Rorty on Derrida on Heidegger

Posted on July 2, 2008
Filed Under Derrida, Heidegger, Philosophy | 4 Comments

EE92D515-8AAB-4645-A512-27B3D946B4EC.jpgEnowning links to a blog that has a paper of Rorty on Derrida on Heidegger. It’s worth reading not because Rorty gets Derrida right (although I think he often does). Rather reading through the paper it reminds me of an anecdote about Derrida and Rorty that someone related in the comments at Leiter Reports. It’s worth quoting as it seems relevant juxtapositioned with Rorty’s paper here.

I only met Rorty once, at a UC Berkeley memorial conference for Derrida, held two weeks after Derrida’s death in late 2004. Rorty gave an interesting paper that argued (as I remember it) that Derridean philosophy was strictly anti-metaphysical. When it ended I took the opportunity to ask him about a comment he had made in a paper published 15 or 20 years earlier, and that seemed relevant to his talk, and that also seemed wrong. He had anticipated then that the appeals to mysterious, mystical explanatory elements in Derrida’s early philosophy of language was an aberration and that it would disappear from his later work. His paper that day seemed to be saying that that was what had happened. But this struck me as a serious misreading of Derrida, and I was able to quote to Rorty four or five passages from relatively recent Derrida papers in which the mystical elements were at play and stronger than ever. In Derrida’s essay on Kafka ‘Before the Law’, it’s possible to reconstruct the claim that the (platonic) form of literature is “an impossible nothing” that does not and could not exist but that nonetheless “calls in silence from its place of hiding” and “makes things happen”. Similarly, in Monolingualism of the Other, there is a suggestion that messianic and eschatological principles are at work in language.

I put this to Rorty and was taken aback by his response. He said something like, “I know. You’re right. It’s true. I always hoped he’d stop but he didn’t. But Derrida was my friend and I tried to overlook that stuff.” And he looked sad. It was an honest and touching and deeply humane response, but not what I had been expecting and not, I thought, philosophically credible.

What he said also reinforced an opinion that I’d been forming before then. This was that, as much as Rorty had a reputation as a wonderful reader of other philosophers, a lot of his readings bore no great resemblance to the works on which they were written. By contrast, I always enjoyed his analytic philosophy and his use of continental ideas in his critique of the analytic mainstream. I’d have loved to attend the class he taught on Gadamer and Davidson. It’s a shame his lecture notes weren’t (so far as I know) published.

I think this is right. I think the Derrida that Rorty talked about was the Derrida Rorty wanted Derrida to be.

Turning back to Rorty’s paper there’s a whole slew of things I could comment on. I’ll just pick a few.

Whereas Heidegger’s words express his reverence for the ineffable, the silent, and the enduring, Derrida’s express his affectionate admiration for the proliferating, the elusive, the allusive, the ever-self-recontextualizing.

…

By abandoning Heideggerian nostalgia, Derrida freed himself from those elements in Heidegger’s thought which chimed with Heidegger’s own sentimental pastoralism and nationalism traits which led him to Nazism. Derrida thus helped free Heidegger up for the use of the political left.

I think what’s so interesting is that Derrida himself after noting these elements in Heidegger then spends the next decades doing the same sort of thing in perhaps a slightly different way. Even Heidegger himself in his latter period can be seen as using different approaches to get at what he’s trying to say without succeeding. The fact that there is a certain ineffability isn’t an error. I’m not sure it’s correct to say Heidegger didn’t focus on the proliferating and elusive. His later work seems a demonstration of this.

Now one can say that the ineffable Derrida talks of is less Being as Truth than a kind of existence. In that Derrida follows Levinas against Heidegger. But as I’ve oft said the difference is less than it sometimes appears. Rorty, however, appears to think that Derrida moves away from the ineffable merely to the pluralistic. I don’t think that’s right – although many of these elements aren’t quite as pronounced in this paper.

There are two moves in expressing the ineffable. The one is a move towards silence, which as Rorty notes is the direction Heidegger heads. He even wrote that, “man speaks by being silent.” The other is the path of negative theology where one writes more and more, denying what one writes. I think this is the move Derrida takes. So Rorty is right here even if he exaggerates the differences a tad much.

The question is whether Derrida’s later moves to make his philosophy relevant to politics is able to escape from “the sentimentalism” that beset Heidegger. I’m not sure it does, although he sure gives it his best try.

The question raised by Novitz’ criticism is whether the fact (which Derrida would hardly deny) that there are non-linguistic objects which constrain (in straightforwardly physical, causal ways) both our linguistic and our non-linguistic behaviour refutes the Derridean suggestion that, in Novitz’ words, ‘our concepts and meanings … do not represent, convey, or correspond to a non-linguistic reality, a “transcendental signified”‘ (’Rage’, p.49). 8 There is obviously a gap between ‘X constrains Y’ and ‘Y represents, conveys or corresponds to X’. ‘Realist’ philosophers think that they can cross this gap. They think that the causal influence of the environment upon linguistic behaviour enables us to give a clear sense to the claim that some bits of language ‘correspond’ to something non-linguistic.

This is right as far as it goes. And indeed is why I keep bringing up Peirce since he gets at this issue quite clearly and precisely. The big difference is that Peirce allows, if only as a regulative principle, the Aristotilean ideal. As Rorty himself says,

Derrida says of the logocentric philosophers who hold out this hope of immediacy: ‘Univocity is the essence, or better, the telos of language. No philosophy has ever renounced this Aristotelian ideal. This ideal is philosophy.’ (Margins, p. 247) To succeed in twisting free of the logocentric tradition would be to write, and to read, in such a way as to renounce this ideal.

The question is whether Derrida’s later moves to make his philosophy relevant to politics is able to escape from “the sentimentalism” that beset Heidegger. This leads me to the best part of Rorty’s paper. The following:

Searle here raises perhaps the most widespread objection to deconstructionism: why should we think that the abandonment of Platonic ideas and strivings would have important ramifications for the rest of culture?

My sense is Derrida took this to heart and it explains the final period of his writing where he started to back off from many of the extravagances of his work in the 70′s and 80′s. But did he make deconstruction relevant? I’m not sure he did ultimately. I think it can be done but the very style Derrida had engaged in made, I think, his work more prone for misuse and abuse than to lead people towards a better political ideal.

Related posts:

  1. Countermemory on Derrida, Nietzsche and Heidegger
  2. Trumpery, Heidegger and Derrida
  3. Best Introduction to Derrida?
  4. Derrida and Universals
  5. Thoughts on Derrida and Realism
  6. Derrida and Thrownness

Comments

4 Responses to “Rorty on Derrida on Heidegger”

I agree with the most of the things you wrote. But I am not sure about your concluding remark which says,”I think, his work more prone for misuse and abuse than to lead people towards a better political ideal.”

Following Richard Beardsworth’s reading of Derrida, there are two possible futures for Derrida’s philosophy: a “left-wing” Derrideanism which would return to the earlier texts of Derrida which read metaphysical logic in terms of the disavowal of techne; a “right-wing” Derrideanism which would follow up on more recent work of Derrida “on the absolute originarity of the promise and of his reorganization of religious discourse to think and describe it.”

I think the problem with Derrida’s texts is that they point to an opening but not to a filling. That is all forms of politics are expressions of Being and actions of existing agents. I think that what Derrida has found (and I agree with him) is simply too broad to be able to do much with in the way he wants to do it.

That’s not to say that by being open to things like Justice, Giving, and so forth we can’t come to understand them and have them act upon us. But I think that this coming forth can’t properly be called right wing or left wing.

3 Michael Dorfman on July 3rd, 2008 3:36 am

middlexeast: Following Richard Beardsworth’s reading of Derrida, there are two possible futures for Derrida’s philosophy: a “left-wing” Derrideanism which would return to the earlier texts of Derrida which read metaphysical logic in terms of the disavowal of techne; a “right-wing” Derrideanism which would follow up on more recent work of Derrida “on the absolute originarity of the promise and of his reorganization of religious discourse to think and describe it.”

This seems quite odd to me, in a number of ways. First of all, I don’t see what would lead one to label Derrida’s more recent work on “the promise” as “right-wing” in any sense; in fact, some of the most fundamental work around these issues came in “Specters of Marx”.

Secondly, and perhaps more decisively, I’m not sure how we could distinguish between these two “Derridas” that are allegedly in opposition– I don’t see any radical discontinuity between the later works and, say, “Violence and Metaphysics”– in fact, they are all of a piece. The “originarity of the promise” follows directly from Derrida’s reading of Levinas and Husserl– it (chronologically) precedes the more famous works of 1967 and 1972.

I also agree that whatever one says about Derrida’s styles or the focus of his work that he’s been remarkably consistent philosophically.

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