Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity - Chapter Six

Chapter Six:  From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida

Unfamiliar Terms:

1.  phonemes

2.  litany

3.  eschatoteleological

4.  envisage

5.  metavocabulary

6.  ascribes

7.  lucubrations

8.  pedagogic

9.  ineffability

10.  paradigmatic

11.  noodging

12.  conflation

13.  finitude

14.  recontextualization

15.  dandled

16.  bildungsroman

17.  nominalism

18.  banalized

19.  neologisms

20.  incommensurable

Ten Key Points:

1.  “…the myth of a lost language, of ‘elementary words’ whose force needs to be restored, is just one more attempt to believe that some words are privileged over others by a power not ourselves, that some final vocabularies are closer to something transhistorical and noncontingent than others.”  This is Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger.  He borrows this criticism from Derrida, whom he spends the rest of the chapter talking about.

2.  Derrida’s earlier works try to go deeper than Heidegger went, but in the search for the same thing.  Both philosophers wanted find words which go “beyond” metaphysics.  “Words which have force apart from us and display their own contingency.”  Derrida has two works: his earlier works which are more professional and his later works which are more personal. 

3.  Rorty states as his problem with “conditions of possibility” existing is that one would have to know it exists before it exists.  “The realm of possibility expands whenever a new vocabulary is invented, so that to find ‘conditions of possibility’ would require us to envisage all such inventions before their occurrence.”

4.   “The later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking and thereby breaks down the tension between ironism and theorizing.  He simply drops theory- the attempt to see his predecessors steadily and whole- in favor of fantasizing about those predecessors, playing with them, giving free rein to the trains of associations they produce.”Rorty praises Derrida’s later writings by saying that these suggestions he had were rarely done before him.

5.  Derrida learned from the mistakes of Heidegger’s use of “elementary words” and figured out that one needs to invent a style so different so that one’s books cannot be compared to their predecessors.  “The attempt to pare language down to ‘elementary words’ was futile.

6.  He then uses children as the symbol for generality.  “In Derrida’s view, nothing ever speaks ‘by itself,’ because nothing has the primordiality- the nonrelational, absolute, character- metaphysicians seek.  Nevertheless, we cannot help wanting to produce something which will so speak.  If there were a ‘unique name,’ and ‘elementary word,’ or ‘conditionless condition of possibility,’ this would be, for Derrida, a tragedy.”

7.  There is then a section about the “origin of jokes”.  In this he compares Freud and Heidegger.  “In Freud’s account of the unconscious origins of jokes, and in Heidegger’s (largely fake) eytmologies, we get the same attention to what most of the books of la grand époque have treated as inessential- the “material” and “accidental” features of the marks and noises people use to get what they want.  Rorty says that if this is true than Derrida’s puns, verbal resonances, and graphical jokes in his later works should be expected of somebody who only sends postcards.

8.  Rorty next talks about the “Fido”-Fido theory of meaning.  This theory is the idea that “all words are names”.  “Words get their sense not simply be association with their referents (if any) but by the relation of their uses to the uses of other words.”  The difference between “Fido” and Fido is that in one instance you are just mentioning a word and in the other you are using it as a dogs name.

9.  “Concepts do not kill anything, even themselves; people kill concepts.”  In this section Rorty talks about recontextualization and how Socrates recontextualized Homer and Hegel recontextualized Socrates and Derrida recontextualized Hegel, Austin, Searle, and everybody else he reads.

10.  Finally Rorty decides that Derrida is resembling the Nietzsche less and less and Proust more and more.  “He is concerned less and less with the sublime and ineffable, and more and more with the beautiful, if fantastical, rearrangement of what he remembers.”  Derrida has achieved a freedom that not many other philosophers could have achieved.

Summary:

Rorty compares Derrida to Heidegger, Nietzsche, Gasche, Freud, Russell, and Proust.  He says that Derrida has surpassed all of these philosophers except Proust whom he remains on the same level with.