What do you think?
Rate this book
Deconstruction and Pragmatism
Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games.
The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface.
The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
112 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
5 people are currently reading
181 people want to read
About the author
Simon Critchley
110 books380 followersSimon Critchley (born 27 February 1960 in Hertfordshire) is an English philosopher currently teaching at The New School. He works in continental philosophy. Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics [...]
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 4, 2022
In this short seven-chapter book (40,000 words, including footnotes) Rorty replies to three interlocutors in three short, thought-provoking essays averaging 2600 words each.
Rorty's riffs are well worth reading, but I found the views of his interlocutors, including Derrida himself, not interesting nor worth reading — and at times, almost crazy.
Below are extracts from Rorty's comments, followed at the end by some quotes from Derrida.
Here's Rorty:
==========================================
The big difference between Foucault and Derrida is that Derrida is a sentimental, hopeful, romantically idealistic writer. Foucault, on the other hand, often seems to be doing his best to have no social hope and no human feelings.
Derrida seems to me as good a humanist as Mill or Dewey. When Derrida talks about deconstruction as prophetic of “the democracy that is to come,” he seems to me to be expressing the same utopian social hope as was felt by these earlier dreamers.
[Derrida’s] essay “The Politics of Friendship” [is] one of my own favorites.
[Derrida’s] Anglophone fans typically use Derrida for the same purposes as Marx and Freud have long been used by literary critics. They think of him as providing new, improved tools for unmasking books and authors—showing what is really going on behind a false front. I do not think that a critic of metaphysics, in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, should be read in this way. For without the traditional concepts of metaphysics one cannot make sense of the appearance-reality distinction, and without that distinction one cannot make sense of the notion of “what is really going on.” No more metaphysics, no more unmasking.
These [Derridean] fans also think that there is a method called “deconstruction” which one can apply to texts and teach to students. I have never been able to figure out what this method is, nor what was being taught to students except some such maxim like “Find something that can be made to look self-contradictory, claim that that contradiction is the central message of the text, and ring some changes on it.” Application of this maxim produced, in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of “deconstructive readings” of texts by American and British professors—readings which were as formulaic and as boring as the tens of thousands of readings which resulted from dutifully applying the maxim “Find something that can be made to sound like a symptom of an unresolved Oedipus complex.” This flurry of deconstructive activity seems to me to have added little to our understanding of literature and to have done little for leftist politics. On the contrary, by diverting attention from real politics, it has helped create a self-satisfied and insular academic left which—like the left of the 1960s—prides itself on not being co-opted by the system and thereby renders itself less able to improve the system. Irving Howe’s much-quoted jibe—“These people don’t want to take over the government; they just want to take over the English Department”—seems to me to remain an important criticism of this academic left.
[Deweyan/Rortyan] Naturalists, like Derrideans, have no use for what Derrida calls “a full presence which is beyond play,” and they distrust, as much as he does, the various God-surrogates which have been proposed for the role of such a full presence. Both kinds of philosophers see everything as constituted by its relations to other things, and as having no intrinsic, ineluctable nature. What it is depends on what it is being related to (or, if you like, what it differs from).
[Pragmatists/Rortyans] read Derrida on language as making pretty much the same criticisms of the Cartesian/Lockean/Husserlian view of “language as the expression of thought” which Wittgenstein made in his Philosophical Investigations. They read both Derrida and Wittgenstein not as having discovered the essential nature of language, or of anything else, but simply as having helped get rid of a misleading, and useless, picture—the one which Quine called the myth of the museum: the image of there being an object, the meaning, and next to it its label, the word. What pragmatists find most foreign in Derrida is his suspicion of empiricism, and naturalism—his assumption that these are forms of metaphysics, rather than replacements for metaphysics. To put it another way: they cannot understand why Derrida wants to sound transcendental, why he persists in taking the project of finding conditions of possibility seriously.
I think of Derrida as at his best in works like the “Envois” section of La Carte postale
I prefer texts like “Envois” and “Circonfession”
Politics, as I see it, is a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms and compromises—compromises which must, in a democratic society, be proposed and defended in terms much less esoteric than those in which we overcome the metaphysics of presence. Political thought centers on the attempt to formulate some hypotheses about how, and under what conditions, such reforms might be effected. I want to save radicalism and pathos for private moments, and stay reformist and pragmatic when it comes to my dealings with other people.
The more one reads either Heidegger or Derrida, the more continuities between the earlier and the later writings appear.
I do not see that, as [Critchley] puts it, “Deconstruction is justice, and justice is an experience of the unexperiencable.” I do not see the point of defining a commonly used term such as “justice” as the name of an impossibility. ... I think of justice as muddling through—in the way judges do when deciding hard cases, and parents do when trying to figure out whether to inform the police about what their children are up to. It seems to me pointless hype to dramatize our difficulties in knowing what to do by labeling our goal “indescribable,” “unexperiencable,” “unintelligible,” or “infinitely distant.”
I do not see the point of delving down to the roots of the difference between people who care about others’ suffering and those who don’t. For all I know, the difference is all acculturation, or all a matter of the environment of the first few days of infancy, or all in the genes. Maybe it’s acculturation in some people and genes in others. I don’t see why this should matter.
I take pragmatists and deconstructionists to be united in thinking that anything can be anything if you put in the right context, and that “right” just means the context that best serves somebody’s purposes at a certain time and place. Metaphysicians think that there is a Right Context, where things are seen as they truly are, without reference to anybody’s purposes. So they look for ultimate sources of this, and indefeasible presuppositions of that. Critchley keeps suggesting that moral seriousness requires us to conduct such a search. I think that if you can manage to act decently you can take moral seriousness or leave it alone.
As I see it, if we could ever stop trying to get beneath the propositional to the non-propositional, we should have pretty well overcome the metaphysician’s need for getting behind Appearance to Reality.
I think it was the beginning of wisdom in philosophy of language when Frege said that words only have meaning in the context of a sentence. Quine, Derrida and Davidson have carried through on Frege’s contextualism—Quine in his claim that a sentence has meaning only in the context of a lot of other sentences....
. . . my claim [is] that naturalism and romanticism are not only compatible, but natural allies....
. . . that Derrida likes to put things in question, whereas Dewey insisted on asking “What’s the problem?” Our [Deweyan/Rortyan] attitude is: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Keep on using it until you can think of some other sort of tool which might do the job better.
I agree with Richard Bernstein that to understand Derrida’s motives one most see his work against a political background—and in particular against the background of the Holocaust. But I also agree with Thomas McCarthy that deconstruction is marginal to politics—that if you want to do some political work, deconstructing texts is not a very efficient way to set about it.
. . . that I see politics, at least in democratic countries, as something to be conducted in as plain, blunt, public, easy-to-handle language as possible. I see the enemies of human happiness as just greed, sloth and hypocrisy, and I don’t see the need for philosophical depth charges in dealing with such surface enemies.
. . . I see European philosophical thought as still dominated by the Marxist notion of Ideologiekritik, and by the romantic notion of the philosopher as the person who penetrates behind the appearances of present social institutions to their reality. I distrust both notions.
As somebody trained in philosophy, I get most of my romantic kicks out of metaphysics-bashing. As a citizen of a democratic state, I do not think that metaphysics-bashing is—except in the very long term—of much use.
Although I have learned a great deal from Laclau’s writings, I nevertheless think of him as overestimating Derrida’s political utility, and thereby contributing to an unfortunate over-philosophication of leftist political debate. That over-philosophication has helped create, in the universities of the US and Britain (where Derrida’s, Laclau’s, and Chantal Mouffe’s books are very widely read and admired) a self-involved academic left which has become increasingly irrelevant to substantive political discussion.
Such over-philosophication is evinced when Laclau isolates notions like “toleration” or “the political” or “representation” and then points out that we cannot, simply by thinking about that notion, figure out what to do. Who except for a few wacky hyperrationalists, ever thought we could? Who takes seriously the idea that an idea, or notion, or principle, could contain the criteria of its own correct application?
I have nothing against higher levels of abstraction. They often come in handy. But I think that the pressure to rise to a higher level of abstraction should, so to speak, come from below. Locally useful abstractions ought to emerge out of local and banal political deliberations. They should not be purveyed ready-made by philosophers, who tend to take the jargon of their own discipline too seriously.
I suspect the notion of “condition of possibility and impossibility” is as useless to political deliberation as Cantorean diagonalization is to civil engineers. Surely the burden is on those who, like Laclau, think the former useful to explain just how and where the utility appears, rather than taking it for granted?
I am glad to have learned (from Saussure and Wittgenstein) that Locke was wrong in thinking of words as names of discrete ideas, that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and that words have the uses they do because of the possibility of using other, contrasting terms. But I see no way to make this new and improved philosophy of language relevant to my reflections on how political deliberations are, or should be, conducted. A theory of meaning seems as irrelevant here as a theory of a priori knowledge—différance as irrelevant as Grund; Saussure and Derrida as irrelevant as Kant and Hegel.
. . . there are no algorithms for deciding controversial questions
I see Laclau as continuing a tradition that began with Marx, and was encouraged by Lenin’s claim that you need to study Hegel before you can grasp your time in thought (not to mention Althusser’s claim that Marx gave us a “science”).
I think that it was a misfortune for the left that Marx, a brilliant political economist, happened to have taken a degree in philosophy when he was young. I also think that it is a misfortune for philosophers that their leftist admirers keep trying to make them relevant to the contemporary political situation. I see it as an advantage of American political thought that the philosophical side of Marx was never taken very seriously by American intellectuals.
===========================
Here's Jacques Derrida:
First, I would like to say, even if this shocks certain amongst you and even if I myself took my head in my hands when Richard Rorty said that I was sentimental and that I believed in happiness, I think that he’s right. This is something very complicated that I would like to come back to later, but I am very grateful to Richard Rorty for having dared to say something very close to my heart and which is essential to what I am trying to do. Even if it appears very provocative to say it and even if I began by protesting, I think that I was wrong. I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness; and I believe that this has an altogether determinant place in my work.
Deconstruction is hyper-politicizing in following paths and codes which are clearly not traditional, and I believe it awakens politicization in the way I mentioned above, that is, it permits us to think the political and think the democratic by granting us the space necessary in order not to be enclosed in the latter. In order to continue to pose the question of the political, it is necessary to withdraw something from the political and the same thing for democracy, which, of course, makes democracy a very paradoxical concept.
. . . my hope, as a man of the left, is that certain elements of deconstruction will have served or—because the struggle continues, particularly in the United States—will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic. I hope—and if I can continue to contribute a little to this I will be very content—that the political left in universities in the United States, France and elsewhere, will gain politically by employing deconstruction. To a certain extent, and in an unequal way, this is a movement that is already under way.
11-27-21
Rorty's riffs are well worth reading, but I found the views of his interlocutors, including Derrida himself, not interesting nor worth reading — and at times, almost crazy.
Below are extracts from Rorty's comments, followed at the end by some quotes from Derrida.
Here's Rorty:
==========================================
The big difference between Foucault and Derrida is that Derrida is a sentimental, hopeful, romantically idealistic writer. Foucault, on the other hand, often seems to be doing his best to have no social hope and no human feelings.
Derrida seems to me as good a humanist as Mill or Dewey. When Derrida talks about deconstruction as prophetic of “the democracy that is to come,” he seems to me to be expressing the same utopian social hope as was felt by these earlier dreamers.
[Derrida’s] essay “The Politics of Friendship” [is] one of my own favorites.
[Derrida’s] Anglophone fans typically use Derrida for the same purposes as Marx and Freud have long been used by literary critics. They think of him as providing new, improved tools for unmasking books and authors—showing what is really going on behind a false front. I do not think that a critic of metaphysics, in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, should be read in this way. For without the traditional concepts of metaphysics one cannot make sense of the appearance-reality distinction, and without that distinction one cannot make sense of the notion of “what is really going on.” No more metaphysics, no more unmasking.
These [Derridean] fans also think that there is a method called “deconstruction” which one can apply to texts and teach to students. I have never been able to figure out what this method is, nor what was being taught to students except some such maxim like “Find something that can be made to look self-contradictory, claim that that contradiction is the central message of the text, and ring some changes on it.” Application of this maxim produced, in the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of “deconstructive readings” of texts by American and British professors—readings which were as formulaic and as boring as the tens of thousands of readings which resulted from dutifully applying the maxim “Find something that can be made to sound like a symptom of an unresolved Oedipus complex.” This flurry of deconstructive activity seems to me to have added little to our understanding of literature and to have done little for leftist politics. On the contrary, by diverting attention from real politics, it has helped create a self-satisfied and insular academic left which—like the left of the 1960s—prides itself on not being co-opted by the system and thereby renders itself less able to improve the system. Irving Howe’s much-quoted jibe—“These people don’t want to take over the government; they just want to take over the English Department”—seems to me to remain an important criticism of this academic left.
[Deweyan/Rortyan] Naturalists, like Derrideans, have no use for what Derrida calls “a full presence which is beyond play,” and they distrust, as much as he does, the various God-surrogates which have been proposed for the role of such a full presence. Both kinds of philosophers see everything as constituted by its relations to other things, and as having no intrinsic, ineluctable nature. What it is depends on what it is being related to (or, if you like, what it differs from).
[Pragmatists/Rortyans] read Derrida on language as making pretty much the same criticisms of the Cartesian/Lockean/Husserlian view of “language as the expression of thought” which Wittgenstein made in his Philosophical Investigations. They read both Derrida and Wittgenstein not as having discovered the essential nature of language, or of anything else, but simply as having helped get rid of a misleading, and useless, picture—the one which Quine called the myth of the museum: the image of there being an object, the meaning, and next to it its label, the word. What pragmatists find most foreign in Derrida is his suspicion of empiricism, and naturalism—his assumption that these are forms of metaphysics, rather than replacements for metaphysics. To put it another way: they cannot understand why Derrida wants to sound transcendental, why he persists in taking the project of finding conditions of possibility seriously.
I think of Derrida as at his best in works like the “Envois” section of La Carte postale
I prefer texts like “Envois” and “Circonfession”
Politics, as I see it, is a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms and compromises—compromises which must, in a democratic society, be proposed and defended in terms much less esoteric than those in which we overcome the metaphysics of presence. Political thought centers on the attempt to formulate some hypotheses about how, and under what conditions, such reforms might be effected. I want to save radicalism and pathos for private moments, and stay reformist and pragmatic when it comes to my dealings with other people.
The more one reads either Heidegger or Derrida, the more continuities between the earlier and the later writings appear.
I do not see that, as [Critchley] puts it, “Deconstruction is justice, and justice is an experience of the unexperiencable.” I do not see the point of defining a commonly used term such as “justice” as the name of an impossibility. ... I think of justice as muddling through—in the way judges do when deciding hard cases, and parents do when trying to figure out whether to inform the police about what their children are up to. It seems to me pointless hype to dramatize our difficulties in knowing what to do by labeling our goal “indescribable,” “unexperiencable,” “unintelligible,” or “infinitely distant.”
I do not see the point of delving down to the roots of the difference between people who care about others’ suffering and those who don’t. For all I know, the difference is all acculturation, or all a matter of the environment of the first few days of infancy, or all in the genes. Maybe it’s acculturation in some people and genes in others. I don’t see why this should matter.
I take pragmatists and deconstructionists to be united in thinking that anything can be anything if you put in the right context, and that “right” just means the context that best serves somebody’s purposes at a certain time and place. Metaphysicians think that there is a Right Context, where things are seen as they truly are, without reference to anybody’s purposes. So they look for ultimate sources of this, and indefeasible presuppositions of that. Critchley keeps suggesting that moral seriousness requires us to conduct such a search. I think that if you can manage to act decently you can take moral seriousness or leave it alone.
As I see it, if we could ever stop trying to get beneath the propositional to the non-propositional, we should have pretty well overcome the metaphysician’s need for getting behind Appearance to Reality.
I think it was the beginning of wisdom in philosophy of language when Frege said that words only have meaning in the context of a sentence. Quine, Derrida and Davidson have carried through on Frege’s contextualism—Quine in his claim that a sentence has meaning only in the context of a lot of other sentences....
. . . my claim [is] that naturalism and romanticism are not only compatible, but natural allies....
. . . that Derrida likes to put things in question, whereas Dewey insisted on asking “What’s the problem?” Our [Deweyan/Rortyan] attitude is: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Keep on using it until you can think of some other sort of tool which might do the job better.
I agree with Richard Bernstein that to understand Derrida’s motives one most see his work against a political background—and in particular against the background of the Holocaust. But I also agree with Thomas McCarthy that deconstruction is marginal to politics—that if you want to do some political work, deconstructing texts is not a very efficient way to set about it.
. . . that I see politics, at least in democratic countries, as something to be conducted in as plain, blunt, public, easy-to-handle language as possible. I see the enemies of human happiness as just greed, sloth and hypocrisy, and I don’t see the need for philosophical depth charges in dealing with such surface enemies.
. . . I see European philosophical thought as still dominated by the Marxist notion of Ideologiekritik, and by the romantic notion of the philosopher as the person who penetrates behind the appearances of present social institutions to their reality. I distrust both notions.
As somebody trained in philosophy, I get most of my romantic kicks out of metaphysics-bashing. As a citizen of a democratic state, I do not think that metaphysics-bashing is—except in the very long term—of much use.
Although I have learned a great deal from Laclau’s writings, I nevertheless think of him as overestimating Derrida’s political utility, and thereby contributing to an unfortunate over-philosophication of leftist political debate. That over-philosophication has helped create, in the universities of the US and Britain (where Derrida’s, Laclau’s, and Chantal Mouffe’s books are very widely read and admired) a self-involved academic left which has become increasingly irrelevant to substantive political discussion.
Such over-philosophication is evinced when Laclau isolates notions like “toleration” or “the political” or “representation” and then points out that we cannot, simply by thinking about that notion, figure out what to do. Who except for a few wacky hyperrationalists, ever thought we could? Who takes seriously the idea that an idea, or notion, or principle, could contain the criteria of its own correct application?
I have nothing against higher levels of abstraction. They often come in handy. But I think that the pressure to rise to a higher level of abstraction should, so to speak, come from below. Locally useful abstractions ought to emerge out of local and banal political deliberations. They should not be purveyed ready-made by philosophers, who tend to take the jargon of their own discipline too seriously.
I suspect the notion of “condition of possibility and impossibility” is as useless to political deliberation as Cantorean diagonalization is to civil engineers. Surely the burden is on those who, like Laclau, think the former useful to explain just how and where the utility appears, rather than taking it for granted?
I am glad to have learned (from Saussure and Wittgenstein) that Locke was wrong in thinking of words as names of discrete ideas, that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and that words have the uses they do because of the possibility of using other, contrasting terms. But I see no way to make this new and improved philosophy of language relevant to my reflections on how political deliberations are, or should be, conducted. A theory of meaning seems as irrelevant here as a theory of a priori knowledge—différance as irrelevant as Grund; Saussure and Derrida as irrelevant as Kant and Hegel.
. . . there are no algorithms for deciding controversial questions
I see Laclau as continuing a tradition that began with Marx, and was encouraged by Lenin’s claim that you need to study Hegel before you can grasp your time in thought (not to mention Althusser’s claim that Marx gave us a “science”).
I think that it was a misfortune for the left that Marx, a brilliant political economist, happened to have taken a degree in philosophy when he was young. I also think that it is a misfortune for philosophers that their leftist admirers keep trying to make them relevant to the contemporary political situation. I see it as an advantage of American political thought that the philosophical side of Marx was never taken very seriously by American intellectuals.
===========================
Here's Jacques Derrida:
First, I would like to say, even if this shocks certain amongst you and even if I myself took my head in my hands when Richard Rorty said that I was sentimental and that I believed in happiness, I think that he’s right. This is something very complicated that I would like to come back to later, but I am very grateful to Richard Rorty for having dared to say something very close to my heart and which is essential to what I am trying to do. Even if it appears very provocative to say it and even if I began by protesting, I think that I was wrong. I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness; and I believe that this has an altogether determinant place in my work.
Deconstruction is hyper-politicizing in following paths and codes which are clearly not traditional, and I believe it awakens politicization in the way I mentioned above, that is, it permits us to think the political and think the democratic by granting us the space necessary in order not to be enclosed in the latter. In order to continue to pose the question of the political, it is necessary to withdraw something from the political and the same thing for democracy, which, of course, makes democracy a very paradoxical concept.
. . . my hope, as a man of the left, is that certain elements of deconstruction will have served or—because the struggle continues, particularly in the United States—will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic. I hope—and if I can continue to contribute a little to this I will be very content—that the political left in universities in the United States, France and elsewhere, will gain politically by employing deconstruction. To a certain extent, and in an unequal way, this is a movement that is already under way.
11-27-21
January 26, 2025
Özellikle tekrardan insanları siyasallaştırmaya nasıl başlayabiliriz üzerine söylediklerini kıymetli buluyorum
November 20, 2014
I think that this collection of essays provides diverse and enriching views of deconstruction's possible standpoints within the socio-political field.
October 17, 2024
A SYMPOSIUM BETWEEN RICHARD RORTY (PRAGMATISM) AND JACQUES DERRIDA (DECONSTRUCTION)
The introductory section of this 1996 book states, “Is pragmatism deconstructive? Is deconstruction pragmatic? These questions are levelled at two of the most prominent thinkers of our time. Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida are brought together in this collection in dialogue to discuss their respective positions… This book is the record of a symposium to discuss, amongst other things, how Derrida’s deconstruction and Rorty’s pragmatism could contribute to a non-foundational theory of democracy. Apart from Derrida and Rorty, two other eminent theorists took part in the discussion… They brought forward the points of convergence as well as the differences in both approaches and examined their political relevance.”
Rorty states, “Whereas [Derrida’s] Anglophone followers typically read books like [On Grammatology] as demonstrating philosophical, transcendental truths, I see them as propadeutic [preparatory study or instruction]. Derrida’s earlier, less idiosyncratic, more ‘strictly philosophical’ work---and in particular his works on Husserl---were necessary to get him a hearing, necessary to establish himself and get himself published. But, although I find these works very valuable, I do not read them as ‘contributions to philosophy,’ in the sense of books that demonstrate, now and forever, certain theses. I read them as books in which Derrida works out his private relationships to the figures who have meant most to him. I prefer texts like ‘Envois’ and ‘Circonfession’ because they seem to me more vivid and forceful forms of private self-creation than is possible through the explication of texts, even when this explication is exceptionally brilliant and original.” (Pg. 16-17)
Rorty later admits, “I agree with Simon Critchley that I have, in the past, made too much of the difference between earlier and later Derrida, and that ‘the closer one looks, the harder it is to find any substantial difference between earlier and later work’. The more one reads Heidegger or Derrida, the more continuities between the earlier and later writings appear. But I should still claim that just as all that programmatic throat-clearing stuff about ‘phenomenal ontology’ at the beginning of ‘Being and Time’ was something which Heidegger would have done better to have edited out, so all that supposedly deep stuff about the primordiality of the trace in Derrida’s earlier work looks like a young philosophy professor, still a bit unsure of himself, making quasi-professional noises.” (Pg. 41)
He continues, “One difference between Derrideans like Critchley and Deweyans like myself is that Derrida likes to put things in question, whereas Dewey insisted on asking, ‘What’s the problem?’ Our attitude is: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Keep on using it until you can think of some other sort of tool which might do the job better. Derrideans tend to think that that the more questioning, problematizing … you can squeeze into the day’s work, the better. Deweyans, on the other hand, think that you should only question when you find yourself in what Dewey called a ‘problematic situation’---a situation in which you are no longer sure of what you are doing.” (Pg. 44)
Derrida begins his essay, “First, I would like to say, even if this shocks certain among you and even if I myself took my head in my hands when Richard Rorty said that I was sentimental and that I believed in happiness, I think that he’s right. This is something very complicated that I would like to come back to later, but I am very grateful to Richard Rorty for having dared to say something very close to my heart and which is essential to what I am trying to do. Even if it appears very provocative to say it and even if I began by protesting, I think that I was wrong. I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness, and I believe that this has an altogether determinant place in my work.” (Pg. 77)
He continues, “I obviously cannot accept the public/private distinction in the way [Rorty] uses it in relation to my work…I have tried to withdraw a dimension of experience … from the public or political sphere… I would not call this private. In other words, for me the private is not defined by the singular (I do not say personal, because I find this a slightly confused notion) or the secret. In so far as I try to thematize a dimension of the secret that is absolutely irreducible to the public, I also resist the application of the public/private distinction to this dimension… It would not only have been impossible to publish ‘Glas’ without [Of Grammatology], but it would have been impossible to write Glas without the early work. It is here a question of an irreversible philosophical ---or quasi-philosophical---trajectory.” (Pg. 79)
This is an excellent, very insightful exchange between these two thinkers, and the two commentators add valuable commentary as well. It will probably be of most interest to those studying (whether sympathetically, or critically) Derrida, rather than those studying Rorty and Pragmatism.
The introductory section of this 1996 book states, “Is pragmatism deconstructive? Is deconstruction pragmatic? These questions are levelled at two of the most prominent thinkers of our time. Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida are brought together in this collection in dialogue to discuss their respective positions… This book is the record of a symposium to discuss, amongst other things, how Derrida’s deconstruction and Rorty’s pragmatism could contribute to a non-foundational theory of democracy. Apart from Derrida and Rorty, two other eminent theorists took part in the discussion… They brought forward the points of convergence as well as the differences in both approaches and examined their political relevance.”
Rorty states, “Whereas [Derrida’s] Anglophone followers typically read books like [On Grammatology] as demonstrating philosophical, transcendental truths, I see them as propadeutic [preparatory study or instruction]. Derrida’s earlier, less idiosyncratic, more ‘strictly philosophical’ work---and in particular his works on Husserl---were necessary to get him a hearing, necessary to establish himself and get himself published. But, although I find these works very valuable, I do not read them as ‘contributions to philosophy,’ in the sense of books that demonstrate, now and forever, certain theses. I read them as books in which Derrida works out his private relationships to the figures who have meant most to him. I prefer texts like ‘Envois’ and ‘Circonfession’ because they seem to me more vivid and forceful forms of private self-creation than is possible through the explication of texts, even when this explication is exceptionally brilliant and original.” (Pg. 16-17)
Rorty later admits, “I agree with Simon Critchley that I have, in the past, made too much of the difference between earlier and later Derrida, and that ‘the closer one looks, the harder it is to find any substantial difference between earlier and later work’. The more one reads Heidegger or Derrida, the more continuities between the earlier and later writings appear. But I should still claim that just as all that programmatic throat-clearing stuff about ‘phenomenal ontology’ at the beginning of ‘Being and Time’ was something which Heidegger would have done better to have edited out, so all that supposedly deep stuff about the primordiality of the trace in Derrida’s earlier work looks like a young philosophy professor, still a bit unsure of himself, making quasi-professional noises.” (Pg. 41)
He continues, “One difference between Derrideans like Critchley and Deweyans like myself is that Derrida likes to put things in question, whereas Dewey insisted on asking, ‘What’s the problem?’ Our attitude is: if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Keep on using it until you can think of some other sort of tool which might do the job better. Derrideans tend to think that that the more questioning, problematizing … you can squeeze into the day’s work, the better. Deweyans, on the other hand, think that you should only question when you find yourself in what Dewey called a ‘problematic situation’---a situation in which you are no longer sure of what you are doing.” (Pg. 44)
Derrida begins his essay, “First, I would like to say, even if this shocks certain among you and even if I myself took my head in my hands when Richard Rorty said that I was sentimental and that I believed in happiness, I think that he’s right. This is something very complicated that I would like to come back to later, but I am very grateful to Richard Rorty for having dared to say something very close to my heart and which is essential to what I am trying to do. Even if it appears very provocative to say it and even if I began by protesting, I think that I was wrong. I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness, and I believe that this has an altogether determinant place in my work.” (Pg. 77)
He continues, “I obviously cannot accept the public/private distinction in the way [Rorty] uses it in relation to my work…I have tried to withdraw a dimension of experience … from the public or political sphere… I would not call this private. In other words, for me the private is not defined by the singular (I do not say personal, because I find this a slightly confused notion) or the secret. In so far as I try to thematize a dimension of the secret that is absolutely irreducible to the public, I also resist the application of the public/private distinction to this dimension… It would not only have been impossible to publish ‘Glas’ without [Of Grammatology], but it would have been impossible to write Glas without the early work. It is here a question of an irreversible philosophical ---or quasi-philosophical---trajectory.” (Pg. 79)
This is an excellent, very insightful exchange between these two thinkers, and the two commentators add valuable commentary as well. It will probably be of most interest to those studying (whether sympathetically, or critically) Derrida, rather than those studying Rorty and Pragmatism.
February 13, 2019
Would have given it one more star if Rorty had taken his quite suggestive response to Laclau a step further by offering a more in-depth critique of the latter's own analysis. But of course, it would be an "unrortyan" move to expect from his part...
May 25, 2020
I loved this book.
June 14, 2021
Will definitely have to do a re-read at some point. Also makes me want to dig into some of Laclau’s works.
August 17, 2025
I agree with Bernstein's blurb: "a splendid and illuminating feast of agnostic debate".
March 23, 2016
Excellent collection of great thinkers being savage to each other in the best way
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews