes in time. As Gayatri ChakravortySpivak indicates, both the sender(s) and the receiver(s) remain


unidentifiable.22 Derrida himself warns of this complication in the‘reading instructions’ which precede the collection of sendings: ‘Thatthe signers and the addressees are not always visibly and necessarilyidentical from one envoi to the other . . . you will have the experience ofall this, and sometimes will feel it quite vividly, although confusedly’(p. 5). Once the impossibility of identifying the invisible author of thepostcards has been recognized, another undecidability steps in. If onecannot be sure that ‘Envois’ speaks of Derrida and his private life, onehas no way of deciding if the postcards refer to actual persons andevents. Since addressor(s) and the addressee(s) cannot be identified,since we cannot know if they are real existing beings or merely fictionalcharacters, it is impossible to conclude that the events and facts towhich the postcards allude exist beyond the fictive space of the recit.

Without taking into serious consideration Derrida’s opening dis-claimers, Rorty hastens to affirm that ‘Envois’ finds its poignancy in thereference to ‘real-life events and people’.23 That such events andpeople are real, that Derrida himself is the protagonist of the love storytold in the postcards, is something not provable. Recalling in a foot-note the passage I quoted above on the difficult identificability of thesignatures in the envois, Rorty is well aware of the fact that the lifewhich organizes the postcards can be Derrida’s or someone else’s, realor imaginary. ‘However’, he stubbornly proceeds to highlight theautobiographical character of ‘Envois’. So basically, Rorty’s compli-ments to Derrida for having ended philosophy and embraced auto-biography are based on a text whose status is not clear, somethingwhich might or might not refer to Derrida’s private life.

Moreover, the fact that autobiographies deal with real lives is anassumption much questioned in literary studies. As de Man argued inthe opening remarks of his ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, auto-biographies seem to depend on actual and potentially verifiable eventsmore clearly than other literary genres.24 Autobiographies function onthe basis of a true reference to life, and even if they contain phantasms,dreams and deviations, their meaning would still remain rooted in theidentity of a subject who lived the narrated experiences. But – and thepoint de Man makes about autobiographies whose ‘proper name’ isreadable is even more evident in ‘Envois’ where the author withdrawsfrom the scene of writing – can we be certain ‘that autobiographydepends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a(realistic) picture on its model?’ Since the genre of autobiography ‘isin fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture’, the lifethat apparently produces the autobiography can be said ‘with equaljustice’ to be itself produced and determined by the autobiographicalgenre and its conventions.25 If ‘Envois’ is a work of fiction – a ‘rede-scription’ to put it in Rorty’s terms – then the claim that it finds itspoignancy in Derrida’s private and real life does not hold, for one


cannot simply say that autobiographies speak about real events and realpeople. And if it does accurately represent real events and real people, ifit is not ‘literature’, that poses an even bigger problem for Rortybecause he cannot any longer maintain that with ‘Envois’ Derrida hasdistanced himself from any desire of mimetic referentiality, of truthand representation. Briefly, one of the problems with Rorty’s use of‘Envois’ is that the difficulties of defining the genre of autobiographyundo his attempt to distinguish a referential (philosophical) and apost-referential (literary) Derrida.

The genreless ‘Envois’ – i.e., the impossibility of deciding about itsreal meaning, of knowing what the postcards refer to, who they arefrom, to whom they are destined, if they are genuine letters or justparodies of the epistolary diary, if they are philosophy or literature – isalso marked by the fact that the stream of writing is often interruptedby fifty-two blank spaces. Derrida uses such a sign, such an absence ofsigns, to indicate that part of the correspondence has been destroyed.The eroded surface might either hide a proper name, just punctuationmarks 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 blankspaces will always be kept unsolved. And for this very reason, oneshould give up ‘the impatience of the bad reader’ (p. 4): the pre-sumption of knowing what the text is all about. When we read thepostcards, we are never sure if we should take them seriously, if they arejokes or if they are symbols to decipher. The postcards bear witness totheir secrecy: exposed to the indiscreet eyes of curious postmen, andyet remaining intrinsically illegible. Derrida writes that he himself hasforgotten the secret code which governed the erasing.

9 May 1979

. . . The secret of the postcards burns – the hands and the tongues – itcannot be kept, q.e.d. It remains secret, what it is, but must immediatelycirculate, like the most hermetic and most fascinating of anonymous – andopen – letters. I don’t cease to verify this. (p. 188)

The secret persists, and its remnants produce the never-endingmovement of reading. One has to accept that the blanks which allow atext to be interpreted simultaneously make its deciphering impossible.Multiplying and disseminating the destinations, Derrida seems toexclude the possibility of finding a single hermeneutical end for hisdispatches. Why does Socrates’ hat, on the postcard that surprisesDerrida, look like an umbrella? Why are Socrates and Plato inverted?Why the small ‘p’? The reading of the postcards should take intoaccount the impotence of solving their meaning, the same sort ofpowerlessness one experiments when facing the fragment in which


Nietzsche declared ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’.26 Rorty instead istoo anxious to decide where the postcards are coming from and wherethey are going. He is sure he knows what is going on, underestimatingthe exile from univocal reference that disorganizes Derrida’s sendings.He believes ‘Envois’ to be the moment in which Derrida starts for-getting about transcendental philosophy and everything that has everbeen linked to it. But no matter how hard Rorty tries to derive astrategy of forgetfulness from an author obsessed by the necessity ofremembering, Derrida simply cannot ‘forget about philosophy as theliberated slave forgets his master’.27 Not even in his most privatemoments. Discussing some passages from Derrida’s ‘autobiographical’Monolingualism of the Other, I will show that the language of philosophymakes itself remembered even when Derrida is telling stories about theups and downs of his private life.

During a colloquium at Louisiana State University, Derrida tells theproblematic story of his belonging to France, his so-called nativecountry. The childhood he spent in Algiers makes him, in fact, para-doxically and aporetically French. French is Derrida’s mother tongue,the language his mother and father spoke, the language spoken in thefamily and at school, in the privacy of the home as in the publicity ofthe market. But, in spite of such familiarity, French cannot be con-sidered his language: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’28

Derrida speaks only one language, he is monolingual. Nonetheless, hisonly language is not really his since he is not able to acknowledge it ashis own:

Yet it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined tospeak, as long as speech is possible for me in life and death; you see, neverwill this language be mine. And, truth to tell, it never was. (p. 2)

Derrida recognizes himself to be a French product, a production ofFrance’s school system, of the classics one reads in school as thefoundations of Frenchness. Nonetheless, such closeness, such com-munion with a nation, a language and a culture is not pacific. It iscontinuously bothered and disturbed by a small but infinite distance,by the expanse of the sea which separates a non-observant Jew born inAlgiers from the capital Paris. To live on board of the French languagedoes not exclude being at the border of France. Feeling not at home init, 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 itwith its language and culture, was ‘naturally’ crossed first by Berberlanguages from Maghreb, then by Arabic. At the time when Derridawas still a child, French was in the process of completely replacingArabic ‘as the official, everyday, administrative language’ (p. 37).


French was becoming the mother tongue of Algeria to the point thatArabic in the lycee was taught as an optional foreign language. Arabic: aforeign language one might choose among others (English, Spanish,German; Latin was required). In Algeria, French, which came from faraway, not autochthonous but imported by an intimidating Paris,dominated the scene of culture. The home called Algeria depended onthe super-home that was France; a mother on another mother; ametropolis, Algiers, on the authentic mater-polis, Paris. At school, onewould have learned by heart France’s history and geography, thenames of every district’s capital and all of its rivers. But ‘not a wordabout Algeria, not a single note on its history and its geography,whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany and the Gironde estuarywith our eyes closed’ (p. 44). To understand Derrida’s problematicrelation to France better, we should also recall that in 1943 underPetain, with an ‘occupation’ that did not even bring to Algeria a singleGerman uniform, the government revoked French citizenship fromJews, citizenship granted to them but not to Muslim Algerians by theCremieux Decree of 1870 with the aim of assimilating them toFrenchness.

Growing up in the colony, in the dimension organized around aspectral centre located elsewhere, Derrida recognizes the impossibilityof belonging without doubts or dissonance to any country, to anyhomeland, to any language. He does not claim that another nation orcommunity, a different existing symbolic place would make him feelmore at home and at ease. On the contrary, Derrida suggests that theproduction of speaking individuals from mute infants always andinevitably involves a violence, and that the identification with a certainlanguage and the nation it represents is thus the effect of a constitutivedressage. No one is ever a native or a native speaker because no nationand no language can ever claim to have a natural right over a certainland. Language does not naturally grow on a piece of land. It is neverautochthonous but always imported. That is why the mother tongueshould not be considered a natural mother at all.29 Derrida, in fact, isnot linked to French by some sort of an organic connection. He had tolearn how to speak it. He was trained to act ‘as if’ it were natural tospeak such determined language. If French were innate, Derrida’smother would not have had to teach it to her speechless son. But sincethe earth does not have a nomos, a linguistic ‘second nature’ – to use aterm common to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche – had to be imposed byGeorgette 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 beenassigned to him by external authorities? His own origin assumes theconfiguration of an alien colonization. It functions as a ban from thepossibility of speaking a very proper language, of truly being himself.


Derrida does not hesitate to affirm that his own linguistic identityhas always been problematic to him because he perceives it not as hisown but as an effect of renvois from elsewhere. 30 Being always alreadyan other, he declares himself to be incapable of saying withouthesitation je, ‘I’.

These are Derrida’s memories, the anamnesis through which heattempts to remember, recall and reconstruct why for him French hadalways been the language of, and from, the other. However, againstsomeone like Rorty who would rush to sanction this text as auto-biographical, it is important to underscore that Monolingualism of theOther is not solely a private diary, a memoir neglectful of the philoso-phical language. In fact, it constantly shifts from autobiographicalremembering to a reflection on the very possibility of writing the self.The problem Derrida faces is that any account of a contingent andsingular situation, a situation with an exclusively private value, ‘mine,for example’ (p. 19), has to be expressed in terms that overcome theprivacy of life. These terms end up attributing a general value to life, avalidity ‘in some way structural, universal, transcendental, or ontolo-gical’ (p. 20). Insofar as it can only be said in the vocabulary that onewas taught – no private language is possible – every event that can betold exists only within the horizon of expectations of a mother tongue.Does not the account of a unique and unrepeatable event such as one’slife fall victim to generality as soon as one talks about it? Does notpublic language always contaminate the privacy of memory? Or better,even before being expressed linguistically, an event, in the verymoment in which it is lived, has a dimension which is not purely privatesince one can live experiences (Erleben) only within a linguistic con-stellation. 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 ofgeneral law, thus denying its private character.

It is evident that Derrida, to give an account of himself, is forced touse a French vocabulary influenced by Heidegger’s conceptual web,especially by the notion of Dasein as the being whose peculiarity is tobe given to impropriety. The contamination of such jargon provokesthe impossibility of writing a pure biography, to live a pure real lifeimmune to theoretical and universal germs. The confession, ‘I onlyhave one language; it is not mine’, assumes the value of a philosophicalposition, a demonstrable truth, simply because it is possible as thoughtand statement. One comes to wonder if the personal and privatealienation experienced by Derrida is not the ontic realization of thenecessary and ontological alienation, which does not take away any-thing from anybody since – being situated before and on this side ofany subjectivity, of any ipseity, of any consciousness – it is the a prioricondition for the existence of an ‘anybody’ to steal from. Without suchinalienable alienation, no alienation historically determined would


ever be possible. Speaking of the colonizing French from Louisiana (aterritory that, as Algeria, had gone through French colonization),Derrida seems to say that a certain colonizing violence is always pre-sent. Why? Because there is no experience which is not already sub-jected to language, to the law of the other, the law coming fromabroad. Just as any Dasein can exist only outside itself, since its ownpossibilities are not posited by itself but inherited from history, so tooculture is never natural, native or peaceful. Derrida notes: ‘Thisstructure of alienation without alienation, this inalienable alienation, isnot only the origin of our responsibility, it also structures the pecu-liarity [le propre] and property of language’ (p. 25).

In the manner in which colonial rape might be acknowledged as anembodiment of a more general and ontological violence, Derrida’suncommon life ends up appearing nothing else but the actualizationof the transcendental infrastructure that made its happening possiblein the first place. The feeling of never being at home, Derrida’s privateemotional tonality, bears vivid witness to that public ontologicalstructure called Unheimlichkeit: what holds for him, also applies to allhuman beings. Derrida thus wonders if just the fact of being heard andunderstood does not makes him ‘the universal hostage’ (p. 20). Butwhat does it mean to be the universal hostage?

I think it means two things at once. First, the universal hostage is theone who is the most representative case of being held hostage: if wewant to understand what a hostage is, we just need to learn about thatone hostage par excellence, the one who serves as the form or arche-type of all present, past, and future hostages. Second, the universalhostage also refers to the fact that any particular event can be con-sidered as the mere realization of a universal law. Therefore, Derrida isthe universal hostage since he is the ideal example of being heldhostage and also because everything that he – as anybody – has livedfalls hostage to generality. Derrida’s personal case appears nothingmore than a revelatory example, perhaps even an exemplary revela-tion, of the transcendental structure that everyone, whether con-sciously or not, acts out.

One can also, of course, try to reverse the terms of the argument. Forinstance, one might want to state – as Rorty does – that the existentialityof Dasein is only Heidegger or Derrida’s generalization of their ownprivate situation and feeling. However, even in this way, one cannotavoid 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-philoso-phical’ contingency is nevertheless the confirmation of philosophy’sjargon. The reasons for the impossibility of a passage from theory toautobiography can be drawn from two of Derrida’s essays which dealwith declarations of philosophy’s death. Rereading some passages from


‘White mythology’ and ‘On an newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philo-sophy’, it will be clearer why Rorty’s circumvention of philosophy isimpossible to accomplish.

Rorty’s Hidden Reductionism

Philosophy, that is, the set of abstract notions produced by theory, hashidden in itself sensible figures drawn from the language humanbeings ‘naturally’ use every day. To succeed, philosophy does not onlyhave to produce concepts, it also has to erase the sources of its owndiscourse. In fact, if the quotidian and the contingent which con-taminate the purity of the concepts were not overlooked, the attemptsto pass philosophy for the ‘science of sciences’ would fail. Since phi-losophy claims to be the purest mode of argumentation, it has to makeits relation with the naive life-world disappear. Consider the followingpassage:

I was thinking how the Metaphysicians, when they make a language forthemselves, are like [image, comparison, a figure in order to signify fig-uration] knife-grinders, who instead of knives and scissors, should putmetals and coins to the grindstone to efface the exergue, the value and thehead. When they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, theysay: ‘These pieces have nothing either English, German or French aboutthem; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are notworth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and theirexchange value is extended indefinitely.’ They are right in speaking thus. Bythis needy knife-grinder’s activity words are changed from a physical to ametaphysical acceptation.31

It is with this long extract from Anatole France’s dialogue betweenPolyphilos (who is speaking above) and Aristos, a dialogue subtitled‘On the language of metaphysics’, that Derrida begins his 1971 ‘Whitemythology’. Derrida treats France’s scepticism as an example of thetypical arguments against the labour of theory: to the transcendentalprojects that aim at unveiling the conditions of the possibility ofexperience, one can always contest the universality of the categoriesmagically discovered, affirming the contingency of any conceptualoperation. As Rorty concludes: ‘There is nothing done within theKantian tradition which the dialectical tradition cannot treat as thedescription of the practices of a certain historical moment.’32 Whilethe Kantians – the ‘Metaphysicians’ in France’s dialogue – are busyconcealing the mundane origins of their production to increase itsvalue, the ironists, more honestly, protest that all discourses aremarked by a time and a space, a date and a place.


Rorty’s positions are clearly in syntony with France’s sceptical dis-missal of philosophy. In fact, he approvingly quotes Polyphilos’ dis-course in a note of ‘Philosophy without mirrors’ – the concludingchapter of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For France and Rorty,on the grounds of philosophical systems there is the everyday languagecamouflaged as something special. Philosophy would then be nothingother than the skilful process through which contingent words areerased of their imprints. In fact, such traces would disclose anembarrassing connivance with the sensible world that metaphysicspretends to have surpassed.

The criminal business of philosophy is to make one lose track of itstheoretical coins and peddle them as pure concepts. Worldly produc-tions ascend to the hyperuranium as long as philosophers recycle thecorrupted natural language in theory’s heaven. ‘Constitutionally, phi-losophical culture will always have been an obliterating one.’33 It will bemortuary and mortal because it wears out the vital force of the terrainon which it originated and, at the same time, acts as if it has no bondwith such a field. Philosophy needs to make its origin disregarded tosucceed in the project in which it is involved. However, the ironistresists metaphysics’ conspiracy of silence by reactivating the materialorigin of the theories produced by transcendental philosophers. As agood debunker, he highlights the evidence to nail down philosophy. Inthe Crisis, Husserl subjects European sciences to a similar investigation:to the disciplines that forgot or never knew their limits, those which livein dreams, one has to show the concrete contingency of their prove-nance.34 Philosophy (Rorty) and sciences (Husserl) must be challengedfor they do not bear memory of their contamination with the interestedand practical dimension of the life-world. In order to reactivate theproper meaning of the great products of spirit, one must acknowledgethat ideality has its ground in a non-theoretical approach to the world.Husserl claims that the ‘meaning-fundament’ of pure geometry is inthe art of land surveying: if such original meaning-giving practice isignored, geometry would be condemned to a perpetual crisis. In asimilar fashion, Rorty tries to rescue philosophy from its disappointingdelusions by recalling that no philosophy can ever succeed. Failure isinevitable because, whatever precautions one might take, the mark ofthe natural world would still block the elevation of the ego beyond life’scontingencies. It is thus a matter of finding evidences to bring to court,in a trial before a judge, and remind the suspected discourses – in aKantian attitude indeed – of their genealogy and their grounds.Metaphysics is charged with being white man’s mythology, the mythoswhich tries to remove from its logos every sensible stain and conse-quently rule in the name of Reason.35 Such Western mythology, at leastuntil the ironists appeared on the scene of history, was able to disguiseitself as candid, just and reasonable.


Philosophy is considered the fog, the sad veil shrouding the livingmeaning of life. But now the time is right for the veil to fall, for life toexpose its full productivity. Rorty appreciates Derrida exactly forexhibiting ‘life-world’ as the source of the meaningfulness of his envois.Deconstruction avoids the dishonesty of transcendental philosophyadmitting that its ultimate reason, its deepest ground, is in Derrida’sown actual life, in the concreteness of his unphilosophical being-in-the-world. Growing out of the life of Jacques Derrida, deconstructionalways needs to be conjugated in the first-person singular. Decon-struction for Rorty is the ultimate Lebensphilosophie.36

Rorty uses deconstruction as if it were a ladder built by Derrida toclimb over philosophers’ claim to speak for a ‘we’ and to access anepoch that can serenely accept the idiosyncrasy of any theoretical sys-tem. Nevertheless, Derrida had himself already clarified almost fortyyears ago in ‘White mythology’ that the ascetic project of escaping frommetaphysics to inaugurate an afterwards is not feasible. If deconstruc-tion is that which Rorty wishes it to have become in the latter phase ofDerrida’s career, then deconstruction is impossible.

[L]et us rather attempt to recognize in principle the condition for theimpossibility of such a project. In its most impoverished, most abstractform, the limit would be the following: metaphor remains, in all itsessential characteristics, a classical philosopheme, a metaphysical con-cept. (p. 219)

Discourses which look for metaphors (i.e., the trace of natural lan-guage) in the philosophical system in order to criticize its legitimacyare nothing but variations of philosophy itself, since they unconsciouslyemploy the conceptual outcomes of that very tradition with which theywant to break. As Derrida puts it: ‘metaphor seems to involve the usageof philosophical language in its entirety, nothing less than the usage ofso-called natural language in philosophical discourse, that is, the usageof natural language as philosophical language’ (p. 209). But if prag-matism can menace the system of metaphysics only from within andnot attack it from abroad, one should conclude that every endeavour tounmask philosophy’s presumed purity is troubled by a constitutionalaporia. The hermeneutics of suspicion, following Nietzsche, claim thattruths are illusions whose deceptive nature has been forgotten; meta-phors which are exhausted and without sensuous power; coins whichhave lost their pictures and count now only as pure value, no longer ascoins. But such thoughts are not as weak as they want to be. Acknowledgeyour contingency, I will recognize mine, is for Derrida a commandmentcomplicit, in a deep and constitutive manner, with the history ofmetaphysics.37

If one decides – for instance on the basis of the belief that metaphors


rather than statements determine most of our philosophical convic-tions38 – to detect the metaphors which sign the body of the philoso-phical. In order to do so, one must first, argues Derrida, produce arigorous concept of metaphor, distinguishing its structure ‘from all theother turns of speech with which metaphor is too often confused’(p. 220). In order to look for metaphors, one must know what ametaphor essentially is. The problem is that the search for metaphorsis inspired by the same desires which organize the very tradition whoseauthority one is trying to dismantle. It appears that one cannot speakabout the metaphorical without at the same time reinforcing the ruleof the transcendental. Of course Rorty does not employ the concept ofmetaphor produced by the metaphysical tradition, because first of all –as I have argued in the first chapter – he tries to get rid of thedichotomy between the literal and the figural. However, the veryreduction of philosophy to metaphors, which for Rorty equates to thereduction of theory to life, is a gesture which can occur only within thebounds of metaphysic. Rorty’s discussion of the presumed merits of‘Envois’ and ‘Circumfession’ locates theory’s condition of possibility inthe practice from which it stems, showing that any philosophy is anautobiography. But in doing so, Rorty himself gets involved in philo-sophy’s business.

The critiques I am directing against Rorty’s pragmatism, as onemight have already figured out, are inspired by de Man’s account ofNietzsche’s rhetoric of persuasion. The point de Man makes is thatNietzsche’s overcoming of the distinction between philosophy andliterature is based on his ‘deconstruction’ of the principle of non-contradiction. According to Nietzsche, the axioms of logic cannot besaid to adequate to reality. To claim so, one would need to know realitybefore logic ‘schemes’ adequate to it. For this reason, one shouldconclude that the principle of non-contradiction ‘contains no criterionof truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count astrue’.39 The problem with this claim is that while it ultimately suggeststhat logic is not grounded on the correspondence to reality but onpragmatic reasons, at the same time, it proposes an irrevocable con-clusion on what logic really is. As de Man comments in Allegories ofReading: ‘The text deconstructs the authority of the principle of con-tradiction by showing that this principle is an act, but when it acts outthis act, it fails to perform the deed to which the text owed its status asact’ (p. 125).

Rorty is well aware of the risks of inconsistency in arguing thatconstative language is not really a constatation but rather a perfor-mance. The second note of his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity statesthat Nietzsche (along with Derrida) is liable to the charges of self-referential inconsistency, for he infers from the premiss ‘truth is not amatter of correspondence to reality’ the conclusion ‘what we call


‘‘truths’’ are just useful lies’. Yet all the critiques Rorty directs againsttranscendental philosophy are clearly informed by the Nieztscheanintuition that redescriptions do not mirror meaning but, rather, theyinstitute it. In other words, Rorty bases his arguments on the veryinference which he previously discarded as generated by confusion.Just eight pages after stating that Nietzsche is inconsistent in claimingto know what he himself claims cannot be known – i.e., the truth ontruth – Rorty buys without hesitation Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism,declaring that his own account of intellectual history chimes withNietzsche’s definition of ‘truth’ as a ‘mobile army of metaphors’.40

Rorty accuses Nietzsche and the ‘bad’ Derrida of poaching. Theyhunt in the terrain which they previously prohibited and declared outof bounds. The irony is that Rorty himself cannot help but commit theexact same crime. The entirety of Rorty’s work is in fact studded withdefinitions of truth. Let me give another example of such self-refer-ential inconsistency. In an earlier essay, Rorty states: ‘truth is simply themost coherent and powerful theory, and no relation of ‘‘correspon-dence to reality’’ need[s] to be invoked to clarify ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘knowl-edge’’.’41 The point is that since Rorty is incapable of avoiding ahidden reference to something extratextual – here, power or coher-ence – he ends up playing the very part he denounced in Nietzsche andDerrida. He wears the costume of a bandit who traffics in ‘transcen-dental presupposition’, precisely what he has banned and forbidden.

Rorty’s most elaborate attempt to defend himself against the chargeof inconsistency is to be found in his review of Geoffrey Bennington’s‘Derridabase’ – the essay floating above Derrida’s ‘Circumfession’. Byreconstructing the movement of ‘White mythology’, Bennington arguesthat an etymological critique of philosophy which tries to bring abstractnotions back to the sensory and a-philosophical world is grounded onthe persuasion that philosophical discourse, in its apparent seriousness,is ‘merely forgotten or worn-out metaphors, a particularly gray and sadfable, mystified in proposing itself as the very truth’.42 Since Rortyadmits to thinking of philosophy in exactly those terms, and even ifBennington does not mention him in this passage, Rorty feels com-pelled to defend his pragmatist account of philosophy ‘as a gray and sadfable’ against the charge of being self-refuting, of being closer to Kantthan it realizes. It is obvious in fact that the point Bennington makesabout 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 dis-course puts life in the transcendental position in regard to the trans-cendental itself.43 The law of the transcendental contraband consists inthis: the act of claiming to have turned the page on transcendental arguments,silently turns back to them. So, while Rorty denounces the transcendentalas a grey and sad fable, the structure of his argument restores it.


In ‘Derrida and the philosophical tradition’ Rorty argues thatBennington’s accusation of transcendental contraband – which is, bythe way, the same charge that Rorty himself has been directing againstDerrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche and others – is both dangerous andweak. It is dangerous since it risks reintroducing the belief in a trans-cendental science which could grasp the unconscious presuppositionsof all other discourses. It is weak since one cannot put finitude in atranscendental position with respect to transcendence for ‘there is nosuch thing as transcendence’. What one can do is ‘putting the finite ina casual position with respect to the invention and use of the word ‘‘trans-cendence’’.’ 44 Rorty admits to having argued that ‘transcendence’,similar to all other words, is a human invention conceived to realizedeterminate goals. This is just a way of reciting the argument thatFeuerbach used against ‘God’. Even better, it is a way of repeating withKierkegaard that the inventor of the Absolute Spirit is a poor existingindividual, or with Judy Garland that the wizard of Oz is neither awizard nor a superman but just ‘a nerd with a gimmick’ (p. 347). IfMarx was right to be exasperated by people saying to the atheists, ‘well,then, atheism is your religion’, then we should stop annoying prag-matists with the accusation of being just lame philosophers (p. 335,note 11). Rorty wonders if being nominalist or historicist like Feuer-bach, Kierkegaard, Dewey and Davidson means belonging to thetranscendental gang: do all of them push transcendence without rea-lizing it? In Rorty’s opinion, those philosophers did not offer condi-tions for the possibility of transcendence; they only explained thecausal conditions of the word ‘transcendence’.

Rorty looks not for what has made transcendence possible, but forwhat has caused the word ‘transcendence’. Basically, he tries to escapefrom Kant by going back to Hume. However, Derrida and Benningtonare not the only ones who consider the move from the non-causaltranscendental arguments to causal empiricist explanations afflicted by‘the worst contradictions’. From the very beginning of his philoso-phical career – let us think for example of his 1971 ‘Transcendentalargument, self-reference, and pragmatism’ – Rorty himself has sanc-tioned the sceptic attack against philosophy as self-refuting. His self-defence in ‘Derrida and the philosophical tradition’ is therefore bothsurprising and puzzling since such an account of pragmatism is quitedifferent from the one he usually gives of it.

Rorty has always tried to avoid inconsistencies by claiming thatpragmatism does not look for what is behind representations, what istheir cause or their condition. Pragmatism stops taking seriously thequest for truth. It changes the topic of the conversation. It does notargue but multiplies the rhetorical questions to undermine the con-fidence in the transcendental presupposition. Thus, after havingaffirmed that any account of a fact is ‘just’ performance, it is not clear


how Rorty can approve Dewey’s ‘empirical inquires into the causalconditions of certain actual events – namely, the uses of certain words incertain ways, the origins of certain terms around which certain socialpractices crystallized’ (p. 334, emphasis added). Are events really some-thing actual? Are they something at all? And most importantly: canRorty reintroduce the reference to the origins of certain languagegames without also betraying the refusal of the dualism between beingsand representations? As Charles Guignon and David Harley mightsuggest: ‘the whole notion of objects and their causal powers existingdistinct from and independent of our ways of speaking and givingreasons should be ruled out by Rorty’s position.’45

In the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty insists thatpragmatists are with regards to transcendental argument in the sameposition that nineteenth-century secularists were with regards to God:it is less a matter of whether God and transcendence exist as facts or asproducts of human mind, than about finding the means to avoid thevocabulary of theology and philosophy. Alternatively, in ‘Derrida andthe philosophical tradition’, while embracing Feuerbach and Dewey’spositions, Rorty clearly goes for sociological explanations of philoso-phy, as Bennington would call them.46 This is how Rorty comments on‘Circumfession’:

The effect of ‘Circumfession’ is to rub one’s nose in the fact that all thequasi-transcendental, rigorous philosophizing that Bennington describes isbeing done by a poor existing individual, somebody who thinks about cer-tain things in certain ways because of certain weird, private contingencies.(p. 347)

It is true that Derrida highlights the fact that the philosopher is alwaysan empirical, factual ego; that philosophy is always occasioned andoccasional. But, if I am not mistaken, he never suggests that one thinksin certain ways about certain things ‘because of’ the contingencies ofprivate life that one happened to experience, nor that philosophicalconcepts are the result of some odd episodes in childhood or ofuncommon form of obsessional neurosis.47 To mark ideas with a dateand a place does not coincide with reducing texts and theories to mereeffects of such a date and a place. Contaminating philosophy with whathas always been considered its ‘other’ does not equate to circumvent-ing philosophy.

All the attempts to unsettle philosophy from some regional domain(sociology, psychology, or economy for instance) are as self-contra-dictory as scepticism because, says Bennington in ‘Derridabase’, they‘can only replace in the final instance something which will play thepart of philosophy without having the means to do so’ (p. 283). Whileattempting to criticize deadly transcendental discourse in name of the


living reality of life, they only confirm the power of the distinctionbetween actual phenomena and transcendental laws, the particularand the general, the conditioned and the unconditional. To put it evenmore directly: they reinforce the authority of philosophical con-ceptuality. The reduction of philosophy is reduced once again tophilosophy. In fact, without an account of the structural bond betweenphilosopheme and theorem, between the conceptualization thatbelongs to the philosophical discourse and that of other logoi, one isdoomed to transform ‘the alleged transgression of philosophy into anunnoticed fault within the philosophical realm. Empiricism would bethe genus of which these faults would always be the species. Trans-philosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophicalnaıvites’.48

The different value that Derrida and Rorty attribute to ‘real’ lifeclearly emerges if one confronts Derrida’s ‘autobiographical’ writingsto Rorty’s. In ‘Trotsky and the wild orchids’ – an essay from his Philo-sophy and Social Hope which I will discuss at length in the next chapter –Rorty treats his own childhood passions as the unquestioned cause ofhis entire philosophical position. By contrast, Derrida, in the Mono-lingualism, states that deconstruction’s first interest relies on the cri-tique of the axiom of purity, that is, the critique of the presumedexistence 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 analyticaldecomposition of a purification that would lead back to the indecompo-sable simplicity of the origin. (p. 46)

While Rorty tries to shed himself of all the philosophical veils in orderto rip the curtain aside and grasp the reality beyond it, Derrida morecautiously affirms that the recit produces the memory of something thatperhaps never was. The history he tells has never happened ‘as such’.Tracing the traces of the phantasmatic events of his childhood, an ‘asif’ history is produced. In the epilogue of Monolingualism, Derridaunequivocally states in fact that the book should not be considered asthe beginning of a future autobiography. The book does not exposeDerrida; it gives an account of the obstacles preventing auto-exposi-tion. The ultimate unveiling cannot take place so ‘the truth of what Ihave 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 nothappen’ were surely influenced by Derrida’s Judeo-French-Maghrebianbackground (p. 61). But the account of his individual journey can existonly within the bounds of the philosophical language and culture intowhich he came to be exiled (p. 71). Hence, giving an account ofoneself is never a private act. On the contrary, it is a gesture which is


always haunted by the spectres of philosophical conceptuality. Derri-da’s genealogy does not lead to the discovery of his original self, to whohe was before philosophy and who he could be after it. As Foucaultputs it, the effect of genealogy is to recognize the fact that countlessspirits dispute the possession over our own selves.49 But such recog-nition – and Derrida notes this with a force hardly found in Foucault –cannot avoid the ‘veils’ weaved by metaphysics. It is precisely in dis-cussing Foucault’s enterprise that Derrida, already affirmed in 1963(maybe for the very first time) the impossibility of purely bypassingphilosophy.50

In his review of Foucault’s The History of Madness, a book ‘admirablein so many respects, powerful in its breadth and style’ (p. 31), Derridaunderscores that Foucault’s project is to evade the force which wouldtrap any writing about madness in the policing language of reason.Foucault does not want to write the history of madness caught in thenets of classical reason. He aims to write a history of madness itself, tohear its scream before it got silenced in the discourses that were pro-duced around it. According to Derrida, the obstinate determination toavoid the ambush of the restraining and restrained language of reason,is at once the most seductive, audacious and maddest aspect inFoucault.

All our European languages, the language of everything that has partici-pated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason – all this is theimmense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the rubric ofcapture or objectification of madness. Nothing within this language, and noone among those who speak it, can escape the historical guilt – if there isone, and if it is historical in a classical sense – which Foucault apparentlywishes to put on trial. But such a trial may be impossible, for by the simplefact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasinglyreiterate the crime. (p. 35)

The case against metaphysics that Foucault prepares for trial appears asbrave as unwary. His will to ‘bypass reason’ – to ‘contourner la raison’in Derrida’s French – is as uneasy as Rorty’s determination to cir-cumvent metaphysics. A similar point was made in 1980 in ‘On a newlyarisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy’.51 Derrida gave this lecture,contemporary with ‘Envois’, at the first Cerisy-la-Salle encounterdedicated to his work. This seminar in particular, organized by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was to start with ‘The endsof man’, an essay introduced by Foucault’s announcement that the endof man was perhaps near.52 In his address, Derrida reflected upon thetonality of the verdicts on philosophy’s end. Laden with euphoria, theyannounce that it will not be too long before the liberating dis-appearance of philosophy from the world. Such discourses want us to


believe that the end of the old world and a new beginning are near;that the coming of a world not mystified by philosophy’s grey fable isimminent. The veils will fall and the real world will expose itself.Eschatology seems to be the Stimmung shared by the different varia-tions on the theme ‘the death of philosophy’. And every turn of dis-course launches itself into a surplus of eschatological eloquence(p. 145).

Derrida urges to take note of the fact that ‘an apocalyptic tone’ is notsomething which newly emerges sometime and somewhere in philo-sophy. The apocalyptic tone does not happen to philosophy, for phi-losophy as such has always existed only in the horizon of theapocalypse. Every philosopher has in fact always aspired to be the lastone – that is the first, the one who eludes the influence of worn-outmetaphors and succeeds in putting an end to the philosophical non-sense. He who believes to be truthful dwells in the apocalypse, since thetruth stands for the end, for what comes after the final judgement. Thetone of truth would thus always be apocalyptic. Derrida discusses theexample of Kant, whose 1796 ‘On a newly arisen superior tone inphilosophy’ attacked those who, in a very lofty tone, preached thedeath of philosophy in the name of some kind of a supernaturalrevelation. But

if Kant denounces those who proclaim that philosophy has been at an endfor two thousand years, he has himself, in marking a limit, indeed the end ofa certain type of metaphysics, freed another wave of eschatological dis-courses in philosophy. His progressivism, his belief in the future of a certainphilosophy, indeed of another metaphysics, is not contradictory to thisproclamation of ends and of the end. (pp. 144–5)

The pragmatist trust in a post-philosophical future has the samestructure which Derrida demystifies in Kant’s progressivism. The iro-nist will expose metaphysics as incapable of apokaluptein, literally, ofunveiling; he will recognize its limits and the metaphors which sign itsbody. Only then will philosophy flourish as the very human and endlessconversation that has always been. Derrida’s position is more cautiousand less optimistic. Surely deconstruction participates in the closing ofmetaphysics. It is even a prominent accomplice to such an event: ‘Weare the worst criminals in history.’53 Yet, while the other discoursesaround the end seem euphoric for thinking that they succeeded in theprojected murder, Derrida indicates that the apocalyptic craving,which longs to bury philosophy, also exhumes it. Philosophy has alwayswanted to be the apocalypse since the very structure of its argu-mentation is organized by the desire for revelation. Any discoursearound and about the end shares the apocalyptic structure of philo-sophy, and for this reason, participates in its desires. This is also what


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, fromthe casket where he deposited them, regain consciousness. They donot pass away. Moreover, all the talking about the end of metaphysicsseems to be the sign that such enterprise is not as dead as one ima-gines. On the contrary, metaphysics must be full of vitality if it is stillable to produce so many attempted disposals, including Rorty’s. To killphilosophy, obsessed by the desire of privacy, is at the same time topreserve it from disappearing: ‘And right here I kill you, save, save, you,save you run away [sauve-toi], the unique, the living one over therewhom I love.’54

In this context, it is easy to grasp Derrida’s distinction between clo-sure and end. The discourses which claim that the present is the timeafter philosophy (La filosofia dopo la filosofia is the Italian title for Rorty’sContingency, Irony, and Solidarity), believe that the age of truth andrepresentation has come to an end, disappeared, and is now dead andburied. Pointing out the closure in which philosophy is setting impliesaffirming 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 thepresent’, be transcended. ‘Envois’ or Monolingualism of the Other do notfind their poignancy – as Rorty believes – in their overcoming ofmetaphysics, but rather in their impossible step beyond it. In thisconsists ‘the discord, the drama between us: not to know whether weare to continue living together (think of the innumerable times of ourseparation, of each auto-da-fe), whether we can live with or without theother’.55 The passage beyond is at once promised, awaited and banned.Without the philosophical axiomatic, it would be impossible for us tothink at all. Once philosophical texts have been read in a certainmanner, the ivory authority of metaphysics is not left untouched, butits vocabulary, even if crossed out or in quotation marks, continues toshape all our experiences. For this reason, in order to enlarge thecrevice through which one glances at the glimmer of the beyond-clo-sure, one has to protest the authority of philosophical terminologywhile using it.56

In fact, Derrida does not try to equalize the different modalities ofparticipating in philosophy’s guilt. He aims to emphasize that anyattempt to contest the language of tradition and open a future inde-pendent from it needs to begin by first recognizing the complicity withsuch a language. As Derrida’s ‘Structure, sign, and play’ states, ‘[t]hequality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the cri-tical rigor with which this relation to the history of metaphysics and toinherited concepts is thought’ (p. 282). There are different ways ofbeing caught in the circle of metaphysics, ways that are more or lessingenuous, more or less conscious, more or less productive.


For example, at the beginning of this chapter, I tried to bring Rortycloser to Husserl. However, Husserl was perfectly aware that ‘life-world’is a philosophical concept and that only philosophy can think the non-philosophical origin of sciences and philosophy itself. Instead, Rortybelieves that to recall the sensible origin of every theoretical concept isthe post-philosophical move which would allows us to be finished withthe traditional order of discourse. According to Husserl, philosophyhas to react against the crisis that torments it by reaffirming thenecessity of a transcendental reflection and by avoiding the sirens ofscepticism. But Husserl’s move is marked by a certain ambiguity: whileclaiming the reactivation of the origin of theoretical concepts (theirnon-theoretical origin), Husserl also affirms that the meaning of thelife-world can be grasped only by the ‘we’ that we are today. Thinkingneeds to be rescued from the critical situation in which it lies. But,paradoxically, it is exactly thought’s present weariness that allows forthe reactivation of its past and, with it, of a renovated future.

Thus we find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of thebeginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given in itspresent-day form, looking back at its development. But in the absence of anunderstanding of the beginnings the development is mute as a development ofmeaning. Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward andbackward in a zigzag pattern; the one must help the other in an interplay.57

As Gasche suggests: Husserl’s method of dismantling enables a retro-gression to something ‘that cannot in principle be given as such’.58

The origins ‘as such’ – in my argument, the contingent anduntheoretical premisses of theory – will remain concealed because theycan only be mediated to us by our actual mode of reflection, by ourpresent language.

It is strange. Rorty does not hesitate calling himself ‘ethnocentric’ onthe grounds of the belief that it is radically impossible to abandon thelanguage we speak, the tradition in which we live. Yet at the same time,he assumes that one can create, without too many difficulties, a voca-bulary capable of circumventing metaphysics and reaching an auton-omous time before and beyond it. Rorty’s euphoria – euphoria that isnot alien to a certain Foucault – is caused by the persuasion of havingfound the right way of turning the page on metaphysics and ofaccessing the contingent, ironic and solidaire epoch of post-philoso-phical democracy. This is exactly the opposite of the aporia thatorganizes the pace of Derrida’s work. Euphoria in Greek means easysolution, easiness, absence of doubt, and it indicates the possibility toovercome smoothly an awkward situation. If one is in an aporia, onecannot see the passage which would wriggle out of the fix. There is nosafe exit, no easy escape. One is at an impasse; the path is a dead end.


One keeps walking up and down, trying to make an impossible steptoward something other than metaphysics. As Heidegger might havesaid, one is stuck in a Holzweg. The track is not beaten, it is impossibleto proceed along it since the obstacles encountered are ‘impassable’.From Derrida’s perspective, it is not easy to find the therapy that wouldallow 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 deter-mined by the fact that all the steps that seem to be the best in over-coming the aporia throw us back again into the depths of the regimewhich we were trying to get rid of.

Rorty himself is too well read to be unaware of the difficulties intaking the step beyond. For example, in ‘Deconstruction and cir-cumvention’, he affirms that ‘we may (as Foucault put it) be doomed tofind Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel (evenif we walk backwards)’.59 Yet, instead of lingering on the ‘dangers’connected with the circumvention of philosophy, he tries to shoulderaway the question by affirming that Derrida’s treatment of the literarygenre called philosophy eventually has allowed us to forget about it.The point is made, in slightly different terms, in the introduction toConsequences of Pragmatism. The problem that pragmatists face consistsin the need to make anti-philosophical points in a non-philosophicallanguage. So either they stop using the language of philosophy andprove that one can do well without it, or they prove that philosophycannot make the points it wants to make. In order to do the latter,pragmatists need to rely on assumptions drawn from the philosophicaltradition. The choice is thus between reaching the conclusion, orstating it. It is impossible to do both.

It is not the case that a therapeutic silence steps up at the end of theTractatus Philosophicus as the consequences of the demystification ofphilosophical meaningless propositions. Rather, the consequences ofpragmatism are anything but quiet. It is true that Rorty approvinglyand often alludes to the ladder thrown away at the conclusion of theTractatus. Yet, Wittgenstein did not hesitate to put the ladder awaywhen he was convinced that he was done with it; he set it aside once hethought he reached the point where he wanted to be. Rorty, on theother hand, keeps climbing up and down, and at the same time, sug-gests that everybody – everybody else maybe – should let the ladder go.Frederic Jameson is surely right in affirming that Rorty’s project is farmore radical than Derrida’s in his attempt to destroy ‘philosophy itselfas a history and a discipline’.60 But I doubt that Rorty can effectivelydestroy philosophy without also reinforcing the effects of its sover-eignty and dignity. Even the fact that he himself has been saying forthirty years that he is done with philosophy should be taken as thesymptom that it is not so easy – or convenient61 – for him to let go ofphilosophy.


At the end of ‘Derrida and the philosophical tradition’, Rorty comesclose to admitting that all his ‘expostulations’ against philosophy are a‘little too metaphysical’. Reading Bennington’s account of Derrida hasincreased his ‘tolerance’ for deconstruction and made him finallyrealize that

I cannot get away with my stance of tough-minded, hypostatization-bashingempiricism without falling a bit too much under the sway of the metaphy-sical logos, the one that tells you that it just isn’t logical to treat one thing as ifit were something else and that it just isn’t rational not to try to figure outwhich is the allegory and which the allegorized. (p. 349)

But this whispered confession does not lead Rorty to a general revisionof his privatization of deconstruction. One would expect at this point asincere analysis of the limits of pragmatism and its complicity withmetaphysics. One would hope that Rorty would expand on the passageI discussed above from the introduction of Consequences of Pragmatism –‘It is impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants toreach’ – and admit that once philosophy has been defined as theactivity grounded on the transcendental presupposition, on the beliefthat some discourses genuinely refer to reality, then it is impossible toproduce a discourse which would not participate in such presupposi-tion. Instead, Rorty changes the topic and puts Derrida under thespotlight. With a sympathetic attitude, he sort of forgives Derrida fornot being able to forget Plato and Kant after reading them. He con-cludes that maybe non-Jewish kids who go to school in exotic placeslike California or Indonesia, places where few have ever heard of Platoand Kant, can forget about philosophy and metaphysics, but Derridacannot. Derrida cannot. Again, Rorty reduces the impossibility ofovercoming the philosophical order as a idiosyncratic and personalmatter. Far from acknowledging that every argument structurally pro-duces a little apocalypse, he makes it sound as if it were Derrida’s faultfor not having been able to circumvent philosophy.

The truth is that, as Christopher Norris noted, Rorty counts Derridaas a useful but suspicious ally, some kind of a half-way pragmatist‘having deconstructed a great deal of surplus ontological baggage butthen fallen victim to the lure of his own negative metaphysics or sys-tematized anti-philosophy’.62 The point is that no one so far has beencapable of being pragmatist and a-transcendental all the way. In fact,who is a true pragmatist? No one, according to Rorty. Not even thefounding fathers of pragmatism. Not Dewey, since he fell victim to theseduction of radical empiricism and panpsychism.63 Not James, whounfortunately did not confine himself to declaring the quest for asuccessful theory of truth as hopeless, but had moments in which he –as Nietzsche – tried to infer what the truth consists of. Certainly not


Pierce whose definition of reality as that which remains at the end ofinquiry is ‘fishy’ because we have no idea what it would be for inquiry tohave an end. He was therefore only half-way on the path of thedestruction of the epistemological debates.64 And surely not Wittgen-stein: the conclusion of the Tractatus – even if Rorty borrows its parableof the ladder – is an undigested residue of Schopenhauer, while thesections of the Philosophical Investigations dedicated to metaphilosophyare unfortunate left-overs from Wittgenstein’s early positivistic per-iod.65 Who is left? Davidson? Almost. In his imaginary debates with thesceptic,

Davidson was a bit misleading in suggesting that he was going to show ushow coherence yields correspondence. It would have been better to havesaid that he was going to offer the skeptic a way of speaking which wouldprevent him from asking his question, than to say that he was going toanswer that question.66

It would be (too) easy to say that Rorty finds inadequate all the othercritics of the metaphysical tradition in order to be recognized as thefirst true and authentic pragmatist/ironist. Yet, he arrives at the pointof admitting that he sounded too much like Carnap in the denounceof the pseudo-problems provoked by unreal philosophical distinctionsand in the fervent physicalism of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.67 Ihope to have demonstrated that in a certain sense, Rorty has neverstepped away from physicalism. His treatment of Derrida in fact showshow Rorty tries to reduce Derrida’s philosophical positions to mereeffects of Derrida’s ‘physical’ life. One might be tempted to describeRorty’s pragmatism as a sort of reductive vitalism for he assumes privatelife to be the causal origin of any given theory.

The Disposal of Philosophy

L’erection tombe.(Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’)

Maybe I have not been generous enough with Rorty. Against hisreading, I have suggested that a solid continuity binds Derrida’s earlyand latter works, the apparently more transcendental and the appar-ently more autobiographical ones. For instance, I have shown that both‘White mythology’ and Monolingualism of the Other, following differentdiscursive strategies, testify to the incapacity of getting philosophy outof one’s mind, of breaking up with metaphysics and theory. It does nottherefore seem legitimate to claim that there is a first and a secondDerrida, that a Kehre intervened and modified the trajectory of his


work. On the contrary, his production might look pretty ‘monotonous’,always stating the necessity for philosophy to be contaminated bysomething other than itself – such ‘other’ being natural language or life– promising an absolute elsewhere while highlighting the inevitabilityfor ‘the now’ to call forth its other and its elsewhere in the language ofphilosophy. Starting from Derrida’s analysis and Bennington’sremarkable exposition of the law of the transcendental contraband, Ihave pointed to the inconsistencies in Rorty’s dismissal of philosophy asa grey and sad fable that has forgotten its constitutive contingency.

But maybe I have been too stingy with Rorty, surely less generousthan he has been with deconstruction in stressing its force toward theimminent circumvention of philosophy. After all, Rorty at his bestwould defend his reading of deconstruction, denying that he has everwanted to show what Derrida is really all about. Unveiling secrets issomething which Gasche might claim to be doing, but it is certainly notfor a pragmatist. A true pragmatist – and actually we saw there are none– would claim that his only intention is to sneak some arguments intothe philosophical scene to make it easier for philosophy to leave itsmyths behind. Rorty is trying to make from Derrida a device powerfulenough to exhaust metaphysics. The ironist does not pretend toobserve or show anything; his discourses have a performative aim, not aconstative one.

What makes Rorty – to use Dennet’s Lexicon – ‘incorrigible’, is hisability to hijack the discussion away from philosophy. When he tries toanswer his critics, when he starts looking for causal origins, Rortybecomes an ‘easy target’.68 Pragmatism is most effective when it talksnot about ‘what is’, but about what might be in the future. You cannotargue against a premonition, can you? Nonetheless, affirming that thechosen vocabulary or reading is the most suited for reaching givengoals – that it is a performance, a doing rather than a showing – is itenough to bypass the transcendental presupposition?

A pure performative, an action not grounded on an implicit con-stative, is as impossible as a pragmatism uncontaminated by thestructure of transcendental arguments. As Heidegger argued whendiscussing the idealistic interpretation of Nietzsche’s will to power,every practice is in fact always accompanied by representations, whichmeans that any performance is at the same time a theorein.69 Thecommerce that deals with pragmata is not blind but has its own insightsinsofar as the determining ground, the arche of proceeding practically,can be found only in the will. And already in Aristotle’s De Anima,willing is structurally representing. Action is possible only because thewill represents that which is willed in the willing. This is why Kantaffirms that the will is the faculty of desire which works in accordancewith concepts, that is to say, in such a way that what is represented aswilled is determinant for the action itself. The desire that originates a


performance is the representation of a fact, a reality; without therepresentation of a state of things, there would be no motive to act orto refrain from acting. Since every action is moved by will – and thisdoes not imply that every action is conscious but only that every actionis determined by a desire – but since no will or desire can exist inde-pendently from representations, no performative can avoid beingaccompanied by a constative. Moreover, a practice has its end in theactual transformation of reality so it would be impossible for the actionto have an end if whatever position of reality is to be avoided. How canone recognize the achievement of a goal without claiming to mirrorthe reality of a situation? How might one justify a decision to act if onecannot support such a decision with any fact? The exile from the will torepresent would make acting itself meaningless and arbitrary since noreason would be given for its opportunity or legitimacy. To say that thetruth is what a given community believes to be true, and that it is usefulto think of the truth in such a way, nevertheless implies the necessity ofreferring to realia – in this case, the reality of consent and convention,and the reality of utility. Every discourse that claims to have ended themirroring referentiality of the transcendental presupposition – thebelief that not all discourses or practices are arbitrary since some aregrounded on ‘raw facts’ as things themselves – indeed heavily relies onit. It is not the case that Derrida speaks of ‘pragrammatology’ ratherthan of pragmatism: the decision to act or not is always bound to thenecessity (and the limits) of calculating, of reflecting upon the situa-tion 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 evenpragmatism ends up repeating, willing or not, consciously or not, theunmasking gestures of metaphysics. Rorty’s attempt brutally to changeterrain appears only as pseudo-euphoria, because while it declares thatit leads us beyond the metaphors of insight and mirroring, it makes usdwell at the centre of the land we wanted to desert. The outside turnedout to be more inside than the inside itself; the after we were soanxious to access was merely the restoration of the present. All theblind spots and inconsistencies that I am charging Rorty with areinduced by the fact that, while he proudly promises a way out of thehistory of philosophy, his arguments lack any serious consideration ofthe structural impossibility for pragmatism to simply step away fromtheory. Every time he notices a transcendental tone in ‘anti-transcen-dental’ philosophers (Dewey and Heidegger, Davidson and Derrida,himself and Nietzsche), Rorty treats it as a mere mistake, as somethingthat should not have and could not have happened. The problem isthat this frenzy for a pure and autonomous non-metaphysical discourseis precisely what holds Rorty captive to the tradition which heannounces to have shut down.


As a typical example of how metaphysics – if something like ametaphysics indeed exists – has always proceeded, let me briefly recallwhat happens in the beginning of Husserl’s 1913 Ideas I.72 In what wasintended as a general introduction to phenomenology, Husserl startsnoticing that empirical experience, i.e., perception, gives to con-sciousness objects as beings which exist individually and spatiotempo-rally, having a temporal and spatial collocation as well as a peculiarphysical shape. However, the perceived beings might have happenedelsewhere, otherwise and in another time. Husserl thus concludes thatevery kind of individual being is contingent: ‘It is so-and-so, but essen-tially it could be other than it is’ (p. 47). It is clear that, for Husserl, thetotality of what is perceived in an individual being does not properlybelong to such being. The objects of possible experience are essentiallycontingent; they can vary without producing a mutation in the object’sown essence. An object can be otherwise and still be that object as longas its structural core is left untouched. In fact, not all the object’scharacteristics might vary: the predicates which necessarily belong tothe thing set insurmountable limits to contingency – that is, to thepossibility for the thing of being different from how it is. The idea –‘Eidos’ in Husserl’s phenomenological translation of Plato – is theimage that delimits the individual object’s idion, the representation ofwhat is proper to it. Husserl’s project is to let the very properties ofthings shine; yet in order to accomplish this goal, he needs the phe-nomenological language to be a pure idiom, a jargon uncontaminatedby empirical experience.

The level of idiomaticity is reached through the work of ideation. Itis a matter of transforming the sensory intuition of something indivi-dual into an insight of what is essential to that particular object. Thecontingency of the individual must be overcome in the determinationof the object’s necessities. In this way, one raises from empirical naturalcognition to the vision of essences. Notably, in the third paragraph ofthe first book of Ideas I – ‘Essential insight and individual intuition’ inW. R. Boyce Gibson’s translation – Husserl affirms that the perceptionof what is contingent and the insight of what is essential are structurallyintertwined, one being the condition of possibility of the other. Inparticular, the grasping of essences is grounded on what is given in theintuition of something individual, but the individual is meaningfulonly insofar as it appears as the specific materialization of an idea.Husserl writes:

Consequently it is certain that no essential intuition is possible without thefree possibility of directing one’s glance to an individual counterpart and ofshaping an illustration; just as contrariwise no individual intuition is possiblewithout the free possibility of carrying out an act of ideation and thereindirecting one’s glance upon the corresponding essence which exemplifiesitself in something individually visible. (p. 50)


The two genres of cognition are surely different in principle, but inprinciple, 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 thatboth kinds of intuition – the one perceiving an object in its contingentexistence and the other grasping it in its necessary essence – arerequired for the constitution of a valid account of the object itself. Itappears that factual perception is as essential for the intuition of anidea as the eidetic intuition is indispensable for the understanding of afact. Yet immediately after concluding the paragraph by suggesting thenecessary link between the transcendental and the empirical, Husserlrevokes the co-implication previously introduced. It would be a pro-blem for phenomenology to admit that the impure world of naturalcognitions is the condition of phenomenological knowledge. Howcould the empirical be the ground of transcendental idiom without atthe same time compromising the status of the transcendental itself? Inorder to avoid the degrading contamination of essential insight withthe existential insight, Husserl is forced to take shelter in the purelyfantastic world of eidetic variation. It is not necessary to base theprocess of ideation upon the impure flow of factual experience since itis possible to utilize also ‘non-empirical intuitions, intuitions that do notapprehend sensory existence, intuition rather ‘‘of a merely imaginative order’’ ’(p. 51). One does not need to rely on the data of perception to reachthe eidetic space since, in our imagination, we can imagine hearing amelody, perceiving bodies, having experiences and, thanks to ideation,grasp the essences of the simulated phenomena. In such a way, thetheatre of conscience produces – without any contact with the realm ofthe empirical and the existential – the truth of ideas: the non-truth offiction is responsible for the truth of phenomenology. One is in factable to know essences whose existence was never experienced, ‘whe-ther such things have ever been given in actual experience or not’.

Phenomenology does not simply reject natural insight and the naivevocabulary derived from it. It is more complex than that. Husserl has toadmit that, in order to constitute adequate essential intuitions, onemust exploit that which is foreign to eidetic idiom, that is, naturalcognition. But, at the same time, Husserl must dismiss natural insightas unnecessary for the process of ideation. Just like writing in Plato’sPhaedro, the non-phenomenological insight is a pharmakon, at once avital constituent and deadly poison. It is that which allows the institu-tion of the realm of idealities, and that which must be immediatelybanned in order to hide the instability of the eidetic.

But if the naivety of natural cognition is a key component in essentialinsight, one should conclude that phenomenology is always in crisisbecause its system to function properly needs that which forbids it tofunction autonomously. The ideological burden that phenomenologycannot escape is provoked by its relieving belief that the spectres of


contingency and existence will quietly rest segregated outside the citywalls once their services are no longer needed inside. Nonetheless,imagination is still haunted by natural cognition. Without an originaryrelation with the natural world, fancy would not have at its disposal theraw material necessary to start the process of eidetic variation. Eideticvariation needs to labour the empirical data, and thus the spectres ofthe empirical will have always and already infected the work of idea-tion. The logos as reassurance stands against the terror provoked by thebogeyman, the black man, the adumbration which might disturb thewhite domain of the transcendental. ‘Philosophy consists of offeringreassurance to children.’73 There is, there must be, an insight nothaunted and stained by naivety. For such reason, Husserl first statesthat the insight of that which exists is necessary to essential insight, andthen backs away from the consequences of his statement. In Ideas I, thethird paragraph is sacrificed by the fourth. As Derrida comments in‘Plato’s pharmacy’:

The purity of the inside can then only be restored if the charges are broughthome against exteriority as a supplement, inessential yet harmful to theessence, a surplus that ought never to have come to be added to theuntouched plenitude of the inside. (p. 128)

Phenomenology needs natural cognition but at the same time, in orderto be a pure phenomenology, it needs to get rid of it. The phenom-enological system tries to constitute its stability by expelling from itsbody, through the refuge into fancy, the contamination of what itought not need. The exact same thing happens in Rorty’s pragmatism.On the one hand, Rorty has a desperate need for transcendentalarguments, for all the tricks of philosophical tradition, because hewould otherwise not have any means of attacking the legitimacy of thetranscendental presupposition itself. He needs philosophy to argueagainst itself in order to promote the awareness of the contingency onwhich all philosophical systems are erected. On the other hand, Rortydoes not want to have anything to do with philosophy and its concepts,otherwise it would impossible for him to claim that he has bypassedphilosophical tradition. He needs to think of philosophy as somethingalien to pragmatism, something that can be circumvented and putaside because it is of little use. Without philosophy, there would be nopragmatism whatsoever. Yet with philosophy, no pure pragmatism canexists.

If transcendental arguments are as crucial for the existence ofpragmatism as the banality of natural insight is a key component forphenomenology, then the transcendental is not a noise that happensto pragmatism nor a noise that it can avoid. Pragmatism is always moreor less than what it wants to be because it needs philosophy to


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 doneusing it to overstep the stories of metaphysics. In this impossibleattempt to break away from the structure and the logic of transcen-dental arguments, Rorty winds up repeating Husserl’s moves. Husserlfirst writes that natural insight and essential insight imply each other,that one is the condition for the possibility of the other; but then, inthe quick turning of a page, he declares the possibility of reachingessences without passing through individual perceptions. In the samefashion, Rorty exploits philosophy to argue against the possibility ofany type of transcendental deduction, and then tries to forget the verytradition which allowed him to perform his critique of metaphysics. Forphenomenology as for pragmatism, it is a matter of hiding the con-ditions for the possibilities of their own tricks: the ontic is made todisappear once the ontological has been reached; philosophy dis-appears once irony has been installed.

Pragmatism dreams of a time and a language that would have endedtheir dependence on all that philosophy has ever stood for. As JohnCaputo has argued in ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental:the case of Rorty and Derrida’,74 it is this craving for autonomy whichmost distinguishes Rorty from Derrida. Rorty’s recourse to the femi-nine pronoun to talk about the ironist (she, the ironist against he, themetaphysician) is not enough to conceal the fact that his entire projectof self-creation is nothing else than a hypermasculine attempt to erasethe debt that binds every language to the other.75 Instead of admittingthat pragmatism needs transcendental philosophy, at least as much asphenomenology needs contingency, Rorty thinks he can do better thanHusserl. He thinks he can create a language which would avoid theinfluence 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 aRomantic metaphysics of the subject, Rorty insists on ignoring that thedebt with the other, the necessity of depending on the other – in oneword, ‘heteronomy’ – is not something that happens and thus might beavoided: it is the constitutive infrastructure of every language, andtherefore, of any existing being.77 As Derrida unmistakably states in thesecond part of The Post Card:

The existential analytic of Dasein situates the structure of originary Schul-digsein (Being-responsible, Being-forewarned, or the capacity-to-be-respon-sible, the possibility of having to answer-for before any debt, any fault, andeven any determined law at all) on this side of any subjectivity, any relationto the object, any knowledge, and above all any consciousness.78

Rorty cannot not know it, but for this very reason, he needs to forgetabout it. He is so at ease in such an embarrassing situation, he declines


the debt with such a hurried assurance, such an imperturbable light-heartedness, that one asks: if it is so obvious that the debts withtranscendental philosophy have been cleared, then why does Rortykeep repeating his long finished business with philosophy? Why shouldone forget about philosophy if one no longer has anything to do withit?

Rorty’s anxiety of being influenced by philosophy is analogous to themetaphysical anguish of contamination. It is nothing different fromthe fear of the other who comes – or better, who has always alreadycome – to invade and destroy the possibility of a pure autos. What is infact metaphysics if not the craving for an aseptic and immune self, for avital body which owes its existence to nothing else than itself? In thisperspective, as suggested by the Anti-Oedipus, let us remember Marx’sgreat declaration on Feuerbach. He who denies God’s existence doesonly a ‘secondary thing’, since he denies God in order to put Man inGod’s place. Should we not affirm that Rorty does as well a secondarything because he contests the supremacy of external authorities inorder to affirm the authenticity of his own laws? Rorty critiques Hei-degger for having claimed that his theory was grounded on somethingbigger than himself. Let us call this Europe, the West or History. Yet,rereading some passages and discreet footnotes, it almost seems thatRorty is not disappointed with Heidegger for having wanted to be toomuch, but for having settled on being too little: a thought whichdepends on something else than itself, is not autonomous enough forRorty. Authenticity does not consist of opening up to the other, but ofcreating one’s own system and avoiding dependency on whatevercomes from the other. Freedom from tradition is understood by Rortyin light of the ascetic category of self-control. To resist the temptationof acquiring traditional fixations, he needs in fact to master himselfwith unfailing skill and severity. The genre of active subject dreamt byRorty, and sometimes by Foucault, would not let anything happen tohimself because he is what makes things happen.79

Unfortunately, no one has control over his own erection. Derridashowed the links between the figure of the phallus and that of thesovereign in the unpublished sessions of the seminar ‘The beast andthe sovereign’. But at the same time, he also argued that since erectionis a reflex, something automatic and independent from one’s will, theground of manhood is a radical passivity which unworks any dream ofabsolute mastery and autonomy. 80 Reacting against the frenzy ofconstituting a pure and autonomous self which would not be upset bythe spectres of passivity and heteronomy, Derrida, in his respectful andinventive reading of philosophy’s great texts, tried to demonstrate howall the attempts to construct a close and autarchic totality fail. They fail,not because an external force intervenes to deconstruct an otherwisesolid structure. Any given system is essentially self-deconstructing, since


in order to be erected, it needs to be grounded on something whichremains inassimilable, indigestible, ungovernable by the system itself.As Caputo’s ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental’ puts it:‘Derrida does not ‘‘deconstruct’’ something by means of his facile andinventive capacity for redescription or recontextualization’ (p. 163).Rather, placing himself on the scene of a silent dispute, he reports thetensions and the fissures, the underground conflict at work under theapparent perpetual peace of the philosophical. Furthermore, this veryreport is not just a passive report as Caputo almost suggests. By sayingyes and responding to the call of the distant roar of the battle risingfrom the field of philosophy, Derrida gets attuned to events already inplace and actively accelerates fractures which would otherwise riskbeing overlooked, denegated or sedated. For example, reading Hus-serl, Derrida shows that the edification of a purely transcendentalidiom cannot succeed since the very condition of (im)possibility of thephenomenological ego is a passivity that no reduction can suspend.But for the very same reason, Rorty’s pragmatism cannot really be whathe wishes it to be. There is no pure contingent language, a pragmaticlanguage which is not already and always contaminated by its other, bythe structure of transcendental arguments. Rorty is not mistaken inpointing out two different tonalities in Derrida’s works: one playful anddeconstructive, the other serious and transcendental. But he is wrongin believing that one of these two sorts of noises might exist without theother. This is why Rorty’s reading of Derrida is inadequate by itself: theemphasis on Derrida’s anti-transcendental moves should always beaccompanied by an analysis of his philosophical gestures; Rorty’sapproach should be completed by Gasche’s patient reading. And viceversa.

From Husserl in particular and from the other great figures of thehistory of philosophy, Derrida affirms having inherited ‘the necessity ofposing transcendental questions in order not to be held within thefragility of an incompetent empiricist discourse’.81 To avoid the naivetyof empiricism, positivism and psychologism, it is crucial for Derrida torenew transcendental questioning. But at the same time, such trans-cendental questioning, to be truly serious and not give in to any sim-plification, needs to take into account the possibility of accidentalityand contingency, the possibility of everything that ironically makeswobble 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 isthus brought down to the plane of immanence. Yet slipping back oncontingency as the condition of possibility of transcendence, theunstable elevation is relaunched again.82 It is hard to deny that there is


something comical in this movement. Is there not something ridicu-lous in being forced into this infinite movement up and down whichconstantly reminds us that the conditions for the possibility of a phe-nomenon make such a phenomenon impossible? Is it not ironic thatthe discipline we try to get rid of keeps coming back to our hands, in anannoying Fort and Da? If Destiny (Geschick) keeps repeating itself, if it isparodized into destinies (envois), it loses the greatness and austerity ofHeidegger’s. It is banalized and vulgarized; a tragedy becomes a farce.The attempted elevation of metaphysics appears to be, after ‘Envois’, afearful and trembling erection.

The silliness of deconstruction is provoked by the fact that themovement against the possibility of producing a pure transcendentaltheory, in its resistance to theory, still produces theory and theories.This is why deconstruction is at the same time two very different kindsof jetties – or tones, as Rorty would say. On the one hand, there is thejetty which throws itself forward and backwards without any intentionof erecting, stating or posing anything stable. On the other hand, thereis the movement which tries to produce a system, institutionalizing andprotecting it from violent and new waves. Following Derrida’s ‘Somestatements and truisms about neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasit-isms, and other small seismisms’, let us call

the first jetty the destabilizing jetty or even more artificially the devastatingjetty, and the other one the stabilizing, establishing, or simply stating jetty –in reference to the supplementary fact that at this moment of stasis, ofstanza, the stabilizing jetty proceeds by predicative clauses, reassures withassertory statements, with assertions, with statements such as ‘this is that’: forexample, deconstruction is this or that.83

The destabilizing jetty resists the stabilizing one, not since it is againsttheory or because it proclaims a theoretical asceticism; but rather,because it opposes the possibility of building a system, an organizedtotality not always and already worked by an underground seism. Thedevastating jetty leaps against the possibility of stating a thesis withoutdoubts, hesitations, uncertainties, and blind points. It does not positanything. It just opposes the dreams of a pure transcendence notcontaminated by contingency. However, both paradoxically and pre-dictably, deconstructive attacks settle on producing a number of the-orems, theories, thematics, themes, theses which come to shape theconceptual core of deconstructionism. The resistance is formalizedinto a method. The devastating jetty is institutionalized into the sta-bilizing one. Deconstruction becomes deconstructionism, a schoolwith its teachable technical rules, procedures, and principles. It createsfortifications and outposts, networks within the academic world whichare in contrast with other theories, spreads ‘a system, a method, a


discipline, and in the worst case an institution with its legitimatingorthodoxy’ (p. 88).

Derrida suggests that Gasche’s The Tain of the Mirror runs the risk ofreconstituting the deconstructive jetty as a philosophy of deconstruc-tion, with its infrastructures and its systematicity. The very use of theterm infrastructure in relation to deconstruction is troubling and,although Derrida understands the strategic role that plays in Gasche’sargumentation, it should be avoided. In my understanding of thepassage, this it to say that Derrida is afraid that Gasche’s tone – whichkills, as Caputo notes, all of Derrida’s jokes84 – might give the idea thatall deconstruction really is, is the stabilizing jetty. Deconstruction is thetheory of theories, a supertheory; the one and only hyper-transcendental critique (p. 89).85 But, of course, opposite risks alsoexist. It amounts to thinking – as Rorty does – that deconstruction isonly the destructive jetty; that it can or should speak only in a desta-bilizing pitch. However, one has to remember that the two kinds ofjetties or tones are interdependent and uneasy to dissociate, if notcompletely indissociable. The position of a proposition, the time forthe thesis, is shaken by the jetty which dismantles the bridges trying toreach a transcendental height. Yet the contrary is also true; topplingdown 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 seriousideological demystification. It cannot rise up without at the same timefalling 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 whichDerrida cannot and does not want to circumvent. The complicity andthe contamination with the transcendental is, in fact, needed toremark that a disorganization of the axiomatics of philosophy has beenproduced not by some regional discipline, from sociology, history orpsychology; not from a Kuhnian redescription of their procedures; notfrom ‘literature’. It is something nourished within the edifice of phi-losophy that has managed to favour the undermining of the discursiveorder in which it was raised. As Derrida puts it: an element in the seriesof philosophical discourses, deconstruction, ‘no longer simply belon-ged 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 thename of foreign and more sovereign powers, falls on the order of thephilosophical. It is rather a patient internal negotiation with the legacyof tradition – negotiation that, born in the very centre of the empireand using its logos, tries to provoke and suspend the laws of the home.Deconstruction’s scandal consists of suggesting that nothing is more


philosophical than the demolition of philosophy itself, that is to say, ofits radical critique. But, if deconstruction really is this patient andparadoxical critique of philosophical conceptuality, then we still haveto understand why for Derrida it is crucial to work the fundamentalaxiomatics of tradition and eat away its authority, instead of leaving, asRorty does, metaphysics to itself and silently reinforcing its sovereignty.

As I will trace in the next chapter, by denying deconstruction anypolitical or ethical relevance – the second kind of privacy he attributesto Derrida – Rorty fails to grasp the profound interests of Derrida’sexperiment 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-transcendentalcharacter praised in the ‘authentic’ Derrida, it is now time to analysethe second kind of privacy which Rorty assigns to deconstruction. Thecircumvention of philosophy is in fact twofold. It consists not only inthe (impossible) abstinence from generality, but also in accepting thatthe courses sailed around the shore of metaphysics will be only ofinterest for those severely infected by philosophical germs. The projectof overcoming tradition is doomed to remain totally irrelevant toanyone who is not involved with the axiomatics organizing the philo-sophical. Nonetheless, it will be germane for those macho-metaphysi-cians – ironist theory is a male business even in Rorty’s use of thefeminine pronoun – who, after suffering from the anxiety of influencefor so long, are looking for a make-over. Derrida’s genealogies wouldprovide, to use Foucault’s words, the confused and anonymous Wes-tern man ‘who no longer knows himself or what name he shouldadopt, the possibility of alternate identities, more individualized andsubstantial than his own’.1 Rorty uses Derrida’s work to supply exactlywhat, for Foucault, a genealogy should not: des identites de rechange. Andyet, the sublime style that Rorty deduces from Derrida is not appro-priate for every occasion. It is useful while ironists are playing withthemselves, but should be dropped when one is taking care of theneeds of the people uninterested in self-recreation.

I take Derrida’s importance to lie in his having had the courage to give upthe attempt to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bringtogether a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonanceand utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of hispredecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful.2

In order better to understand Rorty’s attempt to work Kant’s distinc-tions between public and private, beautiful and sublime, and to makethem consistent with his own anti-Kantian layout, it is necessary to goback to the moment in which Rorty realized that public duties andprivates desires cannot be fulfilled by the same language. Everything

begins with Trotsky, the wild orchids and their disappointingirreconcilability.

In his 1992 autobiographical essay ‘Trotsky and the wild orchids’,Rorty reconstructs the causes that brought him to the private–publicsplit in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.3 Rorty recalls growing up in afamily whose sacred texts were The Case of Leon Trotsky and Not Guilty,books believed to offer everlasting leftist commandments on moralityand truth. Anxious to exhibit his liberal-progressive credentials, Rortycontinues to evoke other scenes from his childhood: his father hadalmost accompanied Dewey to Mexico where the latter chaired thecommission which cleared Trotsky from Stalin’s charges; a collaboratorof the Russian revolutionary hid in Rorty’s home on the DelawareRiver; Carlo Tresca, the famous Italian anarchist gunned down on aNew York sidewalk in 1943, was a family friend to whom Rorty servedsandwiches during a Halloween party. Young Richard, whose parentshad been branded as ‘Trotskyites’ by the Daily Worker, grew up believ-ing that decent people had to be at least socialists if not Trotskyites allthe way. By the time he was twelve, Rorty already understood that ‘thepoint of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice’(p. 6). The rigour of his political commitments, however, began to bedisturbed by unspeakable private passions: first, the interest in theDalai Lama, a ‘fellow eight-year-old who had made good’, and then thetragic and fatal encounter with the wild orchids on the mountains ofnorth-western New Jersey. Rorty was proud to be the only kid aroundwho knew the places of origin, Latin names and blooming seasons ofthe forty different species of wild orchids growing in New Jersey.

How to justify such an overwhelming and apolitical passion fororchids before the voice – who perhaps spoke English with a Ukrainianaccent from Yanovka – of his conscience? Is not the esoteric pastime ofpicking orchids an unforgivable distraction from the commitment toconstitute a system that would guarantee the right to happiness forcitizenry as a whole? ‘I was afraid that Trotsky (whose Literature andRevolution I had nibbled at) would not have approved of my interest inorchids’ (p. 7). Barely fifteen, Rorty decided that his personal missionconsisted in reconciling Trotsky with his wild orchids – public justiceand private desires. The University of Chicago College, where Mrs andMr Rorty sent their overachieving child to save him from a wild bunchof high-school bullies, had to be the place for such a powerful recon-ciliation. For Rorty, philosophy was the mirage of a dimension wherehis interest in flowers would enjoy an ethical-political justification.Although he later abandoned orchids for Proust and Hegel, Rortycontinued to be concerned by the same questions: is it possible toreconcile what is important for oneself with what is important forsociety? Is the time dedicated to literature and philosophy a time takenaway from politics? Thirty years after his departure from Chicago, Rorty


was still searching for a language which might make compatible thesublimity 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 thesatisfaction of private desires are inconsistent with the moral impera-tive of social engagement. Consequently, he started abandoning thesearch for a vocabulary which could resolve the differend betweenTrotsky and the orchids. Duties to oneself and duties to others aredestined to be fulfilled in two different and irreconcilable linguisticspaces, albeit both with the same right to exist. One cannot indulge inmere hedonism or total militancy. At least two vocabularies arenecessary. To satisfy the galaxy of desires that we are, we need to speakat least two languages.

Rorty thinks of Sartre and Savonarola as two aberrant examples ofthe monolingual attempt to judge human activities on the basis of asingle paradigm. While Sartre criticized Proust as an insignificantwriter and man was insignificant for the struggle against capitalism’sviolence, the heretic Dominican condemned art as mere vanity. Proustwas probably irrelevant for the socialist dream, and perhaps it is alsopointless to look for the moral in the artworks that Savonarola cen-sured. Rorty does not discuss this matter. He claims rather that it iswrong to measure with the meter of political or moral utility, works thatwere only produced to satisfy their author’s creative urge and promoterecreation for their consumers. Sartre and Savonarola were mistakensince they evaluated the quest for private autonomy with a languageinappropriate for grasping its ends. Their mistake consisted inaffirming that the private is public. A long quotation from Contingency,Irony, and Solidarity will now provide further clarification of Rorty’sposition.

Books relevant to the avoidance of either social or individual cruelty are oftencontrasted – as books with a ‘moral message’ – with books whose aims are,instead, ‘aesthetic.’ Those who draw this moral-aesthetic contrast and givepriority to the moral usually distinguish between an essential human faculty –conscience – and an optional extra faculty, ‘aesthetic taste.’ Those who drawthe same contrast to the advantage of ‘the aesthetic’ often presuppose adistinction of the same sort. But for the latter the center of the self is assumedto be the ironist’s desire for autonomy, for a kind of perfection which hasnothing to do with his relations with other people. This Nietzschean attitudeexalts 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 generalhappiness but the provision of an opportunity for the especially gifted – thosefitted to become autonomous – to achieve their goal.4

The proposal to divide books on the basis of the faculties they wereproduced by (conscience or taste), cannot be taken seriously by a

The Resistance of Theory 89

thinker like Rorty who does not believe in an immutable essencepreserved at the heart of humankind. The essentialist divisions taste–conscience and beauty–truth, are thus regenerated in proper prag-matic terms by the ironist: certain works can be used to revolutionizethe private sphere, while others are useful to reform the public space.The former vocabularies obey one’s personal equivalent to Trotsky’svoice; the latter are seduced by something similar to the scent of thewild orchids’ scent. There is no point in trying to grade these differentinterests on a single scale. The books in search of a sublime autonomyfrom tradition, an autonomy that only a lucky few can pursue, have thesame dignity as the books which speak of beautiful feelings (such asrespect, solidarity or friendship) to which anyone can relate.

Rorty believes that accepting the necessity to speak several languageson the basis of the goals we pursue is the only effective strategy tosatisfy our diverse and contrasting desires. The needs dictated by theobligation of achieving our country and those organized around thedesire of self-achievement each require a distinct vocabulary. We needa language in the private, when we take care of ourselves and createwho we want to be, and another language in the public, when we areconcerned with our fellow human beings, their urgencies and theirdesires. This is not to say that private and public desires are always inconflict. Many people are happy with who they are and devote them-selves entirely to the common good. Many others devote themselvesonly to personal perfection. Whoever is attracted to both kinds ofdesires, however, must learn to make both speak.

The reasons behind Rorty’s firm distinction between public andprivate 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 increasinglydominate world culture. More and more books can be traced to theProust–Nietzsche–Heidegger canon. Ever more often, the intelligen-tsia discusses autonomy and individual perfection, anxiety of influenceand private ecstasy; ever less do leftist intellectuals devote their work todiffusing progressive ideas in the social body. The vigour of renewedaccusations of irresponsibility against leftist intellectuals depends onthis very cultural logic. The blame does not only come from dull-minded 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 char-ges against the so-called ironists.

Rorty’s dangerous defence of ironist theory – an alibi perhaps evenmore dangerous than Habermas’ indictment – relies on the enforce-ment of the private–public separation. Here is what Rorty writes:


Whereas Habermas sees the line of ironist thinking which runs from Hegelthrough Foucault and Derrida as destructive of social hope, I see this line ofthought as largely irrelevant of public life and to political questions. (p. 83)

The results obtained by the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons or by thegay awareness actions in which Foucault was involved are witness to hisinvaluable influence on contemporary political life. Moreover, Fou-cault has been a key figure in anti-psychiatric struggles, in studentmovements both in the United States and across Europe, and in theItalian 1977 Autonomia among others. Foucault did not only offer histhought to the service of micro-physical revolutions and knowledges inrevolt, but he also put his body on the line. It is undeniable thatFoucault is one of the most valuable public intellectuals for post-warsociety, so much so that I will focus on the danger of the alibi offeredby Rorty to Derrida. The stakes are clear: instead of opposing Haber-mas’s thesis, of highlighting how and why deconstruction is – or mightbe – politically relevant, Rorty reduces philosophy as a whole to anequivalent of his own private search for wild orchids. After spending somuch time depicting Derrida as a perverse and genial adolescent – asTerry Eagleton put it6 – it is easy for Rorty silently to suggest a con-nection between deconstruction and the passion for wild orchids, thesexual flowers par excellence. By reducing deconstruction to a privatepastime, Rorty is able to save it from Habermas, but at the same time,he arrests philosophy to the privacy of personal self-enjoyment, exiledlight years away from any public sphere. Habermas believes that thecritiques of rationality and universality are irresponsible and dangeroussince they oppose the project of finding a social glue able to be asubstitute for religion, a project which can be exclusively grounded onthe Enlightenment concepts of rationality and universality. Thus Der-rida would appear as a corrupter of the young and helpless, makingthem indifferent to their duties before democracy. In Rorty’s opinion,Habermas should not bother blaming post-structuralism since it didnot and cannot have any influence on modern society’s public life.Ironists in search of personal autonomy as Foucault or Derrida areinvaluable for those who are involved in regenerating a private identitydistinct from traditional canons. But they are ‘pretty much uselesswhen it comes to politics’ (p. 83). Once again, here is an instance ofthat ‘repressive tolerance’ which Derrida attributes to Rorty’s defence.Once it has been skimmed of any political and ethical thrust, whatremains of deconstruction?

One problematic aspect of Rorty’s thesis is that a clear-cut divisionbetween what is influential in private philosophical circles and what isrelevant in the public domain is difficult to maintain. In Frederick’scentury – as Kant dubs the Age of Enlightement in homage toFrederick the Great – there were not so many readers with access to the


debates that lit up the Berlinische Monatschrift. In 1784 the philosophicalarguments were only available within limited academic circles. Suchinnocuousness allowed Kant – at least in theory – to speak freely whenaddressing his colleagues, whereas when undertaking a more publicrole, he was obliged to control his critical attitude. Rorty’s privatizationof deconstruction is based on a strikingly similar argument: philosophyis a private matter since it interests only a few people. However, howcan we establish nowadays, at a time when archives and libraries arebecoming virtual and thus more accessible, when the interest in ‘the-ory’ is larger than ever, the line which separates a publication which isprivate and specialized from the one reaching a broader audience?How is it possible to determine a priori the destination of theory? Todecide who will be the addressees that an envoi will end up reaching?

Quite brutally, Rorty divides authors in two categories: there arethose who are moved by the commitment to fighting injustice, andthose like Derrida who are writing to stimulate themselves and theirreaders. The former write for the common welfare while the latter forrenewing and amusing a few chosen people. Actually, beyond its pla-titudinous common sense, it is very difficult to understand where Rortyis going with his argument. The belief that Derrida’s fantasies cannotbe used for any public, political or pedagogical means but can never-theless function as examples of what might be done, seems to be drivenby an internal tension. If Derrida’s gestures can be exemplary, if theyare extremely important for one group of people, it follows that theyundoubtedly have a pedagogical function. What is more public andconcretely political than the irony offering new descriptions to look atreality and renew the ‘we’ to which one belongs? To publish texts onflowers or masturbation, for example, rather than on seemingly moreimmediate political questions, is a public and a political decision. Tomake one’s ‘private life’ public by publishing love envois is to engage inpublic acts with public effects. As a matter of fact, in ‘Habermas,Derrida, and the functions of philosophy’ – an essay included in the1998 collection Truth and Progress but initially intended to be a part ofContingency, Irony, and Solidarity – Rorty admits the relevance of Hei-degger and Derrida in the quest for social justice. They are politicallyrelevant for they show the kind of private autonomy any individualshould be able to pursue in a utopic democracy. And yet, their dis-courses – whose creativity proves that the realm of possibility can beenlarged – do nothing concrete to justify or hasten (but not, despitewhat Habermas believes, to forestall, discredit or delay) the arrival ofsuch utopia.7 The first difficulty of this argument is that it is unclearwhether Rorty believes discourses presumably more argumentative andaccessible to the people – Habermas’ or Rawls’s for example – to beactually relevant for public life. The second difficulty is that the rela-tion between philosophy and politics is put in different terms in


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 ofirresponsible quietism by saying that pragmatism does not have any-thing to do with politics. Rorty claims that pragmatists should not bowtheir heads to those severe critics who think that dismissing the idea ofTruth is rash, nor should they become convinced that the only rea-sonable thing that philosophy can do is to survey the universals whichshape our form of life. Pragmatists instead ‘should see themselves asinvolved in a long-term attempt to change the rhetoric, the commonsense, and the self-image of their community’, a community whosepresent Rorty believes is structured also, but not only, by Greekmetaphysics.8

In this case, Rorty’s position seems to coincide with what Derridasuggests regarding the Socrates–plato couple in a postcard dated 6June 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, andmaking us attend for centuries their colossal and indefatigableanaparalyses?9

Thus, for Derrida – and at times even for Rorty – one could describemetaphysics as an axiomatic which is not merely contingent nor purelynecessary, but simultaneously both necessary and contingent. Neces-sary, because all the attempts to circumvent it have so far failed. Con-tingent, because we cannot believe there is something fatal or naturalin 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 contestthe vocabulary which snuck out of the walls of academia and – con-taminating and contaminated by the events it encountered along itsway – arrived to shape our mode of being in the world. Deconstructionand pragmatism are public acts which aim to interrupt such vocabu-lary, though in order to create a new future rather than, as Heideggerwanted, to restore the Heraclitean adobe where Gods and humansonce dwelled together.

During a conference in Paris in 1993 on the relationship betweendeconstruction and pragmatism, Rorty claimed that what distinguishesDerrida from those other contemporary ‘continental’ thinkers, fromFoucault for example (and what is it that makes Foucault the monsterwho Rorty has always to condemn?), is that Derrida is a sentimental,hopeful, romantically idealistic author, someone who believes in thefuture and in utopia. Derrida, upon hearing such a statement, jumpedon 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,


at least in part, right.10 It is a fact that Rorty was one of the first to pointout the profound promise informing the structure of deconstruction.Already by 1978, even before the attention to Derrida’s so-called ethicalturn in 1980s, Rorty argued that Derrida

is suggesting how things might look if we did not have Kantian philosophy built intothe fabric of our intellectual life, as his predecessors suggested how things might look ifwe 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 valuespromoted by philosophy, Rorty appoints him as an advocate for thepossibility of changing vocabulary. The project which would linkAmerican pragmatism to European post-structuralism comes fromtheir mutual desire to influence common sense in order to free it fromthe metaphysical ground on which it is based. The people will even-tually believe that no human nature really exists: they will come toaccept the fact that we are ‘contingent through and through’, productsof the histories we lived and the vocabularies we spoke.12

And yet, such regeneration is not something urgent. Only in anaffluent and fully democratic society would there be space and time forthe sublimity of such a project. In a moment of economical crisis andglobal instability, it does not make sense to pass the deconstruction ofactuality as the primary social mission. There are other urgencies forsociety. Rorty’s target is not in this case Derrida himself, but thosemembers of the so-called Cultural Left who, influenced by the critiqueof humanism and Enlightenment, rolled back from all progressivemovements which tried to reform the American society because oftheir naive – i.e., metaphysical – presuppositions. While, according toRorty, Derrida underlined the necessity of negotiating with the pre-sent, and thus was not suspicious or diffident in regards to progressivepolitical actions, some of his admirers demanded a Left so radicallyand purely anti-metaphysical that they deprived themselves of theopportunity to give a concrete contribution to politics. In avoiding anycomplicity with the axiomatics of tradition, they became self-exiled inthe ivory tower of philosophical critique. Rorty, in this case, denouncesthe double bind of filiation: Derrida is among those responsible for afrantic tone recently adopted in politics, without being complicit with ithimself.

In Achieving Our Country, Rorty describes the demobilization whichhas transformed the strategies, the objectives and the language of theAmerican Cultural Left starting from the late 1960s. Gradually sub-stituting Marx with Freud, the Capital with contemporary apocalypticFrench philosophy, progressive intellectuals stopped being interestedin the economy and started holding the unconscious responsible forthe illnesses of society. This new academic Left ‘thinks more about


stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexualmotivation than about shallow and evident greed’.13 The leftist turmoilmoved from Social Sciences departments to Humanities buildings; thepublic enemy number one was a mental attitude rather than the eco-nomical system. People were no longer worried about finding analternative to market economy; the one and only true chance was inthe psychic revolution, the liberation of the conscience. The recogni-tion of the otherness of the others, of their difference – perhaps evenof their differance – is the only way to access the reign of Justice. This iswhy, starting from 1968, in the United States, scholarships whose areaof focus are the ‘sacrificial victims’ of the system (Critical Race Theory,Women’s Studies, Post-Colonialism, Chicano Studies and so forth)started to blossom.

Rorty acknowledges that the influence of the Cultural Left on aca-demic programs diminished the tolerance to sadism and crueltyagainst minorities: ‘The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers atas ‘‘politically correct’’ has made America a far more civilized societythan it was thirty years ago’ (p. 81). The act of accusing teachers withirresponsibility relies on the consciousness that in educating youth,one is also moulding a future community. School is the one placewhere it is harder to separate language’s constitutive role and its per-formativity. And yet, why are (especially) those in the Humanitieslabelled as corruptors?

It was already clear to Kant that philosophy as a discipline and as afaculty could exist only in antagonism with the powers of tradition andsocio-political-cultural conservation. In The Conflict of the Faculties, thehigher faculties, those closer to practical necessities and doing, arecontrolled by the government. Thus, they sit in the right wing of theacademic senate, closer to the King, and defend the reasons of theState. The lower faculty, the faculty of philosophy, is only interested inand responsible for critique. Philosophy is, or should be, in fact theplace where students are encouraged to doubt every pre-establishedtruth and to venture into reality with their own light. Conservative andpro-governmental powers intervene to prevent this emancipation ofminors. Unfortunately, nowadays, the system of policing critique needsto be attuned to democratic rhetoric. One can no longer rely on goodold methods like censorship and open threats as used for instance byFrederick William II. One has to find new, more sophisticated and lessevident ways of controlling critical thought. For example, one can limitthe audience of students to which philosophy is offered. Only a certaintype of high school, a certain kind of social group, can access it.Moreover, the age at which students are exposed to philosophy can bedelayed. And one can revoke funding if, for example, the appointedDean to a newly established Southern Californian law school turns outto be too liberal. The right to philosophy and critical thought is always


in danger because the attitude favoured by the lower faculty resists thesovereigns’ desire to dominate and govern.

For Rorty, unlike liberal-bashing commentators, the problem – atleast so it seems at first glance – is not that the Humanities are naturallyleftist hubs for social protest. The problem is that the intellectuals fromthe Cultural Left have not done enough to help realize the socialreforms necessary for saving the United States from the steady increaseof economic inequality and instability. While the Humanities taughtgood feelings and good manners through critical theory, social injus-tice devoured the American dream: that is the problem.

If husband and wife each work 2,000 hours a year for the current averagewage of production and nonsupervisory workers ($7.50 per hour), they willmake that much [$30,000 a year]. But $30,000 a year will not permithomeownership or buy decent daycare. In a country that believes neither inpublic transportation nor in national health insurance, this income permitsa 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 wagerollbacks and downsizing, and of the disastrous consequences of even a briefillness. (p. 84)

The Cultural Left ended up ignoring the process of proletarization,which ruined the United States. Rorty reproaches the Cultural Left forhaving worried too much about superstructures and ideologies, andtoo little about the reform of the economic infrastructure. The chan-ges that can be obtained in public consciousness without a transfor-mation of the economic dynamics in which such a consciousness isplaced are superficial and ephemeral. Critique and critical theories arenot sufficient. How can the reform of libidinal economy or politicalunconscious resist the project of impoverishing 75 per cent of theAmerican population and 95 per cent of the world population?

Rorty strongly believes that all the transformations of common sensewhich developed in the American public scene during the last decadesare doomed to be revoked once another recession makes the middleclass even poorer. The Left failed in fact to channel the rage of analways poorer middle class, letting it be played by the populist andreactionary forces of the Right. White resentment and hostility will bedirected against those minorities who seem to benefit from the poli-tically correct attitude which sprout from academic centres, or against– let me add – the enemy fabricated after 9/11: the Muslim.

Rorty’s general position on the privatization of deconstruction andphilosophy is now clearer. Rorty does not really refute that Derrida’swork has some bearing on public life. What he contests is the delu-sional belief that exclusively by passing through ‘theory’, one can beproductively engaged with the political life of a given community. As


Rorty argues in ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’, by con-quering academic departments, the Cultural Left imposed a rewritingof curricula such that, in a generation or two, the conventional wisdom‘inculcated’ into young Americans will change.14 Deconstruction orpragmatism can have a positive political thrust, yet the fight againstsocial injustice does not have to care about the deconstruction of themetaphysics of presence, or about the circumvention of Platonicvocabulary.

After all, a lot of such repression is so blatant and obvious that it does nottake any great analytic skills or any great philosophical self-consciousness tosee what is going on. It does not, for example, take any ‘critical-linguisticanalysis’ to notice that millions of children in American ghettos grew upwithout hope while the U.S. government was preoccupied with making therich richer – with assuring a greedy and selfish middle class that it was thesalt of the earth. Even economists, plumbers, insurance salesman, andbiochemists – people who have never read a text closely, much lessdeconstructed it – can recognize that the immiseration of much of LatinAmerica is partially due to the deals struck between local plutocracies andNorth America banks and governments. (p. 135)

The real target of Rorty’s polemics is the ridiculous belief – though anystatement can sound ridiculous once skilfully isolated from its context– that the millennium of universal peace and justice among men andwomen would come once we all become ‘ethical readers’.

It is not just the case that one has to have a Saussurian-Wittgensteinian-Derridean understanding of the nature of language in order to think clearlyand usefully about politics. One does not have to be an antiessentialist inphilosophy in order to be politically imaginative or politically useful. Phi-losophy is not that important for politics, nor is literature. Lots of peoplewho accept theocentric or Kantian logocentric accounts of moral obligationunconsciously and uncritically – starting with Kant himself – have done verywell at political thinking. They have been invaluable to social reform andprogress. The same can be said of lots of essentialists – for example, all thosepeople who still think that either natural or social science can change ourself-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 bylate capitalism if we just succeeded in bypassing metaphysics. One doesnot need elaborate critiques of society for its injustices are obvious.Rorty does not see the exigency for more critical theory. What isnecessary is a new reformist project able to win the majority of thevoters. Only professors in the Humanities can claim that deconstruc-tion is the only means of being an effective ‘political animal’, as only an


expert in antisubmarine mines would think of them as central tomodern warfare: ‘History is not a conspiracy of essentialist intellectuals’(p. 136). Believing so is a self-justificatory excuse from Trotsky’s pro-tests against the wild orchids.

According to Rorty, leftist intellectuals are ashamed because theeconomic infrastructure diagnosed on the ground of social injustice isalso what enables them to pursue their passions. Thus, this limitednumber of privileged individuals overcharges its private interests withpolitical significance and public functions. The Humanities crownthemselves as the main body of faculties for the fight against exploi-tation. In saying that metaphysics spreads ‘from Plato to NATO’, pro-fessors try to defeat the occupational alienation haunting their badconsciousness. Closed in libraries or participating in sit-ins, theyattempt to persuade each other that their professional competenceshave a decisive political relevance. In this way, the sense of guilt pro-voked by their social inutility is silenced. Literary theory becomes anindispensable tool for the debunking of ideological discourses. A cer-tain Cultural Left gets to the point of affirming that the problems ofideology and politics can be approached only on the basis of critical-linguistic analysis. By repeating a much-quoted jibe by Irving Howe,Rorty writes: ‘These people don’t want to take over the government;they just want to take over the English Department.’15 It almost appearsas if Rorty is suggesting that taking over academia is not enough.

Rorty criticizes his colleagues not because their political goals wouldhave outweighed their intellectual honesty – as the flourish ofpanicking conservatives screamed. He rather targets the alibi that, bybeing a professor, one has automatically satisfied his duty toward civilsociety. Pragmatism sees itself as allied with all those long-termattempts which aim at changing the rhetoric, the common sense, theself-awareness of that portion of mankind which is the West. Decon-struction and pragmatism might work together against logocentrismand essentialism. That which divides them – at least in Rorty’s reading– is the very way in which each understands the relation between cri-tical theory and leftist politics:

I want to save radicalism and pathos for private moments, and stay reformistand pragmatic when it comes to my dealings with other people.16

Radicalism and philosophy in the privacy of self-achievement; refor-mism and common sense in public engagement. This is Rorty’s solu-tion to the intricate relationship between theory and practice, thoughtand politics. Derrida handles the same topic in a totally different way,connecting the radical questioning of a certain philosophical practicewith the engagement toward a democracy to come.

While Foucault has monstrously confused the private and the public,


philosophical critique and social engagement, Derrida would havebeen decent enough to keep philosophy within the boundaries ofprivate life. In the next section, I will show how Derrida, through aclose dialogue with Kant, arrives at concerning philosophy as a politicalpractice of civil disobedience. Reading the 1980s’ ‘Mochlos, or theconflict of the faculties’ and ‘The principle of reason: the university inthe eyes of its pupils’, and the 1999 ‘The university without condition’,I will show that Foucault and Derrida’s ideas of philosophy are not asdistant 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 dial’s 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 happenedthat the dials in the clocktowers were beingfired at simultaneously and independentlyfrom several locations in Paris.

(Walter Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’)

I studied philosophy in a rather interesting place. The Faculty of Phi-losophy at the University of Rome is not located with the other facultiesin the university town. Philosophy has chosen as its residence theancient Villa Mirafiori on the edge of Via Nomentana. From the roof ofthe mansion, one can enjoy the panoramic view of the city beneath. Isit possible to observe from a distance, on a clear and serene day, thestructures of the other faculties? It would be quite striking if, from theheight of philosophy, one could actually spot the foundations on whichthe other academic disciplines rest. But if from that roof one cannotgrasp the bases of other knowledges, then why should a prospectivestudent even consider philosophy? With what perspective?

Rorty’s answer to the question is easy: philosophers just want to havefun. As I argued in the first chapter, once philosophy had given up theself-legitimation of being the sole transcendental critique and admittedits own failure, the only thing left for philosophy was to be a discipline,which, as other positive discourses – as art for example – was interestedin positing new truths. Yet the very isolation of the faculty of philoso-phy from the social body of the city makes it almost irrelevant for thepeople. To put it briefly: once the Kantian claim that philosophy is the


critique and not a discipline falls, philosophy is erected as the mostprivate of all disciplines, the faculty where people indulge in thepleasures of irony.

The three essays by Derrida that I will deal with in this section areinspired by the same problematics organizing Rorty’s work. Theseessays were originally offered by Derrida to the pupils of prestigiousAmerican institutions (Columbia, Cornell and Stanford). From suchprivate and inaccessible premises, Derrida questions the purposes andreasons of philosophy, its place in relation to the city and in relation toother academic disciplines.

To have a raison d’etre, a reason for being, is to have a justification forexistence, to have a meaning, a purpose [finalite], a destination. It is also tohave a cause, to be explainable according to the ‘principle of reason,’ as it issometimes called – in terms of a reason that it is also a cause (a ground, einGrund), that is to say also a footing and a foundation, ground to stand on. Inthe phrase raison d’etre, this causality takes on above all the sense of finalcause.17

Derrida’s ‘The principle of reason: the university in the eyes of itspupils’, tackles exactly the grounds justifying the sectorization of theinstitution called ‘university’ – the division within academia of differentfaculties, some of them with a public purpose, others with a merelyprivate destination. In particular, Derrida investigates the existence ofPhilosophy as a distinct and separate faculty. Why does the Faculty ofPhilosophy exist? In view of what? With what views?

End-orientation is what justifies the authority of the so-called techno-sciences, of those disciplines whose research can pay off, be econom-ically applied or utilized. Against the utilitarian self-justification ofapplied sciences, the vocabulary of transcendental philosophy opposedthe purity of authentic knowledge, a knowledge whose sole business isthe truthful and disinterested use of reason. Thus, one ends up having,on the one hand, positive sciences which produce knowledges in viewof pragmatic drop-outs (the technological); and on the other hand, thefundamental research which is immune from pragmatic purposes (thetheoretical). It is on the basis of this fracture that the modern para-digm of university has been constituted. This model is not older thanthree hundred years, since its instauration as a universal example canbe dated between 1798 and 1810, between the Kantian The Conflict ofthe Faculties and the institution of the University of Berlin.18

Yet, the German-universal idea of university is nowadays disturbed bya certain finitude. It is not that the university is dead and buried, butthat the presuppositions organizing its structure are perceived asbelonging to the past, unsecured in the here and now. A certainparadigm for the disciplinary division – the one that from Konigsberg


arrives at the rectorship of Freiburg passing through Berlin – is in crisisdue to the shaky authority of its grounding.

Kant intended to draw a line which could delimit the university’splace within society; a border within the academic territory, dividingone faculty from all others. Such a lay-out is neither an empiricalarrangement nor just a clever systematization. It has to be based, saysDerrida, on a pure transcendental deduction: ‘Kant’s principal con-cern is legitimate for someone intending to make the right decisions: itis to trace the rigorous limits of the system called university.’19 Theorganization of the university, its architecture, is not for Kant anempirical or accidental fact. The academic topology is an artificialinstitution which has at its basis the very structure of reason. Derrida isinterested above all in the reasons Kant offered to justify the divisionbetween higher faculties and the lower one. What is ultimately ques-tioned is the possibility of maintaining strictly separate constative andperformative languages.

The disciplines which cultivate officials to serve in the governmentbelong to the higher faculties. As Kant explains in The Conflict of theFaculties, a university does not exclusively raise scholars and scientistsbut also a professional class in the service of State interests.20 Thesepeople are trained inside the university with the view that they willassume civil duties outside it, as government agents, diplomatic aides,instruments of sovereign power. As tools of governance, their role is tohave a certain influence on the public, and precisely for this verymotive, they can only act under strict governmental supervision. Itseems fair to conclude that the task of such higher faculties for Kant isto develop and help enforce what is now called the art of governance.As Foucault notes in his 1979 ‘What is critique?’, from the fifteenthcentury onwards, Europe witnessed an explosion of knowledges con-cerned with the question of how to govern the multitude of peopleforming a nation: ‘how to govern children, how to govern the poor andbeggars, how to govern a family, a house, how to govern armies, dif-ferent groups, cities, States.’21 The demographic boom of the fifteenthcentury was one of the main reasons why the art of governing shiftedfrom a religious practice to a political project, getting displaced fromthe Church to the State. Since the population was increasing expo-nentially, the State needed new and more effective methods of takingcare of its multiplied and diversified body. Let us not forget that theinterest in governmentality coincided with the birth of the territorial,administrative and colonial modern States. The demands of the post-feudal formations with their vast territories and diverse subjectsrequired a new way of being sovereign. Punishing was not enough.Techniques were needed to shape the citizens’ lives in order to controltheir natural indocility and exploit their potentiality in view of a pre-sumed common good. The State assumed as its responsibility the care


of the lives of its citizens. But in doing so, it takes away from the citizensthe possibility of caring for themselves. Putting the multitude under itslifelong tutelage, the State makes it careless, incapable of care. Even-tually the people cannot survive without the State’s caring and paternalsuperintendence. Power for Foucault becomes biopower preciselywhen it starts assuming life as its object and objective.

The task of the higher faculties – law, medicine and theology – was toproduce more apt knowledges to take care of and govern the bodies ofthe citizens and the social body successfully, and to provide the Statewith an apparatus able to sustain the new mode of governance. It is notonly a matter of determining what the nation must believe, but also ofmaking the community comply with such principles: govern-mentalization – as Foucault defines it – is the ‘movement throughwhich individuals are subjugated into the reality of a social practice bymechanisms of power that appeal to a truth’.22

Finding their arche in the reason of the State, the higher facultiesoccupy a powerful and threatening place within the academic carto-graphy. The State itself should protect the lower faculty from theparasitism of such departmental centres of power, whose prestige isdetermined by their looking beyond academia, that is, to the govern-ment of society. Within the university there should be a guaranteedcounter-power, which, as opposed to the higher faculties, would nothave any concrete role in enforcing the governmentalization of citi-zenry. It would instead be granted the right to decide freely the truthand falseness of the discourses and practices enforced by the higherfaculties and analyse their pragmatism. Kant assigns the authority ofcritique to philosophy, the lower faculty. Such a faculty is inferior notonly because it is the furthest from State force and interests, but alsobecause it is closest to the mechanics of knowledge. As Derridareconstructs Kant’s discourse:

The government and the forces it represents, or that represent it (civilsociety), should create a law limiting their own influence and submitting allits statements of a constative type (those claiming to tell the truth) and evenof a ‘practical’ type (insofar as they imply a free judgment) to the jurisdic-tion of university competence and, finally, we will see, to that within it whichis most free and responsible in respect to the truth: the Faculty ofPhilosophy.23

Kant assigns a titanic responsibility to philosophy. It should screenevery 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, whichjust and unjust. Of course, one could not imagine the existence of sucha faculty either in Kant’s epoch or today. In theory, nobody could say


or do anything without going through philosophy, this gigantic criticalagency lacking any concrete means for enforcing its findings. Kantdoes not imply that the lower faculty should replace the higher ones inthe government of the State. Rather, The Conflict of the Faculties suggeststhat the fundamental modalities upholding and determining a com-munity as a social reality should be anchored on the transcendentalinquiries of the lower faculty. The difficulty at the heart of this Kantianidea of university is not hard to grasp.

To defend the autonomy of philosophical criticism, Kant needs toclaim that critique has nothing to do with the dimension of perfor-mativity. Philosophy is only interested in saying the truth; action is notits business for its role is purely critical. If its inquiries overstepped theacademic space, if critique became a public practice rather thanremaining an intra-academic quarrel, then State powers would havethe right, if not the justice, to intervene against it. Only the peopleeducated in the higher faculties are competent enough to respond topublic demands. Therefore, to defend it from the aggression of thoseinterested in governance, Kant reduces the critical attitude of the lowerfaculty to a private practice irrelevant to the governmentalizationproject. Kant’s act of barricading critique away from social realityauthorizes the most contradictory evaluations. As Derrida argues,

Kant defines a university that is as much a safeguard for the most totalitarianof social forms as a place for the most intransigently liberal resistance to anyabuse of power, a resistance that can be judged in turns as most rigorous ormost 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 wouldinvolve an action, an executive power denied the university.24

Both Kant and Rorty seem to agree that philosophers cannot have apublic role since their discussions are limited to academic circles.However, Kant’s distinction between the public and private – which stillmotivates our own academic topology – is anchored on the transcen-dental separation of the constative and the performative. Rorty, bycontrast, insists that it is merely for empirical reasons that philosophyhas almost no function in public reality. Nevertheless, Kant, indefending Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone from the charges ofbeing a seditious text, had to settle on arguments strikingly similar tothe ones Rorty adopted in his defence of Derrida from Habermas.Philosophy cannot constitute a political harm to the government ofmen because it is out of public reach. Philosophy, for Kant and Rortyalike, is ‘an unintelligible, closed book, only a debate between scholarsof the faculty, of which the people take no notice’.25

The question Derrida asks, in his confrontation of Kant, is whether


deciding on truth and falseness is not always and already a public, andtherefore, a political, act.

The element of publicity, the necessarily public character of discourse, inparticular in the form of archive, designates the unavoidable locus ofequivocation [between the language of theoretical statements and of per-formatives] that Kant would like to reduce. Whence the temptation: totransform, into a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language, thediscourse, precisely, of universal value that is that of philosophy.26

Critical thought needs to be kept secret and confined within theboundaries of academia. In fact if scholars can think freely, obeying onlytheir own conscience and knowledge, they cannot publicly expound whatthey think. Those who are appointed to teach the people are bound toteach what the sovereign power sanctions and authorizes as true. Thetranscendental critique on the mechanics of knowledge must be con-stituted as private research, because the public utterances of theory aresubjected to the censoring eye of the higher faculties and the crown theyrepresent. Theory does not undergo State control; its publication does.This amounts to saying that even if the scholars of the lower faculty arephysically in touch with the community, their relation with it is mediatedby the decisions of the sovereign power. Between the public and theprivate, there is the State. The task of teaching consists in having thepupils adopt certain regulated behaviour and beliefs through the pro-cess of interacting within the closely structured setting of the learningenvironment. In this process, the teacher, as the legitimate repre-sentative of the community, regulates the behaviour of his audience tobe in tune with the one of the community itself. But since only thehigher faculties have the right to decide what the legitimate practices ofa given community are, teaching ends up being the means of producinga harmonious and homogeneous community. This is why Kant assignsto the lower faculty a language which is purely constative. Without thepossibility of stripping critical thought from its immediate politicalthrust, philosophy would lose its place. Privacy is the cost that Kant hadto pay to ensure the existence of the lower faculty before the authorityof governmentalization.

It is not difficult to notice how the confidentiality agreement, so tospeak, that Kant signed with Frederick William II in the 1798 Conflict ofthe Faculties is a violation of the Enlightenment project developedfourteen years earlier. In ‘An answer to the question: what is enlight-enment?’ Kant suggests that sovereign power cannot and should notprevent subcommunities from assuming a set of beliefs conflicting withthe truths enforced by governing agencies. The act of thinking, ofreflecting upon what is imposed by the guardians of the State, is notrestrained to academia. The easiness of care-free immaturity – of


having a book that thinks for me, a pastor who functions as my con-science, 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 willenlighten itself is indeed nearly inevitable, if only freedom is granted.And quite surprisingly if one has in mind what Kant will say in TheConflict of the Faculties, the ‘avant-garde’, which has already broken fromthe spell of immaturity, is morally obliged to help fellow human beingsfind the courage and means of thinking for themselves. Independentthinkers, even among the appointed guardians who have seeminglyinternalized the role of superintendence, have the responsibility todisseminate man’s potency of being autonomous and of caring forhimself.27

It is in this perspective that Foucault, collapsing Aufklarung on cri-tique, claims that Enlightenment consists less in learning about truthand falsity from others, than in learning to question the borders whichthe different authorities declare impassable. But the requisite for thematuration of mankind is the public and free use of reason. If not theart of practical insubordination, critique at least involves the right toargue publicly. Each man, as a public officer, needs to obey theguidelines 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 thecommands which one nevertheless obeys for the time being. Kant doesnot restrain the free use of reason within the walls of the university. Onthe contrary, critical thinking is a responsibility which humankind assuch needs to assume. Kant’s ‘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 dif-fusing the idea that philosophy is a nonsense to be cast away. Yet Kantalso notices signs indicating that the present is opening up toward ageneral liberation from the authoritative discourses produced in theinterest of governance. Kant’s enlightenment, in the hope that thepublic will gain total access to free and autonomous use of reason,finds its raison d’etre in the urgency of emancipating the public from theyoke which subjects it to the truths and practices enforced by Stateofficials. It is this sort of Foucauldian critical attitude that I was glad torecognize in Derrida’s essays on Kant and the idea of the university.

For Derrida as for Foucault, critical philosophy is not a matter ofreinforcing the line which separates constative language interestedonly in truth from performative discourses whose sole interests are of apragmatic nature. Seeming to agree with Rorty’s anti-transcendentalarguments, Derrida affirms that it no longer makes sense to contrastfundamental research to goal-oriented inquiries:


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 bythe agencies or instances of the State or, under cover of the State, by civilsociety or capital interest. The sole concern of such basic research would beknowledge, truth, the disinterested exercise of reason, under the soleauthority of the principle of reason.28

In ‘The principle of reason’ Derrida shows that the border between thenoble ends pursued by basic research and the utilitarian empiricalgoals of applied sciences cannot be maintained. No ‘pure’ science isuntouched by economico-political interests. It is evident that the fun-damental research undertaken, for example, by theoretical physicists,chemists or biologists also pursues empirical ends. These ends are, ofcourse, most of the time military. ‘This is not new; but never before hasso-called basic scientific research been so deeply committed to endsthat are at the same time military ends’ (p. 143). It is said that eachminute two million dollars are spent on armaments, but – presumingthat this total covers only the manufacturing expenses – to such anamount, one should add the funding for research programmes, theexpenses for the maintenance of their structures, the salaries of theprofessors, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate students’ salaries and soforth.

Apparently less dangerous and more pacific disciplines can also servethe war machine. For instance, according to Derrida, military reasonprofits from the sciences dealing with the field of language (commu-nication studies, semiotics, semantics, linguistics, translation studies).It is not outrageous to claim that in a time of permanent warfare onecan exploit the sciences which decode texts as hermeneutics, or theones which study linguistic pragmatics and rhetoric.29 Poetry, litera-ture, film and fiction in general can be useful tools for ideological war.Through psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis, one can refine theforce of ‘psychological action’, which is an alternate method of tortureas 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 moresuited to pursue State’s practical ends, he had in mind theology, lawand medicine – the Bible, right and science, in Foucault’s words.Today, it is even more difficult to limit the faculties and departmentswhose truths and knowledges cannot be employed as power-making orpower-enforcing tools. Even the lower faculty – which includes, among


others, history, geography, mathematics and geometry – can serve Statereason. And for this very reason, the barrier that Kant drew betweentruth and power is washed away forever (if it was not always and alreadylost). Those in philosophy, pupils and teachers, cannot bring forth aself-legitimation of a Kantian type, and moreover, they cannot beproud to occupy a field of inquiry which is safe from the intertwining ofpower and knowledge. Arresting critical thought in the golden prisonsof critical theory institutes and releasing it into academic quarrels canbe an inexpensive yet elegant manner of maintaining the socio-poli-tical order in force. It can even be a strategy for a government toadvertise its care for free thought. The State can pay counter-powerforces and allow them free expression, yet not because democracy hasalready arrived, but indeed to prevent it from ever coming. One canfreely criticize, insofar as critique does not disturb the force of laws. AsNietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality recalls,

It is not impossible to imagine a society so conscious of its power that it couldallow itself the noblest luxury available to it, – that of letting its malefactorsgo unpunished. ‘What do I care about my parasites’, it could say, ‘let themlive and flourish: I am strong enough for all that!’.30

Even if all the differences among departments and faculties have see-mingly levelled down in the light of their economical exploitability, inthe light of the fact that they all posit truths exploitable by coercivepowers, we should consider how to assume today, here and now, theindocility Kant described as the fundamental trait of critique, and inparticular, of philosophy. As Derrida affirms in ‘The principle of rea-son’ it is a matter ‘of awakening or of resituating a responsibility, in theuniversity 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 torelaunch the legacy of a certain Kantian attitude and to safeguard theuniversity as the ultimate place of critical resistance against hegemonicpowers.31 But, what does this critical resistance consist of? Derrida hasin mind something very similar to the resistance to authority whichconstitutes – as Judith Butler writes – ‘the hallmark of the Enlight-enment for Foucault’.32

In his lectures on Kant, Foucault objects to reducing critique to amere theoretical activity. Critique should not be understood as thedesire to police the domain of truth in order to restore a legitimate useof knowledge anchored on the structure of reason. By profession, thecritical attitude professes something related to virtue. State power, bysecularizing the Christian pastoral, supported the idea that in order tolive 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,


‘had to be governed and had to let himself be governed’.33 Challen-ging the identification of virtue with obedience, when the project ofgoverning souls and bodies became more aggressive and invasive, amovement of resistance emerged. ‘How to govern’: this is the questionState apparatus and its academic prosthesis were anxious to answer.The social multitude – or at least a part of it – had in mind the oppositequestion: how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of thoseprinciples, in view of such objectives and by the means of such pro-cedure, not like that, not for that, not by them? (p. 43). If govern-mentalization is the movement which tries to subjugate citizens to acertain politics of truth, critique is the art of voluntary inservitudethrough which the subject gives itself the right to question truth con-cerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses oftruth. In brief,

‘to not to want to be governed’ is of course not accepting as true . . . what anauthority tells you is true, or at least not accepting it because an authoritytells you it is true, but rather accepting it only if one considers valid thereasons for doing so. (p. 46)

The indocility of critique – identified by Foucault with ‘virtue in gen-eral’ – limits, questions, challenges and escapes the art of governingand its praise for obedience. It criticizes the legitimacy of the lawsimposed upon the people in the name of ‘universal and indefeasiblerights’ to which any sovereign power needs to submit. Significantly,Foucault does not necessarily imply the actual existence of humanrights grounded on an immutable natural law. Critique does notattempt to discover what is true and what is false, founded orunfounded, real or illusionary, scientific or ideological, legitimate orabusive (p. 59). Critique is inspired by the problem of the how, not ofthe what. It is not in search of a transcendental deduction which mightjustify the desire not to be governed through an inquiry of the essenceof human nature. Rather, critique looks for a way of reinvigoratingsuch will to disobedience. The act of opposing indefeasible naturalrights to the ruling agencies is therefore a way of limiting the right ofthe sovereign power itself. The invention of human rights can be ameans of confronting authority, of strengthening the subaltern revoltsagainst governmentality, even if a ‘natural humanity’ does not exist atall. As Spivak has highlighted, a strategic essentialism is crucial inFoucault’s project of resistance against hegemonic discourses.34 Fou-cault makes it clear in fact that critique is not a disinterested activity forit does not intend to protect the purity of transcendental or quasi-transcendental 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


the bond between truth and power, but also tracks down the breakingpoints of the power/truth mechanism. ‘What this means is that onelooks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted,but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where theypoint up their contingency and their transformability.’35

In ‘What is critique?’ Foucault decisively states that his idea of cri-tique is not to be confused with reflection on the quasitranscendantalthat fixes knowledge. I am not sure if this 1978 cryptic reference to the‘quasi-transcendental’ can be read as an oblique attack against Derridawhose notion of ecriture was with a similar discretion accused of stillbeing too transcendental in ‘What is an author?’ – a lecture whichFoucault gave at another meeting of the Societe francaise de philosophieten years earlier.36 But even if he did intend to distinguish his workfrom Derrida’s, Foucault’s idea of critique, which inspires his project ofan ontology of actuality, chimes with Derrida’s quasi-transcendentalgestures. Describing the conditions of possibility which make a systemfunction amounts to mapping the fissures which unwork it; the slip-pages and the cracks in which a critical intervention can find thenecessary space to resist – or at least negotiate – a given regime of truth.Eventually, Foucault recovers the idea of critique he seemed to reject atthe beginning of his ‘What is critique?’: that critique itself is a means,an instrument that has other goals in mind. A mochlos, to use Derrida’sterm: ‘The mochlos could be a wooden beam, a lever for displacing aboat, a sort of wedge for opening or closing a door, something, inshort, to lean on for forcing and displacing.’37 This sort of leverage thatone needs in order to sabotage the minoritizing machine is also a workof fiction. The truths that the art of governing attempts ‘to naturalizeand render hegemonic’ are in fact displaced by the historical philo-sophical labour which fabricates resisting counter-discourses.38 Theseoeuvres – and in using this term, I am approaching Derrida’s ‘Theuniversity without condition’ – are purported to suspend the grip thatthe governmentality project has on the real, and give back to the pre-sent its eventness: the possibility of happening otherwise.

The ‘fictive’ opposition to actuality, in view of what might come inthe future, is located by Derrida at the heart of a university withoutcondition. Such a university would be one of the centres of uncondi-tional resistance against any exercise of power because it would grantitself the right to question all the figures of sovereignty. The Huma-nities in particular should be the place where one could discuss anddoubt the truths of State powers, of economic powers, of religious andcultural powers. Deconstruction has its privileged position in thiscontext, in the Humanities ‘as the place of irredentist resistance oreven, analogically, a sort of principle of civil disobedience, even ofdissidence 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


on the social body, strategically invoking human rights and denoun-cing crimes against humanity (while other times denouncing the limitsof humanism), deconstruction is not only involved in protecting theuniversity’s autonomy from the invasiveness of the various exercises ofpower. It also aspires to transform the disciplinary structure of theuniversity in order to establish academia as the place from where tosabotage all the attempts of reducing the present to an immutabletotality. In other words, while governance aims at closing the field ofwhat is actually possible – which equates to expelling the possibility ofbecoming from the realm of the real – the deconstruction of actuality,as Foucault’s ontology of it, seeks to open the crevices of the present tothe possibilities which exceed it.

Walter Benjamin showed in ‘Critique of violence’ that sovereignpower imposes on its citizens a life deprived of the faculty of contestingthe laws forced upon them. A State of right tries to ward off, withany means necessary, the possibility of suspending the form of lifethat rules over the present.40 The life that sovereign power cares toprotect in its citizens is not life in general. It is not a ‘whatever’ life, buttheir present life, the way in which life is lived after the enforcement ofthe governmentality project. The possibility of interrupting such a wayof living is considered a menace, and the scope of this menace appearsdirectly proportional to the force required to put the present in play, toassume time as the stake of its action. Sovereign power pretends todefend its citizens (defending in reality only itself) from the possibilityof the de(con)struction of actuality. The threat to those who rule overthe present always comes from the future. Indeed, it is the future itself.Invested in making the present a datum, a fact, sovereign power canrule the present only by regulating the future. Why? Only by control-ling the future – the ‘maybe’ – of what might happen, is it possible toimmunize the present from the possibility of the future. Real andrational coincide when the tension between what is and what might befades, when the present is immunized to the risk of the perhaps. In theprocess of immunization, a sovereign power, in its authoritarianmunificence, creates a disarmed community, a community which is notmunitioned with the force necessary to resist the closing of thepresent.41

Naturally my heroic phantasms – I think this is true for many Frenchmenand Frenchwomen of my generation – usually have to do with the period ofthe Resistance, which I did not experience firsthand; I wasn’t old enough,and I wasn’t in France. When I was very young – and until quite recently – Iused to project a film in my mind of someone who, by night, plants bombson the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-actiondevice and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from a dis-tance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmic


compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operation, which consistsin planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of asudden put a transit route out of commission, making the enemy’s move-ments more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and thinkdifferently.42

Against the hostile attempts to close and control the field of actuality,deconstruction’s unconditional resistance tries to open the space ofcounter-power; to reinvigorate within the multitude the possibility ofcontesting the present in name of the futures. It enables exceptionssimultaneously inside and outside the dominated space: the oppositionagainst the exercise of power tries in fact to create liberated places,temporary anomic zones in which different forms of life and thoughtcould happen. One way in which the Humanities may assume theresponsibility of critique and struggle against unjust institutions andinstitutes is by producing events which have the force to unwork thesolidity of the discursive practices regimenting the present. Such dis-courses and their axiomatics would be interrupted, disjointed, openedup to the spectres of the ‘otherwise’ which always haunts their domain.The claims of absolute sovereignty on the real are disturbed by theunconditioned right to contest any authority. This is why John Caputo’s1988 ‘Beyond aestheticism: Derrida’s responsible anarchy’ and SaulNewman’s 2001 ‘Derrida’s deconstruction of authority’, have noticedthe presence of an anarchic strive in deconstructive operations: apolitics in which no arche, no command, dogma, ground or principle isimmune to the possibility of being critiqued and disobeyed, is anarchicby definition.43 The anarchism of deconstruction does not coincidewith the anarchist’s dream of an absolute absence of every authorityand hierarchy (and for this reason Derrida says ‘I am not an anar-chist’). Resistance always end up erecting centres of power – as we sawin the previous chapter regarding deconstruction’s jetties. Yet decon-struction is ‘undoubtedly anarchic’ – as Derrida specified in the sameinterview where he declared himself not to be an anarchist – because itengages with the constitutions of spaces where no hierarchy orauthority would be stable and immutable.44 It is hard not to hear ananarchic tonality, for instance, in Derrida’s acknowledgment that thereason of the strongest is always the best and that, therefore, anyexercise of sovereignty is also a roguish abuse of power. Critique itselfhas to be related to a ‘fundamental anarchism’ for – as Foucault saysand does not say simultaneously – it is linked with the historic practiceof revolt, with the refusal of being governed.

For Derrida, the Humanities can take some steps toward an ‘ori-ginary anarchy’45 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


of economical discourses that put women and men to work and settlethem in stable and identified places.46 Striking against this exploita-tion, the labour of theory commits itself to a different form of ‘com-munity’ – to use a word that Derrida does not like but nevertheless usesin his writings on the university. What is in fact deconstruction if notthe general strike which reclaims the right to contest ‘and not onlytheoretically’47 the legitimate authorities and all their discursivenorms? As if for a new form of politics to begin, for a radical democracyto start coming, it would be necessary to bracket the governanceactually at work on the present. It is as if the world begins when andwhere work ends.

But this new world cannot be founded by critique. Founding requiresfoundational myths; one needs to gather a multitude around a uniquefire and compose it into a people ‘as one’.48 On the contrary, critique –as Benjamin’s general proletarian strike – does not replace the existingsystem with a different one. It aims to make inoperative the discourseswhich arrest humanity in fixed places and fixed roles. Critique isdestructive because it does not impose a destiny on the living, reg-ulating and ordering its time through the schedule of the workday.Deconstructive critique cannot have any power (which does not meanthat it does not have any force: a force of the weak, a weak force doesindeed exist) for otherwise it would repeat the traditional dream of thephilosopher, that is to teach and at the same time ‘to direct, steer,organize, the empirical work of the laborers’.49 Critique should notdismantle the power of higher faculties and governance in order tomake philosophy acquire more power over the present. There is norevival of Plato’s Philosopher-Kings here, nor the interest in a newsocio-political hierarchization of disciplines and groups. The risk thatneeds to be avoided is turning critique from a mode of resistance tosovereign power, into a superpower itself, reconstituting in such afashion the powers of a given caste, class or corporation. The anti-authoritarian force of critique needs to be maintained as dissociated aspossible from the figure of sovereignty, even if sometimes it is strate-gically necessary to challenge given sovereign powers by evoking ahigher sovereign law – for example, contesting the roguish attitude ofso-called Western democracies in the name of international humanrights. Challenging the sovereign powers’ mastery over the real,deconstruction cannot enforce a different order of things and there-fore fall for the phantasms of sovereignty. The time of reflection isanother time, for its ultimate goal is to deactivate the rigid organizationof the present by exposing it to its futures. This is to say, from my pointof view, that critique’s only business is to help create a radicallydemocratic space, a public space where time itself would be public: theauthority over the present would not be alienated from the social, butwould rather be shared by the plurality of different communities and


identities forming a ‘people’.50 Since it wants to explode the con-tinuum of this time, its calendar and its clocks, critique cannot avoidbeing untimely anachronistic.51 As Foucault admits,

critique only exists in relation with something other than itself: it is aninstrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happento be, it is a gaze on a domain that it would want to police but that isincapable of ruling.52

The right to critique requires infinite responsibility. If the criticalforces that have their primary field of action within the university wantto be effective in their resistance, they should discontinue indulging inthe cushions of their iv(or)y leagues. They should exit the citadel –Stanford, Cornell or Columbia – which grants them freedom to theextent that they do not bother or upset a given order. Academicresistance needs in fact to ally itself with extra-academic forces ‘inorder to organize an inventive resistance, through its oeuvres, its work,to all attempts at reappropriation (political, juridical, economic, and soforth), to all the other figures of sovereignty’.53 By referring through itsgestures and accounts to the possibility of a different happening, theresistance at once theoretical and practical revokes the necessity of thenow. By casting a ‘maybe’ in the heart of the present, deconstructioncan help disarticulate the present’s solidarity and annul its undisputedauthorities. What changes in such a process of disjointment? Every-thing and yet, nothing at all. Even if the reality (Realitat) of the presentremains unaltered, its manner of being becomes modified. To bedisarticulated is the present’s actuality (Wirklichkeit).

Following Heidegger, who is writing in Kant’s wake to accelerate hisown thought, ‘reality’ is the thingness of a determinate being, thetotality of predicates which determine its essential kernel. Such pre-dicates are not affected by deconstructive critique; deconstruction doesnot ‘unrealize’ time by producing counter-discourses that claim tograsp the essence of the world itself better. The oeuvres Derrida talksabout are not primarily meant to depict the present differently. Thelabour of deconstruction aims to modify not the ‘what’ of the now, butits ‘how’ – that is, the way of being of time itself. When Kant asserts thatbeing is not a real predicate, he means that the actuality of a thing isnot a determination which belongs to the conceptual core of that thingitself. Actuality is the manner in which we are directed towards a thing,in our case, the present. The different modalities of being directedtowards it do not alter its essence. ‘A hundred actual thalers and ahundred possible thalers do not differ in their reality’, since existencedoes not belong to the reality of the thing, to its conceptual determi-nations.54 Thus, if deconstruction is interested in actuality, its resis-tance does not modify reality, the essence of the present but, in a


Husserlian fashion, it suspends the manner in which we are directedtoward it. The contents of the world do not change; what changes is theway the world is lived. The deconstruction of actuality weakens thebeing-in-force of the present, its necessity. The presence of the presentstarts 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 reasonand reason tout court – I would even say, the Enlightenment of a certainAufklarung (thus leaving open the abyss which is again opening today underthese words) – not to found, where it is no longer a matter of founding, butto open out to the future, or rather, to the ‘come’, of a certain democracy?55

In the concentrationary universes which yesterday and today – today ina more discreet fashion than yesterday – are born everywhere in theworld, is the ‘to come’ of the possible that is being suppressed. Theonly possibilities allowed are the ones which confirm, rather thancontest, the infrastructure of the real. Under the towers delimiting thescope of concentration there is no perhaps, there is no future, there isno past. There is only the dictatorship of the present. Thus, it is thisking – the present – that we must be tread on, if we want to engage inthe emancipation of that which might come. The possibility of thefuture should not be adored in the silence of a sort of negativetheology; it should be cultivated in order to negotiate the exit from thesame. It is not a matter of enlightening the limits which one knows apriori that one cannot overcome. It is a matter of tracing and openingup the thresholds, those narrow gates through which unexpectedfutures might come.

The explosiveness of the maybe, the peut-etre, is that which philoso-phy today has the duty to safeguard. Deconstructive critique says yes tothe spectres of other forms of communities and of being together. Itsuspends the necessity of the present not in order to inculcate – asRorty would like – a utopian future, community and politics whicheventually might put an end to time. Rather, it revokes the now withthe aim of allowing spaces where the present would be lived as the fieldof an unconditioned and transformative critique, thus ineluctablyimmersed in the becoming without destiny of history.


Politics of Conciliation and Politics of Monstrosity

This is the Western democratic, popular conception ofphilosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinnerconversations at Mr. Rorty’s. Rival opinions at the dinnertable – is this not the eternal Athens, our way of being Greekagain?

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?)

Richard Rorty points out that in these analyses I do not appealto any ‘we’ – to any of those ‘we’s’ whose consensus, whosevalues, whose traditions constitute the framework for athought and define the conditions in which it can be validated.But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actuallysuitable to place oneself within a ‘we’ in order to assert theprinciples one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if itis not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a‘we’ possible by elaborating the question. Because it seemsto me that ‘we’ must not be previous to the question; it canonly be the result – and the necessary temporary result – ofthe question as it is posed in the new terms in which oneformulates it.

(Michel Foucault, ‘Polemics, politics, and problematizations’)

Why is Richard Rorty so afraid of deconstruction? Surely he must feelthreatened by it, otherwise – if it were obvious that philosophy does nothave any significance in the space of contemporary society – he wouldnot be so anxious to avert critical theory’s publicity in his Achieving OurCountry.

In the preceding sections, I first clarified Rorty’s distinction betweenpublic and private, then demonstrated how Derrida in his lecturesabout and from the university – one of which was delivered in front ofRorty himself 56 – questions the isolation of the Humanities from thepublic sphere, localizing in them a potentiality for political resistance.In this final section, I will discuss in detail Rorty’s attempt to aesthe-ticize deconstruction in order to safeguard the present from anyradical critique of its authority.

As it should be evident by now, a strange duality binds Rorty toDerrida’s work. While praising its anti-philosophical originality, Rortyfears that deconstructive attitude will stop being the exclusive propertyof the cultural avant-garde and will start pouring out of academia’sprotected and protective walls. I do not believe in fact that Rorty isreally concerned with the presumed non-publicity of deconstruction,that he is worried by the spectatorial attitude it might induce in itsreaders. On the contrary, I am convinced that Rorty’s apprehension is


provoked by deconstruction’s intrinsic political commitment. Ifdeconstruction attempts to create spaces for an unpredictable other-wise, who can grant that what is to come will not be a monstrouscatastrophe, something much worse than what we enjoy today? Afteraffirming the theoretical legitimacy of the ironist theory descendingfrom Hegel, Rorty begins to estimate its political desirability. The focusshifts from the aporetic epistemic privilege of deconstruction to itsethico-political usefulness. Assuming that deconstruction leads us farfrom the tracks beaten by the traditional axiomatic, one begins towonder if it is worth for critique to be as anachronistic with respect tothe present.

Language – as politics – can be conceived as a battlefield traversed bytwo opposite tensions. One pushes toward innovation and transfor-mation, the other toward invariance and conservation. While the firstmovement aims to produce zones in which the habitual languagegames are suspended, the second tends to safeguard the grammaticalnorms in force.57 Rorty believes that only intellectuals can venturealong the path of transformative experimentation; the masses shouldnot participate in the language game that asserts the unconditionalright to question the structures constituting and regulating our prac-tices. Pragmatism is in fact generously willing to liberate common sensefrom some of its metaphysical presumptions. In ‘the ideal liberalsociety’ (as Rorty calls it), all intellectuals will be ironists: they will enjoyquestioning the grammar of their form of life. The non-intellectuals,on the other hand, will only be nominalists and historicists.58 We, thepeople outside the Humanities, will be aware that we are contingentbeings produced by historical vocabularies. Yet we will not doubt thecontingencies we happened to become. We will not care to understandthe normalizing discourses that transformed us into the subjects thatwe are today, nor would we try to break free from those devices andinvent something new. At best, the intellectuals will propose to usalternatives modalities of being in the world. We would not be able toproduce by ourselves such new modes of living because we were nottrained in the language game of doubting the grammar that shapes ourbeing. Luckily, intellectuals, poets and those others who could affordacquiring such language games (perhaps at Stanford, under Rorty’ssupervision) will do the work for us, and social engineers will helpresolve the more concrete problems which trouble us. To put it inanother way: we will let ourselves be governed by the authors of dis-courses and norms, while the intellectuals will be allowed to decon-struct the authority of the language games ruling over the present.Politics for Rorty is not a matter of acting in order to desubjugateeveryone from the condition of minority; it is not a matter of lettingthose minoritized speak for themselves. As Rorty candidly affirms inContingency, Irony, and Solidarity, ‘I cannot imagine a culture which


socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubiousabout their own process of socialization’ (p. 87). The only form ofsocialization Rorty seems to concede us is the one that – to say it withWittgenstein – makes us blind to alternatives. Rorty’s liberalism bansthe non-intellectuals from the right to dispute the discursive practicesthat shaped their selves. This right is granted only to intellectuals andonly on the condition that they do not abuse the privilege by being tooradical in public: irony can only be a private matter, an activity only fewcan indulge in. The whole business of separating the public and theprivate as two distinct and insurmountable spheres starts to materializeas the policing action that it really is. Once theory has been extractedfrom the body of the city, it is not that hard to reduce philosophy into aprivate hobby, into one’s own wild orchids. Critical thought is firstexiled from the public, then it is argued to lack ‘publicity’. Rorty evenaffirms that it is in the interest of the public that irony should berestrained into the private: ‘most people do not want to be redescribed.They want to be taken on their own terms – taken seriously just as theyare and just as they talk.’59 Rorty hopes that critical thinkers willeventually leave the people alone. The people will be taken in theterms they were trained to use; they will just be as they are and talk asthey do. But is not the attempt to separate intellectuals from thecommunity a way of preventing the desire for not being governed as weare governed from ever acquiring some public relevance? The idealliberal society indeed is the one imagined by Rorty.

Rorty cannot take seriously Habermas’s claim that to protect theinstitutes of Western democracies, one has to disclose the universalisticelements of human experience as such. It is flawed to assume thatdemocracy is the one very political model that is attuned to the essenceof humanity, that any other political regime would alienate the com-municative essence of man: humanity does not have an essence.Democracy does not have to be anchored on the essence of man ingeneral, but only on our own essence; the fact that democracy worksfor us is enough to justify its existence. Liberal politics cannot aspire toany sort of transcendental deduction for it can only be grounded onour present form of life. However, since the way we live now is the soleassurance for our democratic tastes, in order to protect liberal society,we need to dismiss many alternatives to our ‘we’. What binds liberalsocieties are not philosophical grounds, but ‘common vocabularies andcommon hopes’. 60 If one wants to support democracy, then oneshould try to consolidate exactly such common hopes and vocabul-aries. For this reason, Rorty’s approval of French post-Nietzscheanphilosophy comes to an end when it stops being an academic critiqueof Habermas’ theory of communicative action and starts underminingthe soundness of the political hopes which informs it. At one extremeof the philosophical scene is Lyotard, who advocates the idea of the


revocability of any political narrative; on the other is Habermas, whoargues that it is fundamental for a democratic society’s self-image tomaintain a universalistic dimension.

Anything that Habermas will count as retaining a ‘theoretical approach’ willbe counted by an incredulous Lyotard as a ‘metanarrative.’ Anything thatabandons such an approach will be counted by Habermas as more or lessirrationalist because it drops the notions which have been used to justify thevarious reforms which have marked the history of the Western democraciessince the Enlightenment, and which are still being used to criticize thesocioeconomic institutions of both the Free and the Communist worlds.Abandoning a standpoint which is, if not transcendental, at least ‘uni-versalistic,’ seems to Habermas to betray the social hopes which have beencentral to liberal politics. So we find French critics of Habermas ready toabandon liberal politics in order to avoid universalistic philosophy, andHabermas trying to hang on to universalistic philosophy, with all its pro-blems, in order to support liberal politics.61

As if to compromise the two positions, Rorty suggests that democracydoes not need to be grounded on a universalistic position; nonetheless,one should avoid ungrounding it too much. When Rorty proposes tothe Cultural Left ‘a moratorium on theory’, he hopes that the leftisttheorists would set aside their foolish critical attitude.62 He wants themto participate in the public discussion on how to reinforce the ‘bind-ing’ of the present rather than fall for the discreet charm of radicalemancipations whose outcome cannot be predicted. As Ernesto Laclaucommented, Rorty’s disagreement with French post-structuralism(Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and so forth) is essentially political, whilewith Habermas it is merely philosophical and – let me add – strategic.63

The Left, for Rorty, should try to kick its philosophy habit so as tocontribute to public welfare.

Putting aside the theoretical habit for Rorty coincides with embracingan ideological use of literature. As I argued earlier, Foucault and Der-rida consider fictional discourse as a critical lever (mochlos) to unsettlethe solidity of our current we. Rorty assigns it the opposite function.Responsible intellectuals should not produce works which exhibit theradical contingency of the current now. A new political wisdom shouldbe organized around the necessity of producing fictions that wouldprotect the social body from the possible disarticulation of its solidarity:in the interests of one’s own community – as a certain Kant would say –intellectuals should shield principles to which they would not them-selves subscribe with full conviction. By depoliticizing and privatizingdeconstruction, Rorty is able to safeguard the political goals inspiringhis pragmatism. His primary intent is in effect to make liberal institu-tions outlive the demise of the discursive apparatus on which they weregrounded. Since the narratives that powerfully justified the liberal


society ended up inoperative, new narratives become necessary foraccomplishing the same legitimizing task. It is not a matter of findingnew philosophical grounds for democracy and even less a matter oftaking seriously how the critique of Western reason should affect thevery structure of democracy. Since we are sure that Western liberalism isthe best thing that can ever happen to us, we just need to come up witha new rhetoric to let it (and us) prosper. Literature and literary studies,affirms Rorty, are political insofar as they ‘inculcate’ democratic valuesin their readers.64 It is true that, as Foucault remarked, the mode ofgovernance characteristic of liberal societies has imposed on theirmembers a variety of constraints which premodern societies could notimagine. However, contrary to Foucault, Rorty thinks that these modernconstraints have been compensated by the benefits they produced, andeven if not, democracy has in itself the means of adjusting its mechan-isms and achieving its dream.

Strikingly, Rorty does not pay too much attention to the ‘dis-comforts’ provoked by the Western dream on those who do not par-ticipate to it. As Achieving Our Country reveals, Rorty is perfectly aware ofthe fact that the existence of the West is grounded on the scientific andcapillary destruction of the ‘Other World’ – a world that is not simply‘abroad’ but also at the very hearth of the liberal modernity – on theexploitation of its raw men and materials. We can survive only by for-bidding the Third World’s inhabitants all the comforts we enjoy.Nonetheless, Rorty’s biggest concern remains how to defend America’smiddle class from impoverishment. But one should not be surprised bysuch an attitude; after all Rorty has proudly and ethnocentricallydeclared that ‘we must, in practice, privilege our own group’.65 Thereis no reason for him to care about the ‘not-we’.

The privilege of being ourselves is so comfortable that we cannoteven consider breaking out from our current way of living. The ben-efits we enjoy have eventually made us blind and deaf to alternatives.66

Yes, the ironist reads books about strange people, strange families andstrange communities, but it is less a matter of using such books todivert himself effectively from the self that he was trained to be, than ofgetting a temporary private excitement out of such exotic instances, orof acquiring topics to converse wittingly about at dinner. As far asautonomy is conceived as a mere intellectualistic game against philo-sophical tradition, it is no longer a political resistance to State gov-ernmentality. As long as irony is a private practice, it does noteffectively mark the political body; on the contrary, under the pretextof disconcerting, it plays the game of the established politicalmechanism. Reducing irony and autonomy to inherently private mat-ters is Rorty’s way of blocking deconstructive attitude from deactivatingthe established social order and promoting the formation of alter-native ‘we’.67


Significantly, Rorty’s proposal of putting a moratorium on theory isintertwined with the exigency of mobilizing what remains of the pridein being ‘Americans’. Theory is in fact denounced – with an ethic ofreading one would expect from Allan Bloom – as one of the majorobstacles to the reactivation of American pride. With its abstract andbarren explanations of even the most concrete and simple things (‘acurrent TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal’)68 theoryunderstands 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 forBlack Muslims. As usual, Rorty here does two things at once: on theone hand, he denounces ‘theory’ for it produces a retreat from acti-vism and a disengagement from practice; and on the other hand, hesubtly suggests that the labour of theory risks generating the same anti-American ‘separatism’ that one is supposed to find among members ofa controversial formation. Interested in the well-being of this commu-nity, Rorty needs to ward off any discourses that could promote a formof community against the grain of the present. ‘We’ Americans need togo about our public business. We Americans should not be displacedby Foucauldian discourses. Therefore, theory cannot be right. If onebecame convinced that the war in Vietnam or the endless humiliationinflicted on African-Americans were not just mistakes correctable byreforms, but rather, signs of something structurally wrong with theUnited States, then one would have the responsibility of revolutioniz-ing that very structure. But since a radical intervention in the real iswhat needs to be avoided in the first place, the United States cannot bean evil empire. Rorty does not say that ‘our country’ is not an evilempire, that the configuration of the American society does notresemble an Orwellian dictatorship. But since such accounts wouldendanger the present of the United States, their heavy objectivity needsto be bracketed. Rorty accomplishes this task mainly by following twostrategies. First, he denigrates the groups, specifically the New Left,who believe there is something profoundly wrong with the West. Sec-ondly, he very subtly falsifies the events denounced by the 1960s’radical leftism by resorting to all sorts of rhetorical mediation. TheNew Leftists started to become convinced that the United States was not aspure as described by their parents and their teachers, because theywanted to believe so – maybe for a sort of adolescent rebellion againstauthority figures – and on the basis of some clues like the Vietnam Warand State racism (p. 66). This is not to say that the New Left, convincedthat the dystopic Oceania was not so far from Washington DC, did notaccomplish great things then (‘It may have saved our country frombecoming a garrison state’). Rather, it is to affirm that for the sake ofour now, the radicalism of its critique should be now put aside. To savethe trust in the United States’ present and future, its past must be


forgotten – circumvented, if you will – for such history might fire updiscontent against the institutes and the values which shape our selves.

To participate in the political life of one’s community, for Rorty,amounts to partaking in the present’s mechanics, and not, as Derridahas argued, to questioning such mechanisms in name of the exploited‘others’. If it were not like this, it would be impossible to understandwhy Rorty suggests that there is something wrong in being moreinterested in the wretched of the earth than in the proletarization ofAmerican white bourgeoisie (p. 89). When humanity’s welfare andhomeland security clash – as it does quite often – Rorty always choosesto privilege the latter. But for this very reason, it is really difficult tocomprehend how he can reconcile the Christian ecumenism organiz-ing Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity with the frankly ethnocentricpatriotism in Achieving Our Country.

With its sublime critique, does not theory end up risking the verybelief that the different countries to which we belong is achieving agreat dream?

Rorty hopes that the quasi-religious tone assumed by the movementcrowding both Atlantic coasts becomes a private cult. Some venerateGod, others Being, others the Superhuman and still others, the powerof critique and the critique of power. All these sects should be grantedthe right to believe in what they prefer. Everyone seeks individualperfection 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 disturbanceproduced by theory is determined by its emphasis on unrepresent-ability and the unrepresentable. Taking into serious consideration themechanisms of exclusion from representability and the production ofunrepresented voices, groups and communities would of courserequire a radical reconfiguration of the so-called Western representa-tive liberalisms. Twisting Derrida’s position upside down, Rorty insiststhat considering democratic politics as inadequate would amount toapathy. If one believes that power is everywhere, that everyone is to acertain degree ‘guilty’, then why should one persist in the attempt tomake as just as possible the time in which one lives?

Rorty thinks that it would be better if leftist intellectuals worked forthe promise of concrete reforms rather than get stuck in post-struc-turalist critiques. In Rorty’s opinion, we do not need Derrida’sdeconstruction and philosophical critique to be aware of the lacera-tions which wound the contemporary world. For instance, Derrida’sSpecters of Marx lists ten plagues which can bury the democratic dream:the growing rate of unemployment; the exclusion of homeless peoplefrom political life; economical and trade wars which oppose States toStates, groups of States to groups of States; the contrasts between thefree market and the rights of labourers; the blackmail of foreign debt


which starves a large portion of the planet; the increasing power of thearms industry; the uncontrolled spreading of nuclear weapons; inter-ethnic wars; mafias and drug cartels which have become phantomstates; a powerless international law.69 The problem is that thedeconstruction of the distinction use-exchange or the phenomenologyof the unrepresentable are not useful tools for resolving such pro-blems. Rorty has Derrida in such a high esteem that he awaits practicalsuggestions for acting, but all he can get is the usual unfamiliarizationof everything one believed to be familiar. It is as if Rorty got a littleannoyed with deconstructive practice. Ironist frivolity and suspicionhave grown old.

Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was real, but now you see that it’s only a socialconstruct! You thought it was just a familiar object of sense-perception, butlook! It has a supersensible, spectral, spiritual, backside!70

Nowadays the monstrosity of deconstruction has exhausted its sub-versive power. Deconstruction should not be satisfied with being anexclusively critical force; besides undermining the authority and thecredibility of the ‘enemy’, it should also help establish a crediblealternative. It is time to dismiss its patient and infinite questioning andstart devising answers: Rorty would concede a public value to decon-struction only if it became a normative practice, interested in incul-cating democratic values and safeguarding the established politicalorder. If Derrida does not want to pick up such a role, then decon-struction should be excluded from participating in public life.

The public sphere – as imagined by Rorty – would be a place shel-tered from deconstructing parasites; a domain where critiques tooradical are not welcome.

What Rorty has in mind is a sort of gentlemen’s agreement. Sinceonly a very limited circle of people holds critical interventions in highaccount, when one is dealing with the real, concrete and urgent needsof 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 ofthe common sense’s vocabulary. Only by compromising with it, canone reach a social-economical improvement. The privileged ones, thecultured, pot-bellied, sophisticated ones will have time to criticizeprivately. Publicly it would be better to avoid it as a form of educationand out of respect for the exigency of the others.

And what about those who insist on producing critique? In Rorty’sopinion, the democratic spirit of accommodation and tolerance shouldnot reach the point of taking every question introduced into the publicsphere seriously.71 Even if such an attitude denotes a certain disdainfor the very tolerance on which the institutes of democracy pretend tobe grounded, in order to save democracy from critique, one has not to


be religiously democratic. That is to say, not completely and radicallydemocratic. Democracy must be able to limit philosophy even if, doingso, it becomes a limited democracy, even if it gives up Enlightenment’sdemand for a criticizability without conditions: ‘When the two comeinto 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 ofphilosophy’s relevance to public life. 72 Rorty intends to keep not onlyreligious beliefs distant from the political sphere – as Jefferson wanted– but also philosophical problematizations. Within democracy, philo-sophical and religious beliefs should not be granted any influence onpolitical issues. Religious or philosophical convictions are allowed inprivate so long as such beliefs do not interfere with the regular work-ings of the social order. When the private either aspires to becomepublic, or conflicts in a too radical manner with the presumed publiccommon sense, then the State is legitimized in using force againstindividual conscience. The quite enlightened 1988 ‘The priority ofdemocracy to philosophy’ eventually shows the dark side of Rorty’scontingent, ironic and solidaire liberalism.

A liberal democracy will not only exempt opinions on such matters fromlegal coercion, but also aim at disengaging discussions of such questionsfrom discussions of social policy. Yet it will use force against the individualconscience, just insofar as conscience leads individuals to act so as tothreaten democratic institutions. (p. 183)

Nothing can claim the right to bother democratic institutions. If theproposal of a moratorium against theory and of a limitation to therange of critique is not enough to safeguard the present, Rorty clearlyasserts the possibility of resorting to violence in order to eradicate thephilosophical threats to democracy. What is at the same time mostinteresting and shocking in Rorty’s position is that he does not try tojustify theoretically the legitimacy of such eventual repression. Theexercise of violence has its sufficient justification in the fact that vio-lence is a means of consolidating the very existence of democracy.Within the economy of Rorty’s arguments, the defence of democracy –or better, the defence of the now of democracy distinguished from itsto come – is the supreme value, unquestionable and indubitable asGod, which justifies even violent interventions in the private realm inorder to prevent any threat on the well-being of the present. The onlyarguments that are admitted in the public space – but after all, also inthe private – are those that are aligned with the profound structureswhich are not to be challenged. The private must not only be dis-tinguished from but also attuned to the public in order to assure apacified society. The assumption of the contingency of human history


does not coincide in Rorty with the recognition of the unconditionalquestionability of all its institutes, as it happens in Derrida. On thecontrary, 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 sociusand of the we, when theory nearly creates counter-communities bothwithin and without the public space, belonging to the same physicalspace but organized around a different time, then the police step in. Inthe best tradition of American literary studies, Rorty thinks of literatureas primarily a normative way of guaranteeing the integrity of a certainsocial and historical self. Critique, focusing on the modalities of pro-duction and reception of meaning and value, is ultimately perceived asa 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 enforcesuch stories, it should be distanced from actual politics. The questionsthat those who spend their lives on philosophy books should askthemselves is whether they want to lose time with disputes such as thespectacular one exploded between John Searle and Derrida. Ben-nington wonders:

How could we agree to remain shut up in a library poring over old philo-sophers, who, for the most part, moreover, encourage us to put the booksaway 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 newconcepts which can lacerate the present. What matters is to be activelyengaged in politics. However, that which is important to underscore isthat the modality of such engagement is strictly and pre-emptivelypoliced: for Rorty, private are all those modes of being together that donot share the hegemonic articulation of the real. Public sphere is theharmonious space in which consensus in created; not the dimension inwhich different projects conflict one against the other. Since it is evi-dent who we should be, since we are certain of the values and princi-ples in which we want to believe, the identity to which we belongcannot be examined radically and publicly. Thus one needs to excludefrom the public space all those struggles which aspire to favourantagonistic ways of living the now. The only way to participate inpolitics is, for Rorty, being cautiously reformist.

The kind of weak postmodern liberalism advocated by Rorty is not soweak after all: it does not imply any disarmament towards the other andtowards critique, that is towards the transformation of the present andthe exposedness to what the current system cannot represent. We areonly to find the most suitable means for enhancing our own form ofcommunity and thought. And for this very reason, we have the


responsibility to intervene against the dissemination of the anarchicconviction that any institution and any law can be criticized. One has todelimit a private area to prevent the contagious epidemic of counter-communities. It seems that Rorty’s discourse aspires to be institutio-nalized as a tool for protecting society from any danger that can stemfrom contemporary French philosophy’s monstrosity and from any-thing which can be even remotely related to it. Being interested in thesolidarity of the social body as if it were an indivisible unity, Rorty, as aperfect political epidemiologist, implies that the goal of politics is toharmonize tensions so as to avoid radical changes. And philosophy andnarrative 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 con-flict from the social-democratic public environment. Rorty does notimmediately prohibit the possibility for a polemic or a debate eventhough they appear sterile and useless. For a start, he attempts toconvince us, mainly through a ‘preemptive argumentative war’, that itis dangerous for us to renounce the comforts of today’s security. Asusual, Rorty tries to change the topic of conversation and isolate in aspiral of silence those who do not comply with his agenda. But such aresistance to theory is not merely verbal and argumentative. Critique istolerated so long as the political indocility on which it is anchored andwhich it promotes does not constitute an effective threat against thegovernmentalization project. As soon as critique compromises thebond through which a community is tied to itself, Rorty does nothesitate to summon the brutal intervention of the police to enforce thesocial status quo. As Hardt and Negri have highlighted, the benignpractice of avoiding critical problems in order to preserve social har-mony can only be grounded on the violent intervention of the police.

In this sense, the thin State of postmodern liberalism appear, in effect, as arefinement and extension of the German tradition of the science of thepolice. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction and isola-tion: the ‘thin blue line’ delimits the boundaries of what will be accepted asinputs in the system of rule. Rorty says that the State will discard or set asideelements of difference and conflict, but when we pose the operation ofdiscarding and setting aside on the real field of power it can only beunderstood as the preventive deployment of force, or rather the threat ofultimate force in the final instance. . . . The Disneyland of a fictional socialequilibrium and harmony, the simulacrum of the happiest place on earth, isnecessarily backed up by the LAPD.75

Ultimately, Rorty’s liberal societies are not founded on good feelingsand solidarity, but on police. Terrorized by what might happen to it,the West needs to terrorize its citizenry and render them docile. In


Rorty’s fear of deconstruction and critique, in his resistance to theory,it is easy to recognize the liberal disapproval for an ethics committed toincreasing the chance of events explosive enough to transgress thegrammar we are now. It is mandatory to avoid the production of thetraumatic awareness that the normality which we live – the ‘we’ towhich literature should reduce any ‘other’ – is radically contingent andunconditionally revocable. For such reasons, it is vital to condemndeconstruction with a double privacy: privacy to prevent disjointmentof the public space, and privacy as isolation of the occurred outbreak inorder to avert further damage.

It was in 1966, during a symposium in the United States we were bothparticipating in. After some friendly remarks about the talk I had just given,Jean Hyppolite added: ‘That said, I really don’t see where you are going.’ Ithink 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 getthere’.76

It looks as though Rorty endeavours in any way to shield himself fromthe unpredictability of deconstruction’s anarchic and responsibleengagements. He needs to have assurance that at the end of the day hewill return to the exact same form of life from where he moved in themorning. And when such a happy ending cannot be guaranteed, thefear of the unpredictable makes him create protective barriers thatensure the security of his home. Both from a political and a philoso-phical point of view, Rorty is not able – nor willing – really to contestthe authority of the axiomatics organizing the present. By cir-cumventing tradition, Rorty can preserve its sovereignty and its grip onus. He can make the metaphysical norms outlive its demise. He canethnocentrically enjoy its benefits without caring for their grounding.From this perspective, Rorty’s privatization of deconstruction even-tually appears as a powerful attempt to domesticate Derrida and to makehim pacific, restrained, inoffensive. To turn a monster into a pet. Apuppy. Rorty’s attempt to privatize Derrida eventually appears as adefensive discourse which contains the risks of deconstruction bypassing it for a gratuitous play devoid of scientific or theoretical ser-iousness, as well as of political or ethical thrust.77 What Rorty fears themost is the monstrosity of critique: the discursive monsters producedby deconstruction might force the people to become aware of thehistory of normality, of the normalization process which made themthe good citizens they are. As Derrida writes, faced by a monster ‘onemay become aware of what the norm is and when this norm has ahistory – which is the case with discursive norms, philosophical norms,socio-cultural norms, they have a history – any appearance of mon-strosity in this domain allows an analysis of the history of the norms’.78


But a monster is always alive, is a living being, and so one cannotforesee where it will end up bringing itself (and us).

The necessity of security is exactly what marks the infinite distanceseparating Rorty from Derrida. The former is locked within theboundaries of a given theoretical and political community, confidingin narratives and philosophy to prevent the coming of monsters.Deconstruction, instead, plays in blindfolds. It bids on possibilities foran existence to come. An unpredictable, multiple, unnamable exis-tence, which – recalling the 1996 symposium that opened UnitedStates to Jacques Derrida’s work – ‘is proclaiming itself and which cando so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under thespecies of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifyingform of monstrosity’.79


Notes

Chapter 1

1 See Rorty, ‘Keeping philosophy pure: an essay on Wittgenstein’, in Con-sequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,1982), pp. 19–36. Rorty uses the German word Fach to describe philosophy asan autonomous discipline (a ‘faculty’ in my own terms).

2 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1979), p. 131.

3 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1982), p. 11. Further reference will be given in the main bodyof 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. 77–103.

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. 274–89.10 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989), pp. 73–94.11 See Rorty, ‘Science as solidarity’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 22–4.12 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 (1973–4), pp. 5–20.14 Actually Davidson, referring to Quine’s 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.

19 Rorty, ‘Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism’, p. 99.20 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 8.21 See Rorty, ‘Science as solidarity’, pp. 21–34.22 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. 103–9.25 Rorty, ‘Dewey between Hegel and Darwin’, in Truth and Progress, pp. 301–

6. See also Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 12–13.26 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 7.27 See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1997), pp. 26–39.28 Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),

p. 49. Bloom is here quoting Derrida’s ‘Freud and the scene of writing’,quoting Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.

29 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 60. Here Bloom is quoting GiambattistaVico’s 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 Uni-

versity Press, 2007), p. 47.34 See Plato, The Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),

Book VII, 514a 2–517a 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. 17–22.38 See Godzich, ‘The domestication of Derrida’, in The Yale Critics, ed. J.

Arac, W. Godzich and W. Martin (Minneapolis, MN: University of MinnesotaPress, 1983), pp. 20–7.

39 Wheeler III, ‘Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man’, in Redrawingthe Lines, ed. R. Dasenbrock (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,1989), pp. 126–8. See de Man, Allegories of Reading (Yale: Yale University Press,1982), pp. 119–31.

40 Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense, quoted (and translateddirectly from German) by de Man in Allegories of Reading, pp. 110–11.

41 See Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, pp. 90–2.42 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 59–60.43 ‘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 andTime (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 272.

44 Rorty, ‘Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism’, in Essays on Heideggerand Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 34.

45 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 119.

Notes130

46 Ibid., p. 101.47 Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, p. 93.48 Besides ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, see Rorty’s ‘Derrida on lan-

guage, being, and abnormal philosophy’, The Journal of Philosophy, 74(11)(1977), pp. 673–81.

49 Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982), pp. 26–7.

50 Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1998), p. 216.

51 Rorty, ‘Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism’, pp. 38–9.52 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 Husserl’s 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, ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, in Dissemination (Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 1981), p. 108.

67 Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, p. 106.68 Derrida, ‘Plato’s 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

Kafka’s diaries.74 Derrida, ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, p. 84.75 See Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore,

MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 45–51.

Notes 131

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. 126–7.80 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 Rorty’s own

account of cultural history as a succession of redescriptions, it is hard tounderstand 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. Thesame quotation returns in Consequences of Pragmatism (p. 50) and a couple oftimes in Essays on Heidegger and Others. Heidegger’s sentence can function asthe slogan for the circumvention of philosophy only by artfully isolating itfrom its context.

Chapter 2

1 Rorty, ‘Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?’, in Essays on Heideggerand Others (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 119.

2 ‘Jonathan and Cynthia were standing near me next to the glass case, thetable rather, where laid out, under glass, in a transparent coffin, amonghundreds of displayed reproductions, this card had to jump out at me. I sawnothing else, but that did not prevent me from feeling that right near meJonathan and Cynthia were observing me obliquely, watching me look. As ifthey were spying on me in order to finish the effects of a spectacle they hadstaged (they have just married more or less)’: Derrida, ‘Envois’, in The PostCard (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 andOthers, p. 86.

Notes132

5 Rorty, ‘Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?’, pp. 119–20 and‘Deconstruction and circumvention’, p. 105.

6 Norris, ‘Philosophy as not just a ‘‘kind of writing’’: Derrida and the claimof reason’, in Redrawing the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of MinnesotaPress, 1989), p. 192.

7 See Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1986), p. 5. For a detailed critical account of Gasche’s project and anindispensable discussion of some interpretations of Derrida in the mid-1980s,see Bennington, ‘Deconstruction and the philosophers (the very idea)’, inLegislations (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 11–60. 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 powerfulmodern inflection of that tradition in terms of reflection’ (p. 20). One of theproblems connected with this approach is that it presupposes the very idea oflinear history that Derrida has contested. Bennington suggests in fact thatGasche’s contextualization of Derrida ends up thinking history as filiation: firstthere was Descartes, then Kant, then the two lesser-known Fitche and Schel-ling, then the very important Hegel and eventually Derrida (p. 21). Afterreading 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 ofthe 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. 122–3.11 Ibid., p. 124.12 Davidson, ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, Proceedings and

Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (1973–4), p. 16, quoted byRorty 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 Redrawingthe 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: ‘‘Plato’s letter’’ ’, MLN, 99(4) (September

1984), pp. 748–68.17 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. 62–3.19 See Derrida and Ferraris, ‘I have the taste for the secret’, p. 62.20 See Gasche, The Tain of The Mirror, pp. 76–7. Gasche introduces the

expression ‘theoretical ascetism’ to discuss Ernst Tugendhat’s critique of

Notes 133

reflection. Gasche concludes that Tugendhat’s position is ‘self-defeating’.Rorty defends Tugendhat from Gasche in ‘Is Derrida a transcendental philo-sopher?’. In doing so, Rorty of course is also defending himself and his Der-rida from Gasche.

21 Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 6. Further reference will be given in the main body ofthe text in parenthesis.

22 See Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Love me, love my ombre, Elle’, Diacritics, 14(4)(Winter 1984), pp. 19–36.

23 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 127.24 See de Man, ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, MLN, 94(5) (December

1979), pp. 919–30.25 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 textin parenthesis. For a study on Derrida’s ‘NostAlgeria’ see D. Carroll,‘ ‘‘Remains’’ of Algeria: justice, hospitality, politics’, MLN, 121(4) (2006),pp. 802–27.

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 isalso true for motherhood. They are both naturalized legal fictions. SeeDerrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 93.

30 ‘Renvois d’ailleurs /Echoes from Elsewhere’ is the bilingual title of theconference that originated Monolingualism of the Other.

31 Derrida, ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’, inMargins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 210.Derrida is here quoting a passage from Anatole France’s 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 Phenomenol-

ogy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 3–59.35 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, Rorty’s philosophy as a Lebensphilosophie in The PhilosophicalDiscourse 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.

Notes134

42 Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, JacquesDerrida (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 thetext in parenthesis.

45 Guignon and Hiley, ‘Richard Rorty and contemporary philosophy’, inRichard Rorty, ed. C. Guignon and D. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 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: Cam-bridge 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, Counter-Memory, 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. 31–63. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text inparenthesis.

51 See Derrida, ‘On a newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy’, inRaising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. P. Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1993), pp. 117–71. Further reference will be given in themain body of the text in parenthesis.

52 I think that the ‘perhaps’ which breaks the rhythm of Foucault’sannouncement has been too often overlooked. It would be interesting to startfrom this ‘perhaps’ a rereading of the relationship between Foucault’sontology of the present and Derrida’s 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, ‘Marx’s purloined letter’, in Ghostly Demarcations, ed. M. Sprin-

ker (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: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1992), pp. 283–300.

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.

Notes 135

64 See Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and truth’, in Objectivity, Relativism, andTruth, pp. 126–7.

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. 54–68.70 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. 27–8.

71 Rorty, ‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’, in Deconstruction andPragmatism, ed. C. Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 14.

72 See Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York:Collier, 1967), pp. 46–50. Further reference will be given in the main body ofthe text in parenthesis.

73 Derrida, ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, in Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 1981), p. 122.

74 See J. Caputo, ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental: the caseof Rorty and Derrida’, in Working Through Derrida, ed. G. Madison (Evanston,IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 147–69.

75 In a quite merciless move, one could set up Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, andSolidarity against Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity (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 Freud’s declared avoidance of Nietzsche andphilosophy to Rorty.

79 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction (New York: PantheonBooks, 1978). An account of the similarities between Rorty’s irony and Fou-cault’s 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 thislast seminar by Derrida. In this seminar, given in Paris (2002) and in Irvine(2003), Derrida elaborates the deconstruction of sovereignty which is alreadyat work in Rogues. The most original part of the seminar seems to be the one inwhich Derrida reads Agamben’s distinction between bios and zoe, as promisedin a footnote in Rogues. For some quick remarks on the relation betweenAgamben and Derrida, see my interview with Jean Luc-Nancy (‘Philosophy aschance’) in Critical Inquiry, 33(2) (Winter 2007), pp. 427–40.

81 Derrida, ‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’, in Deconstructionand 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.

Notes136

Carroll (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 84. Further reference will be given inthe main body of the text in parenthesis.

84 See Caputo, ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental’, p. 157.85 See also Derrida’s comments on Gasche and the quasi-transcendental in

his interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge,1992), pp. 70–2.

86 See Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, pp. 268–79.

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. 3–20. Further reference will be given in themain body of the text in parenthesis.

4 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 141–2.5 Ibid., pp. 73–95. 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. 83–7.7 See Rorty, ‘Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy’, in Truth

and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 307–26.8 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. 77–88, 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 inparenthesis.

14 See Rorty, ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’, in Essays on Heideggerand Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 129–39. Fur-ther 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 Philo-

sophy 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 129–30.18 See Derrida, ‘Mochlos, or the conflict of the faculties’, in Eyes of the

University, pp. 83–112.19 Ibid., p. 93.

Notes 137

20 See Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. Der Streit Der Fakultaten (New York:Abaris Books, 1979), pp. 23–9.

21 Foucault, ‘What is critique?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer (LosAngeles: 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. 29–37.28 Derrida, ‘The principle of reason’, pp. 141–2. 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 allowscertain surplus value – through the channel of private foundations, amongothers – to sustain research or creative projects that are not immediately orapparently profitable, we also know that military programs, especially those ofthe Navy, can very rationally subsidize linguistic, semiotic, or anthropologicalinvestigations. 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. 47–8.31 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 Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s Virtue’, p. 222.36 See Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,

pp. 113–38.37 Derrida, ‘Mochlos’, p. 110.38 Butler, ‘What is critique? An essay on Foucault’s virtue’, p. 221. Butler

does a great job in pointing out the relation between the fiction of critiquesand 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. 236–52.

41 See Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis’, in Judging Lyotard, ed. A. Benjamin (NewYork: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–25; see also R. Esposito’s important Communitas:Origine e destino della comunita (Turin: Einaudi, 1998) and Immunitas: Protezione enegazione della vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).

Notes138

42 Derrida and Ferraris, ‘A taste for the secret’, in The Taste for the Secret(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 51–2.

43 See Caputo, ‘Beyond aestheticism: Derrida’s responsible anarchy’,Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988), pp. 59–73; Newman, ‘Derrida’s decon-struction of authority’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 27(3) (2001), pp. 1–20.

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. 204–547 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. 43–70 (‘Myth interrupted’).49 Derrida, ‘The principle of reason’, p. 152.50 On this point the obvious reference is to the remarkably ‘Gramscian-

Derridian’Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics(London: Verso, 2001) by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe. See also Laclau’s review ofContingency, Irony, and Solidarity, ‘Community and its paradoxes: Richard Ror-ty’s ‘‘liberal utopia’’ ’, in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 106–23.

51 Here I can only obliquely allude to the similarity between Derrida’sdeconstruction of actuality and Benjamin’s messianic materialism as it appearsin ‘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. 389–400. See also M. Fritsch’s The Promise of Memory: History andPolitics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY: State University of New YorkPress, 2005), pp. 103–56.

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 Kamuf’s preface to Derrida’s Without Alibi, ‘The

university without condition’ was introduced by a warm and wry welcome byRorty, who was at the time Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and ComparativeLiterature at Stanford.

57 See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (NewYork: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 159–65.

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. 164–5.62 See Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 91.63 See Laclau, ‘Community and its paradoxes: Richard Rorty’s ‘‘liberal

utopia’’ ’, pp. 110–11.

Notes 139

64 See Rorty, ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’, pp. 129–39.65 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. 68–73.67 In the famous 1968 Cerisy-la-Salle decade on ‘Nietzsche aujourd’hui’

Derrida, commenting on Klossowski’s lecture, tried to distinguish between aparodic practice which ‘under the pretext of disconcerting, plays the game ofthe established order’ and an other which would effectively deconstruct it. Foran account of the relation between deconstruction and parody, see S. Weber,‘Upping the ante: deconstruction as parodic practice’, in Deconstruction Is/InAmerica, ed. A. Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995),pp. 60–7.

68 Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 93. Further reference will be given in themain body of the text in parenthesis.

69 See Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 81–4.70 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, Rela-

tivism, and Truth, p. 190. Further reference will be given in the main body ofthe text in parenthesis.

72 See Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Min-neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 235–8.

73 See de Man, ‘The resistance to theory’, in The Resistance to Theory, ed. W.Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 3–6.

74 Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, JacquesDerrida (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. 46–7.77 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. 75–80.

78 Derrida, ‘Passages – from traumatism to promise’, in Points . . . Interviews,1974–1994, ed. E. Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995),pp. 385–6.

79 Derrida, ‘Structure, sign, and play’, in Writing and Difference (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 293.

Notes140

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Index

A Taste for the Secret (Derrida) 43Achieving Our Country (Rorty) 94, 115,

119, 121actuality 113Agamben, Giorgio 47Algeria 56–7Allegories of Reading (De Man) 22, 63Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 15apocalypse 69aporia 71–2Aristotle 37, 39autobiographies 54autochthonous 57

Basic Problems of Phenomenology, The(Heidegger) 8

Being 7–8, 24–8, 37, 47–9Being and Time (Heidegger) 42Benjamin, Walter 110, 112, 139n.51Bennington, Geoffrey 64–6, 75, 124‘Beyond aestheticism: Derrida’s

responsible anarchy’ (Caputo)111

Blanchot, Maurice 41Bloom, Harold 15–20, 23, 34Bonaparte, Napoleon 41Boyce Gibson, W. R. 77bricolage 36Butler, Judith 107–8, 138n.38

Caputo, John 80, 82, 111Carnap, Rudolf 74Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 34Cerisy-la-Salle encounter 68Circumfession (Derrida) 43, 52, 66‘come’ 114Conflict of the Faculties, The (Kant) 95,

101, 103–5

Consequences of Pragmatism (Rorty) 66,72

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity(Rorty) 1, 3, 13, 19, 43, 46, 48, 50,63, 69, 88–9, 116, 121

contingent 77Cratylus (Plato) 41critique 107–8, 112, 124–6Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 2‘Critique of violence’ (Benjamin) 110Culler, Jonathan 45–6

Darwin, Charles 14Dasein 19, 23, 27, 58–9, 80Davidson, Donald 2, 11–12, 14, 20,

49, 74‘De Man and the American Cultural

Left’ (Rorty) 97De Man, Paul 21–2, 30, 54, 63deconstruction 1, 3–4, 33, 35, 36–7,

45–53, 62–3, 67, 75, 83–5, 91–4,96–8, 109–14, 115–16, 118–19,121–2, 126, 136n.80, 139n.47

‘Deconstruction and circumvention’(Rorty) 72

democracy 123–4‘Derrida and the Philosophical

Tradition’ (Rorty) 65‘Derridabase’ (Bennington) 64, 66‘Derridadaism’ 45‘Derrida’s deconstruction of

authority’ (Newman) 111Descartes, Rene 15Dewey, John 73differance 31–2, 49, 95

Eagleton, Terry 91ego 34, 36eidetic variation 78–9

engineers 36Enlightenment, the 104‘Envois’ (Derrida) 37–8, 40–1, 43–5,

53–6, 62, 70, 83, 132n.2erection 81, 83–4essentialism 98

Faculty of Philosophy, University ofRome 99–100

femininity 36, 45Ferraris, Maurizio 51, 52Feuerbach, Ludwig 81‘Fido’ 41filiation 40Flaubert, Gustave 52Foucault, Michel 68, 72, 81, 87, 91,

93, 99–102, 105–9, 111, 113,118–19, 135n.52, 136n.79

France 56–9, 134n.29France, Anatole 6Freud, Sigmund 40

Gasche, Rodolphe 3, 46–7, 50, 53, 71,75, 84, 133–4n.20

God 35, 81, 121, 123Godzich, Wlad 20Guignon, Charles 66

‘Habermas, Derrida and thefunctions of philosophy’ (Rorty)92

Habermas, Jurgen 4, 48, 90–1, 117–18Hardt, Michael 123, 125Harley, David 66Hartman, Geoffrey 35, 45Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

13–15, 24–5, 29, 37, 42, 48, 72Heidegger, Martin 7–8, 18–21, 24–9,

34, 38, 41–4, 47–8, 50, 58–9, 72,75, 81, 92–3

hermeneutics 106historicists 116History of Madness, The (Foucault) 68Howe, Irving 98Humanities 109, 111, 115–16Husserl, Edmund 30, 34, 48, 61, 71,

77–80

‘I’ 37–8, 42–3idea 77Ideas I (Husserl) 77, 79ideation 77–8In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 25intuition 9irony 10, 12–13, 23, 25, 90–1,

116–17, 119

James, William 73Jameson, Frederic 72jetty 83–4

Kamuf, Peggy 139n.56Kant, Immanuel 2, 7–8, 34, 37, 60, 69,

75, 87, 91–2, 95, 99–107, 118Klossowski, Pierre 18knowledge 107

Labor of Dionysus (Negri/Hardt) 123Laclau, Ernesto 118Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 68language 17–18, 22Lebensphilosophie 62liberalism 123–6‘life-world’ 71logic 63logocentrism 98Lyotard, Jean-Francois 117–18

Map of Misreading, A (Bloom) 15, 34Marx, Karl 65, 81masturbation 31–3metaphors 19–24, 62–3metaphysics 35, 43–4, 61, 71, 93mind 9–10mochlos 109, 118Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida)

53, 56, 58, 70, 74‘Myth of the Cave’ (Socrates) 18

Nancy, Jean-Luc 68Negri, Tony 123, 125New Leftists 120–1Newman, Saul 111Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 17–19,

21, 22, 25, 35, 42, 56, 62–4, 107

Index148

Nietzsche. The Will to Power as Art(Heidegger) 21

Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle(Klossowski) 18

nominalists 116Norris, Christopher 46, 73

Of Grammatology (Derrida) 31On the Genealogy of Morality

(Nietzsche) 17, 107‘On the very idea of a conceptual

scheme’ (Davidson) 2

Paris, Matthew 38Phenomenology 77–9Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 13–15,

25Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, The

(Habermas) 4Philosophical Investigations

(Wittgenstein) 74Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

(Rorty) 8–9, 61, 74Pierce, Charles Sanders 74Plato 23, 37–9, 41, 78, 112‘Plato’s pharmacy’ (Derrida) 79Poetry 16politics 123–5‘pornosophy’ 35Post Card, The (Derrida) 53–5, 80, 93post-Cartesian tradition 15post-Nietzschean philosophy 117post-structuralism 118pragmatism 46, 51, 65, 72–3, 75, 79,

82, 93, 97–8, 116‘principle of reason’ 100, 107privacy 50–1proletarization 96Proust, Marcel 25, 52, 88–9

‘quasi-transcendental’ 109

realism 10–12, 76, 113redemption 17relativism 10, 12religion 7Religion within the Limits of Reason

Alone (Kant) 103

Republic (Plato) 18, 20Romanticism 14–16, 22Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 31

Sartre, Jean-Paul 89Savonarola, Girolamo 89Searle, John 124self-legislation 18sexuality 35–6socialization 117Socrates 18, 22–3, 39sovereign power 110Specters of Marx (Derrida) 121Speech and Phenomena (Derrida) 30Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 53, 108State, the 101–8

Tain of the Mirror, The (Gasche) 46–7,84, 133n.7

Tarski, Alfred 11, 48textual 49The Crisis of European Sciences

(Husserl) 61theorein 75theory 120thinking 27trace 47–8Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

(Wittgenstein) 72, 73–4transcendence 47, 53, 59, 64–5,

79–82, 84Tresca, Carlo 88Trotsky, Leon 88, 98‘Trotsky and the wild orchids’ (Rorty)

67, 88truth 2, 11, 21, 30, 64, 107–8Truth and Progress (Rorty) 92–3Tugendhat, Ernest 53, 133–4n.20

Unheimlichkeit 59United States 95–6, 120, 138n.29universal hostage 59

‘What is critique? ’ (Foucault) 109‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (Kant)

105Wheeler, Samuel 22‘White Mythology’ (Derrida) 60, 74

Index 149

wild orchids 67, 88, 90–1, 98, 117Will to Power, The (Heidegger) 18

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72, 74writing 32–6, 40

Index150

The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction

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