Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

The Domestication of Derrida

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nicholas Hewlett Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, Claire Colebrook Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan-Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell Husserl’s Phenomenology, Kevin Hermberg The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Du¨ttmann Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, T. Storm Heter Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert

The Domestication of Derrida Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction Lorenzo Fabbri

Translated by Daniele Manni

English translation edited by Vuslat Demirkoparan and Ari Lee Laskin (University of California, Irvine, USA)

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building

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www.continuumbooks.com # Lorenzo Fabbri 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9778-0 ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9778-9 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Taking Rorty Seriously

vii 1

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

7 7 15 26 37

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

45 45 53 60 74

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

87 87 99 115

Notes

129

Bibliography

141

Index

147

Acknowledgements Many people have been close to this book in the different phases of its realization. My warmest gratitude goes to my family for having supported me in all my endeavours. Donatella Di Cesare had the patience of following and encouraging my work from its very beginning. I am grateful to Ari Lee Laskin, Arianna Lodeserto, Daniele Manni and Nicola Zippel, who provided extensive and lively comments to earlier drafts. I would also like to thank David Carroll, Ellen Burt, Franca Hamber, Gol Bazargani and my friend James Chiampi for their impeccable hospitality in the department of French and Italian at the University of California, Irvine. Many thanks also to Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine for the generous financial support to this project. Without Vuslat Demirkoparan, this book would have never come to light. While I take full responsibility for its weaknesses, she should be credited for all the good moments of The Domestication of Derrida. I am also grateful to the following: Milan Kundera and Faber & Faber Ltd for the permission to quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Cambridge University Press for the permission to quote from Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Fata Morgana for the permission to quote from Maurice Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort (# 1994); Les Editions de Minuit for the permission to quote from Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (# 1991); Random House Inc., for the permission to quote from Michel Foucault’s ‘Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with Michel Foucault’ (in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow); Routledge for the permission to quote from Jacques Derrida’s ‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’ (in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe); Stanford University Press for the permission to quote from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Pardes: the writing of potentiality’ (in Potentialities, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen); Verso for the permission to quote from Jacques Derrida’s ‘Marx & Sons’ and Terry Eagleton’s ‘Marxism without Marxism’ (both in Ghostly Demarcations, edited by Michael Sprinker). An earlier and very different version of this project was published in

Italian by Mimesis in 2006 under the title L’addomesticamento di Derrida. Pragmatismo/Decostruzione. Rome–Irvine November 2007

Introduction

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

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

Introduction

3

adjournments (i.e., analytic philosophy) and get interested in experimenting of new ways of thinking; he would make the metaphysical quest for truth look trivial and idiosyncratic. But if the ‘true’ Derrida, the one that starts after The Post Card, refuses the projects of digging up the infrastructure of the real, then how does one have to understand his work? In the sixth chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes – in a passage crucial for understanding the whole pragmatist rearrangement of deconstruction – that Derrida’s greatest merit consists in transforming philosophical reflection into a private matter, therefore bridging the gap between theory and literature. When Derrida realized the inconsistencies of any epistemological project, he got rid of the craving for generality that still haunted his earlier works. He dropped theory and started exploring the mental associations produced by a thought liberated from the necessity of representing the structure of the mind or of the world. According to Rorty, Derrida at his best plays with philosophy without yielding to the nostalgia for a time in which words pretended to exhibit the conditions of Being, and without the hope of selling out the possibilities of thinking. In other words: deconstruction is able to reduce philosophy to a production of fantasies which do not claim to have any epistemological or public relevance. I will argue that Rorty’s reading ends up assigning to the deconstructive operations two kinds of privacy: deconstruction is private because it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendental demand, privatizing itself in the autobiographical genre, but it is also private because it deprives itself of any political pretension. It is precisely this double privacy that I will challenge in The Domestication of Derrida. After tracking the context and tone of Rorty’s pragmatism, I will confront the two key features of his privatization of deconstruction: on the one hand, the reduction of deconstructive writing to a sort of autobiographical drift, an activity liberated from the presuppositions on which the whole philosophical tradition, from Descartes to Kant and beyond, is grounded; on the other hand, the belief that Derrida dismisses the endeavour to engage philosophy with political struggle, a concern that has deeply dominated French contemporary thought (Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.). In the second chapter, ‘Derrida, the transcendental, and theoretical ascetism’, I question the legitimacy of attributing to Derrida the sort of ‘theoretical ascetism’ – to use a fortunate expression coined by Rodolphe Gasche´ – which one can see at work in Ernst Tugendhat: is Derrida really a hero in the virtuous and strenuous resistance to the temptation of falling back into the much maligned presuppositions of transcendental philosophy? To answer such a question, I comment on two of Derrida’s texts that Rorty heavily relies on. While Rorty gives the idea that ‘White mythology’ and ‘Envois’ are the places where the

4

The Domestication of Derrida

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

Introduction

5

actuality, Rorty – in essays such as ‘The priority of democracy to philosophy’ – suggests that everything must be done to enforce the ‘now’ and defend it from any radical modification. For Rorty, philosophy should not try to disturb what we are today: it is surely true that the pattern of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies has imposed on its members many different constraints, but the advantages provoked by this pattern compensate by far for the constraints. The only political task philosophy should thus assume is to reinforce the solidity and the solidarity of the form of life we were trained to be. Working for the security and the sanity of the social body as a perfect epidemiologist would do, Rorty believes in a politics whose sole objective is to manage social tensions in order to sustain our actual form of life. The Domestication of Derrida might at first appear as a hostile critique of pragmatism. But I hope that one will recognize in it the signs of my admired and grateful homage to the late Richard Rorty.

Chapter 1

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

It was only after the battle against religion was won that philosophy started feeling the exigency of claiming a significant difference from the sciences: once the mission of clearing the path for scientific revolution had been accomplished, philosophy risked being left without a purpose. Kant was the first consciously to identify the essence of philosophy as ‘theory of knowledge’, thus allowing for the survival of philosophy and securing it as an autonomous discipline. The self-understanding of philosophy as the science able to evaluate the legitimacy of other scientific discourses is not a characteristic limited to modern philosophy; this self-understanding continues, for example, all the way until modern phenomenology. The influence of the Kantian identification of philosophy as epistemology is especially clear in Martin Heidegger’s claim that Being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy.3 Whereas positive sciences have a positional character, that is, they deal with beings or domains of beings that are given, determined

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

The Contingency of Being

9

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

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Rorty wonders if we can still exploit the image of the mind as mirror: did the mirroring theories succeed in their effort to explain how language reflects reality, or did they fail? If we are unsatisfied with the way in which philosophy has tried thus far to legitimize the transcendental presupposition, we can choose among three options: 1. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way to demonstrate the transcendental presupposition. In this case, we would engage with the Kantian question on the possibility of knowledge. 2. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way to demonstrate the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposition. In this case we would still be engaged with the Kantian question on the possibility of knowledge. 3. We can decide that it is a waste of time either to attempt to legitimize or to invalidate the transcendental presupposition.9 The first two options share the belief that philosophy’s goal is to enlighten the true structure of knowledge, the relation between factual reality and propositions. The third one instead concludes that it does not pay to keep working within the sophists–Plato–Hume–Kant mechanism, and hopes for a philosophy that will not be a theory of knowledge. This third track leads, according to Rorty, to ironist theory.10 What clearly differentiates irony from traditional philosophical thought is that the former does not acknowledge the vocabulary used to criticize the Kantian approach as closer to the structure of reality than other vocabularies. Thus, irony should not be confused with the relativistic position: Rorty argues that relativism is self-refuting because it claims that all beliefs have the same value, and that such a belief is not as relative as the other beliefs.11 Since any attempt to demonstrate correctly and clearly the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposition is inconsistent, one is therefore left with two of the three previously mentioned possibilities: either one tries to demonstrate the transcendental presupposition along with the advocates of realism, or one just stops talking about it. But is realism actually possible or is it, in its turn, unsustainable? First, we must understand what we mean by ‘realism’. Rorty specifies three criteria for a theory to be defined as ‘realist’: a. Realism assumes a distinction between scheme and content, such as the one between concepts and intuitions, representations and objects, language and world. b. The internal coherence of the elements on the side of the ‘scheme’ is not sufficient to assure that genuine knowledge has been reached; further legitimation is necessary.

The Contingency of Being

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

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Rorty and Davidson’s distance from both relativism and realism is underlined by the fact that their aim is not to advocate the possibility of taking apart scheme and content (‘For we have found no intelligible basis on which it can be said that schemes are different’17), nor to unite them (‘It would be equally wrong to announce the glorious news that all mankind – all speakers of language, at least – share a common scheme and ontology’18). With Davidson, Rorty argues ‘against the whole problematic of legitimation created by the scheme-content distinction’.19 He does not claim that the anti-transcendental arguments reveal the intrinsic nature of reality to be either intrinsic – as realism pretends – or extrinsic – as relativism does – but that intrinsic natures do not exist. To say that there are no intrinsic natures, for the ironist, is to say that the term ‘intrinsic nature’ is one which it would pay us not to use, an expression which has caused more trouble than it has been worth. To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest.20

The ironist, unlike the realist, does not believe that the credibility demonstrated by certain beliefs is granted by their different relation with a presumed reality. Rather, he trusts certain beliefs to have a more remarkable authority since we are not willing to challenge them: they are necessary to our form of life because they are very useful and are largely agreed upon. Rorty considers the realist charge of being of the same species as the relativists absolutely unacceptable. It is not true that everything is relative, insofar as there are alternatives to our cultural perspective so distant from our own way of thinking that we cannot even seriously consider them. In the spirit, if not in the letter of ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, one might affirm that in giving up the dualism of scheme and content one does not give up the world but only the presupposition that what makes our opinions true is their correspondence to reality rather than to history and language. Rorty thus wishes for his argument to be recognized as a form of ethnocentrism. His intent is not the relativization of truth but its banalization: the snow is indisputably white if the proposition ‘the snow is white’ is true for the particular historical linguistic community in which we find ourselves speaking.21 For Rorty, the ironist is convinced that anything can look good or bad depending on how it is ‘redescribed’. Accordingly, she keeps placing the vocabularies which she does not approve in a negative light so that her proposal to switch vocabularies becomes more seducing and less indecent. She is substantially a parasite who devours the great texts of the philosophical tradition, nibbling and chewing on them

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

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

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

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

The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence You’ll soon create the sun and the heavenly bodies, soon create the earth, soon create yourself, other living creatures, furniture, plants, and all the things we’ve just been talking about. (Plato, The Republic)

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

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– rather than the distant in space, for time is the means through which spirits influence each other. The poet is terrorized by the fear that the tradition has been implanted so deeply in him as to deny him any possibility of differing from how he is. This anxiety does not derive from perceiving some worldly beings as fearsome. Rather, the absorption in worldliness provides precisely the means of turning away, getting distracted, from anxiety. The peculiarity of the anxiety of influence is that the only entities that are truly threatening, those that provoke anxiety and not just fear, are those who share our mode of Being. The threatening character belongs, therefore, not to things (res extensa), but to thinking spirits (res cogitans) since ‘they’ are of our own genre. We flee away from others of our own kind because we fear we will become just like them. We do not want to be – to put it with Heidegger’s Being and Time – as ‘they are’. Bloom argues that the faces by which the poet feels threatened are those of the great authors of the past. Since writing has acquired the symbolic meaning of coitus – as an act which ‘consists in allowing a fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper’28 – the fear is of insemination by the liquids spilled into the muses of Poetry. Having conquered the Muses with their creations, tradition’s strongest poets cast their spell on us, obliging us to speak with their voice, to persist in their language, to live in their vocabulary. The capacity of foretelling the future – ‘Poets were properly called divine in the sense of diviners, from divinari, to divine or predict’29 – would have, in fact, granted them the authority to rule us in the present. And the threatening character of the ghosts from the past grows with the Muses’ age. This is because the more time that passes from the birth of ‘poetry’, the more plausible is the assumption that such a literary genre has exhausted its task; that all which needed to be said has been said. If one arrives five hundred years after Shakespeare, it is not likely that Calliope would still be available. With so many suitors already taken and deceived, among so many flirts she ‘whored’ with – as Bloom says30 – why should I be special for her? The presence of other poetical egos wounds the young author’s narcissism since his uncontaminated solitude is disturbed by the discovery that he is not alone, and even less that he is not the one. Broadening the scope of Bloom’s inquiry, transforming his theory of poetry into a theory of poiesis, Rorty claims that not only the poet, but anyone engaged in a poiein, in a production, in the activity that aims to posit an unexpected event, is terrorized by the demon of belonging to the continuum of history. Modern man’s fear is to be belated, to have come afterwards, to have been thrown in that bankruptcy of time in which no original task can be undertaken because debts have imposed themselves as unclearable. Thus the expression ‘poet’ should refer to all those men (such as

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Nietzsche or Heidegger) who fear being unable to be innovative and creative. Rorty attempts to show that, from Hegel on, every ironist (exactly like Bloom’s poets) has been chased by a sort of performance anxiety. Since truth depends on time rather than on space, meaning that truth is a human product whose fundamental traits change through the flow of history, ironists fear not being able to produce radically new truths and phenomena never before experienced. One keeps hoping for a task to undertake, for a discontinuity to impose on history, because that is what would make him special and original, in spite of tradition’s majesty. The words (or shapes, or theorems, or models of physical nature) marshaled to one’s command may seem merely stock items, rearranged in routine 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 the past enforces its aggression. The vocabulary inherited from tradition can be conceived as a vast cemetery haunted by ghosts. If one cannot allow oneself to be possessed by such spectres, then one needs to forge a language capable of liberating oneself from the eternal return of the same. It is impossible to break out of the language in which we are contained, as much as it is impossible ‘to step outside of our skins’.32 But we can still choose whether to leave our skin untouched or to modify it according to our will. If we are terrorized by the angst of being influenced by the spectres of language possessing us, we have to elaborate strategies to exorcize them. The intention of the maker is to create his own language, a language which would free him from being the heir of any tradition. As Bloom would put it: he wants to be his own father. The original sin, whose burden some men feel, is to be, from the very moment of conception, indebted. As Nietzsche suggests in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the feelings of guilt and shame connected with this debt have their mundane origin in the most ancient and original relationship between people: the relation between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. One feels guilt (Schuld) if one cannot settle the debts (Schulden) incurred with others.33 Rorty, following Nietzsche, believes that it is through poetic creation that such indebtedness can be overcome: the poet is he who owns himself, he who has liberated himself from every mortgage and thus owes nothing to tradition. If one could switch from ‘this is how I was thrown’ to ‘this is how I throw myself’, the bills of the past would be paid off and no jury could pass a verdict of guilty. Redemption is not a matter of reproducing a past model; redemption is the creation of something radically original. One is saved if an absolute new future is instituted.

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

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They were going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature of reality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would thereby inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not ourselves. They would exhibit the stamp which had been impressed on all of us.35

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

It is true that we are all mortals, yet we are not all mortals in the same manner. Some people, instead of politely following the rules of traditional language, challenge the continuity of time and try to make new metaphors break out.

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

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

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

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

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

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Plato’s index, an index in which Plato shows Socrates looking forward from behind him. The future is behind past’s back: Poetic thought is proleptic, and the Muse invoked under the name Memory is being implored to help the poet remember the future.42

Rorty believes that the truth of a story should not be evaluated on the basis of how much such a narrative reflects a presumed reality existing before the re´cit. It must be evaluated on the basis of its capacity to make the future arrive. Bloom defines this sort of relation with the past as a form of misreading: every historical redescription is a misreading, an aberration, since it is the attempt to walk away from our common understanding and open a new horizon towards which moving. Central to the activity of giving an account of a fact, is the moment of application: to remember is to donate a sense that enables the possibility of the present to become otherwise. The stories told about the past are meant to clear the debt that binds one to it. Thus, every revisionism is a ‘perversion’ since its appearing is a protest against the alleged naturality of standard historiography. As art and metaphor, ironist theorizing was born as clinamen, as an unexpected detour from normal history: the young thinker throws himself on the vocabulary of his authoritative precursors, he devours them to the point of imposing on them a deficiency in which he can find space to say something original. The redescribed tradition looks like a sequence of self-liberating caricatures, for only by demonstrating that the past has failed, can one believe there is still a mission to accomplish in the present. The Muse did not give herself to anybody else: chaste and pure, she waited so long for me to come. The past of the ironist is constituted by that literary genre which attests, with a straight face, the existence of a vocabulary that no redescription will ever alter, of a language so sacred that it is immune to irony. Shaped within the tradition of metaphysics, ironists are bound to it by an uncanny familiarity. They know they are products of traditional philosophy, but at the same time they are somehow foreign to it as well. Thus, ironists feel the need to understand the will to truth (their past) without becoming a victim of its fascination. If they manage to avoid being caught in the compulsion to repeat possibilities already lived by others, they might escape from the rules of the home and autonomously construct new laws for thinking. The ironists’ new history of philosophy shows that the attempts to invent a final vocabulary are just clever and historically determined ways of substituting worn metaphors with original ones. When Heidegger wrote that there is truth only as long and as far as Dasein exists, he meant (or for Rorty, should have meant) that truth depends on humanity, not on something that stands independently from it. Truth

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

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

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

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The Domestication of Derrida

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

It is now the moment to answer the question which opened the first section of the present chapter: what determines the existence of philosophy as a discipline and as a faculty? According to Rorty, it is neither a methodology, nor a privileged relation with things. It is not even a circumscribed and homogeneous set of epistemological topics. Philosophy, by being just one of the many literary families of modernity, cannot assume to be the only sector of culture that lets us rigorously grasp the unseen presuppositions of positive sciences. Philosophers ‘are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects or methods but in the ‘‘family resemblance’’ way in which latecomers in a sequence of commentators on commentators are connected with older members of the same sequence’.47 In this perspective, one can finally understand the reasons behind Rorty’s interest in the work of Jacques Derrida. Rorty’s attraction to Derrida – an attraction whose first important signs are two of Rorty’s essays from the late 1970s48 – arises from the firm belief that the Jewish-Franco-Algerian philosopher allows us to recognize the continuity of the philosophical tradition from Plato to Heidegger, and thus to read philosophy as a kind of family romance. What still links Heidegger to the metaphysical family is a certain passion for light. In the final pages of ‘Diffe´rance’, in what has by now become a famous passage, Derrida, confronting ‘The saying of Anaximander’, tracks the ambiguity which organizes the questions posited by Heidegger and destines him to be placed in Plato’s light. Heidegger’s movement stems from the desire to respark the fire of a purely proper and appropriate language; a flame which might illuminate the path for thinking’s nostalgic return to its lost native country: Greek logos.49 Such

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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 to its dawning. And it is starting from the light of origin that one thinks of the West, the end and the fall, cadence or check, death or night.50

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

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Heidegger was not satisfied with dismantling the authority of philosophy’s heritage by historicizing it. He hoped that on the ruins produced by his destruction of tradition, a totally other construction could be erected; something not only different from the usual house of philosophy, but also more authentic. The authority of metaphysical presence was surely deconstructed, but only in order to affirm the sovereignty of thinking’s possible future, that is to say, of its past. As Derrida concludes, Heidegger was guided by ‘a kind of reevaluation and revalorization of the essence and dignity of man’, which culminated in his effort to restore a ‘natural’ nearness of man with that which an authentic vocabulary unveils.52 Derrida suggests that Heidegger was not content with consuming, like a parasite, the grip of other theories. Rather, he wanted to ground his own discursive edifice into some kind of authority external to such vocabulary. In a word, for Heidegger, not every philosophical discourse is equal to another. Heidegger’s quest for the forgotten Seinsversta¨ndnis, for the vocabulary which might properly be called an ‘understanding of Being’, attests to his acceptance that: (1) a particular vocabulary is indeed more authentic and authoritative than all the others and substantially different in regard to them (i.e., less obfuscated and forgetful); and (2) proper to man is the possibility of deciding to dwell in such a language, which is the only one that can serve as a home, custody and final shelter of the fire of Being. ‘Today, when philosophizing is so barbarous, so much like a St. Vitus’ dance’,53 we can actually save ourselves from the vortex of philosophical tradition, which pulls us deeper and deeper, solely by rising up on our feet in the open of a luminous clearing. Proper to man, his property, is the possibility of erecting himself and gathering in the light of Being. As Derrida notes in ‘Ends of man’: ‘The near is the proper; the proper is the nearest (prope, proprius)’ (p. 133). Instead of trying to reactivate the original and authentic philosophical fire as Heidegger did, Derrida endeavours to overcome Heidegger’s problematic completely by revaluing what could not find place within a philosophical scenario organized by the lust for light. And it is primarily through the appreciation of writing that Derrida opposes the ‘photophilia’ governing the philosophical romance. Now, what is so offensive in characterizing philosophy as an act of writing? Philosophers who hold scientists as their models, those who hope that philosophy might mutate into a rigorous science, are convinced that putting a theory in writing is an unfortunate necessity. They seek words so discreet that they will allow a reader to hear the voice of their writer with perfect isomorphic correspondence and transparency. In this way, the world will be displayed and explained to the reader. The fullness of vision will end all need of further clarification; no other comments, no glosses, no notes will be necessary. Writing is thus

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

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

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

Derrida’s texts are footnotes for other footnotes, and each one of these notes contains many others. There is no original and fundamental centre around which the various senses of Derrida’s writing can be organized. One of the three epigraphs opening Speech and Phenomena is a passage from Ideas I, which is worth looking at since it gives a good idea of Derrida’s complicated style. Here is the scene that Husserl stages: somebody happens to say something which reminds me of my last visit to the Dresden painting gallery. Memory teletransports me into the corridors of that gallery. Before me stands a portrait representing a gallery of paintings. Now I find myself wandering in the paintings of that gallery. On some of these pictures are epigraphs. I read them. Who knows where these epigraphs will lead me. For Derrida, we are always in the gallery. There is no memory or promise of the broad daylight’s kiss. Contrary to what our desire cannot not want to believe, the thing itself always withdraws.59 The disappointment that one feels when reading Derrida’s essays is due to the fact that his writings do not end with a vision that offers the things in themselves, nor with a final redescription; rather, they inconclusively and endlessly relaunch the movement of conceptualization, which coincides – as we saw in de Man – with the calling of things with inappropriate names.60 Derrida’s philosophy is a kind of writing, for it is not ‘the primary prescription or the prophetic annunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination’.61 It

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brackets the dream of one correct way of interpreting things and texts. As ‘Diffe´rance’ announces: There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance. (p. 27)

The assumption of diffe´rance – ‘the difference between a text and what it means’62 – not only extends the domain and play of interpretation ad infinitum, but also transforms the trajectories of philosophical discursivity into an adventurous wandering. The drift acted out by Derrida’s writing is exactly the risk that the philosophical tradition has always wanted to avoid ‘the philosopher, after overstrenuous inquiry into our relation to the world, may lose his nerve, his reason, and the world simultaneously. He does this by withdrawing into a dream world of ideas, of representations – even, God help us, of texts’.63 Derrida’s Of Grammatology associates this resistance toward writing with the traditional condemnation of self-eroticism. The one who plays with writing and the one who plays with himself run the same risk. What do these two manual activities have in common? What kind of threatening perversion do they share? The supplement that ‘cheats’ maternal ‘nature’ operates as writing, and as writing it is dangerous to life. This danger is that of the image. Just as writing opens the crisis of the living speech in terms of its ‘image,’ its painting or its representation, so onanism announces the ruin of vitality in terms of imaginary seductions. (p. 151)

The ‘West’ has been dominated by the belief that masturbatory praxis is not only an improper pastime, but also a habit that predisposes one to a great number of illnesses. Derrida deals specifically with JeanJacques Rousseau, but a broader and still circumscribed account of the grounding of masturbation as a self-destructive practice would require much further investigation.64 To give some other examples from ‘Rousseau’s epoch’ (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), Tissot’s L’onanisme, Debray’s Hygie`ne et physiologie du mariage, Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel, as well as Proudhon, Mandeville and Littre´, all describe at length the fatal results of the solitary act of pleasure. Attuned with such a (pseudo)science, Western popular tradition affirms that the practice of masturbation causes the obfuscation of sight; it makes young men go blind, making them unable to see how things really are. Writing, according to some philosophical experts, provokes the same effects.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The letters which constitute this collection talk about and are the effects of Derrida’s desires. They witness a private and personal Streben that does not necessarily apply to the whole of humanity. While Heidegger ended up trying to ground philosophy on something bigger than himself, Derrida quite honestly shows that theory is just the product of the contingencies of one’s own private life. The key event in ‘Envois’ is the discovery of a book on divination by the medieval chronicler Matthew Paris. What, however, strikes the author of the postcards – and let’s just call such a textual persona ‘Derrida’ – is not the topic of the book, but rather, Paris’s illustration displayed on its cover. The portrait shows two characters: one sits at a scribe’s desk writing, while the other, holding up his index, urges the former from behind. Above the head of the one sitting is written ‘Socrates’, and above the other, ‘plato’, with a small ‘p’. ‘Derrida’ goes crazy over the picture that reverses the canonic story between Plato and Socrates, and thus decides to acquire an entire stock of this image; from this love at first sight, he will write only on such reproductions, using them as postal paper. The relationship with his faraway love is mediated through the flipside of the 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 inattentive copyist, something else catches his attention. ‘For no clear reason, there is a big something (looking a bit like a skateboard) sticking out from between Socrates’ rear end and the chair he is sitting in.’80 What is that strange tool that almost stabs Socrates in the back? ‘Derrida’ seizes the opportunity to interpret the situation in the most obscene way. It is an overbearing erected penis that Plato is handling behind the impotent Socrates.

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

Is this not what happens daily? Are we not always already in the age of mechanical reproduction? The desire to have children is connected by ‘Derrida’ to the Socratic desire to conceive universal, general truths; both operations are ways to defeat finitude, to leave an indelible trace of one’s self. The illusion of philosophers is that the works they brought to life will always conform to the intentions of those who originated them. Behaving as faithful representatives, the texts produced will speak with their authors’ voice, in their stead. Unfortunately, texts, just like children when they grow up, are not infants (speechless); they have their own voice (p. 25). If it is true, as Aristotle suggested, that a man is the father of his books as he is of his children, then being a father can only mean ‘having the extremely joyful and painful experience of the fact that one is not the father – that a son or daughter is someone one does not answer for, or who answers for themselves, who can speak for themselves’.82 Texts and children always end up being, in one way or another, parricides because they are truly alive only when they put in question the authorial sovereignty of the father. In this perspective, one can affirm that writing is a matter of being exposed to death, for the texts signed off will travel without any regard for their author’s original will. Once they are gone one has no control over them. Derrida is conscious of the fact that without the risk of dying, there would be no writing. Yet, accepting the temporary nature of any author and authority, he decides not to do anything to prevent the works he signs, sends, addresses, from turning against himself. Of course such a decision is killing ‘Derrida’, but it would be worse otherwise.83 Worse than death for Rorty would be to give in to the male desires with which the philosophical tradition is tempting Derrida.

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

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

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

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

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from school at the age of eleven for being Jewish (p. 87). To that wound, dated 1942, Derrida ascribes his inability to distinguish between the materiality of the empirical ‘I’ and the ideality of the transcendental ego. The ambient of culture, of theory, of knowledge, was not alien to the concreteness of Europe’s and little Jacques’s history. ‘Envois’, like ‘Circumfession’, expresses the necessity to show that it is always an ‘I’, this ‘I’, who writes, thinks, in a determinate place, on a specific occasion. For metaphysics, the date on which a thought was elaborated, its hour, its place, its language, the mood and the gender of the one who conceived it, all these aspects belong to the sphere of the inessential and of the frivolous. The imposition of a distinction between the transcendental ego that philosophizes and the empirical ‘I’ interested in the world implies that one can ascend from the worldly and banal reign of idiosyncratic factuality to the transcendental heaven of essential meanings and truths. But Derrida, instead of describing Geist’s trip in search of Absolute Knowledge, is interested in a phenomenology of Witz which tries to remember and preserve everything (signifiers, contingency, language) metaphysics considered of little account. As he puts it in A Taste for the Secret: ‘philosophy, or academic philosophy at any rate, for me has always been at the service of this autobiographical design of memory’ (p. 41). Derrida does not claim to say something about things, Being, humanity, the West. He is only speaking for himself and for those who had a past analogous to his. Just like anybody else in his daily practice, he tries to rewrite his past in order to open new paths for the future. Philosophical praxis is thus privatized inasmuch as it is shown that the theorein, brought back to the horizon of love, is never disinterested, but always contaminated by the desires that every narrative – for being oriented towards the moment of application – chases. The ‘dirty Jew’ (p. 38) of Spanish origin from Algiers with fantasy and effort has elaborated a new manner of writing and thinking of philosophy. What is the purpose of writing in such a way? None, if we expect from philosophy answers and demonstrations. A lot, if, sharing some of Derrida’s experiences, especially his tensions of desire, his o`rexis, the books he read, we consider somehow relevant the problem of how to leave metaphysics behind. By creating a new canon, Derrida is able to forge the tools to circumvent philosophy, to navigate around its coasts without running aground on them. Of metaphysics, Derrida made a compendium, treating it allusively and carelessly. Rorty often recalls a certain passage from Heidegger. He approvingly quotes it also in a note from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity defining it as the ‘slogan’ of ironist theorizing:

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

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

Chapter 2

Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism

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

In 1989, Richard Rorty commented that for years a quarrel had been simmering among the American admirers of Derrida: ‘On the one side there are the people who admire Derrida for having invented a new, splendidly ironic way of writing about the philosophical tradition. On the other side are those who admire him for having given us rigorous arguments for surprising philosophical conclusions.’ 1 The first skirmishes had already broken out at the beginning of the 1980s. For example, Jonathan Culler – perhaps the Jonathan who staged the encounter between Derrida and the Socrates–plato postcard in ‘Envois’2 – declared that using the term ‘Derridadaism’ to label Derrida’s work is ‘a witty gesture by which Geoffrey Hartman blots out Derridian argument’.3 Defending Hartman’s light-hearted tone, Rorty deemed Culler’s interpretation of deconstruction as too old-fashioned to grasp Derrida’s originality. Either Derrida is a rigorous thinker, someone who has complied with the argumentative procedures of philosophy and thus proved his conclusions to be right, or he has altogether distanced himself from the ‘philosophical machismo’ which inspires the quest for accurate representations.4 In a manner of speaking, one cannot have both: the choice is between becoming a woman by betraying the norms of tradition, or staying a man by arguing rigorously. It should by now be clear that ‘femininity’ is the quality that Rorty appreciates the most in Derrida.

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By the time that Rorty released Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – one of the smartest and most energetic books in recent contemporary philosophy – the line-ups were pretty clear. Rorty was anxious to explain why pragmatism and deconstruction might, or should, go hand in hand. The ‘American Derrideans’ (Jonathan Culler, Rodolphe Gasche´, Christopher Norris) kept affirming that between deconstruction and pragmatism there could be no ‘we’. Some of the American admirers of Derrida – and one wonders why Rorty defines such admirers ‘American’ or ‘North American’5 when among his primary references only Culler is from the USA – accused Rorty’s ironist pragmatization of Derrida as being too frivolous for them, it dismisses Derrida’s serious philosophical work by focusing, instead, almost exclusively on word games, jokes, vulgar allusions and private memories. According to Culler, thinking of deconstruction as a protest against the serious claims of classic philosophy would mistake it for a playful celebration of the irrational and unsystematic. Pragmatism, as Norris argues, would reduce philosophy ‘into a species of applied rhetoric’.6 In Rorty’s opinion, deconstruction and pragmatism should in fact work together to blur the distinction between literature and philosophy and advocate the idea of a text that is not interested in determining its own genre but only in producing effects. After all, Derrida himself suggested that genres should not go unmixed. But philosophy is not just a kind of writing, nor can it simply be circumvented. For this reason – as the ‘American’ Derrideans argued according to Rorty’s self-understanding of the debate – deconstruction deserves more seriousness than Rorty is willing to concede it. Yet it would be ungenerous to define Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida as a case of misreading (Norris) or misunderstanding (Gasche´), for he is well aware that a serious philosophical endeavour is somehow present in Derrida. The first pages of the chapter dedicated to Derrida in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity make it clear that Derrida’s earlier works legitimate Gasche´’s (quasi-)transcendentalizing account of deconstruction. Nonetheless, the problem with The Tain of the Mirror is that, in order to function, it needs to overlook Derrida’s latter work. Gasche´ himself admits that his book, aiming to expose the essential traits and the philosophical thrusts of deconstruction, is based on Derrida’s production prior to 1979.7 As a matter of fact, Gasche´’s selection excludes not only The Post Card (first published in 1980), but also Glas (first published in 1974). Despite recognizing the limitation of his book, Gasche´ still insists that the motifs found in earlier works ‘continue to inform and direct Derrida’s more ‘‘playful’’ texts’. Yet such playful texts declared to fit easily in the reading protocol of The Tain of the Mirror do not even appear in the book’s bibliography. This is no mere oversight: once one suggests that these playful texts are primarily the application of ‘infrastructures’ discovered in the first phase

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

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

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

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linguistic entities, how the world gear moves the language gear. If one were able to do so, one could finally justify a belief by exhibiting its extratextual conditions. However, it is impossible to explain the way in which the world provokes the words we use to talk about it. Unfortunately, as Davidson puts it, ‘no thing makes sentences and theories true: not experience, not surface irritations, not the world, can make a sentence true’.12 Davidson suggests that our beliefs can be justified only on the basis of other beliefs, and our propositions on other propositions. The probatory vectors do not run vertically from the mind to the world but they redirect us horizontally to other mind products. Therefore Derrida, to be coherent with his own anti-transcendental therapy, cannot profess that the structures he introduced on the philosophical scene have a dignity which other metaphors lack. He cannot silently enforce the presupposition that certain special ‘non-words’ are somehow able to mirror something beyond and behind the propositional truths, something that is not already textual. But if the structure is already textual – which for Rorty means historical, contingent, exposed to falsification, in one word, finite – it cannot avoid being recontextualized and transformed into a totally different infrastructure. Any structure that is in fact marked by finitude must imply the possibility of becoming other than itself. For this reason, Derrida cannot state that any discursive formation (present, past or future) necessarily works on the ground of diffe´rance. Only by being the God-like entity which one cannot be, would it be possible to lay such a general claim. Yet, in a certain sense, it is not wrong to understand Derrida’s metaphors as infrastructures. For sure, they are the conditions of the possibility of deconstruction, the devices that allowed its discourses to be produced. Without them, Derrida would not be who he is. But in order to be consistent with the Davidsonian intuition that ‘any level of meaning must be language-like’,13 that no magic language or name can ever be proper and final, Derrida has to dismiss the belief that there exists a hidden logical space from where to anticipate the structure of any possible utterance. Instead of foreclosing what might be, of offering transcendental insights on the conditions for the possibility of Being as such, Derrida should be content in playing with the vocabularies he finds on his way in order to keep the future coming – the only ‘beyond’ he should take care of. Derrida’s need to find new metaphors once his current ones lose their poignancy suggests that he is less interested in systematizing the structure of the real, in showing the infrastructures which ground it, than in shaking it up in order to promote its afterwards. Given this interest, Rorty concludes that Derrida should be satisfied with having given a response to the tradition that is influential to the present of philosophy. A response and not the response because,

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

It appears evident that Rorty’s interpretation ends up labelling the later Derrida with a sort of ‘double privacy’. Deconstruction is private because it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendental demand, privatizing itself in a self-referential fantasizing, but it is also private because it deprives itself of any political pretension. I organized the first chapter around the strengths of Rorty’s

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

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

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

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

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the inquisitor who burns books, and sometimes even their authors, is more respectful of their theses than the ironist in the contingent, solidaire and ironic republic of ideas.19 However, it is clear that Rorty’s reading is too quick to grasp deconstruction without betraying its spirit. As Derrida’s comments quoted above reveal, he is explicitly resistant to the kind of interpretation Rorty proposes of his work. Derrida is not at all happy about the theoretical ascetism – to use a fortunate expression coined by Gasche´ in referring to Ernst Tugendhat20 – with which Rorty labels him. Is it not too generous to assume that Derrida, at a certain point of his philosophical career, starts avoiding the urge for transcendentality and confines his thought to a propositional and linguistic conception of truth? Is it true that Derrida moves in a hermitage sheltered from any theoretical and transcendental temptation? Does he actually stop referring to the public world and take refuge in a post-philosophical and post-transcendental privacy? In order to answer these questions, it will not suffice to rely on Derrida’s reaction. The only way of judging the validity of Rorty’s interpretation is by paying close attention to what happens 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 ‘cuts the branches’; he experiences the exile of terminology, its paradoxical subsistence in the isolation of all univocal reference. (Giorgio Agamben, ‘ Pardes: the writing of potentiality’)

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

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unidentifiable.22 Derrida himself warns of this complication in the ‘reading instructions’ which precede the collection of sendings: ‘That the signers and the addressees are not always visibly and necessarily identical from one envoi to the other . . . you will have the experience of all this, and sometimes will feel it quite vividly, although confusedly’ (p. 5). Once the impossibility of identifying the invisible author of the postcards has been recognized, another undecidability steps in. If one cannot be sure that ‘Envois’ speaks of Derrida and his private life, one has no way of deciding if the postcards refer to actual persons and events. Since addressor(s) and the addressee(s) cannot be identified, since we cannot know if they are real existing beings or merely fictional characters, it is impossible to conclude that the events and facts to which the postcards allude exist beyond the fictive space of the re´cit. Without taking into serious consideration Derrida’s opening disclaimers, Rorty hastens to affirm that ‘Envois’ finds its poignancy in the reference to ‘real-life events and people’.23 That such events and people are real, that Derrida himself is the protagonist of the love story told in the postcards, is something not provable. Recalling in a footnote the passage I quoted above on the difficult identificability of the signatures in the envois, Rorty is well aware of the fact that the life which organizes the postcards can be Derrida’s or someone else’s, real or imaginary. ‘However’, he stubbornly proceeds to highlight the autobiographical character of ‘Envois’. So basically, Rorty’s compliments to Derrida for having ended philosophy and embraced autobiography are based on a text whose status is not clear, something which might or might not refer to Derrida’s private life. Moreover, the fact that autobiographies deal with real lives is an assumption much questioned in literary studies. As de Man argued in the opening remarks of his ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, autobiographies seem to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events more clearly than other literary genres.24 Autobiographies function on the basis of a true reference to life, and even if they contain phantasms, dreams and deviations, their meaning would still remain rooted in the identity of a subject who lived the narrated experiences. But – and the point de Man makes about autobiographies whose ‘proper name’ is readable is even more evident in ‘Envois’ where the author withdraws from the scene of writing – can we be certain ‘that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model?’ Since the genre of autobiography ‘is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture’, the life that apparently produces the autobiography can be said ‘with equal justice’ to be itself produced and determined by the autobiographical genre and its conventions.25 If ‘Envois’ is a work of fiction – a ‘redescription’ to put it in Rorty’s terms – then the claim that it finds its poignancy in Derrida’s private and real life does not hold, for one

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cannot simply say that autobiographies speak about real events and real people. And if it does accurately represent real events and real people, if it is not ‘literature’, that poses an even bigger problem for Rorty because he cannot any longer maintain that with ‘Envois’ Derrida has distanced himself from any desire of mimetic referentiality, of truth and representation. Briefly, one of the problems with Rorty’s use of ‘Envois’ is that the difficulties of defining the genre of autobiography undo his attempt to distinguish a referential (philosophical) and a post-referential (literary) Derrida. The genreless ‘Envois’ – i.e., the impossibility of deciding about its real meaning, of knowing what the postcards refer to, who they are from, to whom they are destined, if they are genuine letters or just parodies of the epistolary diary, if they are philosophy or literature – is also marked by the fact that the stream of writing is often interrupted by fifty-two blank spaces. Derrida uses such a sign, such an absence of signs, to indicate that part of the correspondence has been destroyed. The eroded surface might either hide a proper name, just punctuation marks or even the text of one or more letters. Reading the postcards, one should be aware of the fact that the secrets hidden by the blank spaces will always be kept unsolved. And for this very reason, one should give up ‘the impatience of the bad reader’ (p. 4): the presumption of knowing what the text is all about. When we read the postcards, we are never sure if we should take them seriously, if they are jokes or if they are symbols to decipher. The postcards bear witness to their secrecy: exposed to the indiscreet eyes of curious postmen, and yet remaining intrinsically illegible. Derrida writes that he himself has forgotten the secret code which governed the erasing. 9 May 1979 . . . The secret of the postcards burns – the hands and the tongues – it cannot be kept, q.e.d. It remains secret, what it is, but must immediately circulate, like the most hermetic and most fascinating of anonymous – and open – letters. I don’t cease to verify this. (p. 188)

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

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Nietzsche declared ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’.26 Rorty instead is too anxious to decide where the postcards are coming from and where they are going. He is sure he knows what is going on, underestimating the exile from univocal reference that disorganizes Derrida’s sendings. He believes ‘Envois’ to be the moment in which Derrida starts forgetting about transcendental philosophy and everything that has ever been linked to it. But no matter how hard Rorty tries to derive a strategy of forgetfulness from an author obsessed by the necessity of remembering, Derrida simply cannot ‘forget about philosophy as the liberated slave forgets his master’.27 Not even in his most private moments. Discussing some passages from Derrida’s ‘autobiographical’ Monolingualism of the Other, I will show that the language of philosophy makes itself remembered even when Derrida is telling stories about the ups and downs of his private life. During a colloquium at Louisiana State University, Derrida tells the problematic story of his belonging to France, his so-called native country. The childhood he spent in Algiers makes him, in fact, paradoxically and aporetically French. French is Derrida’s mother tongue, the language his mother and father spoke, the language spoken in the family and at school, in the privacy of the home as in the publicity of the market. But, in spite of such familiarity, French cannot be considered his language: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’28 Derrida speaks only one language, he is monolingual. Nonetheless, his only language is not really his since he is not able to acknowledge it as his own: Yet it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak, as long as speech is possible for me in life and death; you see, never will this language be mine. And, truth to tell, it never was. (p. 2)

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

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French was becoming the mother tongue of Algeria to the point that Arabic in the lyce´e was taught as an optional foreign language. Arabic: a foreign language one might choose among others (English, Spanish, German; Latin was required). In Algeria, French, which came from far away, not autochthonous but imported by an intimidating Paris, dominated the scene of culture. The home called Algeria depended on the super-home that was France; a mother on another mother; a metropolis, Algiers, on the authentic mater-polis, Paris. At school, one would have learned by heart France’s history and geography, the names of every district’s capital and all of its rivers. But ‘not a word about Algeria, not a single note on its history and its geography, whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany and the Gironde estuary with our eyes closed’ (p. 44). To understand Derrida’s problematic relation to France better, we should also recall that in 1943 under Petain, with an ‘occupation’ that did not even bring to Algeria a single German uniform, the government revoked French citizenship from Jews, citizenship granted to them but not to Muslim Algerians by the Cre´mieux Decree of 1870 with the aim of assimilating them to Frenchness. Growing up in the colony, in the dimension organized around a spectral centre located elsewhere, Derrida recognizes the impossibility of belonging without doubts or dissonance to any country, to any homeland, to any language. He does not claim that another nation or community, a different existing symbolic place would make him feel more at home and at ease. On the contrary, Derrida suggests that the production of speaking individuals from mute infants always and inevitably involves a violence, and that the identification with a certain language and the nation it represents is thus the effect of a constitutive dressage. No one is ever a native or a native speaker because no nation and no language can ever claim to have a natural right over a certain land. Language does not naturally grow on a piece of land. It is never autochthonous but always imported. That is why the mother tongue should not be considered a natural mother at all.29 Derrida, in fact, is not linked to French by some sort of an organic connection. He had to learn how to speak it. He was trained to act ‘as if’ it were natural to speak such determined language. If French were innate, Derrida’s mother would not have had to teach it to her speechless son. But since the earth does not have a nomos, a linguistic ‘second nature’ – to use a term common to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche – had to be imposed by Georgette on her little Jackie. So, how can French belong to Derrida – and thus Derrida to France – if such a primary property (the property over a language) had been assigned to him by external authorities? His own origin assumes the configuration of an alien colonization. It functions as a ban from the possibility of speaking a very proper language, of truly being himself.

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Derrida does not hesitate to affirm that his own linguistic identity has always been problematic to him because he perceives it not as his own but as an effect of renvois from elsewhere. 30 Being always already an other, he declares himself to be incapable of saying without hesitation je, ‘I’. These are Derrida’s memories, the anamnesis through which he attempts to remember, recall and reconstruct why for him French had always been the language of, and from, the other. However, against someone like Rorty who would rush to sanction this text as autobiographical, it is important to underscore that Monolingualism of the Other is not solely a private diary, a memoir neglectful of the philosophical language. In fact, it constantly shifts from autobiographical remembering to a reflection on the very possibility of writing the self. The problem Derrida faces is that any account of a contingent and singular situation, a situation with an exclusively private value, ‘mine, for example’ (p. 19), has to be expressed in terms that overcome the privacy of life. These terms end up attributing a general value to life, a validity ‘in some way structural, universal, transcendental, or ontological’ (p. 20). Insofar as it can only be said in the vocabulary that one was taught – no private language is possible – every event that can be told exists only within the horizon of expectations of a mother tongue. Does not the account of a unique and unrepeatable event such as one’s life fall victim to generality as soon as one talks about it? Does not public language always contaminate the privacy of memory? Or better, even before being expressed linguistically, an event, in the very moment in which it is lived, has a dimension which is not purely private since one can live experiences (Erleben) only within a linguistic constellation. There is a sort of inertia in the language in which we live, think and speak, that reduces the event to an example, to a case of general law, thus denying its private character. It is evident that Derrida, to give an account of himself, is forced to use a French vocabulary influenced by Heidegger’s conceptual web, especially by the notion of Dasein as the being whose peculiarity is to be given to impropriety. The contamination of such jargon provokes the impossibility of writing a pure biography, to live a pure real life immune to theoretical and universal germs. The confession, ‘I only have one language; it is not mine’, assumes the value of a philosophical position, a demonstrable truth, simply because it is possible as thought and statement. One comes to wonder if the personal and private alienation experienced by Derrida is not the ontic realization of the necessary and ontological alienation, which does not take away anything from anybody since – being situated before and on this side of any subjectivity, of any ipseity, of any consciousness – it is the a priori condition for the existence of an ‘anybody’ to steal from. Without such inalienable alienation, no alienation historically determined would

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

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

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

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

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Rorty’s positions are clearly in syntony with France’s sceptical dismissal of philosophy. In fact, he approvingly quotes Polyphilos’ discourse in a note of ‘Philosophy without mirrors’ – the concluding chapter of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For France and Rorty, on the grounds of philosophical systems there is the everyday language camouflaged as something special. Philosophy would then be nothing other than the skilful process through which contingent words are erased of their imprints. In fact, such traces would disclose an embarrassing connivance with the sensible world that metaphysics pretends to have surpassed. The criminal business of philosophy is to make one lose track of its theoretical coins and peddle them as pure concepts. Worldly productions ascend to the hyperuranium as long as philosophers recycle the corrupted natural language in theory’s heaven. ‘Constitutionally, philosophical culture will always have been an obliterating one.’33 It will be mortuary and mortal because it wears out the vital force of the terrain on which it originated and, at the same time, acts as if it has no bond with such a field. Philosophy needs to make its origin disregarded to succeed in the project in which it is involved. However, the ironist resists metaphysics’ conspiracy of silence by reactivating the material origin of the theories produced by transcendental philosophers. As a good debunker, he highlights the evidence to nail down philosophy. In the Crisis, Husserl subjects European sciences to a similar investigation: to the disciplines that forgot or never knew their limits, those which live in dreams, one has to show the concrete contingency of their provenance.34 Philosophy (Rorty) and sciences (Husserl) must be challenged for they do not bear memory of their contamination with the interested and practical dimension of the life-world. In order to reactivate the proper meaning of the great products of spirit, one must acknowledge that ideality has its ground in a non-theoretical approach to the world. Husserl claims that the ‘meaning-fundament’ of pure geometry is in the art of land surveying: if such original meaning-giving practice is ignored, geometry would be condemned to a perpetual crisis. In a similar fashion, Rorty tries to rescue philosophy from its disappointing delusions by recalling that no philosophy can ever succeed. Failure is inevitable because, whatever precautions one might take, the mark of the natural world would still block the elevation of the ego beyond life’s contingencies. It is thus a matter of finding evidences to bring to court, in a trial before a judge, and remind the suspected discourses – in a Kantian attitude indeed – of their genealogy and their grounds. Metaphysics is charged with being white man’s mythology, the mythos which tries to remove from its logos every sensible stain and consequently rule in the name of Reason.35 Such Western mythology, at least until the ironists appeared on the scene of history, was able to disguise itself as candid, just and reasonable.

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Philosophy is considered the fog, the sad veil shrouding the living meaning of life. But now the time is right for the veil to fall, for life to expose its full productivity. Rorty appreciates Derrida exactly for exhibiting ‘life-world’ as the source of the meaningfulness of his envois. Deconstruction avoids the dishonesty of transcendental philosophy admitting that its ultimate reason, its deepest ground, is in Derrida’s own actual life, in the concreteness of his unphilosophical being-in-theworld. Growing out of the life of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction always needs to be conjugated in the first-person singular. Deconstruction for Rorty is the ultimate Lebensphilosophie.36 Rorty uses deconstruction as if it were a ladder built by Derrida to climb over philosophers’ claim to speak for a ‘we’ and to access an epoch that can serenely accept the idiosyncrasy of any theoretical system. Nevertheless, Derrida had himself already clarified almost forty years ago in ‘White mythology’ that the ascetic project of escaping from metaphysics to inaugurate an afterwards is not feasible. If deconstruction is that which Rorty wishes it to have become in the latter phase of Derrida’s career, then deconstruction is impossible. [L]et us rather attempt to recognize in principle the condition for the impossibility of such a project. In its most impoverished, most abstract form, the limit would be the following: metaphor remains, in all its essential characteristics, a classical philosopheme, a metaphysical concept. (p. 219)

Discourses which look for metaphors (i.e., the trace of natural language) in the philosophical system in order to criticize its legitimacy are nothing but variations of philosophy itself, since they unconsciously employ the conceptual outcomes of that very tradition with which they want to break. As Derrida puts it: ‘metaphor seems to involve the usage of philosophical language in its entirety, nothing less than the usage of so-called natural language in philosophical discourse, that is, the usage of natural language as philosophical language’ (p. 209). But if pragmatism can menace the system of metaphysics only from within and not attack it from abroad, one should conclude that every endeavour to unmask philosophy’s presumed purity is troubled by a constitutional aporia. The hermeneutics of suspicion, following Nietzsche, claim that truths are illusions whose deceptive nature has been forgotten; metaphors which are exhausted and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and count now only as pure value, no longer as coins. But such thoughts are not as weak as they want to be. Acknowledge your contingency, I will recognize mine, is for Derrida a commandment complicit, in a deep and constitutive manner, with the history of metaphysics.37 If one decides – for instance on the basis of the belief that metaphors

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rather than statements determine most of our philosophical convictions38 – to detect the metaphors which sign the body of the philosophical. In order to do so, one must first, argues Derrida, produce a rigorous concept of metaphor, distinguishing its structure ‘from all the other turns of speech with which metaphor is too often confused’ (p. 220). In order to look for metaphors, one must know what a metaphor essentially is. The problem is that the search for metaphors is inspired by the same desires which organize the very tradition whose authority one is trying to dismantle. It appears that one cannot speak about the metaphorical without at the same time reinforcing the rule of the transcendental. Of course Rorty does not employ the concept of metaphor produced by the metaphysical tradition, because first of all – as I have argued in the first chapter – he tries to get rid of the dichotomy between the literal and the figural. However, the very reduction of philosophy to metaphors, which for Rorty equates to the reduction of theory to life, is a gesture which can occur only within the bounds of metaphysic. Rorty’s discussion of the presumed merits of ‘Envois’ and ‘Circumfession’ locates theory’s condition of possibility in the practice from which it stems, showing that any philosophy is an autobiography. But in doing so, Rorty himself gets involved in philosophy’s business. The critiques I am directing against Rorty’s pragmatism, as one might have already figured out, are inspired by de Man’s account of Nietzsche’s rhetoric of persuasion. The point de Man makes is that Nietzsche’s overcoming of the distinction between philosophy and literature is based on his ‘deconstruction’ of the principle of noncontradiction. According to Nietzsche, the axioms of logic cannot be said to adequate to reality. To claim so, one would need to know reality before logic ‘schemes’ adequate to it. For this reason, one should conclude that the principle of non-contradiction ‘contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true’.39 The problem with this claim is that while it ultimately suggests that logic is not grounded on the correspondence to reality but on pragmatic reasons, at the same time, it proposes an irrevocable conclusion on what logic really is. As de Man comments in Allegories of Reading: ‘The text deconstructs the authority of the principle of contradiction by showing that this principle is an act, but when it acts out this act, it fails to perform the deed to which the text owed its status as act’ (p. 125). Rorty is well aware of the risks of inconsistency in arguing that constative language is not really a constatation but rather a performance. The second note of his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity states that Nietzsche (along with Derrida) is liable to the charges of selfreferential inconsistency, for he infers from the premiss ‘truth is not a matter of correspondence to reality’ the conclusion ‘what we call

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‘‘truths’’ are just useful lies’. Yet all the critiques Rorty directs against transcendental philosophy are clearly informed by the Nieztschean intuition that redescriptions do not mirror meaning but, rather, they institute it. In other words, Rorty bases his arguments on the very inference which he previously discarded as generated by confusion. Just eight pages after stating that Nietzsche is inconsistent in claiming to know what he himself claims cannot be known – i.e., the truth on truth – Rorty buys without hesitation Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism, declaring that his own account of intellectual history chimes with Nietzsche’s definition of ‘truth’ as a ‘mobile army of metaphors’.40 Rorty accuses Nietzsche and the ‘bad’ Derrida of poaching. They hunt in the terrain which they previously prohibited and declared out of bounds. The irony is that Rorty himself cannot help but commit the exact same crime. The entirety of Rorty’s work is in fact studded with definitions of truth. Let me give another example of such self-referential inconsistency. In an earlier essay, Rorty states: ‘truth is simply the most coherent and powerful theory, and no relation of ‘‘correspondence to reality’’ need[s] to be invoked to clarify ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘knowledge’’.’41 The point is that since Rorty is incapable of avoiding a hidden reference to something extratextual – here, power or coherence – he ends up playing the very part he denounced in Nietzsche and Derrida. He wears the costume of a bandit who traffics in ‘transcendental presupposition’, precisely what he has banned and forbidden. Rorty’s most elaborate attempt to defend himself against the charge of inconsistency is to be found in his review of Geoffrey Bennington’s ‘Derridabase’ – the essay floating above Derrida’s ‘Circumfession’. By reconstructing the movement of ‘White mythology’, Bennington argues that an etymological critique of philosophy which tries to bring abstract notions back to the sensory and a-philosophical world is grounded on the persuasion that philosophical discourse, in its apparent seriousness, is ‘merely forgotten or worn-out metaphors, a particularly gray and sad fable, mystified in proposing itself as the very truth’.42 Since Rorty admits to thinking of philosophy in exactly those terms, and even if Bennington does not mention him in this passage, Rorty feels compelled to defend his pragmatist account of philosophy ‘as a gray and sad fable’ against the charge of being self-refuting, of being closer to Kant than it realizes. It is obvious in fact that the point Bennington makes about Habermas and Foucault also concerns Rorty. The critique of ‘transcendental discourse in the name of the concrete realities of life’ would be unconsciously Kantian because, ‘quite simple’, such a discourse puts life in the transcendental position in regard to the transcendental itself.43 The law of the transcendental contraband consists in this: the act of claiming to have turned the page on transcendental arguments, silently turns back to them. So, while Rorty denounces the transcendental as a grey and sad fable, the structure of his argument restores it.

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

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how Rorty can approve Dewey’s ‘empirical inquires into the causal conditions of certain actual events – namely, the uses of certain words in certain ways, the origins of certain terms around which certain social practices crystallized’ (p. 334, emphasis added). Are events really something actual? Are they something at all? And most importantly: can Rorty reintroduce the reference to the origins of certain language games without also betraying the refusal of the dualism between beings and representations? As Charles Guignon and David Harley might suggest: ‘the whole notion of objects and their causal powers existing distinct from and independent of our ways of speaking and giving reasons should be ruled out by Rorty’s position.’45 In the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty insists that pragmatists are with regards to transcendental argument in the same position that nineteenth-century secularists were with regards to God: it is less a matter of whether God and transcendence exist as facts or as products of human mind, than about finding the means to avoid the vocabulary of theology and philosophy. Alternatively, in ‘Derrida and the philosophical tradition’, while embracing Feuerbach and Dewey’s positions, Rorty clearly goes for sociological explanations of philosophy, as Bennington would call them.46 This is how Rorty comments on ‘Circumfession’: The effect of ‘Circumfession’ is to rub one’s nose in the fact that all the quasi-transcendental, rigorous philosophizing that Bennington describes is being done by a poor existing individual, somebody who thinks about certain things in certain ways because of certain weird, private contingencies. (p. 347)

It is true that Derrida highlights the fact that the philosopher is always an empirical, factual ego; that philosophy is always occasioned and occasional. But, if I am not mistaken, he never suggests that one thinks in certain ways about certain things ‘because of’ the contingencies of private life that one happened to experience, nor that philosophical concepts are the result of some odd episodes in childhood or of uncommon form of obsessional neurosis.47 To mark ideas with a date and a place does not coincide with reducing texts and theories to mere effects of such a date and a place. Contaminating philosophy with what has always been considered its ‘other’ does not equate to circumventing philosophy. All the attempts to unsettle philosophy from some regional domain (sociology, psychology, or economy for instance) are as self-contradictory as scepticism because, says Bennington in ‘Derridabase’, they ‘can only replace in the final instance something which will play the part of philosophy without having the means to do so’ (p. 283). While attempting to criticize deadly transcendental discourse in name of the

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living reality of life, they only confirm the power of the distinction between actual phenomena and transcendental laws, the particular and the general, the conditioned and the unconditional. To put it even more directly: they reinforce the authority of philosophical conceptuality. The reduction of philosophy is reduced once again to philosophy. In fact, without an account of the structural bond between philosopheme and theorem, between the conceptualization that belongs to the philosophical discourse and that of other logoi, one is doomed to transform ‘the alleged transgression of philosophy into an unnoticed fault within the philosophical realm. Empiricism would be the genus of which these faults would always be the species. Transphilosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical naı¨vite´s’.48 The different value that Derrida and Rorty attribute to ‘real’ life clearly emerges if one confronts Derrida’s ‘autobiographical’ writings to Rorty’s. In ‘Trotsky and the wild orchids’ – an essay from his Philosophy and Social Hope which I will discuss at length in the next chapter – Rorty treats his own childhood passions as the unquestioned cause of his entire philosophical position. By contrast, Derrida, in the Monolingualism, states that deconstruction’s first interest relies on the critique of the axiom of purity, that is, the critique of the presumed existence of something like a simple and pure origin: the first impulse of what is called ‘deconstruction’ carries it toward this ‘critique’ of the phantasm of the axiom of purity, or toward the analytical decomposition of a purification that would lead back to the indecomposable simplicity of the origin. (p. 46)

While Rorty tries to shed himself of all the philosophical veils in order to rip the curtain aside and grasp the reality beyond it, Derrida more cautiously affirms that the re´cit produces the memory of something that perhaps never was. The history he tells has never happened ‘as such’. Tracing the traces of the phantasmatic events of his childhood, an ‘as if’ history is produced. In the epilogue of Monolingualism, Derrida unequivocally states in fact that the book should not be considered as the beginning of a future autobiography. The book does not expose Derrida; it gives an account of the obstacles preventing auto-exposition. The ultimate unveiling cannot take place so ‘the truth of what I have lived: the truth itself beyond memory’ is always to come (p. 73). The paths followed in the attempt to write a ‘genealogy of what did not happen’ were surely influenced by Derrida’s Judeo-French-Maghrebian background (p. 61). But the account of his individual journey can exist only within the bounds of the philosophical language and culture into which he came to be exiled (p. 71). Hence, giving an account of oneself is never a private act. On the contrary, it is a gesture which is

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always haunted by the spectres of philosophical conceptuality. Derrida’s genealogy does not lead to the discovery of his original self, to who he was before philosophy and who he could be after it. As Foucault puts it, the effect of genealogy is to recognize the fact that countless spirits dispute the possession over our own selves.49 But such recognition – and Derrida notes this with a force hardly found in Foucault – cannot avoid the ‘veils’ weaved by metaphysics. It is precisely in discussing Foucault’s enterprise that Derrida, already affirmed in 1963 (maybe for the very first time) the impossibility of purely bypassing philosophy.50 In his review of Foucault’s The History of Madness, a book ‘admirable in so many respects, powerful in its breadth and style’ (p. 31), Derrida underscores that Foucault’s project is to evade the force which would trap any writing about madness in the policing language of reason. Foucault does not want to write the history of madness caught in the nets of classical reason. He aims to write a history of madness itself, to hear its scream before it got silenced in the discourses that were produced around it. According to Derrida, the obstinate determination to avoid the ambush of the restraining and restrained language of reason, is at once the most seductive, audacious and maddest aspect in Foucault. All our European languages, the language of everything that has participated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason – all this is the immense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the rubric of capture or objectification of madness. Nothing within this language, and no one among those who speak it, can escape the historical guilt – if there is one, and if it is historical in a classical sense – which Foucault apparently wishes to put on trial. But such a trial may be impossible, for by the simple fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime. (p. 35)

The case against metaphysics that Foucault prepares for trial appears as brave as unwary. His will to ‘bypass reason’ – to ‘contourner la raison’ in Derrida’s French – is as uneasy as Rorty’s determination to circumvent metaphysics. A similar point was made in 1980 in ‘On a newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy’.51 Derrida gave this lecture, contemporary with ‘Envois’, at the first Ce´risy-la-Salle encounter dedicated to his work. This seminar in particular, organized by JeanLuc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was to start with ‘The ends of man’, an essay introduced by Foucault’s announcement that the end of man was perhaps near.52 In his address, Derrida reflected upon the tonality of the verdicts on philosophy’s end. Laden with euphoria, they announce that it will not be too long before the liberating disappearance of philosophy from the world. Such discourses want us to

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believe that the end of the old world and a new beginning are near; that the coming of a world not mystified by philosophy’s grey fable is imminent. The veils will fall and the real world will expose itself. Eschatology seems to be the Stimmung shared by the different variations on the theme ‘the death of philosophy’. And every turn of discourse launches itself into a surplus of eschatological eloquence (p. 145). Derrida urges to take note of the fact that ‘an apocalyptic tone’ is not something which newly emerges sometime and somewhere in philosophy. The apocalyptic tone does not happen to philosophy, for philosophy as such has always existed only in the horizon of the apocalypse. Every philosopher has in fact always aspired to be the last one – that is the first, the one who eludes the influence of worn-out metaphors and succeeds in putting an end to the philosophical nonsense. He who believes to be truthful dwells in the apocalypse, since the truth stands for the end, for what comes after the final judgement. The tone of truth would thus always be apocalyptic. Derrida discusses the example of Kant, whose 1796 ‘On a newly arisen superior tone in philosophy’ attacked those who, in a very lofty tone, preached the death of philosophy in the name of some kind of a supernatural revelation. But if Kant denounces those who proclaim that philosophy has been at an end for two thousand years, he has himself, in marking a limit, indeed the end of a certain type of metaphysics, freed another wave of eschatological discourses in philosophy. His progressivism, his belief in the future of a certain philosophy, indeed of another metaphysics, is not contradictory to this proclamation of ends and of the end. (pp. 144–5)

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

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

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

As Gasche´ suggests: Husserl’s method of dismantling enables a retrogression to something ‘that cannot in principle be given as such’.58 The origins ‘as such’ – in my argument, the contingent and untheoretical premisses of theory – will remain concealed because they can only be mediated to us by our actual mode of reflection, by our present language. It is strange. Rorty does not hesitate calling himself ‘ethnocentric’ on the grounds of the belief that it is radically impossible to abandon the language we speak, the tradition in which we live. Yet at the same time, he assumes that one can create, without too many difficulties, a vocabulary capable of circumventing metaphysics and reaching an autonomous time before and beyond it. Rorty’s euphoria – euphoria that is not alien to a certain Foucault – is caused by the persuasion of having found the right way of turning the page on metaphysics and of accessing the contingent, ironic and solidaire epoch of post-philosophical democracy. This is exactly the opposite of the aporia that organizes the pace of Derrida’s work. Euphoria in Greek means easy solution, easiness, absence of doubt, and it indicates the possibility to overcome smoothly an awkward situation. If one is in an aporia, one cannot see the passage which would wriggle out of the fix. There is no safe exit, no easy escape. One is at an impasse; the path is a dead end.

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

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

But this whispered confession does not lead Rorty to a general revision of his privatization of deconstruction. One would expect at this point a sincere analysis of the limits of pragmatism and its complicity with metaphysics. One would hope that Rorty would expand on the passage I discussed above from the introduction of Consequences of Pragmatism – ‘It is impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach’ – and admit that once philosophy has been defined as the activity grounded on the transcendental presupposition, on the belief that some discourses genuinely refer to reality, then it is impossible to produce a discourse which would not participate in such presupposition. Instead, Rorty changes the topic and puts Derrida under the spotlight. With a sympathetic attitude, he sort of forgives Derrida for not being able to forget Plato and Kant after reading them. He concludes that maybe non-Jewish kids who go to school in exotic places like California or Indonesia, places where few have ever heard of Plato and Kant, can forget about philosophy and metaphysics, but Derrida cannot. Derrida cannot. Again, Rorty reduces the impossibility of overcoming the philosophical order as a idiosyncratic and personal matter. Far from acknowledging that every argument structurally produces a little apocalypse, he makes it sound as if it were Derrida’s fault for not having been able to circumvent philosophy. The truth is that, as Christopher Norris noted, Rorty counts Derrida as a useful but suspicious ally, some kind of a half-way pragmatist ‘having deconstructed a great deal of surplus ontological baggage but then fallen victim to the lure of his own negative metaphysics or systematized anti-philosophy’.62 The point is that no one so far has been capable of being pragmatist and a-transcendental all the way. In fact, who is a true pragmatist? No one, according to Rorty. Not even the founding fathers of pragmatism. Not Dewey, since he fell victim to the seduction of radical empiricism and panpsychism.63 Not James, who unfortunately did not confine himself to declaring the quest for a successful theory of truth as hopeless, but had moments in which he – as Nietzsche – tried to infer what the truth consists of. Certainly not

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

It would be (too) easy to say that Rorty finds inadequate all the other critics of the metaphysical tradition in order to be recognized as the first true and authentic pragmatist/ironist. Yet, he arrives at the point of admitting that he sounded too much like Carnap in the denounce of the pseudo-problems provoked by unreal philosophical distinctions and in the fervent physicalism of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.67 I hope to have demonstrated that in a certain sense, Rorty has never stepped away from physicalism. His treatment of Derrida in fact shows how Rorty tries to reduce Derrida’s philosophical positions to mere effects of Derrida’s ‘physical’ life. One might be tempted to describe Rorty’s pragmatism as a sort of reductive vitalism for he assumes private life to be the causal origin of any given theory.

The Disposal of Philosophy L’e´rection tombe. (Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derridabase’)

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

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

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

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

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

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contingency and existence will quietly rest segregated outside the city walls once their services are no longer needed inside. Nonetheless, imagination is still haunted by natural cognition. Without an originary relation with the natural world, fancy would not have at its disposal the raw material necessary to start the process of eidetic variation. Eidetic variation needs to labour the empirical data, and thus the spectres of the empirical will have always and already infected the work of ideation. The logos as reassurance stands against the terror provoked by the bogeyman, the black man, the adumbration which might disturb the white domain of the transcendental. ‘Philosophy consists of offering reassurance to children.’73 There is, there must be, an insight not haunted and stained by naivety. For such reason, Husserl first states that the insight of that which exists is necessary to essential insight, and then backs away from the consequences of his statement. In Ideas I, the third paragraph is sacrificed by the fourth. As Derrida comments in ‘Plato’s pharmacy’: The purity of the inside home against exteriority essence, a surplus that untouched plenitude of

can then only be restored if the charges are brought as a supplement, inessential yet harmful to the ought never to have come to be added to the the inside. (p. 128)

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

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configure itself as the powerful argument that it is. For this very reason, Rorty claims that philosophy must be forgotten as soon as one is done using it to overstep the stories of metaphysics. In this impossible attempt to break away from the structure and the logic of transcendental arguments, Rorty winds up repeating Husserl’s moves. Husserl first writes that natural insight and essential insight imply each other, that one is the condition for the possibility of the other; but then, in the quick turning of a page, he declares the possibility of reaching essences without passing through individual perceptions. In the same fashion, Rorty exploits philosophy to argue against the possibility of any type of transcendental deduction, and then tries to forget the very tradition which allowed him to perform his critique of metaphysics. For phenomenology as for pragmatism, it is a matter of hiding the conditions for the possibilities of their own tricks: the ontic is made to disappear once the ontological has been reached; philosophy disappears once irony has been installed. Pragmatism dreams of a time and a language that would have ended their dependence on all that philosophy has ever stood for. As John Caputo has argued in ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental: the case of Rorty and Derrida’,74 it is this craving for autonomy which most distinguishes Rorty from Derrida. Rorty’s recourse to the feminine pronoun to talk about the ironist (she, the ironist against he, the metaphysician) is not enough to conceal the fact that his entire project of self-creation is nothing else than a hypermasculine attempt to erase the debt that binds every language to the other.75 Instead of admitting that pragmatism needs transcendental philosophy, at least as much as phenomenology needs contingency, Rorty thinks he can do better than Husserl. He thinks he can create a language which would avoid the influence of what has made it possible in the first place. Or at least, Rorty hopes it is possible to bag it for disposal.76 Clinging onto a Romantic metaphysics of the subject, Rorty insists on ignoring that the debt with the other, the necessity of depending on the other – in one word, ‘heteronomy’ – is not something that happens and thus might be avoided: it is the constitutive infrastructure of every language, and therefore, of any existing being.77 As Derrida unmistakably states in the second part of The Post Card: The existential analytic of Dasein situates the structure of originary Schuldigsein (Being-responsible, Being-forewarned, or the capacity-to-be-responsible, the possibility of having to answer-for before any debt, any fault, and even any determined law at all) on this side of any subjectivity, any relation to the object, any knowledge, and above all any consciousness.78

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

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the debt with such a hurried assurance, such an imperturbable lightheartedness, that one asks: if it is so obvious that the debts with transcendental philosophy have been cleared, then why does Rorty keep repeating his long finished business with philosophy? Why should one forget about philosophy if one no longer has anything to do with it? Rorty’s anxiety of being influenced by philosophy is analogous to the metaphysical anguish of contamination. It is nothing different from the fear of the other who comes – or better, who has always already come – to invade and destroy the possibility of a pure autos. What is in fact metaphysics if not the craving for an aseptic and immune self, for a vital body which owes its existence to nothing else than itself? In this perspective, as suggested by the Anti-Oedipus, let us remember Marx’s great declaration on Feuerbach. He who denies God’s existence does only a ‘secondary thing’, since he denies God in order to put Man in God’s place. Should we not affirm that Rorty does as well a secondary thing because he contests the supremacy of external authorities in order to affirm the authenticity of his own laws? Rorty critiques Heidegger for having claimed that his theory was grounded on something bigger than himself. Let us call this Europe, the West or History. Yet, rereading some passages and discreet footnotes, it almost seems that Rorty is not disappointed with Heidegger for having wanted to be too much, but for having settled on being too little: a thought which depends on something else than itself, is not autonomous enough for Rorty. Authenticity does not consist of opening up to the other, but of creating one’s own system and avoiding dependency on whatever comes from the other. Freedom from tradition is understood by Rorty in light of the ascetic category of self-control. To resist the temptation of acquiring traditional fixations, he needs in fact to master himself with unfailing skill and severity. The genre of active subject dreamt by Rorty, and sometimes by Foucault, would not let anything happen to himself because he is what makes things happen.79 Unfortunately, no one has control over his own erection. Derrida showed the links between the figure of the phallus and that of the sovereign in the unpublished sessions of the seminar ‘The beast and the sovereign’. But at the same time, he also argued that since erection is a reflex, something automatic and independent from one’s will, the ground of manhood is a radical passivity which unworks any dream of absolute mastery and autonomy. 80 Reacting against the frenzy of constituting a pure and autonomous self which would not be upset by the spectres of passivity and heteronomy, Derrida, in his respectful and inventive reading of philosophy’s great texts, tried to demonstrate how all the attempts to construct a close and autarchic totality fail. They fail, not because an external force intervenes to deconstruct an otherwise solid structure. Any given system is essentially self-deconstructing, since

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

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something comical in this movement. Is there not something ridiculous in being forced into this infinite movement up and down which constantly reminds us that the conditions for the possibility of a phenomenon make such a phenomenon impossible? Is it not ironic that the discipline we try to get rid of keeps coming back to our hands, in an annoying Fort and Da? If Destiny (Geschick) keeps repeating itself, if it is parodized into destinies (envois), it loses the greatness and austerity of Heidegger’s. It is banalized and vulgarized; a tragedy becomes a farce. The attempted elevation of metaphysics appears to be, after ‘Envois’, a fearful and trembling erection. The silliness of deconstruction is provoked by the fact that the movement against the possibility of producing a pure transcendental theory, in its resistance to theory, still produces theory and theories. This is why deconstruction is at the same time two very different kinds of jetties – or tones, as Rorty would say. On the one hand, there is the jetty which throws itself forward and backwards without any intention of erecting, stating or posing anything stable. On the other hand, there is the movement which tries to produce a system, institutionalizing and protecting it from violent and new waves. Following Derrida’s ‘Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms’, let us call the first jetty the destabilizing jetty or even more artificially the devastating jetty, and the other one the stabilizing, establishing, or simply stating jetty – in reference to the supplementary fact that at this moment of stasis, of stanza, the stabilizing jetty proceeds by predicative clauses, reassures with assertory statements, with assertions, with statements such as ‘this is that’: for example, deconstruction is this or that.83

The destabilizing jetty resists the stabilizing one, not since it is against theory or because it proclaims a theoretical asceticism; but rather, because it opposes the possibility of building a system, an organized totality not always and already worked by an underground seism. The devastating jetty leaps against the possibility of stating a thesis without doubts, hesitations, uncertainties, and blind points. It does not posit anything. It just opposes the dreams of a pure transcendence not contaminated by contingency. However, both paradoxically and predictably, deconstructive attacks settle on producing a number of theorems, theories, thematics, themes, theses which come to shape the conceptual core of deconstructionism. The resistance is formalized into a method. The devastating jetty is institutionalized into the stabilizing one. Deconstruction becomes deconstructionism, a school with its teachable technical rules, procedures, and principles. It creates fortifications and outposts, networks within the academic world which are in contrast with other theories, spreads ‘a system, a method, a

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

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

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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was still searching for a language which might make compatible the sublimity of the orchids with the beauty of the socialist revolution. After having published in 1979 his first philosophical best-seller, Rorty slowly began to realize that the pleasures derived from the satisfaction of private desires are inconsistent with the moral imperative of social engagement. Consequently, he started abandoning the search for a vocabulary which could resolve the differend between Trotsky and the orchids. Duties to oneself and duties to others are destined to be fulfilled in two different and irreconcilable linguistic spaces, albeit both with the same right to exist. One cannot indulge in mere hedonism or total militancy. At least two vocabularies are necessary. To satisfy the galaxy of desires that we are, we need to speak at least two languages. Rorty thinks of Sartre and Savonarola as two aberrant examples of the monolingual attempt to judge human activities on the basis of a single paradigm. While Sartre criticized Proust as an insignificant writer and man was insignificant for the struggle against capitalism’s violence, the heretic Dominican condemned art as mere vanity. Proust was probably irrelevant for the socialist dream, and perhaps it is also pointless to look for the moral in the artworks that Savonarola censured. Rorty does not discuss this matter. He claims rather that it is wrong to measure with the meter of political or moral utility, works that were only produced to satisfy their author’s creative urge and promote recreation for their consumers. Sartre and Savonarola were mistaken since they evaluated the quest for private autonomy with a language inappropriate for grasping its ends. Their mistake consisted in affirming that the private is public. A long quotation from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity will now provide further clarification of Rorty’s position. Books relevant to the avoidance of either social or individual cruelty are often contrasted – as books with a ‘moral message’ – with books whose aims are, instead, ‘aesthetic.’ Those who draw this moral-aesthetic contrast and give priority to the moral usually distinguish between an essential human faculty – conscience – and an optional extra faculty, ‘aesthetic taste.’ Those who draw the same contrast to the advantage of ‘the aesthetic’ often presuppose a distinction of the same sort. But for the latter the center of the self is assumed to be the ironist’s desire for autonomy, for a kind of perfection which has nothing to do with his relations with other people. This Nietzschean attitude exalts the figure of the ‘artist,’ just as the former attitude exalts those who ‘live for others.’ It assumes that the point of human society is not the general happiness but the provision of an opportunity for the especially gifted – those fitted to become autonomous – to achieve their goal.4

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

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

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

The results obtained by the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons or by the gay awareness actions in which Foucault was involved are witness to his invaluable influence on contemporary political life. Moreover, Foucault has been a key figure in anti-psychiatric struggles, in student movements both in the United States and across Europe, and in the Italian 1977 Autonomia among others. Foucault did not only offer his thought to the service of micro-physical revolutions and knowledges in revolt, but he also put his body on the line. It is undeniable that Foucault is one of the most valuable public intellectuals for post-war society, so much so that I will focus on the danger of the alibi offered by Rorty to Derrida. The stakes are clear: instead of opposing Habermas’s thesis, of highlighting how and why deconstruction is – or might be – politically relevant, Rorty reduces philosophy as a whole to an equivalent of his own private search for wild orchids. After spending so much time depicting Derrida as a perverse and genial adolescent – as Terry Eagleton put it6 – it is easy for Rorty silently to suggest a connection between deconstruction and the passion for wild orchids, the sexual flowers par excellence. By reducing deconstruction to a private pastime, Rorty is able to save it from Habermas, but at the same time, he arrests philosophy to the privacy of personal self-enjoyment, exiled light years away from any public sphere. Habermas believes that the critiques of rationality and universality are irresponsible and dangerous since they oppose the project of finding a social glue able to be a substitute for religion, a project which can be exclusively grounded on the Enlightenment concepts of rationality and universality. Thus Derrida would appear as a corrupter of the young and helpless, making them indifferent to their duties before democracy. In Rorty’s opinion, Habermas should not bother blaming post-structuralism since it did not and cannot have any influence on modern society’s public life. Ironists in search of personal autonomy as Foucault or Derrida are invaluable for those who are involved in regenerating a private identity distinct from traditional canons. But they are ‘pretty much useless when it comes to politics’ (p. 83). Once again, here is an instance of that ‘repressive tolerance’ which Derrida attributes to Rorty’s defence. Once it has been skimmed of any political and ethical thrust, what remains of deconstruction? One problematic aspect of Rorty’s thesis is that a clear-cut division between what is influential in private philosophical circles and what is relevant in the public domain is difficult to maintain. In Frederick’s century – as Kant dubs the Age of Enlightement in homage to Frederick the Great – there were not so many readers with access to the

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debates that lit up the Berlinische Monatschrift. In 1784 the philosophical arguments were only available within limited academic circles. Such innocuousness allowed Kant – at least in theory – to speak freely when addressing his colleagues, whereas when undertaking a more public role, he was obliged to control his critical attitude. Rorty’s privatization of deconstruction is based on a strikingly similar argument: philosophy is a private matter since it interests only a few people. However, how can we establish nowadays, at a time when archives and libraries are becoming virtual and thus more accessible, when the interest in ‘theory’ is larger than ever, the line which separates a publication which is private and specialized from the one reaching a broader audience? How is it possible to determine a priori the destination of theory? To decide who will be the addressees that an envoi will end up reaching? Quite brutally, Rorty divides authors in two categories: there are those who are moved by the commitment to fighting injustice, and those like Derrida who are writing to stimulate themselves and their readers. The former write for the common welfare while the latter for renewing and amusing a few chosen people. Actually, beyond its platitudinous common sense, it is very difficult to understand where Rorty is going with his argument. The belief that Derrida’s fantasies cannot be used for any public, political or pedagogical means but can nevertheless function as examples of what might be done, seems to be driven by an internal tension. If Derrida’s gestures can be exemplary, if they are extremely important for one group of people, it follows that they undoubtedly have a pedagogical function. What is more public and concretely political than the irony offering new descriptions to look at reality and renew the ‘we’ to which one belongs? To publish texts on flowers or masturbation, for example, rather than on seemingly more immediate political questions, is a public and a political decision. To make one’s ‘private life’ public by publishing love envois is to engage in public acts with public effects. As a matter of fact, in ‘Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy’ – an essay included in the 1998 collection Truth and Progress but initially intended to be a part of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – Rorty admits the relevance of Heidegger and Derrida in the quest for social justice. They are politically relevant for they show the kind of private autonomy any individual should be able to pursue in a utopic democracy. And yet, their discourses – whose creativity proves that the realm of possibility can be enlarged – do nothing concrete to justify or hasten (but not, despite what Habermas believes, to forestall, discredit or delay) the arrival of such utopia.7 The first difficulty of this argument is that it is unclear whether Rorty believes discourses presumably more argumentative and accessible to the people – Habermas’ or Rawls’s for example – to be actually relevant for public life. The second difficulty is that the relation between philosophy and politics is put in different terms in

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another essay from Truth and Progress. In ‘Is truth the goal of inquiry?’ Rorty does not defend pragmatism from the charges of being a form of irresponsible quietism by saying that pragmatism does not have anything to do with politics. Rorty claims that pragmatists should not bow their heads to those severe critics who think that dismissing the idea of Truth is rash, nor should they become convinced that the only reasonable thing that philosophy can do is to survey the universals which shape our form of life. Pragmatists instead ‘should see themselves as involved in a long-term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self-image of their community’, a community whose present Rorty believes is structured also, but not only, by Greek metaphysics.8 In this case, Rorty’s position seems to coincide with what Derrida suggests regarding the Socrates–plato couple in a postcard dated 6 June 1977: Do people (I am not speaking of ‘philosophers’ or of those who read Plato) realize to what extent this old couple has invaded our most private domesticity, mixing themselves up in everything, taking their part of everything, and making us attend for centuries their colossal and indefatigable anaparalyses?9

Thus, for Derrida – and at times even for Rorty – one could describe metaphysics as an axiomatic which is not merely contingent nor purely necessary, but simultaneously both necessary and contingent. Necessary, because all the attempts to circumvent it have so far failed. Contingent, because we cannot believe there is something fatal or natural in a vocabulary which forbids us to make it inoperative and thus, somehow, work our way out of it. We need at once to talk and contest the vocabulary which snuck out of the walls of academia and – contaminating and contaminated by the events it encountered along its way – arrived to shape our mode of being in the world. Deconstruction and pragmatism are public acts which aim to interrupt such vocabulary, though in order to create a new future rather than, as Heidegger wanted, to restore the Heraclitean adobe where Gods and humans once dwelled together. During a conference in Paris in 1993 on the relationship between deconstruction and pragmatism, Rorty claimed that what distinguishes Derrida from those other contemporary ‘continental’ thinkers, from Foucault for example (and what is it that makes Foucault the monster who Rorty has always to condemn?), is that Derrida is a sentimental, hopeful, romantically idealistic author, someone who believes in the future and in utopia. Derrida, upon hearing such a statement, jumped on his chair, and in despair, grabbed his head in his hands. Soon after, however, Derrida had to admit to himself and to others that Rorty was,

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at least in part, right.10 It is a fact that Rorty was one of the first to point out the profound promise informing the structure of deconstruction. Already by 1978, even before the attention to Derrida’s so-called ethical turn in 1980s, Rorty argued that Derrida is suggesting how things might look if we did not have Kantian philosophy built into the fabric of our intellectual life, as his predecessors suggested how things might look if we did not have religion built into the fabric of our moral life.11

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

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stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivation than about shallow and evident greed’.13 The leftist turmoil moved from Social Sciences departments to Humanities buildings; the public enemy number one was a mental attitude rather than the economical system. People were no longer worried about finding an alternative to market economy; the one and only true chance was in the psychic revolution, the liberation of the conscience. The recognition of the otherness of the others, of their difference – perhaps even of their diffe´rance – is the only way to access the reign of Justice. This is why, starting from 1968, in the United States, scholarships whose area of focus are the ‘sacrificial victims’ of the system (Critical Race Theory, Women’s Studies, Post-Colonialism, Chicano Studies and so forth) started to blossom. Rorty acknowledges that the influence of the Cultural Left on academic programs diminished the tolerance to sadism and cruelty against minorities: ‘The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at as ‘‘politically correct’’ has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago’ (p. 81). The act of accusing teachers with irresponsibility relies on the consciousness that in educating youth, one is also moulding a future community. School is the one place where it is harder to separate language’s constitutive role and its performativity. And yet, why are (especially) those in the Humanities labelled as corruptors? It was already clear to Kant that philosophy as a discipline and as a faculty could exist only in antagonism with the powers of tradition and socio-political-cultural conservation. In The Conflict of the Faculties, the higher faculties, those closer to practical necessities and doing, are controlled by the government. Thus, they sit in the right wing of the academic senate, closer to the King, and defend the reasons of the State. The lower faculty, the faculty of philosophy, is only interested in and responsible for critique. Philosophy is, or should be, in fact the place where students are encouraged to doubt every pre-established truth and to venture into reality with their own light. Conservative and pro-governmental powers intervene to prevent this emancipation of minors. Unfortunately, nowadays, the system of policing critique needs to be attuned to democratic rhetoric. One can no longer rely on good old methods like censorship and open threats as used for instance by Frederick William II. One has to find new, more sophisticated and less evident ways of controlling critical thought. For example, one can limit the audience of students to which philosophy is offered. Only a certain type of high school, a certain kind of social group, can access it. Moreover, the age at which students are exposed to philosophy can be delayed. And one can revoke funding if, for example, the appointed Dean to a newly established Southern Californian law school turns out to be too liberal. The right to philosophy and critical thought is always

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in danger because the attitude favoured by the lower faculty resists the sovereigns’ desire to dominate and govern. For Rorty, unlike liberal-bashing commentators, the problem – at least so it seems at first glance – is not that the Humanities are naturally leftist hubs for social protest. The problem is that the intellectuals from the Cultural Left have not done enough to help realize the social reforms necessary for saving the United States from the steady increase of economic inequality and instability. While the Humanities taught good feelings and good manners through critical theory, social injustice devoured the American dream: that is the problem. If husband and wife each work 2,000 hours a year for the current average wage of production and nonsupervisory workers ($7.50 per hour), they will make that much [$30,000 a year]. But $30,000 a year will not permit homeownership or buy decent daycare. In a country that believes neither in public transportation nor in national health insurance, this income permits a family of four only a humiliating, hand-to-mouth existence. Such a family, trying to get by on this income, will be constantly tormented by fears of wage rollbacks and downsizing, and of the disastrous consequences of even a brief illness. (p. 84)

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

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Rorty argues in ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’, by conquering academic departments, the Cultural Left imposed a rewriting of curricula such that, in a generation or two, the conventional wisdom ‘inculcated’ into young Americans will change.14 Deconstruction or pragmatism can have a positive political thrust, yet the fight against social injustice does not have to care about the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, or about the circumvention of Platonic vocabulary. After all, a lot of such repression is so blatant and obvious that it does not take any great analytic skills or any great philosophical self-consciousness to see what is going on. It does not, for example, take any ‘critical-linguistic analysis’ to notice that millions of children in American ghettos grew up without hope while the U.S. government was preoccupied with making the rich richer – with assuring a greedy and selfish middle class that it was the salt of the earth. Even economists, plumbers, insurance salesman, and biochemists – people who have never read a text closely, much less deconstructed it – can recognize that the immiseration of much of Latin America is partially due to the deals struck between local plutocracies and North America banks and governments. (p. 135)

The real target of Rorty’s polemics is the ridiculous belief – though any statement can sound ridiculous once skilfully isolated from its context – that the millennium of universal peace and justice among men and women would come once we all become ‘ethical readers’. It is not just the case that one has to have a Saussurian-WittgensteinianDerridean understanding of the nature of language in order to think clearly and usefully about politics. One does not have to be an antiessentialist in philosophy in order to be politically imaginative or politically useful. Philosophy is not that important for politics, nor is literature. Lots of people who accept theocentric or Kantian logocentric accounts of moral obligation unconsciously and uncritically – starting with Kant himself – have done very well at political thinking. They have been invaluable to social reform and progress. The same can be said of lots of essentialists – for example, all those people who still think that either natural or social science can change our self-image for the better by telling us what we really, essentially, intrinsically, are. (p. 135)

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

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

Radicalism and philosophy in the privacy of self-achievement; reformism and common sense in public engagement. This is Rorty’s solution to the intricate relationship between theory and practice, thought and politics. Derrida handles the same topic in a totally different way, connecting the radical questioning of a certain philosophical practice with the engagement toward a democracy to come. While Foucault has monstrously confused the private and the public,

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

Casting a Maybe at the Heart of the Present O gentlemen, the time of life is short! To spend that shortness basely, were too long, If life did ride upon a 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 happened that the dials in the clocktowers were being fired at simultaneously and independently from several locations in Paris. (Walter Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’)

I studied philosophy in a rather interesting place. The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rome is not located with the other faculties in the university town. Philosophy has chosen as its residence the ancient Villa Mirafiori on the edge of Via Nomentana. From the roof of the mansion, one can enjoy the panoramic view of the city beneath. Is it possible to observe from a distance, on a clear and serene day, the structures of the other faculties? It would be quite striking if, from the height of philosophy, one could actually spot the foundations on which the other academic disciplines rest. But if from that roof one cannot grasp the bases of other knowledges, then why should a prospective student even consider philosophy? With what perspective? Rorty’s answer to the question is easy: philosophers just want to have fun. As I argued in the first chapter, once philosophy had given up the self-legitimation of being the sole transcendental critique and admitted its own failure, the only thing left for philosophy was to be a discipline, which, as other positive discourses – as art for example – was interested in positing new truths. Yet the very isolation of the faculty of philosophy from the social body of the city makes it almost irrelevant for the people. To put it briefly: once the Kantian claim that philosophy is the

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critique and not a discipline falls, philosophy is erected as the most private of all disciplines, the faculty where people indulge in the pleasures of irony. The three essays by Derrida that I will deal with in this section are inspired by the same problematics organizing Rorty’s work. These essays were originally offered by Derrida to the pupils of prestigious American institutions (Columbia, Cornell and Stanford). From such private and inaccessible premises, Derrida questions the purposes and reasons of philosophy, its place in relation to the city and in relation to other academic disciplines. To have a raison d’eˆtre, a reason for being, is to have a justification for existence, to have a meaning, a purpose [finalite´], a destination. It is also to have a cause, to be explainable according to the ‘principle of reason,’ as it is sometimes called – in terms of a reason that it is also a cause (a ground, ein Grund), that is to say also a footing and a foundation, ground to stand on. In the phrase raison d’eˆtre, this causality takes on above all the sense of final cause.17

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

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

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of the lives of its citizens. But in doing so, it takes away from the citizens the possibility of caring for themselves. Putting the multitude under its lifelong tutelage, the State makes it careless, incapable of care. Eventually the people cannot survive without the State’s caring and paternal superintendence. Power for Foucault becomes biopower precisely when it starts assuming life as its object and objective. The task of the higher faculties – law, medicine and theology – was to produce more apt knowledges to take care of and govern the bodies of the citizens and the social body successfully, and to provide the State with an apparatus able to sustain the new mode of governance. It is not only a matter of determining what the nation must believe, but also of making the community comply with such principles: governmentalization – as Foucault defines it – is the ‘movement through which individuals are subjugated into the reality of a social practice by mechanisms of power that appeal to a truth’.22 Finding their arche´ in the reason of the State, the higher faculties occupy a powerful and threatening place within the academic cartography. The State itself should protect the lower faculty from the parasitism of such departmental centres of power, whose prestige is determined by their looking beyond academia, that is, to the government of society. Within the university there should be a guaranteed counter-power, which, as opposed to the higher faculties, would not have any concrete role in enforcing the governmentalization of citizenry. It would instead be granted the right to decide freely the truth and falseness of the discourses and practices enforced by the higher faculties and analyse their pragmatism. Kant assigns the authority of critique to philosophy, the lower faculty. Such a faculty is inferior not only because it is the furthest from State force and interests, but also because it is closest to the mechanics of knowledge. As Derrida reconstructs Kant’s discourse: The government and the forces it represents, or that represent it (civil society), should create a law limiting their own influence and submitting all its statements of a constative type (those claiming to tell the truth) and even of a ‘practical’ type (insofar as they imply a free judgment) to the jurisdiction of university competence and, finally, we will see, to that within it which is most free and responsible in respect to the truth: the Faculty of Philosophy.23

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

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or do anything without going through philosophy, this gigantic critical agency lacking any concrete means for enforcing its findings. Kant does not imply that the lower faculty should replace the higher ones in the government of the State. Rather, The Conflict of the Faculties suggests that the fundamental modalities upholding and determining a community as a social reality should be anchored on the transcendental inquiries of the lower faculty. The difficulty at the heart of this Kantian idea of university is not hard to grasp. To defend the autonomy of philosophical criticism, Kant needs to claim that critique has nothing to do with the dimension of performativity. Philosophy is only interested in saying the truth; action is not its business for its role is purely critical. If its inquiries overstepped the academic space, if critique became a public practice rather than remaining an intra-academic quarrel, then State powers would have the right, if not the justice, to intervene against it. Only the people educated in the higher faculties are competent enough to respond to public demands. Therefore, to defend it from the aggression of those interested in governance, Kant reduces the critical attitude of the lower faculty to a private practice irrelevant to the governmentalization project. Kant’s act of barricading critique away from social reality authorizes the most contradictory evaluations. As Derrida argues, Kant defines a university that is as much a safeguard for the most totalitarian of social forms as a place for the most intransigently liberal resistance to any abuse of power, a resistance that can be judged in turns as most rigorous or most impotent. In effect, its power is limited to a power-to-think-and-judge, a power-to-say, though not necessarily to say in public, since this would involve an action, an executive power denied the university.24

Both Kant and Rorty seem to agree that philosophers cannot have a public role since their discussions are limited to academic circles. However, Kant’s distinction between the public and private – which still motivates our own academic topology – is anchored on the transcendental separation of the constative and the performative. Rorty, by contrast, insists that it is merely for empirical reasons that philosophy has almost no function in public reality. Nevertheless, Kant, in defending Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone from the charges of being a seditious text, had to settle on arguments strikingly similar to the ones Rorty adopted in his defence of Derrida from Habermas. Philosophy cannot constitute a political harm to the government of men because it is out of public reach. Philosophy, for Kant and Rorty alike, is ‘an unintelligible, closed book, only a debate between scholars of the faculty, of which the people take no notice’.25 The question Derrida asks, in his confrontation of Kant, is whether

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deciding on truth and falseness is not always and already a public, and therefore, a political, act. The element of publicity, the necessarily public character of discourse, in particular in the form of archive, designates the unavoidable locus of equivocation [between the language of theoretical statements and of performatives] that Kant would like to reduce. Whence the temptation: to transform, into a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language, the discourse, precisely, of universal value that is that of philosophy.26

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

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having a book that thinks for me, a pastor who functions as my conscience, a doctor who decides my diet – needs to be disturbed. For now, says Kant, only a few are using their own minds, but that the public will enlighten itself is indeed nearly inevitable, if only freedom is granted. And quite surprisingly if one has in mind what Kant will say in The Conflict of the Faculties, the ‘avant-garde’, which has already broken from the spell of immaturity, is morally obliged to help fellow human beings find the courage and means of thinking for themselves. Independent thinkers, even among the appointed guardians who have seemingly internalized the role of superintendence, have the responsibility to disseminate man’s potency of being autonomous and of caring for himself.27 It is in this perspective that Foucault, collapsing Aufkla¨rung on critique, claims that Enlightenment consists less in learning about truth and falsity from others, than in learning to question the borders which the different authorities declare impassable. But the requisite for the maturation of mankind is the public and free use of reason. If not the art of practical insubordination, critique at least involves the right to argue publicly. Each man, as a public officer, needs to obey the guidelines received by the highest power and its representatives. However, at the same time, as a part of the entire commonwealth – which is transnational since Kant talks about a ‘cosmopolitan society’ – every human being has the duty to question the opportunity of the commands which one nevertheless obeys for the time being. Kant does not restrain the free use of reason within the walls of the university. On the contrary, critical thinking is a responsibility which humankind as such needs to assume. 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 diffusing the idea that philosophy is a nonsense to be cast away. Yet Kant also notices signs indicating that the present is opening up toward a general liberation from the authoritative discourses produced in the interest of governance. Kant’s enlightenment, in the hope that the public will gain total access to free and autonomous use of reason, finds its raison d’eˆtre in the urgency of emancipating the public from the yoke which subjects it to the truths and practices enforced by State officials. It is this sort of Foucauldian critical attitude that I was glad to recognize in Derrida’s essays on Kant and the idea of the university. For Derrida as for Foucault, critical philosophy is not a matter of reinforcing the line which separates constative language interested only in truth from performative discourses whose sole interests are of a pragmatic nature. Seeming to agree with Rorty’s anti-transcendental arguments, Derrida affirms that it no longer makes sense to contrast fundamental research to goal-oriented inquiries:

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

In ‘The principle of reason’ Derrida shows that the border between the noble ends pursued by basic research and the utilitarian empirical goals of applied sciences cannot be maintained. No ‘pure’ science is untouched by economico-political interests. It is evident that the fundamental research undertaken, for example, by theoretical physicists, chemists or biologists also pursues empirical ends. These ends are, of course, most of the time military. ‘This is not new; but never before has so-called basic scientific research been so deeply committed to ends that are at the same time military ends’ (p. 143). It is said that each minute two million dollars are spent on armaments, but – presuming that this total covers only the manufacturing expenses – to such an amount, one should add the funding for research programmes, the expenses for the maintenance of their structures, the salaries of the professors, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate students’ salaries and so forth. Apparently less dangerous and more pacific disciplines can also serve the war machine. For instance, according to Derrida, military reason profits from the sciences dealing with the field of language (communication studies, semiotics, semantics, linguistics, translation studies). It is not outrageous to claim that in a time of permanent warfare one can exploit the sciences which decode texts as hermeneutics, or the ones which study linguistic pragmatics and rhetoric.29 Poetry, literature, film and fiction in general can be useful tools for ideological war. Through psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis, one can refine the force of ‘psychological action’, which is an alternate method of torture as witnessed in the wars in Algeria and Indochina. Thus, a military budget can invest in anything at all, in view of deferred profits: ‘basic’ scientific theory, the humanities, literary theory, and philosophy. (p. 144)

When Kant thought of the academic centres whose services were more suited to pursue State’s practical ends, he had in mind theology, law and medicine – the Bible, right and science, in Foucault’s words. Today, it is even more difficult to limit the faculties and departments whose truths and knowledges cannot be employed as power-making or power-enforcing tools. Even the lower faculty – which includes, among

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

Even if all the differences among departments and faculties have seemingly levelled down in the light of their economical exploitability, in the light of the fact that they all posit truths exploitable by coercive powers, we should consider how to assume today, here and now, the indocility Kant described as the fundamental trait of critique, and in particular, of philosophy. As Derrida affirms in ‘The principle of reason’ it is a matter ‘of awakening or of resituating a responsibility, in the university or in face of the university, whether one belongs to it or not’ (p. 146). At once inside and outside the boundaries of academia, within and without philosophy, Derrida professes the urgency to relaunch the legacy of a certain Kantian attitude and to safeguard the university as the ultimate place of critical resistance against hegemonic powers.31 But, what does this critical resistance consist of? Derrida has in mind something very similar to the resistance to authority which constitutes – as Judith Butler writes – ‘the hallmark of the Enlightenment for Foucault’.32 In his lectures on Kant, Foucault objects to reducing critique to a mere theoretical activity. Critique should not be understood as the desire to police the domain of truth in order to restore a legitimate use of knowledge anchored on the structure of reason. By profession, the critical attitude professes something related to virtue. State power, by secularizing the Christian pastoral, supported the idea that in order to live a good life, to avoid guilt and conquer salvation, a human being, whatever his age or status, from the beginning to the end of his life,

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‘had to be governed and had to let himself be governed’.33 Challenging the identification of virtue with obedience, when the project of governing souls and bodies became more aggressive and invasive, a movement of resistance emerged. ‘How to govern’: this is the question State apparatus and its academic prosthesis were anxious to answer. The social multitude – or at least a part of it – had in mind the opposite question: how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such procedure, not like that, not for that, not by them? (p. 43). If governmentalization is the movement which tries to subjugate citizens to a certain politics of truth, critique is the art of voluntary inservitude through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth. In brief, ‘to not to want to be governed’ is of course not accepting as true . . . what an authority tells you is true, or at least not accepting it because an authority tells you it is true, but rather accepting it only if one considers valid the reasons for doing so. (p. 46)

The indocility of critique – identified by Foucault with ‘virtue in general’ – limits, questions, challenges and escapes the art of governing and its praise for obedience. It criticizes the legitimacy of the laws imposed upon the people in the name of ‘universal and indefeasible rights’ to which any sovereign power needs to submit. Significantly, Foucault does not necessarily imply the actual existence of human rights grounded on an immutable natural law. Critique does not attempt to discover what is true and what is false, founded or unfounded, real or illusionary, scientific or ideological, legitimate or abusive (p. 59). Critique is inspired by the problem of the how, not of the what. It is not in search of a transcendental deduction which might justify the desire not to be governed through an inquiry of the essence of human nature. Rather, critique looks for a way of reinvigorating such will to disobedience. The act of opposing indefeasible natural rights to the ruling agencies is therefore a way of limiting the right of the sovereign power itself. The invention of human rights can be a means of confronting authority, of strengthening the subaltern revolts against governmentality, even if a ‘natural humanity’ does not exist at all. As Spivak has highlighted, a strategic essentialism is crucial in Foucault’s project of resistance against hegemonic discourses.34 Foucault makes it clear in fact that critique is not a disinterested activity for it does not intend to protect the purity of transcendental or quasitranscendental inquiries from the pragmatism of the politics of truth. Critique is an attitude and, as such, it has its own pragmatic interests. The critic has a double task, comments Butler: he not only denounces

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the bond between truth and power, but also tracks down the breaking points of the power/truth mechanism. ‘What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability.’35 In ‘What is critique?’ Foucault decisively states that his idea of critique is not to be confused with reflection on the quasitranscendantal that fixes knowledge. I am not sure if this 1978 cryptic reference to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ can be read as an oblique attack against Derrida whose notion of e´criture was with a similar discretion accused of still being too transcendental in ‘What is an author?’ – a lecture which Foucault gave at another meeting of the Socie´te´ franc¸aise de philosophie ten years earlier.36 But even if he did intend to distinguish his work from Derrida’s, Foucault’s idea of critique, which inspires his project of an ontology of actuality, chimes with Derrida’s quasi-transcendental gestures. Describing the conditions of possibility which make a system function amounts to mapping the fissures which unwork it; the slippages and the cracks in which a critical intervention can find the necessary space to resist – or at least negotiate – a given regime of truth. Eventually, Foucault recovers the idea of critique he seemed to reject at the beginning of his ‘What is critique?’: that critique itself is a means, an instrument that has other goals in mind. A mochlos, to use Derrida’s term: ‘The mochlos could be a wooden beam, a lever for displacing a boat, a sort of wedge for opening or closing a door, something, in short, to lean on for forcing and displacing.’37 This sort of leverage that one needs in order to sabotage the minoritizing machine is also a work of fiction. The truths that the art of governing attempts ‘to naturalize and render hegemonic’ are in fact displaced by the historical philosophical labour which fabricates resisting counter-discourses.38 These oeuvres – and in using this term, I am approaching Derrida’s ‘The university without condition’ – are purported to suspend the grip that the governmentality project has on the real, and give back to the present its eventness: the possibility of happening otherwise. The ‘fictive’ opposition to actuality, in view of what might come in the future, is located by Derrida at the heart of a university without condition. Such a university would be one of the centres of unconditional resistance against any exercise of power because it would grant itself the right to question all the figures of sovereignty. The Humanities in particular should be the place where one could discuss and doubt the truths of State powers, of economic powers, of religious and cultural powers. Deconstruction has its privileged position in this context, in the Humanities ‘as the place of irredentist resistance or even, analogically, a sort of principle of civil disobedience, even of dissidence in the name of a superior law and a justice of thought’.39 Acting in the name of something other than what is presently imposed

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on the social body, strategically invoking human rights and denouncing crimes against humanity (while other times denouncing the limits of humanism), deconstruction is not only involved in protecting the university’s autonomy from the invasiveness of the various exercises of power. It also aspires to transform the disciplinary structure of the university in order to establish academia as the place from where to sabotage all the attempts of reducing the present to an immutable totality. In other words, while governance aims at closing the field of what is actually possible – which equates to expelling the possibility of becoming from the realm of the real – the deconstruction of actuality, as Foucault’s ontology of it, seeks to open the crevices of the present to the possibilities which exceed it. Walter Benjamin showed in ‘Critique of violence’ that sovereign power imposes on its citizens a life deprived of the faculty of contesting the laws forced upon them. A State of right tries to ward off, with any means necessary, the possibility of suspending the form of life that rules over the present.40 The life that sovereign power cares to protect in its citizens is not life in general. It is not a ‘whatever’ life, but their present life, the way in which life is lived after the enforcement of the governmentality project. The possibility of interrupting such a way of living is considered a menace, and the scope of this menace appears directly proportional to the force required to put the present in play, to assume time as the stake of its action. Sovereign power pretends to defend its citizens (defending in reality only itself) from the possibility of the de(con)struction of actuality. The threat to those who rule over the present always comes from the future. Indeed, it is the future itself. Invested in making the present a datum, a fact, sovereign power can rule the present only by regulating the future. Why? Only by controlling the future – the ‘maybe’ – of what might happen, is it possible to immunize the present from the possibility of the future. Real and rational coincide when the tension between what is and what might be fades, when the present is immunized to the risk of the perhaps. In the process of immunization, a sovereign power, in its authoritarian munificence, creates a disarmed community, a community which is not munitioned with the force necessary to resist the closing of the present.41 Naturally my heroic phantasms – I think this is true for many Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of my generation – usually have to do with the period of the Resistance, which I did not experience firsthand; I wasn’t old enough, and I wasn’t in France. When I was very young – and until quite recently – I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by night, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmic

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compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operation, which consists in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit route out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently.42

Against the hostile attempts to close and control the field of actuality, deconstruction’s unconditional resistance tries to open the space of counter-power; to reinvigorate within the multitude the possibility of contesting the present in name of the futures. It enables exceptions simultaneously inside and outside the dominated space: the opposition against the exercise of power tries in fact to create liberated places, temporary anomic zones in which different forms of life and thought could happen. One way in which the Humanities may assume the responsibility of critique and struggle against unjust institutions and institutes is by producing events which have the force to unwork the solidity of the discursive practices regimenting the present. Such discourses and their axiomatics would be interrupted, disjointed, opened up to the spectres of the ‘otherwise’ which always haunts their domain. The claims of absolute sovereignty on the real are disturbed by the unconditioned right to contest any authority. This is why John Caputo’s 1988 ‘Beyond aestheticism: Derrida’s responsible anarchy’ and Saul Newman’s 2001 ‘Derrida’s deconstruction of authority’, have noticed the presence of an anarchic strive in deconstructive operations: a politics in which no arche´, no command, dogma, ground or principle is immune to the possibility of being critiqued and disobeyed, is anarchic by definition.43 The anarchism of deconstruction does not coincide with the anarchist’s dream of an absolute absence of every authority and hierarchy (and for this reason Derrida says ‘I am not an anarchist’). Resistance always end up erecting centres of power – as we saw in the previous chapter regarding deconstruction’s jetties. Yet deconstruction is ‘undoubtedly anarchic’ – as Derrida specified in the same interview where he declared himself not to be an anarchist – because it engages with the constitutions of spaces where no hierarchy or authority would be stable and immutable.44 It is hard not to hear an anarchic tonality, for instance, in Derrida’s acknowledgment that the reason of the strongest is always the best and that, therefore, any exercise of sovereignty is also a roguish abuse of power. Critique itself has to be related to a ‘fundamental anarchism’ for – as Foucault says and does not say simultaneously – it is linked with the historic practice of revolt, with the refusal of being governed. For Derrida, the Humanities can take some steps toward an ‘originary 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

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of economical discourses that put women and men to work and settle them in stable and identified places.46 Striking against this exploitation, the labour of theory commits itself to a different form of ‘community’ – to use a word that Derrida does not like but nevertheless uses in his writings on the university. What is in fact deconstruction if not the general strike which reclaims the right to contest ‘and not only theoretically’47 the legitimate authorities and all their discursive norms? As if for a new form of politics to begin, for a radical democracy to start coming, it would be necessary to bracket the governance actually at work on the present. It is as if the world begins when and where work ends. But this new world cannot be founded by critique. Founding requires foundational myths; one needs to gather a multitude around a unique fire and compose it into a people ‘as one’.48 On the contrary, critique – as Benjamin’s general proletarian strike – does not replace the existing system with a different one. It aims to make inoperative the discourses which arrest humanity in fixed places and fixed roles. Critique is destructive because it does not impose a destiny on the living, regulating and ordering its time through the schedule of the workday. Deconstructive critique cannot have any power (which does not mean that it does not have any force: a force of the weak, a weak force does indeed exist) for otherwise it would repeat the traditional dream of the philosopher, that is to teach and at the same time ‘to direct, steer, organize, the empirical work of the laborers’.49 Critique should not dismantle the power of higher faculties and governance in order to make philosophy acquire more power over the present. There is no revival of Plato’s Philosopher-Kings here, nor the interest in a new socio-political hierarchization of disciplines and groups. The risk that needs to be avoided is turning critique from a mode of resistance to sovereign power, into a superpower itself, reconstituting in such a fashion the powers of a given caste, class or corporation. The antiauthoritarian force of critique needs to be maintained as dissociated as possible from the figure of sovereignty, even if sometimes it is strategically necessary to challenge given sovereign powers by evoking a higher sovereign law – for example, contesting the roguish attitude of so-called Western democracies in the name of international human rights. Challenging the sovereign powers’ mastery over the real, deconstruction cannot enforce a different order of things and therefore fall for the phantasms of sovereignty. The time of reflection is another time, for its ultimate goal is to deactivate the rigid organization of the present by exposing it to its futures. This is to say, from my point of view, that critique’s only business is to help create a radically democratic space, a public space where time itself would be public: the authority over the present would not be alienated from the social, but would rather be shared by the plurality of different communities and

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identities forming a ‘people’.50 Since it wants to explode the continuum of this time, its calendar and its clocks, critique cannot avoid being untimely anachronistic.51 As Foucault admits, critique only exists in relation with something other than itself: it is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be, it is a gaze on a domain that it would want to police but that is incapable of ruling.52

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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which starves a large portion of the planet; the increasing power of the arms industry; the uncontrolled spreading of nuclear weapons; interethnic wars; mafias and drug cartels which have become phantom states; a powerless international law.69 The problem is that the deconstruction of the distinction use-exchange or the phenomenology of the unrepresentable are not useful tools for resolving such problems. Rorty has Derrida in such a high esteem that he awaits practical suggestions for acting, but all he can get is the usual unfamiliarization of everything one believed to be familiar. It is as if Rorty got a little annoyed with deconstructive practice. Ironist frivolity and suspicion have grown old. Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was real, but now you see that it’s only a social construct! You thought it was just a familiar object of sense-perception, but look! It has a supersensible, spectral, spiritual, backside!70

Nowadays the monstrosity of deconstruction has exhausted its subversive power. Deconstruction should not be satisfied with being an exclusively critical force; besides undermining the authority and the credibility of the ‘enemy’, it should also help establish a credible alternative. It is time to dismiss its patient and infinite questioning and start devising answers: Rorty would concede a public value to deconstruction only if it became a normative practice, interested in inculcating democratic values and safeguarding the established political order. If Derrida does not want to pick up such a role, then deconstruction should be excluded from participating in public life. The public sphere – as imagined by Rorty – would be a place sheltered from deconstructing parasites; a domain where critiques too radical are not welcome. What Rorty has in mind is a sort of gentlemen’s agreement. Since only a very limited circle of people holds critical interventions in high account, when one is dealing with the real, concrete and urgent needs of those who do not read philosophy, who do not have time to read, who do not know how to read, one has to accept happily the naivety of the common sense’s vocabulary. Only by compromising with it, can one reach a social-economical improvement. The privileged ones, the cultured, pot-bellied, sophisticated ones will have time to criticize privately. Publicly it would be better to avoid it as a form of education and out of respect for the exigency of the others. And what about those who insist on producing critique? In Rorty’s opinion, the democratic spirit of accommodation and tolerance should not reach the point of taking every question introduced into the public sphere seriously.71 Even if such an attitude denotes a certain disdain for the very tolerance on which the institutes of democracy pretend to be grounded, in order to save democracy from critique, one has not to

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

Nothing can claim the right to bother democratic institutions. If the proposal of a moratorium against theory and of a limitation to the range of critique is not enough to safeguard the present, Rorty clearly asserts the possibility of resorting to violence in order to eradicate the philosophical threats to democracy. What is at the same time most interesting and shocking in Rorty’s position is that he does not try to justify theoretically the legitimacy of such eventual repression. The exercise of violence has its sufficient justification in the fact that violence is a means of consolidating the very existence of democracy. Within the economy of Rorty’s arguments, the defence of democracy – or better, the defence of the now of democracy distinguished from its to come – is the supreme value, unquestionable and indubitable as God, which justifies even violent interventions in the private realm in order to prevent any threat on the well-being of the present. The only arguments that are admitted in the public space – but after all, also in the private – are those that are aligned with the profound structures which are not to be challenged. The private must not only be distinguished from but also attuned to the public in order to assure a pacified society. The assumption of the contingency of human history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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But a monster is always alive, is a living being, and so one cannot foresee where it will end up bringing itself (and us). The necessity of security is exactly what marks the infinite distance separating Rorty from Derrida. The former is locked within the boundaries of a given theoretical and political community, confiding in narratives and philosophy to prevent the coming of monsters. Deconstruction, instead, plays in blindfolds. It bids on possibilities for an existence to come. An unpredictable, multiple, unnamable existence, which – recalling the 1996 symposium that opened United States to Jacques Derrida’s work – ‘is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity’.79

Notes Chapter 1 1

See Rorty, ‘Keeping philosophy pure: an essay on Wittgenstein’, in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 19–36. Rorty uses the German word Fach to describe philosophy as an autonomous discipline (a ‘faculty’ in my own terms). 2 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 131. 3 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 11. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 4 Rorty, ‘Keeping philosophy pure’, p. 19. 5 See Rorty, ‘Introduction: pragmatism and philosophy’, in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xxxix. 6 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 155. 7 See Rorty, ‘Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism’, in Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. P. Bieri, R. Hortsman and L. Kru¨ger (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.

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Rorty, ‘Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism’, p. 99. 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 Giambattista Vico’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 University 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 Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 20–7. 39 Wheeler III, ‘Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man’, in Redrawing the Lines, ed. R. Dasenbrock (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 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 translated directly 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 and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 272. 44 Rorty, ‘Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism’, in Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 34. 45 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 119. 20

Notes 46

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Ibid., p. 101. Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, p. 93. 48 Besides ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, see Rorty’s ‘Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy’, The Journal of Philosophy, 74(11) (1977), pp. 673–81. 49 Derrida, ‘Diffe´rance’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 26–7. 50 Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 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, ‘Diffe´rance’, 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 diffe´rance (‘Diffe´rance’, p. 7). 66 See Derrida, ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, in Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University 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. 47

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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 to understand what would make an etymology ‘fake’. 86 Ibid. 87 See Blanchot, The Instant of My Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 88 See Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 21. 89 Derrida and Ferraris, ‘I have the taste for the secret’, p. 35. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 90 Heidegger, ‘Time and being’, in On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 24. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 97, note 1. The same quotation returns in Consequences of Pragmatism (p. 50) and a couple of times in Essays on Heidegger and Others. Heidegger’s sentence can function as the slogan for the circumvention of philosophy only by artfully isolating it from its context.

Chapter 2 1

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

Notes 5

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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 claim of reason’, in Redrawing the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 192. 7 See Gasche´, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 5. For a detailed critical account of Gasche´’s project and an indispensable discussion of some interpretations of Derrida in the mid-1980s, see Bennington, ‘Deconstruction and the philosophers (the very idea)’, in Legislations (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 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 powerful modern inflection of that tradition in terms of reflection’ (p. 20). One of the problems connected with this approach is that it presupposes the very idea of linear history that Derrida has contested. Bennington suggests in fact that Gasche´’s contextualization of Derrida ends up thinking history as filiation: first there was Descartes, then Kant, then the two lesser-known Fitche and Schelling, then the very important Hegel and eventually Derrida (p. 21). After reading Bennington, one wonders if Rorty and Gasche´ are so distant after all: they both produce a history of mirrors in which Derrida would play the role of the last man, the one that radicalizes the mirroring to the point of breaking (with) it. 8 Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing’, in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 102. 9 Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 102. 10 Rorty, ‘Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?’, pp. 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 by Rorty in ‘Is natural science a natural kind?’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 50. Emphasis added. 13 Wheeler III, ‘Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man’, in Redrawing the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 117. 14 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 125. 15 See Derrida and Ferraris, ‘I have the taste for the secret’, in A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 9. 16 Derrida, ‘An idea of Flaubert: ‘‘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

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reflection. Gasche´ concludes that Tugendhat’s position is ‘self-defeating’. Rorty defends Tugendhat from Gasche´ in ‘Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?’. In doing so, Rorty of course is also defending himself and his Derrida from Gasche´. 21 Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 6. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 22 See Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Love me, love my ombre, Elle’, Diacritics, 14(4) (Winter 1984), pp. 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 text in 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 is also true for motherhood. They are both naturalized legal fictions. See Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 93. 30 ‘Renvois d’ailleurs /Echoes from Elsewhere’ is the bilingual title of the conference that originated Monolingualism of the Other. 31 Derrida, ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 210. Derrida is here quoting a passage from Anatole 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 Phenomenology (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 Ju¨rgen Habermas has described, from a different perspective and with different goals, Rorty’s philosophy as a Lebensphilosophie in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 205. 37 See Ferraris, La svolta testuale (Milan: Unicopli, 1986), p. 38. 38 See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 12. 39 de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 120. 40 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 17. 41 Rorty, ‘Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism’, in Transcendental Arguments and Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), p. 77.

Notes 42

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Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 122. 43 Ibid., p. 281. 44 Rorty, ‘Derrida and the philosophical’, in Truth and Progress (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 334. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 45 Guignon and Hiley, ‘Richard Rorty and contemporary philosophy’, in Richard Rorty, ed. C. Guignon and D. Hiley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 32. 46 See Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, p. 281. 47 See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 17, and his ‘Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn’, in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 174. 48 Derrida, ‘Structure, sign, and play’, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 288. 49 See Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, and history’, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. D. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 161. 50 See Derrida, ‘Cogito and the history of madness’, in Writing and Difference, pp. 31–63. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 51 See Derrida, ‘On a newly arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy’, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. P. Fenves (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 117–71. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 52 I think that the ‘perhaps’ which breaks the rhythm of Foucault’s announcement has been too often overlooked. It would be interesting to start from this ‘perhaps’ a rereading of the relationship between Foucault’s ontology 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. Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), p. 34. 61 See Bell, ‘Rorty on Derrida: a discourse of simulated moderation’, in Ethics in Danger, ed. A. Dallery, C. E. Scott and P. Roberts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 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.

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See Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and truth’, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 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 and Pragmatism, ed. C. Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 14. 72 See Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Collier, 1967), pp. 46–50. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 73 Derrida, ‘Plato’s pharmacy’, in Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 122. 74 See J. Caputo, ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental: the case of Rorty and Derrida’, in Working Through Derrida, ed. G. Madison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 147–69. 75 In a quite merciless move, one could set up Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity against Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 76 See Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and truth’, p. 128, note 9. 77 Caputo, ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental’, p. 164. 78 Derrida, ‘To speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’ ’, in The Post Card, p. 264, note 10. I will apply what Derrida says about Freud’s declared avoidance of Nietzsche and philosophy to Rorty. 79 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). An account of the similarities between Rorty’s irony and Foucault’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 this last seminar by Derrida. In this seminar, given in Paris (2002) and in Irvine (2003), Derrida elaborates the deconstruction of sovereignty which is already at work in Rogues. The most original part of the seminar seems to be the one in which Derrida reads Agamben’s distinction between bios and zoe´, as promised in a footnote in Rogues. For some quick remarks on the relation between Agamben and Derrida, see my interview with Jean Luc-Nancy (‘Philosophy as chance’) in Critical Inquiry, 33(2) (Winter 2007), pp. 427–40. 81 Derrida, ‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 81. 82 See Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, p. 279. 83 Derrida, ‘Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms’, in The States of ‘Theory’, ed. D.

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Carroll (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 84. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 84 See Caputo, ‘On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental’, p. 157. 85 See also 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 the main 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 in parenthesis. 14 See Rorty, ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’, in Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 129–39. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 15 Rorty, ‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’, p. 15. 16 Ibid., p. 17. 17 Derrida, ‘The principle of reason’, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 129–30. 18 See Derrida, ‘Mochlos, or the conflict of the faculties’, in Eyes of the University, pp. 83–112. 19 Ibid., p. 93.

138 20

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See Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. Der Streit Der Fakulta¨ten (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), pp. 23–9. 21 Foucault, ‘What is critique?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 44. 22 Ibid., p. 47. Translation slightly modified. 23 Derrida, ‘Mochlos’, p. 96. 24 Ibid., p. 97. 25 Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 15. 26 Derrida, ‘Mochlos’, p. 98. 27 See Kant, ‘What is Aufkla¨rung’, 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 allows certain surplus value – through the channel of private foundations, among others – to sustain research or creative projects that are not immediately or apparently profitable, we also know that military programs, especially those of the Navy, can very rationally subsidize linguistic, semiotic, or anthropological investigations. These in turn are related to history, literature, hermeneutics, law, political science, psychoanalysis, and so forth’. Ibid., p. 145. 30 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 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 critiques and the genealogic practice. 39 Derrida, ‘The university without condition’, p. 208. 40 See Benjamin, ‘Critique of violence’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913– 1926, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), pp. 236–52. 41 See Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis’, in Judging Lyotard, ed. A. Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–25; see also R. Esposito’s important Communitas: Origine e destino della comunita` (Turin: Einaudi, 1998) and Immunitas: Protezione e negazione della vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).

Notes 42

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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 deconstruction 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. 204–5 47 Derrida, ‘Force of law: the ‘‘mystical foundation of authority’’ ’, in Acts of Religion, ed. G. Anidjar (New York: Routledge 2002), p. 242. 48 See Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 43–70 (‘Myth interrupted’). 49 Derrida, ‘The principle of reason’, p. 152. 50 On this point the obvious reference is to the remarkably ‘GramscianDerridian’Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001) by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe. See also Laclau’s review of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, ‘Community and its paradoxes: Richard Rorty’s ‘‘liberal utopia’’ ’, in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 106–23. 51 Here I can only obliquely allude to the similarity between Derrida’s deconstruction of actuality and Benjamin’s messianic materialism as it appears in ‘On the concept of history’ (which I quoted as an epigraph of this section). See Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’, in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938– 1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), pp. 389–400. See also M. Fritsch’s The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 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 by Rorty, who was at the time Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Stanford. 57 See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 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.

140 64

Notes

See Rorty, ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’, pp. 129–39. 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 Ce´risy-la-Salle decade on ‘Nietzsche aujourd’hui’ Derrida, commenting on Klossowski’s lecture, tried to distinguish between a parodic practice which ‘under the pretext of disconcerting, plays the game of the established order’ and an other which would effectively deconstruct it. For an account of the relation between deconstruction and parody, see S. Weber, ‘Upping the ante: deconstruction as parodic practice’, in Deconstruction Is/In America, ed. A. Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 60–7. 68 Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 93. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 69 See Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 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, Relativism, and Truth, p. 190. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis. 72 See Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 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, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 99. 75 Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, p. 238. 76 Derrida and Ferraris, ‘I have a taste for the secret’, pp. 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. 65

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Index A Taste for the Secret (Derrida) 43 Achieving Our Country (Rorty) 94, 115, 119, 121 actuality 113 Agamben, Giorgio 47 Algeria 56–7 Allegories of Reading (De Man) 22, 63 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 15 apocalypse 69 aporia 71–2 Aristotle 37, 39 autobiographies 54 autochthonous 57 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, The (Heidegger) 8 Being 7–8, 24–8, 37, 47–9 Being and Time (Heidegger) 42 Benjamin, Walter 110, 112, 139n.51 Bennington, Geoffrey 64–6, 75, 124 ‘Beyond aestheticism: Derrida’s responsible anarchy’ (Caputo) 111 Blanchot, Maurice 41 Bloom, Harold 15–20, 23, 34 Bonaparte, Napoleon 41 Boyce Gibson, W. R. 77 bricolage 36 Butler, Judith 107–8, 138n.38 Caputo, John 80, 82, 111 Carnap, Rudolf 74 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 34 Ce´risy-la-Salle encounter 68 Circumfession (Derrida) 43, 52, 66 ‘come’ 114 Conflict 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 77 Cratylus (Plato) 41 critique 107–8, 112, 124–6 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 2 ‘Critique of violence’ (Benjamin) 110 Culler, Jonathan 45–6 Darwin, Charles 14 Dasein 19, 23, 27, 58–9, 80 Davidson, Donald 2, 11–12, 14, 20, 49, 74 ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’ (Rorty) 97 De Man, Paul 21–2, 30, 54, 63 deconstruction 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) 111 Descartes, Rene´ 15 Dewey, John 73 diffe´rance 31–2, 49, 95 Eagleton, Terry 91 ego 34, 36 eidetic variation 78–9

148

Index

engineers 36 Enlightenment, the 104 ‘Envois’ (Derrida) 37–8, 40–1, 43–5, 53–6, 62, 70, 83, 132n.2 erection 81, 83–4 essentialism 98 Faculty of Philosophy, University of Rome 99–100 femininity 36, 45 Ferraris, Maurizio 51, 52 Feuerbach, Ludwig 81 ‘Fido’ 41 filiation 40 Flaubert, Gustave 52 Foucault, Michel 68, 72, 81, 87, 91, 93, 99–102, 105–9, 111, 113, 118–19, 135n.52, 136n.79 France 56–9, 134n.29 France, Anatole 6 Freud, Sigmund 40 Gasche´, Rodolphe 3, 46–7, 50, 53, 71, 75, 84, 133–4n.20 God 35, 81, 121, 123 Godzich, Wlad 20 Guignon, Charles 66 ‘Habermas, Derrida and the functions of philosophy’ (Rorty) 92 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 4, 48, 90–1, 117–18 Hardt, Michael 123, 125 Harley, David 66 Hartman, Geoffrey 35, 45 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 13–15, 24–5, 29, 37, 42, 48, 72 Heidegger, Martin 7–8, 18–21, 24–9, 34, 38, 41–4, 47–8, 50, 58–9, 72, 75, 81, 92–3 hermeneutics 106 historicists 116 History of Madness, The (Foucault) 68 Howe, Irving 98 Humanities 109, 111, 115–16 Husserl, Edmund 30, 34, 48, 61, 71, 77–80

‘I’ 37–8, 42–3 idea 77 Ideas I (Husserl) 77, 79 ideation 77–8 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 25 intuition 9 irony 10, 12–13, 23, 25, 90–1, 116–17, 119 James, William 73 Jameson, Frederic 72 jetty 83–4 Kamuf, Peggy 139n.56 Kant, Immanuel 2, 7–8, 34, 37, 60, 69, 75, 87, 91–2, 95, 99–107, 118 Klossowski, Pierre 18 knowledge 107 Labor of Dionysus (Negri/Hardt) 123 Laclau, Ernesto 118 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 68 language 17–18, 22 Lebensphilosophie 62 liberalism 123–6 ‘life-world’ 71 logic 63 logocentrism 98 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 117–18 Map of Misreading, A (Bloom) 15, 34 Marx, Karl 65, 81 masturbation 31–3 metaphors 19–24, 62–3 metaphysics 35, 43–4, 61, 71, 93 mind 9–10 mochlos 109, 118 Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida) 53, 56, 58, 70, 74 ‘Myth of the Cave’ (Socrates) 18 Nancy, Jean-Luc 68 Negri, Tony 123, 125 New Leftists 120–1 Newman, Saul 111 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 17–19, 21, 22, 25, 35, 42, 56, 62–4, 107

Index Nietzsche. The Will to Power as Art (Heidegger) 21 Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (Klossowski) 18 nominalists 116 Norris, Christopher 46, 73 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 31 On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche) 17, 107 ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’ (Davidson) 2 Paris, Matthew 38 Phenomenology 77–9 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 13–15, 25 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, The (Habermas) 4 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 74 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty) 8–9, 61, 74 Pierce, Charles Sanders 74 Plato 23, 37–9, 41, 78, 112 ‘Plato’s pharmacy’ (Derrida) 79 Poetry 16 politics 123–5 ‘pornosophy’ 35 Post Card, The (Derrida) 53–5, 80, 93 post-Cartesian tradition 15 post-Nietzschean philosophy 117 post-structuralism 118 pragmatism 46, 51, 65, 72–3, 75, 79, 82, 93, 97–8, 116 ‘principle of reason’ 100, 107 privacy 50–1 proletarization 96 Proust, Marcel 25, 52, 88–9 ‘quasi-transcendental’ 109 realism 10–12, 76, 113 redemption 17 relativism 10, 12 religion 7 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant) 103

149

Republic (Plato) 18, 20 Romanticism 14–16, 22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 31 Sartre, Jean-Paul 89 Savonarola, Girolamo 89 Searle, John 124 self-legislation 18 sexuality 35–6 socialization 117 Socrates 18, 22–3, 39 sovereign power 110 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 121 Speech and Phenomena (Derrida) 30 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 53, 108 State, the 101–8 Tain of the Mirror, The (Gasche´) 46–7, 84, 133n.7 Tarski, Alfred 11, 48 textual 49 The Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl) 61 theorein 75 theory 120 thinking 27 trace 47–8 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 72, 73–4 transcendence 47, 53, 59, 64–5, 79–82, 84 Tresca, Carlo 88 Trotsky, Leon 88, 98 ‘Trotsky and the wild orchids’ (Rorty) 67, 88 truth 2, 11, 21, 30, 64, 107–8 Truth and Progress (Rorty) 92–3 Tugendhat, Erne´st 53, 133–4n.20 Unheimlichkeit 59 United States 95–6, 120, 138n.29 universal hostage 59 ‘What is critique? ’ (Foucault) 109 ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (Kant) 105 Wheeler, Samuel 22 ‘White Mythology’ (Derrida) 60, 74

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

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