The Domestication of Derrida ppt

The Domestication of Derrida Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research mono- graphs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nicholas Hewlett Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, Claire Colebrook Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan-Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell Husserl’s Phenomenology, Kevin Hermberg The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Du¨ttmann Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, T. Storm Heter Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert The Domestication of Derrida Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction Lorenzo Fabbri Translated by Daniele Manni English translation edited by Vuslat Demirkoparan and Ari Lee Laskin (University of California, Irvine, USA) Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com # Lorenzo Fabbri 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrie- val system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9778-0 ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9778-9 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk Contents Acknowledgements 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 Rorty’s 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 [...]... meant; after them, it was the modern scientists, then the German idealists All of them anxiously made the same claim: The Contingency of Being 19 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... nothing of this understanding’ (p 52) Positive sciences do not interrogate the pre-comprehension of the Being of beings they are directed toward And even if they did interrogate it, they would not come up with anything interesting to say because their positive inquiries can only confirm the fundamental mode of inquiry in which they move, without being able to grasp the reason of their manner of thematizing... persist in their language, to live in their vocabulary The capacity of foretelling the future – ‘Poets were properly called divine in the sense of diviners, from divinari, to divine or predict’29 – would have, in fact, granted them the authority to rule us in the present And the threatening character of the ghosts from the past grows with the Muses’ age This is because the more time that passes from the birth... the unreal rather than merely unveil what other stars have illuminated They want to be little deities capable of demiurgically producing worlds for the demos Rorty wonders where the privilege granted to the logic of creation, rather than to the logic of discovery, will lead us For instance, what are the consequences of our understanding of human nature? Greek philosophers were the first to declare they... liberated from the necessity of representing the structure of the mind or of the world According to Rorty, Derrida at his best plays with philosophy without yielding to the nostalgia for a time in which words pretended to exhibit the conditions of Being, and without the hope of selling out the possibilities of thinking In other words: deconstruction is able to reduce philosophy to a production of fantasies... importance in the constitution of who we are today But who are ‘we’? Rorty suggests that the mistake of this Heidegger (the one after the alleged Kehre of the 1930s) results from assuming that the words important for him were important also for the rest of humanity Heidegger’s project was thus twofold On the one hand, he wanted ‘to recapture a sense of contingency, of the fragility and riskiness of any human... useless The elementariness of elementary words, in Heidegger’s sense of ‘elementary,’ is a private and idiosyncratic matter The list of books which Heidegger read is no more central for Europe and its destiny than a lot of other lists of a lot of other books, and the concept of the destiny of Europe’ is, in any case, one we can do without.45 Philosophy is only one of the many literary genres of modern... experimenting of new ways of thinking; he would make the metaphysical quest for truth look trivial and idiosyncratic But if the ‘true’ Derrida, the one that starts after The Post Card, refuses the projects of digging up the infrastructure of the real, then how does one have to understand his work? In the sixth chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty writes – in a passage crucial for understanding the. .. by the inadequacy of the present.25 Let us now go back to Hegel According to Rorty, the history told in the Phenomenology about a spirit that gets nearer and nearer to selfconsciousness is the mise-en-scene of the eventful route that led ` Romanticism to dominate European culture, eliminating the competition of other forms of language: 15 The Contingency of Being What the Romantics expressed as the. .. should not think of himself as a superscientist, but as an ally of the artist Artists and philosophers are involved in the solar activity of creating words and worlds, of offering new descriptions of reality The ironist, having renounced the hope that the clear and distinct ideas of things themselves might become available to the mind’s infallible eye, has to be content to read the texts of tradition To . ‘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 The Contingency of Being. 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. Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.). In the second chapter, Derrida, the transcendental, and theoretical ascetism’, I question the legitimacy of attributing to Derrida the sort of ‘theoretical ascetism’ – to