Rorty on Derrida

Rorty goes some heroic miles to save Derrida from the anal-lytic dung heap. Are they worth traveling with him?

If Derrida had limited himself to pointing out that choice and selective emphasis underlie all philosophical systems — as Rorty wants him to do…

If he had also limited himself to pointing out how the excluded concepts and/or assumptions required to make ‘the system work’ sometimes ‘return’ implicitly in the thinking that explicitly excludes them — as Rorty thinks he does…

If these two things were true, then Derrida’s work would be of great value in reading the history of philosophy — as Rorty thinks it is. In following Derrida, readers would be brought to understand the choices philosophers have made when parsing what Dewey called “crude,” “ordinary experience,” as they construct their systems. In other words, it would take us back to that from which one draws when starting a philosophy, however inchoate the drawing, and oblique the concepts.

But he didn’t. Instead, Derrida developed a baroque mélange that was a system but not a system, one that required a master concept that was neither “master” nor “concept,” one carried out in a grammatology not involving grammar — one thing after another that did/did not include/exclude its contrary/same element. It just gets silly. Rudolphe Gasche does a commendable job of unpacking this silliness into something semi-sensible, and Christopher Norris defends the general idea. The net result, though: even after this charitable and impressively patient erudition, Derrida ends up wrapped up in a type of theoretical reflection trying to catch its own tail in the very act of reflecting and theorizing, resulting in an interpretive engine that only runs in one tight little itty-bitty circle, despite its expansiveness into texts.

What is this circle? What is his choice and selective emphasis from “crude,” “ordinary” experience? What is the supposition fueling the engine of that circle?

The interplay of presence and absence, particularly in communication via words and signs.

Specifically, Derrida goes from “sometimes the thing itself steals away,” as it does from time to time (and abstractly considered always can), to “the thing itself always steals away,” committing reader through this emphasis to an array of signs endlessly ‘deferring’ and ‘differing’ to and from one another, with no veritable traction in principle in experience, the things themselves, or with the things of a world we have in common, out of which we derive common sense. In other words, for the “metaphysics of presence” he sees in philosophy Derrida substitutes his own metaphysics of absence, one tyrannized by signs fortified with difference, one he read back into the tradition, always already “finding” it there, in the elements thinkers within that tradition excluded in their selective emphasis.

The con beneath this interpretative shell game he called “deconstruction”: philosophers must exclude. They must selectively emphasize, including one meaning and excluding another, otherwise they never get off the ground. And — shocker — they use words and signs to do this, none of which are ever completely determinable, hence the exclusions can never be complete or the inclusions all-inclusive.

In light of this necessary incompleteness, deconstruction can always be made to ‘fit the facts’ of a text, which can’t be complete, even as it claims there are no facts — anywhere — to fit, philosophy being “text” all the way down, lacking an ‘inside’ or an ‘outside’ to boot. Since the thing itself always steals away, there must not be things themselves outside the text, to which it refers.

Now, one can always pretend words don’t reach things and reveal experiences, on the basis that they never have a completely determinable meaning, absent reference to other words, which in turn are never completely determinable either…

…but…

…the whole enterprise is pointlessness; ridiculous, even. When reading philosophers, it is enough to point out and re-evaluate the conceptual choices and commitments they make, without invoking a “metaphysics of absence,” justified by differance, which sends readers through circles and ellipses ‘within the text’ because meaning can never end in one place. When used in this way, “differance” becomes an invocation that excuses intelligent criticism and replaces it with a self-absorbed game of self-referential gestures, played with foolish attachment to its own erudition. Intelligently re-evaluating philosophical commitments should be done from time to time, either with one’s own ideas, or through testing those stated against newly revealed features of “crude” “ordinary” experience — features in part revealed through the very ideas under review.

Deconstruction, however, is not it.

If you’re still tempted, perhaps it’s good to keep an adage in mind: don’t become a maniacal inversion of whatever it is you love to hate, otherwise you’ll end up looking as ridiculous as Derrida (though, to be fair, you’ll be compelling to people who can do no better, or to those who share your recreational skepticism — aka Richard Rorty).

But re-evaluate against what? How? To what end?

Indeed, those are the questions. Just don’t beg them with the one-trick pony ride that is differance…