Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
www.continuumbooks.com
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Taking Rorty Seriously 1
1. The Contingency of Being 7
Two Ideas of Philosophy: Kant and Hegel 7
The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence 15
Histories of Writing and Masturbation 26
Deconstruction as Circumvention: Envois 37
2. Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 45
The Double Privacy of Deconstruction 45
On the Very Possibility of Biographical Writing 53
Rortys Hidden Reductionism 60
The Disposal of Philosophy 74
3. The Resistance of Theory 87
The Desires We are, The Languages We Speak 87
Casting a Maybe at the Heart of the Present 99
Politics of Conciliation and Politics of Monstrosity 115
Notes 129
Bibliography 141
Index 147
Acknowledgements
Many people have been close to this book in the different phases of its
realization. My warmest gratitude goes to my family for having sup-
ported me in all my endeavours. Donatella Di Cesare had the patience
of following and encouraging my work from its very beginning. I am
grateful to Ari Lee Laskin, Arianna Lodeserto, Daniele Manni and
Nicola Zippel, who provided extensive and lively comments to earlier
drafts. I would also like to thank David Carroll, Ellen Burt, Franca
Hamber, Gol Bazargani and my friend James Chiampi for their
impeccable hospitality in the department of French and Italian at the
University of California, Irvine. Many thanks also to Ngug wa Thiongo
and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine
for the generous financial support to this project.
Without Vuslat Demirkoparan, this book would have never come to
light. While I take full responsibility for its weaknesses, she should be
credited for all the good moments of The Domestication of Derrida.
I am also grateful to the following: Milan Kundera and Faber &
Faber Ltd for the permission to quote from The Unbearable Lightness of
Being; Cambridge University Press for the permission to quote from
Richard Rortys Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Fata Morgana for the
permission to quote from Maurice Blanchots Linstant de ma mort (#
1994); Les Editions de Minuit for the permission to quote from Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattaris Quest-ce que la philosophie? (# 1991);
Random House Inc., for the permission to quote from Michel Fou-
caults Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with
Michel Foucault (in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow);
Routledge for the permission to quote from Jacques Derridas
Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism (in Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe); Stanford University Press for
the permission to quote from Giorgio Agambens Pardes: the writing of
potentiality (in Potentialities, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen); Verso
for the permission to quote from Jacques Derridas Marx & Sons and
Terry Eagletons Marxism without Marxism (both in Ghostly Demar-
cations, edited by Michael Sprinker).
An earlier and very different version of this project was published in
Italian by Mimesis in 2006 under the title Laddomesticamento di Derrida.
Pragmatismo/Decostruzione.
RomeIrvine
November 2007
Introduction
The first time I read Richard Rortys Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity it
was 1999 and I was a sophomore in the Faculty of Philosophy at the
University of Rome I clearly felt that I was reading one of the most
influential books in contemporary philosophy: not surprisingly,
nobody on the stuffy Italian philosophical scene was talking about it.
With its at once light-hearted and corrosive irony against philosophers
egotism, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity changed the way I looked at
philosophy both as a discipline and as a faculty. And yet there was
something unsettling in Rortys attempt to strip post-Hegelian irony of
any kind of public dimension: for me, the book was a powerful critique
of the rigid organization of the programI was attending.
I started reading Jacques Derrida at the same time: Rortys inter-
pretation of deconstruction was fundamental for orienting me in
Derridas apparently senseless writing. And yet, the more I read Der-
rida, the more I became aware that Rortys reading was missing
something very important. Rortys account of deconstruction as an
anti-philosophy, as merely a brilliant artistic creation, was too reductive
insofar as it completely ignored all the essays in which Derrida clearly
resisted the possibility of taking leave from the metaphysical language.
Rortys attempt to confine Derrida to prestigious yet strictly academic
venues was excessively disengaged and clashed against the Deleuzian
idea of concepts as weapons to interfere with and intervene into the
real. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity the book that changed my way
of thinking about philosophy, the book whose dancing and laughing
style is still unmatched for me eventually appeared to be profoundly
inadequate. The Domestication of Derrida also tells the story between
Rorty and me (a story of which he was informed only by a couple of
quick emails). The first chapter is marked by my initial trust in Rortys
pragmatism, the second and the third testify to my deep disappoint-
ment with it.
In the first section of this book, I will show the strong points of
Rortys reading. In order to challenge effectively his attempt to align
deconstruction with the American liberal and pragmatist traditions, I
believe it is important to take some time to get attuned to the reasons
behind Rortys interpretation of Derrida. In fact, the vast majority of
the essays that have been dedicated to the relation between
2 The Domestication of Derrida
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 revo-
lution had been accomplished, philosophy risked being left without a
purpose. Kant was the first consciously to identify the essence of phi-
losophy 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 lim-
ited to modern philosophy; this self-understanding continues, for
example, all the way until modern phenomenology. The influence of
the Kantian identification of philosophy as epistemology is especially
clear in Martin Heideggers claim that Being is the proper and sole theme of
philosophy.3 Whereas positive sciences have a positional character, that is,
they deal with beings or domains of beings that are given, determined
8 The Domestication of Derrida
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 phenom-
enological analysis explication of meanings or examination of the logic
of the language or of the structure of the constituting activity of con-
sciousness would not have made sense.8
10 The Domestication of Derrida
Rorty wonders if we can still exploit the image of the mind as mirror:
did the mirroring theories succeed in their effort to explain how lan-
guage 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:
The first two options share the belief that philosophys goal is to
enlighten the true structure of knowledge, the relation between factual
reality and propositions. The third one instead concludes that it does
not pay to keep working within the sophistsPlatoHumeKant
mechanism, and hopes for a philosophy that will not be a theory of
knowledge. This third track leads, according to Rorty, to ironist
theory.10
What clearly differentiates irony from traditional philosophical
thought is that the former does not acknowledge the vocabulary used to
criticize the Kantian approach as closer to the structure of reality than
other vocabularies. Thus, irony should not be confused with the rela-
tivistic 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 cor-
rectly and clearly the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposi-
tion is inconsistent, one is therefore left with two of the three previously
mentioned possibilities: either one tries to demonstrate the transcen-
dental 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:
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 cul-
tural perspective so distant from our own way of thinking that we
cannot even seriously consider them. In the spirit, if not in the letter of
On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, one might affirm that in
giving up the dualism of scheme and content one does not give up the
world but only the presupposition that what makes our opinions true is
their correspondence to reality rather than to history and language.
Rorty thus wishes for his argument to be recognized as a form of
ethnocentrism. His intent is not the relativization of truth but its
banalization: the snow is indisputably white if the proposition the
snow is white is true for the particular historical linguistic community
in which we find ourselves speaking.21
For Rorty, the ironist is convinced that anything can look good or
bad depending on how it is redescribed. Accordingly, she keeps
placing the vocabularies which she does not approve in a negative light
so that her proposal to switch vocabularies becomes more seducing
and less indecent. She is substantially a parasite who devours the great
texts of the philosophical tradition, nibbling and chewing on them
The Contingency of Being 13
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
rather than the distant in space, for time is the means through which
spirits influence each other.
The poet is terrorized by the fear that the tradition has been
implanted so deeply in him as to deny him any possibility of differing
from how he is. This anxiety does not derive from perceiving some
worldly beings as fearsome. Rather, the absorption in worldliness
provides precisely the means of turning away, getting distracted, from
anxiety. The peculiarity of the anxiety of influence is that the only
entities that are truly threatening, those that provoke anxiety and not
just fear, are those who share our mode of Being. The threatening
character belongs, therefore, not to things (res extensa), but to thinking
spirits (res cogitans) since they are of our own genre. We flee away
from others of our own kind because we fear we will become just like
them. We do not want to be to put it with Heideggers Being and Time
as they are.
Bloom argues that the faces by which the poet feels threatened are
those of the great authors of the past. Since writing has acquired the
symbolic meaning of coitus as an act which consists in allowing a
fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper28 the fear is
of insemination by the liquids spilled into the muses of Poetry. Having
conquered the Muses with their creations, traditions strongest poets
cast their spell on us, obliging us to speak with their voice, to persist in
their language, to live in their vocabulary. The capacity of foretelling
the future Poets were properly called divine in the sense of diviners,
from divinari, to divine or predict29 would have, in fact, granted
them the authority to rule us in the present. And the threatening
character of the ghosts from the past grows with the Muses age. This is
because the more time that passes from the birth of poetry, the more
plausible is the assumption that such a literary genre has exhausted its
task; that all which needed to be said has been said. If one arrives five
hundred years after Shakespeare, it is not likely that Calliope would still
be available. With so many suitors already taken and deceived, among
so many flirts she whored with as Bloom says30 why should I be
special for her? The presence of other poetical egos wounds the young
authors narcissism since his uncontaminated solitude is disturbed by
the discovery that he is not alone, and even less that he is not the one.
Broadening the scope of Blooms inquiry, transforming his theory of
poetry into a theory of poiesis, Rorty claims that not only the poet, but
anyone engaged in a poiein, in a production, in the activity that aims to
posit an unexpected event, is terrorized by the demon of belonging to
the continuum of history. Modern mans fear is to be belated, to have
come afterwards, to have been thrown in that bankruptcy of time in
which no original task can be undertaken because debts have imposed
themselves as unclearable.
Thus the expression poet should refer to all those men (such as
The Contingency of Being 17
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, fol-
lowing Nietzsche, believes that it is through poetic creation that such
indebtedness can be overcome: the poet is he who owns himself, he
who has liberated himself from every mortgage and thus owes nothing
to tradition. If one could switch from this is how I was thrown to this
is how I throw myself, the bills of the past would be paid off and no
jury could pass a verdict of guilty. Redemption is not a matter of
reproducing a past model; redemption is the creation of something
radically original. One is saved if an absolute new future is instituted.
18 The Domestication of Derrida
They were going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature of
reality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would thereby
inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not
ourselves. They would exhibit the stamp which had been impressed on all of
us.35
It is true that we are all mortals, yet we are not all mortals in the same
manner. Some people, instead of politely following the rules of tradi-
tional language, challenge the continuity of time and try to make new
metaphors break out.
20 The Domestication of Derrida
Poetic thought is proleptic, and the Muse invoked under the name Memory
is being implored to help the poet remember the future.42
Rorty believes that the truth of a story should not be evaluated on the
basis of how much such a narrative reflects a presumed reality existing
before the recit. It must be evaluated on the basis of its capacity to make
the future arrive. Bloom defines this sort of relation with the past as a
form of misreading: every historical redescription is a misreading, an
aberration, since it is the attempt to walk away from our common
understanding and open a new horizon towards which moving. Central
to the activity of giving an account of a fact, is the moment of appli-
cation: 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 natur-
ality of standard historiography. As art and metaphor, ironist theoriz-
ing 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 car-
icatures, 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 tradi-
tional 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 man-
age 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 Hei-
degger wrote that there is truth only as long and as far as Dasein exists,
he meant (or for Rorty, should have meant) that truth depends on
humanity, not on something that stands independently from it. Truth
24 The Domestication of Derrida
It is now the moment to answer the question which opened the first
section of the present chapter: what determines the existence of phi-
losophy 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. Philo-
sophy, by being just one of the many literary families of modernity,
cannot assume to be the only sector of culture that lets us rigorously
grasp the unseen presuppositions of positive sciences. Philosophers
are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects or
methods but in the family resemblance way in which latecomers in a
sequence of commentators on commentators are connected with older
members of the same sequence.47 In this perspective, one can finally
understand the reasons behind Rortys interest in the work of Jacques
Derrida. Rortys attraction to Derrida an attraction whose first
important signs are two of Rortys essays from the late 1970s48 arises
from the firm belief that the Jewish-Franco-Algerian philosopher allows
us to recognize the continuity of the philosophical tradition from Plato
to Heidegger, and thus to read philosophy as a kind of family romance.
What still links Heidegger to the metaphysical family is a certain pas-
sion for light.
In the final pages of Differance, in what has by now become a
famous passage, Derrida, confronting The saying of Anaximander,
tracks the ambiguity which organizes the questions posited by Hei-
degger and destines him to be placed in Platos light. Heideggers
movement stems from the desire to respark the fire of a purely proper
and appropriate language; a flame which might illuminate the path for
thinkings nostalgic return to its lost native country: Greek logos.49 Such
The Contingency of Being 27
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
Derridas texts are footnotes for other footnotes, and each one of these
notes contains many others. There is no original and fundamental
centre around which the various senses of Derridas writing can be
organized. One of the three epigraphs opening Speech and Phenomena is
a passage from Ideas I, which is worth looking at since it gives a good
idea of Derridas complicated style. Here is the scene that Husserl
stages: somebody happens to say something which reminds me of my
last visit to the Dresden painting gallery. Memory teletransports me
into the corridors of that gallery. Before me stands a portrait repre-
senting 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 Der-
rida, we are always in the gallery. There is no memory or promise of the
broad daylights kiss. Contrary to what our desire cannot not want to
believe, the thing itself always withdraws.59
The disappointment that one feels when reading Derridas essays is
due to the fact that his writings do not end with a vision that offers the
things in themselves, nor with a final redescription; rather, they
inconclusively and endlessly relaunch the movement of con-
ceptualization, which coincides as we saw in de Man with the calling
of things with inappropriate names.60 Derridas philosophy is a kind of
writing, for it is not the primary prescription or the prophetic
annunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination.61 It
The Contingency of Being 31
brackets the dream of one correct way of interpreting things and texts.
As Differance announces:
There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we
must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely
maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the
contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirma-
tion into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance. (p. 27)
The West has been dominated by the belief that masturbatory praxis
is not only an improper pastime, but also a habit that predisposes one
to a great number of illnesses. Derrida deals specifically with Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, but a broader and still circumscribed account of the
grounding of masturbation as a self-destructive practice would require
much further investigation.64 To give some other examples from
Rousseaus epoch (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), Tissots
Lonanisme, Debrays Hygiene et physiologie du mariage, Larousses Grand
Dictionnaire Universel, as well as Proudhon, Mandeville and Littre, all
describe at length the fatal results of the solitary act of pleasure.
Attuned with such a (pseudo)science, Western popular tradition
affirms that the practice of masturbation causes the obfuscation of
sight; it makes young men go blind, making them unable to see how
things really are. Writing, according to some philosophical experts,
provokes the same effects.
32 The Domestication of Derrida
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
If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing ones concepts from the text
of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that
every discourse is bricoleur.77
positions with which the tradition always and continuously tempts us,
but to drive ourselves, finally, toward other passions.
The letters which constitute this collection talk about and are the
effects of Derridas desires. They witness a private and personal Streben
that does not necessarily apply to the whole of humanity. While Hei-
degger ended up trying to ground philosophy on something bigger
than himself, Derrida quite honestly shows that theory is just the pro-
duct of the contingencies of ones own private life.
The key event in Envois is the discovery of a book on divination by
the medieval chronicler Matthew Paris. What, however, strikes the
author of the postcards and lets just call such a textual persona
Derrida is not the topic of the book, but rather, Pariss illustration
displayed on its cover. The portrait shows two characters: one sits at a
scribes desk writing, while the other, holding up his index, urges the
former from behind. Above the head of the one sitting is written
Socrates, and above the other, plato, with a small p. Derrida goes
crazy over the picture that reverses the canonic story between Plato and
Socrates, and thus decides to acquire an entire stock of this image;
from this love at first sight, he will write only on such reproductions,
using them as postal paper. The relationship with his faraway love is
mediated through the flipside of the Socratesplato postcard.
Derrida fantasizes with his thou about the S-p picture. In fact,
alongside the case of mistaken identities due presumably to the inat-
tentive copyist, something else catches his attention. For no clear
reason, there is a big something (looking a bit like a skateboard)
sticking out from between Socrates rear end and the chair he is sitting
in.80 What is that strange tool that almost stabs Socrates in the back?
Derrida seizes the opportunity to interpret the situation in the most
obscene way. It is an overbearing erected penis that Plato is handling
behind the impotent Socrates.
The Contingency of Being 39
Imagine the day, as I have already, that we will be able to send sperm by post
card, without going through a check drawn on some sperm bank, and that it
remains living enough for the artificial insemination to yield fecundation.
(p. 24)
Is this not what happens daily? Are we not always already in the age of
mechanical reproduction? The desire to have children is connected by
Derrida to the Socratic desire to conceive universal, general truths;
both operations are ways to defeat finitude, to leave an indelible trace
of ones self. The illusion of philosophers is that the works they
brought to life will always conform to the intentions of those who
originated them. Behaving as faithful representatives, the texts pro-
duced will speak with their authors voice, in their stead. Unfortu-
nately, texts, just like children when they grow up, are not infants
(speechless); they have their own voice (p. 25). If it is true, as Aristotle
suggested, that a man is the father of his books as he is of his children,
then being a father can only mean having the extremely joyful and
painful experience of the fact that one is not the father that a son or
daughter is someone one does not answer for, or who answers for
themselves, who can speak for themselves.82 Texts and children always
end up being, in one way or another, parricides because they are truly
alive only when they put in question the authorial sovereignty of the
father. In this perspective, one can affirm that writing is a matter of
being exposed to death, for the texts signed off will travel without any
regard for their authors original will. Once they are gone one has no
control over them. Derrida is conscious of the fact that without the risk
of dying, there would be no writing. Yet, accepting the temporary
nature of any author and authority, he decides not to do anything to
prevent the works he signs, sends, addresses, from turning against
himself. Of course such a decision is killing Derrida, but it would be
worse otherwise.83 Worse than death for Rorty would be to give in to
the male desires with which the philosophical tradition is tempting
Derrida.
40 The Domestication of Derrida
from school at the age of eleven for being Jewish (p. 87). To that
wound, dated 1942, Derrida ascribes his inability to distinguish
between the materiality of the empirical I and the ideality of the
transcendental ego. The ambient of culture, of theory, of knowledge,
was not alien to the concreteness of Europes and little Jacquess his-
tory. Envois, like Circumfession, expresses the necessity to show that
it is always an I, this I, who writes, thinks, in a determinate place, on
a specific occasion.
For metaphysics, the date on which a thought was elaborated, its
hour, its place, its language, the mood and the gender of the one who
conceived it, all these aspects belong to the sphere of the inessential
and of the frivolous. The imposition of a distinction between the
transcendental ego that philosophizes and the empirical I interested
in the world implies that one can ascend from the worldly and banal
reign of idiosyncratic factuality to the transcendental heaven of
essential meanings and truths. But Derrida, instead of describing Geists
trip in search of Absolute Knowledge, is interested in a phenomenol-
ogy of Witz which tries to remember and preserve everything (sig-
nifiers, 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 ela-
borated a new manner of writing and thinking of philosophy. What is
the purpose of writing in such a way? None, if we expect from philo-
sophy answers and demonstrations. A lot, if, sharing some of Derridas
experiences, especially his tensions of desire, his orexis, 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 compen-
dium, treating it allusively and carelessly.
Rorty often recalls a certain passage from Heidegger. He approvingly
quotes it also in a note from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity defining it
as the slogan of ironist theorizing:
44 The Domestication of Derrida
Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome
metaphysics. Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave
metaphysics to itself.90
In 1989, Richard Rorty commented that for years a quarrel had been
simmering among the American admirers of Derrida: On the one side
there are the people who admire Derrida for having invented a new,
splendidly ironic way of writing about the philosophical tradition. On
the other side are those who admire him for having given us rigorous
arguments for surprising philosophical conclusions. 1 The first
skirmishes had already broken out at the beginning of the 1980s. For
example, Jonathan Culler perhaps the Jonathan who staged the
encounter between Derrida and the Socratesplato postcard in
Envois2 declared that using the term Derridadaism to label Der-
ridas work is a witty gesture by which Geoffrey Hartman blots out
Derridian argument.3 Defending Hartmans light-hearted tone, Rorty
deemed Cullers interpretation of deconstruction as too old-fashioned
to grasp Derridas originality. Either Derrida is a rigorous thinker,
someone who has complied with the argumentative procedures of
philosophy and thus proved his conclusions to be right, or he has
altogether distanced himself from the philosophical machismo which
inspires the quest for accurate representations.4 In a manner of
speaking, one cannot have both: the choice is between becoming a
woman by betraying the norms of tradition, or staying a man by
arguing rigorously. It should by now be clear that femininity is the
quality that Rorty appreciates the most in Derrida.
46 The Domestication of Derrida
By the time that Rorty released Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity one
of the smartest and most energetic books in recent contemporary
philosophy the line-ups were pretty clear. Rorty was anxious to
explain why pragmatism and deconstruction might, or should, go hand
in hand. The American Derrideans (Jonathan Culler, Rodolphe
Gasche, Christopher Norris) kept affirming that between deconstruc-
tion and pragmatism there could be no we. Some of the American
admirers of Derrida and one wonders why Rorty defines such
admirers American or North American5 when among his primary
references only Culler is from the USA accused Rortys ironist
pragmatization of Derrida as being too frivolous for them, it dismisses
Derridas serious philosophical work by focusing, instead, almost
exclusively on word games, jokes, vulgar allusions and private mem-
ories. According to Culler, thinking of deconstruction as a protest
against the serious claims of classic philosophy would mistake it for a
playful celebration of the irrational and unsystematic. Pragmatism, as
Norris argues, would reduce philosophy into a species of applied
rhetoric.6 In Rortys opinion, deconstruction and pragmatism should
in fact work together to blur the distinction between literature and
philosophy and advocate the idea of a text that is not interested in
determining its own genre but only in producing effects. After all,
Derrida himself suggested that genres should not go unmixed. But
philosophy is not just a kind of writing, nor can it simply be cir-
cumvented. For this reason as the American Derrideans argued
according to Rortys self-understanding of the debate deconstruction
deserves more seriousness than Rorty is willing to concede it.
Yet it would be ungenerous to define Rortys interpretation of Der-
rida as a case of misreading (Norris) or misunderstanding (Gasche),
for he is well aware that a serious philosophical endeavour is somehow
present in Derrida. The first pages of the chapter dedicated to Derrida
in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity make it clear that Derridas earlier
works legitimate Gasches (quasi-)transcendentalizing account of
deconstruction. Nonetheless, the problem with The Tain of the Mirror is
that, in order to function, it needs to overlook Derridas latter work.
Gasche himself admits that his book, aiming to expose the essential
traits and the philosophical thrusts of deconstruction, is based on
Derridas production prior to 1979.7 As a matter of fact, Gasches
selection excludes not only The Post Card (first published in 1980), but
also Glas (first published in 1974). Despite recognizing the limitation
of his book, Gasche still insists that the motifs found in earlier works
continue to inform and direct Derridas more playful texts. Yet
such playful texts declared to fit easily in the reading protocol of The
Tain of the Mirror do not even appear in the books bibliography. This is
no mere oversight: once one suggests that these playful texts are pri-
marily the application of infrastructures discovered in the first phase
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 47
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 condi-
tions for the actuality of various things.10
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. Unfortu-
nately, 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 Der-
rida, 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 recontextua-
lized and transformed into a totally different infrastructure. Any
structure that is in fact marked by finitude must imply the possibility of
becoming other than itself. For this reason, Derrida cannot state that
any discursive formation (present, past or future) necessarily works on
the ground of differance. Only by being the God-like entity which one
cannot be, would it be possible to lay such a general claim. Yet, in a
certain sense, it is not wrong to understand Derridas metaphors as
infrastructures. For sure, they are the conditions of the possibility of
deconstruction, the devices that allowed its discourses to be produced.
Without them, Derrida would not be who he is. But in order to be
consistent with the Davidsonian intuition that any level of meaning
must be language-like,13 that no magic language or name can ever be
proper and final, Derrida has to dismiss the belief that there exists a
hidden logical space from where to anticipate the structure of any
possible utterance. Instead of foreclosing what might be, of offering
transcendental insights on the conditions for the possibility of Being as
such, Derrida should be content in playing with the vocabularies he
finds on his way in order to keep the future coming the only beyond
he should take care of. Derridas need to find new metaphors once his
current ones lose their poignancy suggests that he is less interested in
systematizing the structure of the real, in showing the infrastructures
which ground it, than in shaking it up in order to promote its after-
wards. Given this interest, Rorty concludes that Derrida should be
satisfied with having given a response to the tradition that is influential
to the present of philosophy. A response and not the response because,
50 The Domestication of Derrida
The tolerance which enables Rorty to grant Derrida the right to say
whatever he wants to, actually anesthetizes deconstruction into an
52 The Domestication of Derrida
I remember having gone to bed very late after a moment of anger and irony
against a sentence of Prousts, praised in a book in this collection Les
Contemporains, which says: A work in which there are theories is like an
object on which one has left the price tag, and I find nothing more vulgar
than this Franco-Britannic decorum, European in truth, I associate with it
Joyce, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and a few others, the salon literature of that
republic of letters, the grimace of a good taste naive enough to believe that
one can efface the labor of theory, as if there wasnt any in Pr., and med-
iocre theory at that, . . . and I admit that I write with the price on, I display,
not so that the price be legible to the first-comer, . . . you have to pay the
price to read the price displayed.18
the inquisitor who burns books, and sometimes even their authors, is
more respectful of their theses than the ironist in the contingent,
solidaire and ironic republic of ideas.19 However, it is clear that Rortys
reading is too quick to grasp deconstruction without betraying its spirit.
As Derridas comments quoted above reveal, he is explicitly resistant
to the kind of interpretation Rorty proposes of his work. Derrida is not
at all happy about the theoretical ascetism to use a fortunate
expression coined by Gasche in referring to Ernst Tugendhat20 with
which Rorty labels him.
Is it not too generous to assume that Derrida, at a certain point of his
philosophical career, starts avoiding the urge for transcendentality and
confines his thought to a propositional and linguistic conception of
truth? Is it true that Derrida moves in a hermitage sheltered from any
theoretical and transcendental temptation? Does he actually stop
referring to the public world and take refuge in a post-philosophical
and post-transcendental privacy? In order to answer these questions, it
will not suffice to rely on Derridas reaction. The only way of judging
the validity of Rortys interpretation is by paying close attention to what
happens in Derridas texts.
cannot simply say that autobiographies speak about real events and real
people. And if it does accurately represent real events and real people, if
it is not literature, that poses an even bigger problem for Rorty
because he cannot any longer maintain that with Envois Derrida has
distanced himself from any desire of mimetic referentiality, of truth
and representation. Briefly, one of the problems with Rortys use of
Envois is that the difficulties of defining the genre of autobiography
undo his attempt to distinguish a referential (philosophical) and a
post-referential (literary) Derrida.
The genreless Envois i.e., the impossibility of deciding about its
real meaning, of knowing what the postcards refer to, who they are
from, to whom they are destined, if they are genuine letters or just
parodies of the epistolary diary, if they are philosophy or literature is
also marked by the fact that the stream of writing is often interrupted
by fifty-two blank spaces. Derrida uses such a sign, such an absence of
signs, to indicate that part of the correspondence has been destroyed.
The eroded surface might either hide a proper name, just punctuation
marks or even the text of one or more letters. Reading the postcards,
one should be aware of the fact that the secrets hidden by the blank
spaces will always be kept unsolved. And for this very reason, one
should give up the impatience of the bad reader (p. 4): the pre-
sumption of knowing what the text is all about. When we read the
postcards, we are never sure if we should take them seriously, if they are
jokes or if they are symbols to decipher. The postcards bear witness to
their secrecy: exposed to the indiscreet eyes of curious postmen, and
yet remaining intrinsically illegible. Derrida writes that he himself has
forgotten the secret code which governed the erasing.
9 May 1979
. . . The secret of the postcards burns the hands and the tongues it
cannot be kept, q.e.d. It remains secret, what it is, but must immediately
circulate, like the most hermetic and most fascinating of anonymous and
open letters. I dont cease to verify this. (p. 188)
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)
French was becoming the mother tongue of Algeria to the point that
Arabic in the lycee was taught as an optional foreign language. Arabic: a
foreign language one might choose among others (English, Spanish,
German; Latin was required). In Algeria, French, which came from far
away, not autochthonous but imported by an intimidating Paris,
dominated the scene of culture. The home called Algeria depended on
the super-home that was France; a mother on another mother; a
metropolis, Algiers, on the authentic mater-polis, Paris. At school, one
would have learned by heart Frances history and geography, the
names of every districts capital and all of its rivers. But not a word
about Algeria, not a single note on its history and its geography,
whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany and the Gironde estuary
with our eyes closed (p. 44). To understand Derridas problematic
relation to France better, we should also recall that in 1943 under
Petain, with an occupation that did not even bring to Algeria a single
German uniform, the government revoked French citizenship from
Jews, citizenship granted to them but not to Muslim Algerians by the
Cremieux Decree of 1870 with the aim of assimilating them to
Frenchness.
Growing up in the colony, in the dimension organized around a
spectral centre located elsewhere, Derrida recognizes the impossibility
of belonging without doubts or dissonance to any country, to any
homeland, to any language. He does not claim that another nation or
community, a different existing symbolic place would make him feel
more at home and at ease. On the contrary, Derrida suggests that the
production of speaking individuals from mute infants always and
inevitably involves a violence, and that the identification with a certain
language and the nation it represents is thus the effect of a constitutive
dressage. No one is ever a native or a native speaker because no nation
and no language can ever claim to have a natural right over a certain
land. Language does not naturally grow on a piece of land. It is never
autochthonous but always imported. That is why the mother tongue
should not be considered a natural mother at all.29 Derrida, in fact, is
not linked to French by some sort of an organic connection. He had to
learn how to speak it. He was trained to act as if it were natural to
speak such determined language. If French were innate, Derridas
mother would not have had to teach it to her speechless son. But since
the earth does not have a nomos, a linguistic second nature to use a
term common to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche had to be imposed by
Georgette on her little Jackie.
So, how can French belong to Derrida and thus Derrida to France
if such a primary property (the property over a language) had been
assigned to him by external authorities? His own origin assumes the
configuration of an alien colonization. It functions as a ban from the
possibility of speaking a very proper language, of truly being himself.
58 The Domestication of Derrida
Derrida does not hesitate to affirm that his own linguistic identity
has always been problematic to him because he perceives it not as his
own but as an effect of renvois from elsewhere. 30 Being always already
an other, he declares himself to be incapable of saying without
hesitation je, I.
These are Derridas memories, the anamnesis through which he
attempts to remember, recall and reconstruct why for him French had
always been the language of, and from, the other. However, against
someone like Rorty who would rush to sanction this text as auto-
biographical, it is important to underscore that Monolingualism of the
Other is not solely a private diary, a memoir neglectful of the philoso-
phical 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 ontolo-
gical (p. 20). Insofar as it can only be said in the vocabulary that one
was taught no private language is possible every event that can be
told exists only within the horizon of expectations of a mother tongue.
Does not the account of a unique and unrepeatable event such as ones
life fall victim to generality as soon as one talks about it? Does not
public language always contaminate the privacy of memory? Or better,
even before being expressed linguistically, an event, in the very
moment in which it is lived, has a dimension which is not purely private
since one can live experiences (Erleben) only within a linguistic con-
stellation. There is a sort of inertia in the language in which we live,
think and speak, that reduces the event to an example, to a case of
general law, thus denying its private character.
It is evident that Derrida, to give an account of himself, is forced to
use a French vocabulary influenced by Heideggers conceptual web,
especially by the notion of Dasein as the being whose peculiarity is to
be given to impropriety. The contamination of such jargon provokes
the impossibility of writing a pure biography, to live a pure real life
immune to theoretical and universal germs. The confession, I only
have one language; it is not mine, assumes the value of a philosophical
position, a demonstrable truth, simply because it is possible as thought
and statement. One comes to wonder if the personal and private
alienation experienced by Derrida is not the ontic realization of the
necessary and ontological alienation, which does not take away any-
thing from anybody since being situated before and on this side of
any subjectivity, of any ipseity, of any consciousness it is the a priori
condition for the existence of an anybody to steal from. Without such
inalienable alienation, no alienation historically determined would
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 59
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 con-
taminate the purity of the concepts were not overlooked, the attempts
to pass philosophy for the science of sciences would fail. Since phi-
losophy 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 fig-
uration] 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 crown-
pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they
say: These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about
them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not
worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their
exchange value is extended indefinitely. They are right in speaking thus. By
this needy knife-grinders activity words are changed from a physical to a
metaphysical acceptation.31
Philosophy is considered the fog, the sad veil shrouding the living
meaning of life. But now the time is right for the veil to fall, for life to
expose its full productivity. Rorty appreciates Derrida exactly for
exhibiting life-world as the source of the meaningfulness of his envois.
Deconstruction avoids the dishonesty of transcendental philosophy
admitting that its ultimate reason, its deepest ground, is in Derridas
own actual life, in the concreteness of his unphilosophical being-in-the-
world. Growing out of the life of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction
always needs to be conjugated in the first-person singular. Decon-
struction for Rorty is the ultimate Lebensphilosophie.36
Rorty uses deconstruction as if it were a ladder built by Derrida to
climb over philosophers claim to speak for a we and to access an
epoch that can serenely accept the idiosyncrasy of any theoretical sys-
tem. 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 deconstruc-
tion is that which Rorty wishes it to have become in the latter phase of
Derridas career, then deconstruction is impossible.
Discourses which look for metaphors (i.e., the trace of natural lan-
guage) 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 prag-
matism can menace the system of metaphysics only from within and
not attack it from abroad, one should conclude that every endeavour to
unmask philosophys presumed purity is troubled by a constitutional
aporia. The hermeneutics of suspicion, following Nietzsche, claim that
truths are illusions whose deceptive nature has been forgotten; meta-
phors 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
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 63
truths are just useful lies. Yet all the critiques Rorty directs against
transcendental philosophy are clearly informed by the Nieztschean
intuition that redescriptions do not mirror meaning but, rather, they
institute it. In other words, Rorty bases his arguments on the very
inference which he previously discarded as generated by confusion.
Just eight pages after stating that Nietzsche is inconsistent in claiming
to know what he himself claims cannot be known i.e., the truth on
truth Rorty buys without hesitation Nietzsches reversal of Platonism,
declaring that his own account of intellectual history chimes with
Nietzsches definition of truth as a mobile army of metaphors.40
Rorty accuses Nietzsche and the bad Derrida of poaching. They
hunt in the terrain which they previously prohibited and declared out
of bounds. The irony is that Rorty himself cannot help but commit the
exact same crime. The entirety of Rortys work is in fact studded with
definitions of truth. Let me give another example of such self-refer-
ential inconsistency. In an earlier essay, Rorty states: truth is simply the
most coherent and powerful theory, and no relation of correspon-
dence to reality need[s] to be invoked to clarify true or knowl-
edge.41 The point is that since Rorty is incapable of avoiding a
hidden reference to something extratextual here, power or coher-
ence he ends up playing the very part he denounced in Nietzsche and
Derrida. He wears the costume of a bandit who traffics in transcen-
dental presupposition, precisely what he has banned and forbidden.
Rortys most elaborate attempt to defend himself against the charge
of inconsistency is to be found in his review of Geoffrey Benningtons
Derridabase the essay floating above Derridas Circumfession. By
reconstructing the movement of White mythology, Bennington argues
that an etymological critique of philosophy which tries to bring abstract
notions back to the sensory and a-philosophical world is grounded on
the persuasion that philosophical discourse, in its apparent seriousness,
is merely forgotten or worn-out metaphors, a particularly gray and sad
fable, mystified in proposing itself as the very truth.42 Since Rorty
admits to thinking of philosophy in exactly those terms, and even if
Bennington does not mention him in this passage, Rorty feels com-
pelled 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 dis-
course puts life in the transcendental position in regard to the trans-
cendental 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.
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 65
how Rorty can approve Deweys empirical inquires into the causal
conditions of certain actual events namely, the uses of certain words in
certain ways, the origins of certain terms around which certain social
practices crystallized (p. 334, emphasis added). Are events really some-
thing actual? Are they something at all? And most importantly: can
Rorty reintroduce the reference to the origins of certain language
games without also betraying the refusal of the dualism between beings
and representations? As Charles Guignon and David Harley might
suggest: the whole notion of objects and their causal powers existing
distinct from and independent of our ways of speaking and giving
reasons should be ruled out by Rortys position.45
In the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty insists that
pragmatists are with regards to transcendental argument in the same
position that nineteenth-century secularists were with regards to God:
it is less a matter of whether God and transcendence exist as facts or as
products of human mind, than about finding the means to avoid the
vocabulary of theology and philosophy. Alternatively, in Derrida and
the philosophical tradition, while embracing Feuerbach and Deweys
positions, Rorty clearly goes for sociological explanations of philoso-
phy, as Bennington would call them.46 This is how Rorty comments on
Circumfession:
The effect of Circumfession is to rub ones nose in the fact that all the
quasi-transcendental, rigorous philosophizing that Bennington describes is
being done by a poor existing individual, somebody who thinks about cer-
tain things in certain ways because of certain weird, private contingencies.
(p. 347)
It is true that Derrida highlights the fact that the philosopher is 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 circumvent-
ing philosophy.
All the attempts to unsettle philosophy from some regional domain
(sociology, psychology, or economy for instance) are as self-contra-
dictory as scepticism because, says Bennington in Derridabase, they
can only replace in the final instance something which will play the
part of philosophy without having the means to do so (p. 283). While
attempting to criticize deadly transcendental discourse in name of the
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 67
living reality of life, they only confirm the power of the distinction
between actual phenomena and transcendental laws, the particular
and the general, the conditioned and the unconditional. To put it even
more directly: they reinforce the authority of philosophical con-
ceptuality. 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. Trans-
philosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical
navites.48
The different value that Derrida and Rorty attribute to real life
clearly emerges if one confronts Derridas autobiographical writings
to Rortys. In Trotsky and the wild orchids an essay from his Philo-
sophy and Social Hope which I will discuss at length in the next chapter
Rorty treats his own childhood passions as the unquestioned cause of
his entire philosophical position. By contrast, Derrida, in the Mono-
lingualism, states that deconstructions first interest relies on the cri-
tique of the axiom of purity, that is, the critique of the presumed
existence of something like a simple and pure origin:
While Rorty tries to shed himself of all the philosophical veils in order
to rip the curtain aside and grasp the reality beyond it, Derrida more
cautiously affirms that the recit produces the memory of something that
perhaps never was. The history he tells has never happened as such.
Tracing the traces of the phantasmatic events of his childhood, an as
if history is produced. In the epilogue of Monolingualism, Derrida
unequivocally states in fact that the book should not be considered as
the beginning of a future autobiography. The book does not expose
Derrida; it gives an account of the obstacles preventing auto-exposi-
tion. The ultimate unveiling cannot take place so the truth of what I
have lived: the truth itself beyond memory is always to come (p. 73).
The paths followed in the attempt to write a genealogy of what did not
happen were surely influenced by Derridas Judeo-French-Maghrebian
background (p. 61). But the account of his individual journey can exist
only within the bounds of the philosophical language and culture into
which he came to be exiled (p. 71). Hence, giving an account of
oneself is never a private act. On the contrary, it is a gesture which is
68 The Domestication of Derrida
All our European languages, the language of everything that has partici-
pated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason all this is the
immense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the rubric of
capture or objectification of madness. Nothing within this language, and no
one among those who speak it, can escape the historical guilt if there is
one, and if it is historical in a classical sense which Foucault apparently
wishes to put on trial. But such a trial may be impossible, for by the simple
fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly
reiterate the crime. (p. 35)
The case against metaphysics that Foucault prepares for trial appears as
brave as unwary. His will to bypass reason to contourner la raison
in Derridas French is as uneasy as Rortys determination to cir-
cumvent metaphysics. A similar point was made in 1980 in On a newly
arisen apocalyptic tone in philosophy.51 Derrida gave this lecture,
contemporary with Envois, at the first Cerisy-la-Salle encounter
dedicated to his work. This seminar in particular, organized by Jean-
Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was to start with The ends
of man, an essay introduced by Foucaults announcement that the end
of man was perhaps near.52 In his address, Derrida reflected upon the
tonality of the verdicts on philosophys end. Laden with euphoria, they
announce that it will not be too long before the liberating dis-
appearance of philosophy from the world. Such discourses want us to
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 69
believe that the end of the old world and a new beginning are near;
that the coming of a world not mystified by philosophys grey fable is
imminent. The veils will fall and the real world will expose itself.
Eschatology seems to be the Stimmung shared by the different varia-
tions on the theme the death of philosophy. And every turn of dis-
course launches itself into a surplus of eschatological eloquence
(p. 145).
Derrida urges to take note of the fact that an apocalyptic tone is not
something which newly emerges sometime and somewhere in philo-
sophy. The apocalyptic tone does not happen to philosophy, for phi-
losophy as such has always existed only in the horizon of 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 non-
sense. 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 dis-
courses in philosophy. His progressivism, his belief in the future of a certain
philosophy, indeed of another metaphysics, is not contradictory to this
proclamation of ends and of the end. (pp. 1445)
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 presupposi-
tion. 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 con-
cludes 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 pro-
duces a little apocalypse, he makes it sound as if it were Derridas fault
for not having been able to circumvent philosophy.
The truth is that, as Christopher Norris noted, Rorty counts Derrida
as a useful but suspicious ally, some kind of a half-way pragmatist
having deconstructed a great deal of surplus ontological baggage but
then fallen victim to the lure of his own negative metaphysics or sys-
tematized 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
74 The Domestication of Derrida
It would be (too) easy to say that Rorty finds inadequate all the other
critics of the metaphysical tradition in order to be recognized as the
first true and authentic pragmatist/ironist. Yet, he arrives at the point
of admitting that he sounded too much like Carnap in the denounce
of the pseudo-problems provoked by unreal philosophical distinctions
and in the fervent physicalism of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.67 I
hope to have demonstrated that in a certain sense, Rorty has never
stepped away from physicalism. His treatment of Derrida in fact shows
how Rorty tries to reduce Derridas philosophical positions to mere
effects of Derridas physical life. One might be tempted to describe
Rortys pragmatism as a sort of reductive vitalism for he assumes private
life to be the causal origin of any given theory.
Maybe I have not been generous enough with Rorty. Against his
reading, I have suggested that a solid continuity binds Derridas early
and latter works, the apparently more transcendental and the appar-
ently more autobiographical ones. For instance, I have shown that both
White mythology and Monolingualism of the Other, following different
discursive strategies, testify to the incapacity of getting philosophy out
of ones mind, of breaking up with metaphysics and theory. It does not
therefore seem legitimate to claim that there is a first and a second
Derrida, that a Kehre intervened and modified the trajectory of his
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 75
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 idea-
tion. The logos as reassurance stands against the terror provoked by the
bogeyman, the black man, the adumbration which might disturb the
white domain of the transcendental. Philosophy consists of offering
reassurance to children.73 There is, there must be, an insight not
haunted and stained by naivety. For such reason, Husserl first states
that the insight of that which exists is necessary to essential insight, and
then backs away from the consequences of his statement. In Ideas I, the
third paragraph is sacrificed by the fourth. As Derrida comments in
Platos pharmacy:
The purity of the inside can then only be restored if the charges are brought
home against exteriority as a supplement, inessential yet harmful to the
essence, a surplus that ought never to have come to be added to the
untouched plenitude of the inside. (p. 128)
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 transcen-
dental arguments, Rorty winds up repeating Husserls moves. Husserl
first writes that natural insight and essential insight imply each other,
that one is the condition for the possibility of the other; but then, in
the quick turning of a page, he declares the possibility of reaching
essences without passing through individual perceptions. In the same
fashion, Rorty exploits philosophy to argue against the possibility of
any type of transcendental deduction, and then tries to forget the very
tradition which allowed him to perform his critique of metaphysics. For
phenomenology as for pragmatism, it is a matter of hiding the con-
ditions for the possibilities of their own tricks: the ontic is made to
disappear once the ontological has been reached; philosophy dis-
appears once irony has been installed.
Pragmatism dreams of a time and a language that would have ended
their dependence on all that philosophy has ever stood for. As John
Caputo has argued in On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental:
the case of Rorty and Derrida,74 it is this craving for autonomy which
most distinguishes Rorty from Derrida. Rortys recourse to the femi-
nine 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:
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
Derrida, the Transcendental and Theoretical Ascetism 81
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 pre-
dictably, deconstructive attacks settle on producing a number of the-
orems, 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 sta-
bilizing 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
84 The Domestication of Derrida
I take Derridas importance to lie in his having had the courage to give up
the attempt to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring
together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonance
and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his
predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful.2
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 impera-
tive of social engagement. Consequently, he started abandoning the
search for a vocabulary which could resolve the differend between
Trotsky and the orchids. Duties to oneself and duties to others are
destined to be fulfilled in two different and irreconcilable linguistic
spaces, albeit both with the same right to exist. One cannot indulge in
mere hedonism or total militancy. At least two vocabularies are
necessary. To satisfy the galaxy of desires that we are, we need to speak
at least two languages.
Rorty thinks of Sartre and Savonarola as two aberrant examples of
the monolingual attempt to judge human activities on the basis of a
single paradigm. While Sartre criticized Proust as an insignificant
writer and man was insignificant for the struggle against capitalisms
violence, the heretic Dominican condemned art as mere vanity. Proust
was probably irrelevant for the socialist dream, and perhaps it is also
pointless to look for the moral in the artworks that Savonarola cen-
sured. Rorty does not discuss this matter. He claims rather that it is
wrong to measure with the meter of political or moral utility, works that
were only produced to satisfy their authors creative urge and promote
recreation for their consumers. Sartre and Savonarola were mistaken
since they evaluated the quest for private autonomy with a language
inappropriate for grasping its ends. Their mistake consisted in
affirming that the private is public. A long quotation from Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity will now provide further clarification of Rortys
position.
Books relevant to the avoidance of either social or individual cruelty are often
contrasted as books with a moral message with books whose aims are,
instead, aesthetic. Those who draw this moral-aesthetic contrast and give
priority to the moral usually distinguish between an essential human faculty
conscience and an optional extra faculty, aesthetic taste. Those who draw
the same contrast to the advantage of the aesthetic often presuppose a
distinction of the same sort. But for the latter the center of the self is assumed
to be the ironists desire for autonomy, for a kind of perfection which has
nothing to do with his relations with other people. This Nietzschean attitude
exalts the figure of the artist, just as the former attitude exalts those who
live for others. It assumes that the point of human society is not the general
happiness but the provision of an opportunity for the especially gifted those
fitted to become autonomous to achieve their goal.4
The proposal to divide books on the basis of the faculties they were
produced by (conscience or taste), cannot be taken seriously by a
90 The Domestication of Derrida
Whereas Habermas sees the line of ironist thinking which runs from Hegel
through Foucault and Derrida as destructive of social hope, I see this line of
thought as largely irrelevant of public life and to political questions. (p. 83)
The results obtained by the Groupe dInformation sur les Prisons or by the
gay awareness actions in which Foucault was involved are witness to his
invaluable influence on contemporary political life. Moreover, Fou-
cault 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 Haber-
mass 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 con-
nection 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 Der-
rida would appear as a corrupter of the young and helpless, making
them indifferent to their duties before democracy. In Rortys opinion,
Habermas should not bother blaming post-structuralism since it did
not and cannot have any influence on modern societys public life.
Ironists in search of personal autonomy as Foucault or Derrida are
invaluable for those who are involved in regenerating a private identity
distinct from traditional canons. But they are pretty much useless
when it comes to politics (p. 83). Once again, here is an instance of
that repressive tolerance which Derrida attributes to Rortys defence.
Once it has been skimmed of any political and ethical thrust, what
remains of deconstruction?
One problematic aspect of Rortys thesis is that a clear-cut division
between what is influential in private philosophical circles and what is
relevant in the public domain is difficult to maintain. In Fredericks
century as Kant dubs the Age of Enlightement in homage to
Frederick the Great there were not so many readers with access to the
92 The Domestication of Derrida
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 any-
thing 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 rea-
sonable thing that philosophy can do is to survey the universals which
shape our form of life. Pragmatists instead should see themselves as
involved in a long-term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common
sense, and the self-image of their community, a community whose
present Rorty believes is structured also, but not only, by Greek
metaphysics.8
In this case, Rortys position seems to coincide with what Derrida
suggests regarding the Socratesplato couple in a postcard dated 6
June 1977:
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. Neces-
sary, because all the attempts to circumvent it have so far failed. Con-
tingent, 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 con-
taminating 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 vocabu-
lary, 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,
94 The Domestication of Derrida
at least in part, right.10 It is a fact that Rorty was one of the first to point
out the profound promise informing the structure of deconstruction.
Already by 1978, even before the attention to Derridas so-called ethical
turn in 1980s, Rorty argued that Derrida
is suggesting how things might look if we did not have Kantian philosophy built into
the fabric of our intellectual life, as his predecessors suggested how things might look if
we did not have religion built into the fabric of our moral life.11
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 eco-
nomical 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 recogni-
tion of the otherness of the others, of their difference perhaps even
of their differance is the only way to access the reign of Justice. This is
why, starting from 1968, in the United States, scholarships whose area
of focus are the sacrificial victims of the system (Critical Race Theory,
Womens Studies, Post-Colonialism, Chicano Studies and so forth)
started to blossom.
Rorty acknowledges that the influence of the Cultural Left on aca-
demic programs diminished the tolerance to sadism and cruelty
against minorities: The adoption of attitudes which the Right sneers at
as politically correct has made America a far more civilized society
than it was thirty years ago (p. 81). The act of accusing teachers with
irresponsibility relies on the consciousness that in educating youth,
one is also moulding a future community. School is the one place
where it is harder to separate languages constitutive role and its per-
formativity. 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
96 The Domestication of Derrida
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 injus-
tice 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)
After all, a lot of such repression is so blatant and obvious that it does not
take any great analytic skills or any great philosophical self-consciousness to
see what is going on. It does not, for example, take any critical-linguistic
analysis to notice that millions of children in American ghettos grew up
without hope while the U.S. government was preoccupied with making the
rich richer with assuring a greedy and selfish middle class that it was the
salt of the earth. Even economists, plumbers, insurance salesman, and
biochemists people who have never read a text closely, much less
deconstructed it can recognize that the immiseration of much of Latin
America is partially due to the deals struck between local plutocracies and
North America banks and governments. (p. 135)
The real target of Rortys polemics is the ridiculous belief though any
statement can sound ridiculous once skilfully isolated from its context
that the millennium of universal peace and justice among men and
women would come once we all become ethical readers.
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
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. Even-
tually the people cannot survive without the States caring and paternal
superintendence. Power for Foucault becomes biopower precisely
when it starts assuming life as its object and objective.
The task of the higher faculties law, medicine and theology was to
produce more apt knowledges to take care of and govern the bodies of
the citizens and the social body successfully, and to provide the State
with an apparatus able to sustain the new mode of governance. It is not
only a matter of determining what the nation must believe, but also of
making the community comply with such principles: govern-
mentalization 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 carto-
graphy. 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 govern-
ment 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 citi-
zenry. It would instead be granted the right to decide freely the truth
and falseness of the discourses and practices enforced by the higher
faculties and analyse their pragmatism. Kant assigns the authority of
critique to philosophy, the lower faculty. Such a faculty is inferior not
only because it is the furthest from State force and interests, but also
because it is closest to the mechanics of knowledge. As Derrida
reconstructs Kants discourse:
Kant defines a university that is as much a safeguard for the most totalitarian
of social forms as a place for the most intransigently liberal resistance to any
abuse of power, a resistance that can be judged in turns as most rigorous or
most impotent. In effect, its power is limited to a power-to-think-and-judge,
a power-to-say, though not necessarily to say in public, since this would
involve an action, an executive power denied the university.24
Both Kant and Rorty seem to agree that philosophers cannot have a
public role since their discussions are limited to academic circles.
However, Kants distinction between the public and private which still
motivates our own academic topology is anchored on the transcen-
dental 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
104 The Domestication of Derrida
deciding on truth and falseness is not always and already a public, and
therefore, a political, act.
having a book that thinks for me, a pastor who functions as my con-
science, a doctor who decides my diet needs to be disturbed. For now,
says Kant, only a few are using their own minds, but that the public will
enlighten itself is indeed nearly inevitable, if only freedom is granted.
And quite surprisingly if one has in mind what Kant will say in The
Conflict of the Faculties, the avant-garde, which has already broken from
the spell of immaturity, is morally obliged to help fellow human beings
find the courage and means of thinking for themselves. Independent
thinkers, even among the appointed guardians who have seemingly
internalized the role of superintendence, have the responsibility to
disseminate mans potency of being autonomous and of caring for
himself.27
It is in this perspective that Foucault, collapsing Aufklarung on cri-
tique, claims that Enlightenment consists less in learning about truth
and falsity from others, than in learning to question the borders which
the different authorities declare impassable. But the requisite for the
maturation of mankind is the public and free use of reason. If not the
art of practical insubordination, critique at least involves the right to
argue publicly. Each man, as a public officer, needs to obey the
guidelines received by the highest power and its representatives.
However, at the same time, as a part of the entire commonwealth
which is transnational since Kant talks about a cosmopolitan society
every human being has the duty to question the opportunity of the
commands which one nevertheless obeys for the time being. Kant does
not restrain the free use of reason within the walls of the university. On
the contrary, critical thinking is a responsibility which humankind as
such needs to assume. Kants What is Enlightenment? suggests that,
for the moment, the social body is in the hands of the higher faculties
artful leaders, who pretend to respond to public demands while dif-
fusing the idea that philosophy is a nonsense to be cast away. Yet Kant
also notices signs indicating that the present is opening up toward a
general liberation from the authoritative discourses produced in the
interest of governance. Kants enlightenment, in the hope that the
public will gain total access to free and autonomous use of reason,
finds its raison detre in the urgency of emancipating the public from the
yoke which subjects it to the truths and practices enforced by State
officials. It is this sort of Foucauldian critical attitude that I was glad to
recognize in Derridas essays on Kant and the idea of the university.
For Derrida as for Foucault, critical philosophy is not a matter of
reinforcing the line which separates constative language interested
only in truth from performative discourses whose sole interests are of a
pragmatic nature. Seeming to agree with Rortys anti-transcendental
arguments, Derrida affirms that it no longer makes sense to contrast
fundamental research to goal-oriented inquiries:
106 The Domestication of Derrida
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 fun-
damental 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 (commu-
nication 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, litera-
ture, 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,
When Kant thought of the academic centres whose services were more
suited to pursue States practical ends, he had in mind theology, law
and medicine the Bible, right and science, in Foucaults words.
Today, it is even more difficult to limit the faculties and departments
whose truths and knowledges cannot be employed as power-making or
power-enforcing tools. Even the lower faculty which includes, among
The Resistance of Theory 107
Even if all the differences among departments and faculties have see-
mingly 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 rea-
son 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 Enlight-
enment 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,
108 The Domestication of Derrida
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 cri-
tique is not to be confused with reflection on the quasitranscendantal
that fixes knowledge. I am not sure if this 1978 cryptic reference to the
quasi-transcendental can be read as an oblique attack against Derrida
whose notion of ecriture was with a similar discretion accused of still
being too transcendental in What is an author? a lecture which
Foucault gave at another meeting of the Societe francaise de philosophie
ten years earlier.36 But even if he did intend to distinguish his work
from Derridas, Foucaults idea of critique, which inspires his project of
an ontology of actuality, chimes with Derridas quasi-transcendental
gestures. Describing the conditions of possibility which make a system
function amounts to mapping the fissures which unwork it; the slip-
pages and the cracks in which a critical intervention can find the
necessary space to resist or at least negotiate a given regime of truth.
Eventually, Foucault recovers the idea of critique he seemed to reject at
the beginning of his What is critique?: that critique itself is a means,
an instrument that has other goals in mind. A mochlos, to use Derridas
term: The mochlos could be a wooden beam, a lever for displacing a
boat, a sort of wedge for opening or closing a door, something, in
short, to lean on for forcing and displacing.37 This sort of leverage that
one needs in order to sabotage the minoritizing machine is also a work
of fiction. The truths that the art of governing attempts to naturalize
and render hegemonic are in fact displaced by the historical philo-
sophical labour which fabricates resisting counter-discourses.38 These
oeuvres and in using this term, I am approaching Derridas The
university without condition are purported to suspend the grip that
the governmentality project has on the real, and give back to the pre-
sent 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 uncondi-
tional resistance against any exercise of power because it would grant
itself the right to question all the figures of sovereignty. The Huma-
nities 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
110 The Domestication of Derrida
Against the hostile attempts to close and control the field of actuality,
deconstructions unconditional resistance tries to open the space of
counter-power; to reinvigorate within the multitude the possibility of
contesting the present in name of the futures. It enables exceptions
simultaneously inside and outside the dominated space: the opposition
against the exercise of power tries in fact to create liberated places,
temporary anomic zones in which different forms of life and thought
could happen. One way in which the Humanities may assume the
responsibility of critique and struggle against unjust institutions and
institutes is by producing events which have the force to unwork the
solidity of the discursive practices regimenting the present. Such dis-
courses and their axiomatics would be interrupted, disjointed, opened
up to the spectres of the otherwise which always haunts their domain.
The claims of absolute sovereignty on the real are disturbed by the
unconditioned right to contest any authority. This is why John Caputos
1988 Beyond aestheticism: Derridas responsible anarchy and Saul
Newmans 2001 Derridas deconstruction of authority, have noticed
the presence of an anarchic strive in deconstructive operations: a
politics in which no arche, no command, dogma, ground or principle is
immune to the possibility of being critiqued and disobeyed, is anarchic
by definition.43 The anarchism of deconstruction does not coincide
with the anarchists dream of an absolute absence of every authority
and hierarchy (and for this reason Derrida says I am not an anar-
chist). Resistance always end up erecting centres of power as we saw
in the previous chapter regarding deconstructions jetties. Yet decon-
struction is undoubtedly anarchic as Derrida specified in the same
interview where he declared himself not to be an anarchist because it
engages with the constitutions of spaces where no hierarchy or
authority would be stable and immutable.44 It is hard not to hear an
anarchic tonality, for instance, in Derridas acknowledgment that the
reason of the strongest is always the best and that, therefore, any
exercise of sovereignty is also a roguish abuse of power. Critique itself
has to be related to a fundamental anarchism for as Foucault says
and does not say simultaneously it is linked with the historic practice
of revolt, with the refusal of being governed.
For Derrida, the Humanities can take some steps toward an ori-
ginary anarchy45 because of their relation to the literary dimension.
Under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge,
critical thought can produce oeuvres which interrupt halt the force
112 The Domestication of Derrida
of economical discourses that put women and men to work and settle
them in stable and identified places.46 Striking against this exploita-
tion, the labour of theory commits itself to a different form of com-
munity to use a word that Derrida does not like but nevertheless uses
in his writings on the university. What is in fact deconstruction if not
the general strike which reclaims the right to contest and not only
theoretically47 the legitimate authorities and all their discursive
norms? As if for a new form of politics to begin, for a radical democracy
to start coming, it would be necessary to bracket the governance
actually at work on the present. It is as if the world begins when and
where work ends.
But this new world cannot be founded by critique. Founding requires
foundational myths; one needs to gather a multitude around a unique
fire and compose it into a people as one.48 On the contrary, critique
as Benjamins general proletarian strike does not replace the existing
system with a different one. It aims to make inoperative the discourses
which arrest humanity in fixed places and fixed roles. Critique is
destructive because it does not impose a destiny on the living, reg-
ulating and ordering its time through the schedule of the workday.
Deconstructive critique cannot have any power (which does not mean
that it does not have any force: a force of the weak, a weak force does
indeed exist) for otherwise it would repeat the traditional dream of the
philosopher, that is to teach and at the same time to direct, steer,
organize, the empirical work of the laborers.49 Critique should not
dismantle the power of higher faculties and governance in order to
make philosophy acquire more power over the present. There is no
revival of Platos Philosopher-Kings here, nor the interest in a new
socio-political hierarchization of disciplines and groups. The risk that
needs to be avoided is turning critique from a mode of resistance to
sovereign power, into a superpower itself, reconstituting in such a
fashion the powers of a given caste, class or corporation. The anti-
authoritarian force of critique needs to be maintained as dissociated as
possible from the figure of sovereignty, even if sometimes it is strate-
gically 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 there-
fore fall for the phantasms of sovereignty. The time of reflection is
another time, for its ultimate goal is to deactivate the rigid organization
of the present by exposing it to its futures. This is to say, from my point
of view, that critiques only business is to help create a radically
democratic space, a public space where time itself would be public: the
authority over the present would not be alienated from the social, but
would rather be shared by the plurality of different communities and
The Resistance of Theory 113
which starves a large portion of the planet; the increasing power of the
arms industry; the uncontrolled spreading of nuclear weapons; inter-
ethnic 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 pro-
blems. Rorty has Derrida in such a high esteem that he awaits practical
suggestions for acting, but all he can get is the usual unfamiliarization
of everything one believed to be familiar. It is as if Rorty got a little
annoyed with deconstructive practice. Ironist frivolity and suspicion
have grown old.
Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was real, but now you see that its only a social
construct! You thought it was just a familiar object of sense-perception, but
look! It has a supersensible, spectral, spiritual, backside!70
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)
How could we agree to remain shut up in a library poring over old philo-
sophers, who, for the most part, moreover, encourage us to put the books
away and to go out and do something?74
Chapter 1
1
See Rorty, Keeping philosophy pure: an essay on Wittgenstein, in Con-
sequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1982), pp. 1936. Rorty uses the German word Fach to describe philosophy as
an autonomous discipline (a faculty in my own terms).
2
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1979), p. 131.
3
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1982), p. 11. Further reference will be given in the main body
of the text in parenthesis.
4
Rorty, Keeping philosophy pure, p. 19.
5
See Rorty, Introduction: pragmatism and philosophy, in Consequences of
Pragmatism, p. xxxix.
6
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 155.
7
See Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, in
Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. P. Bieri, R. Hortsman and L. Kruger
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 77103.
8
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 12.
9
See Rorty, The contingency of philosophical problems, in Truth and
Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 27489.
10
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), pp. 7394.
11
See Rorty, Science as solidarity, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 224.
12
Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, p. 79.
13
See Davidson, On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (19734), pp. 520.
14
Actually Davidson, referring to Quines two dogmas of empiricism, talks
about a fitting of the scheme to the content rather than of its adequation; see
On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, p. 14.
15
Davidson continues: How would you organize the Pacific Ocean?
Straighten out its shores, perhaps, or relocate its islands, or destroy its fish (p.
14).
16
Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, p. 97.
17
Davidson, On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, p. 20.
18
Ibid.
130 Notes
19
Rorty, Transcendental argument, self-reference, and pragmatism, p. 99.
20
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 8.
21
See Rorty, Science as solidarity, pp. 2134.
22
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 75.
23
Ibid., p. 80.
24
See Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing: an essay on Derrida, in
Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 1039.
25
Rorty, Dewey between Hegel and Darwin, in Truth and Progress, pp. 301
6. See also Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1213.
26
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 7.
27
See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), pp. 2639.
28
Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975),
p. 49. Bloom is here quoting Derridas Freud and the scene of writing,
quoting Freuds Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.
29
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 60. Here Bloom is quoting Giambattista
Vicos On the Study Methods of Our Time.
30
Ibid., p. 61.
31
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 24.
32
Rorty, Introduction: pragmatism and philosophy, p. xix.
33
See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2007), p. 47.
34
See Plato, The Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
Book VII, 514a 2517a 7.
35
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 26. Further reference will be
given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
36
Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volume I: The Will to Power as Art (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1991), p. 184.
37
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1722.
38
See Godzich, The domestication of Derrida, in The Yale Critics, ed. J.
Arac, W. Godzich and W. Martin (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), pp. 207.
39
Wheeler III, Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man, in Redrawing
the Lines, ed. R. Dasenbrock (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), pp. 1268. See de Man, Allegories of Reading (Yale: Yale University Press,
1982), pp. 11931.
40
Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense, quoted (and translated
directly from German) by de Man in Allegories of Reading, pp. 11011.
41
See Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, pp. 902.
42
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 5960.
43
Being (not entities) is something which there is only in so far as truth
is. And truth is only in so far and as long as Dasein is: Heidegger, Being and
Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 272.
44
Rorty, Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 34.
45
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 119.
Notes 131
46
Ibid., p. 101.
47
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 93.
48
Besides Philosophy as a kind of writing, see Rortys Derrida on lan-
guage, being, and abnormal philosophy, The Journal of Philosophy, 74(11)
(1977), pp. 67381.
49
Derrida, Differance, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 267.
50
Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), p. 216.
51
Rorty, Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism, pp. 389.
52
Derrida, Ends of Man, in Margins of Philosophy, p. 128.
53
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 14.
54
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 95.
55
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 29.
56
Rorty, Professionalized philosophy and transcendentalist culture, in
Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 67.
57
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 94.
58
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of human sciences, in
Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 279.
59
See Derrida, Speech and phenomena: introduction to the problem of
signs in Husserls phenomenology, in Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104.
60
Wheeler III, Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man, p. 128.
61
Derrida, Differance, p. 27.
62
Rorty, Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, p. 677.
63
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 96.
64
This is done with a Foucauldian erudition by Jean Stengers and Anne van
Neck in Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
65
Blind tactics is one of the ways the other being empirical wandering
in which Derrida describes the mode of the thought of differance (Differance,
p. 7).
66
See Derrida, Platos pharmacy, in Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1981), p. 108.
67
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 106.
68
Derrida, Platos pharmacy, p. 137.
69
Rorty, Deconstruction and circumvention, in Essays on Heidegger and
Others, p. 87.
70
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 98.
71
Rorty, Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, p. 678.
72
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, p. 105.
73
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 272. Derrida is here quoting a passage from
Kafkas diaries.
74
Derrida, Platos pharmacy, p. 84.
75
See Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 4551.
132 Notes
76
Rorty, Derrida on language, being, and abnormal philosophy, p. 681,
note 12.
77
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play, p. 285.
78
See Derrida, Envois, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 5.
79
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1267.
80
Ibid., p. 128.
81
Derrida, Envois, p. 18. Further reference will be given in the main body
of the text in parenthesis.
82
Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, in A Taste for the
Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 29.
83
See Derrida, Envois, p. 26.
84
Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, p. 27.
85
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 131. On the basis of Rortys own
account of cultural history as a succession of redescriptions, it is hard to
understand what would make an etymology fake.
86
Ibid.
87
See Blanchot, The Instant of My Death (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
88
See Derrida, Envois, p. 21.
89
Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, p. 35. Further
reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
90
Heidegger, Time and being, in On Time and Being (New York: Harper &
Row, 1972), p. 24. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 97, note 1. The
same quotation returns in Consequences of Pragmatism (p. 50) and a couple of
times in Essays on Heidegger and Others. Heideggers sentence can function as
the slogan for the circumvention of philosophy only by artfully isolating it
from its context.
Chapter 2
1
Rorty, Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 119.
2
Jonathan and Cynthia were standing near me next to the glass case, the
table rather, where laid out, under glass, in a transparent coffin, among
hundreds of displayed reproductions, this card had to jump out at me. I saw
nothing else, but that did not prevent me from feeling that right near me
Jonathan and Cynthia were observing me obliquely, watching me look. As if
they were spying on me in order to finish the effects of a spectacle they had
staged (they have just married more or less): Derrida, Envois, in The Post
Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 17.
3
Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982),
p. 28.
4
See Rorty, Deconstruction and circumvention, in Essays on Heidegger and
Others, p. 86.
Notes 133
5
Rorty, Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?, pp. 11920 and
Deconstruction and circumvention, p. 105.
6
Norris, Philosophy as not just a kind of writing: Derrida and the claim
of reason, in Redrawing the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), p. 192.
7
See Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986), p. 5. For a detailed critical account of Gasches project and an
indispensable discussion of some interpretations of Derrida in the mid-1980s,
see Bennington, Deconstruction and the philosophers (the very idea), in
Legislations (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1160. According to Bennington,
Gasche tries to situate Derrida in terms of (a particular reading of) the
philosophical tradition, and specifically in terms of a particularly powerful
modern inflection of that tradition in terms of reflection (p. 20). One of the
problems connected with this approach is that it presupposes the very idea of
linear history that Derrida has contested. Bennington suggests in fact that
Gasches contextualization of Derrida ends up thinking history as filiation: first
there was Descartes, then Kant, then the two lesser-known Fitche and Schel-
ling, then the very important Hegel and eventually Derrida (p. 21). After
reading Bennington, one wonders if Rorty and Gasche are so distant after all:
they both produce a history of mirrors in which Derrida would play the role of
the last man, the one that radicalizes the mirroring to the point of breaking
(with) it.
8
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, in Consequences of Pragmatism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 102.
9
Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2005), p. 102.
10
Rorty, Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?, pp. 1223.
11
Ibid., p. 124.
12
Davidson, On the very idea of a conceptual scheme, Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (19734), p. 16, quoted by
Rorty in Is natural science a natural kind?, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 50. Emphasis added.
13
Wheeler III, Metaphor according to Davidson and de Man, in Redrawing
the Lines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 117.
14
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 125.
15
See Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, in A Taste for the
Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 9.
16
Derrida, An idea of Flaubert: Platos letter , MLN, 99(4) (September
1984), pp. 74868.
17
Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 124.
18
Derrida, Circumfession, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, Jacques Derrida
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 623.
19
See Derrida and Ferraris, I have the taste for the secret, p. 62.
20
See Gasche, The Tain of The Mirror, pp. 767. Gasche introduces the
expression theoretical ascetism to discuss Ernst Tugendhats critique of
134 Notes
Carroll (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 84. Further reference will be given in
the main body of the text in parenthesis.
84
See Caputo, On not circumventing the quasi-transcendental, p. 157.
85
See also Derridas comments on Gasche and the quasi-transcendental in
his interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge,
1992), pp. 702.
86
See Bennington, Derridabase, pp. 26879.
Chapter 3
1
Foucault, Nietzsche, genealogy, and history, in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 160.
2
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 125.
3
See Rorty, Trotsky and the wild orchids, in Philosophy and Social Hope
(New York: Penguin, 1999), pp. 320. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
4
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 1412.
5
Ibid., pp. 7395. Further reference will be given in the main body of the
text in parenthesis.
6
See Eagleton, Marxism without Marxism, in M. Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly
Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 837.
7
See Rorty, Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy, in Truth
and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 30726.
8
Rorty, Is truth a goal of inquiry?, in Truth and Progress, p. 41.
9
Derrida, Envois, in The Post Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), p. 18. Emphasis added.
10
See Rorty, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, p. 13, and
Derrida, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, pp. 7788, both in C.
Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
11
Rorty, Philosophy as a kind of writing, in Consequences of Pragmatism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 98.
12
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87.
13
Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 77. Further reference will be given in the main body of the text in
parenthesis.
14
See Rorty, De Man and the American Cultural Left, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 12939. Fur-
ther reference will be given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
15
Rorty, Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism, p. 15.
16
Ibid., p. 17.
17
Derrida, The principle of reason, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philo-
sophy 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 12930.
18
See Derrida, Mochlos, or the conflict of the faculties, in Eyes of the
University, pp. 83112.
19
Ibid., p. 93.
138 Notes
20
See Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. Der Streit Der Fakultaten (New York:
Abaris Books, 1979), pp. 239.
21
Foucault, What is critique?, in The Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 44.
22
Ibid., p. 47. Translation slightly modified.
23
Derrida, Mochlos, p. 96.
24
Ibid., p. 97.
25
Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 15.
26
Derrida, Mochlos, p. 98.
27
See Kant, What is Aufklarung, in The Politics of Truth S. Lotringer (ed.)
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007) pp. 2937.
28
Derrida, The principle of reason, pp. 1412. Further reference will be
given in the main body of the text in parenthesis.
29
In the United States, for example (and it is not just one example among
the others), without even mentioning the economic regulation that allows
certain surplus value through the channel of private foundations, among
others to sustain research or creative projects that are not immediately or
apparently profitable, we also know that military programs, especially those of
the Navy, can very rationally subsidize linguistic, semiotic, or anthropological
investigations. These in turn are related to history, literature, hermeneutics,
law, political science, psychoanalysis, and so forth. Ibid., p. 145.
30
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 478.
31
See Derrida, The university without conditions, in Without Alibi, ed. P.
Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 204.
32
Butler, What is critique? An essay on Foucaults virtue, in The Political,
ed. D. Ingram (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 217.
33
Foucault, What is critique?, p. 43. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
34
See Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen,
1987), p. 205.
35
Butler, What is critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, p. 222.
36
See Foucault, What is an author?, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,
pp. 11338.
37
Derrida, Mochlos, p. 110.
38
Butler, What is critique? An essay on Foucaults virtue, p. 221. Butler
does a great job in pointing out the relation between the fiction of critiques
and the genealogic practice.
39
Derrida, The university without condition, p. 208.
40
See Benjamin, Critique of violence, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913
1926, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004),
pp. 23652.
41
See Lyotard, Sensus communis, in Judging Lyotard, ed. A. Benjamin (New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 125; see also R. Espositos important Communitas:
Origine e destino della comunita (Turin: Einaudi, 1998) and Immunitas: Protezione e
negazione della vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).
Notes 139
42
Derrida and Ferraris, A taste for the secret, in The Taste for the Secret
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 512.
43
See Caputo, Beyond aestheticism: Derridas responsible anarchy,
Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988), pp. 5973; Newman, Derridas decon-
struction of authority, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 27(3) (2001), pp. 120.
44
See Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, ed. E. Rottenberg
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 22.
45
Derrida, The principle of reason, p. 153.
46
See Derrida, The university without condition, pp. 2045
47
Derrida, Force of law: the mystical foundation of authority , in Acts of
Religion, ed. G. Anidjar (New York: Routledge 2002), p. 242.
48
See Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 4370 (Myth interrupted).
49
Derrida, The principle of reason, p. 152.
50
On this point the obvious reference is to the remarkably Gramscian-
DerridianHegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(London: Verso, 2001) by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe. See also Laclaus review of
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Community and its paradoxes: Richard Ror-
tys liberal utopia , in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 10623.
51
Here I can only obliquely allude to the similarity between Derridas
deconstruction of actuality and Benjamins messianic materialism as it appears
in On the concept of history (which I quoted as an epigraph of this section).
See Benjamin, On the concept of history, in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938
1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2003), pp. 389400. See also M. Fritschs The Promise of Memory: History and
Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2005), pp. 10356.
52
Foucault, What is critique?, p. 42. Translation slightly modified.
53
Derrida, The university without condition, p. 236.
54
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1982), p. 38.
55
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), p. 306.
56
As we can read in Peggy Kamufs preface to Derridas Without Alibi, The
university without condition was introduced by a warm and wry welcome by
Rorty, who was at the time Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative
Literature at Stanford.
57
See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New
York: Zone Books, 1999), pp. 15965.
58
See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 87.
59
Ibid., p. 89.
60
Ibid., p. 86.
61
Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity, in Essays on Heidegger
and Others, pp. 1645.
62
See Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 91.
63
See Laclau, Community and its paradoxes: Richard Rortys liberal
utopia , pp. 11011.
140 Notes
64
See Rorty, De Man and the American Cultural Left, pp. 12939.
65
Rorty, Solidarity or objectivity?, in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
(Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 29.
66
See Geertz, The uses of diversity, in Available Light (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), pp. 6873.
67
In the famous 1968 Cerisy-la-Salle decade on Nietzsche aujourdhui
Derrida, commenting on Klossowskis lecture, tried to distinguish between a
parodic practice which under the pretext of disconcerting, plays the game of
the established order and an other which would effectively deconstruct it. For
an account of the relation between deconstruction and parody, see S. Weber,
Upping the ante: deconstruction as parodic practice, in Deconstruction Is/In
America, ed. A. Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995),
pp. 607.
68
Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 93. Further reference will be given in the
main body of the text in parenthesis.
69
See Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 814.
70
Rorty, A spectre in haunting the intellectuals: Derrida on Marx, in
Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 217.
71
See Rorty, The priority of democracy to philosophy, in Objectivity, Rela-
tivism, 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 (Min-
neapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 2358.
73
See de Man, The resistance to theory, in The Resistance to Theory, ed. W.
Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 36.
74
Bennington, Derridabase, in J. Derrida and G. Bennington, Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 99.
75
Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, p. 238.
76
Derrida and Ferraris, I have a taste for the secret, pp. 467.
77
See Derrida, Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms,
postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms, in The States of Theory, ed. D.
Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 7580.
78
Derrida, Passages from traumatism to promise, in Points . . . Interviews,
19741994, ed. E. Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995),
pp. 3856.
79
Derrida, Structure, sign, and play, in Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 293.
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Index
wild orchids 67, 88, 901, 98, 117 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72, 74
Will to Power, The (Heidegger) 18 writing 326, 40