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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
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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
Acknowledgements
Many people have been close to this book in the different phases of its
realization. My warmest gratitude goes to my family for having sup-
ported me in all my endeavours. Donatella Di Cesare had the patience
of following and encouraging my work from its very beginning. I am
grateful to Ari Lee Laskin, Arianna Lodeserto, Daniele Manni and
Nicola Zippel, who provided extensive and lively comments to earlier
drafts. I would also like to thank David Carroll, Ellen Burt, Franca
Hamber, Gol Bazargani and my friend James Chiampi for their

impeccable hospitality in the department of French and Italian at the
University of California, Irvine. Many thanks also to Ngu
˜
gı
˜
wa Thiong’o
and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine
for the generous financial support to this project.
Without Vuslat Demirkoparan, this book would have never come to
light. While I take full responsibility for its weaknesses, she should be
credited for all the good moments of The Domestication of Derrida.
I am also grateful to the following: Milan Kundera and Faber &
Faber Ltd for the permission to quote from The Unbearable Lightness of
Being; Cambridge University Press for the permission to quote from
Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Fata Morgana for the
permission to quote from Maurice Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort (
#
1994); Les Editions de Minuit for the permission to quote from Gilles
Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (
# 1991);
Random House Inc., for the permission to quote from Michel Fou-
cault’s ‘Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with
Michel Foucault’ (in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow);
Routledge for the permission to quote from Jacques Derrida’s
‘Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism’ (in Deconstruction and
Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe); Stanford University Press for
the permission to quote from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Pardes: the writing of
potentiality’ (in Potentialities, edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen); Verso
for the permission to quote from Jacques Derrida’s ‘Marx & Sons’ and
Terry Eagleton’s ‘Marxism without Marxism’ (both in Ghostly Demar-

cations, edited by Michael Sprinker).
An earlier and very different version of this project was published in
Italian by Mimesis in 2006 under the title L’addomesticamento di Derrida.
Pragmatismo/Decostruzione.
Rome–Irvine
November 2007
Introduction
Taking Rorty Seriously
The first time I read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity –it
was 1999 and I was a sophomore in the Faculty of Philosophy at the
University of Rome – I clearly felt that I was reading one of the most
influential books in contemporary philosophy: not surprisingly,
nobody on the stuffy Italian philosophical scene was talking about it.
With its at once light-hearted and corrosive irony against philosophers’
egotism, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity changed the way I looked at
philosophy both as a discipline and as a faculty. And yet there was
something unsettling in Rorty’s attempt to strip post-Hegelian irony of
any kind of public dimension: for me, the book was a powerful critique
of the rigid organization of the programI was attending.
I started reading Jacques Derrida at the same time: Rorty’s inter-
pretation of deconstruction was fundamental for orienting me in
Derrida’s apparently senseless writing. And yet, the more I read Der-
rida, the more I became aware that Rorty’s reading was missing
something very important. Rorty’s account of deconstruction as an
anti-philosophy, as merely a brilliant artistic creation, was too reductive
insofar as it completely ignored all the essays in which Derrida clearly
resisted the possibility of taking leave from the metaphysical language.
Rorty’s attempt to confine Derrida to prestigious yet strictly academic
venues was excessively disengaged and clashed against the Deleuzian
idea of concepts as weapons to interfere with and intervene into ‘the

real’. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – the book that changed my way
of thinking about philosophy, the book whose dancing and laughing
style is still unmatched for me – eventually appeared to be profoundly
inadequate. The Domestication of Derrida also tells the story between
Rorty and me (a story of which he was informed only by a couple of
quick emails). The first chapter is marked by my initial trust in Rorty’s
pragmatism, the second and the third testify to my deep disappoint-
ment with it.
In the first section of this book, I will show the strong points of
Rorty’s reading. In order to challenge effectively his attempt to align
deconstruction with the American liberal and pragmatist traditions, I
believe it is important to take some time to get attuned to the reasons
behind Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida. In fact, the vast majority of
the essays that have been dedicated to the relation between
pragmatism and deconstruction are so hasty to ‘defend’ Derrida from
Rorty, that they end up underestimating the force of Rorty’s reading
protocol. I will argue that to contextualize his appropriation of
deconstruction, it is first necessary to recognize the two opposite
answers that, according to Rorty, have been given to the question: what
is philosophy? Kant gives the first type of answer in Critique of Pure
Reason, specifically in the section on ‘Transcendental schematism’.
Kant’s idea of philosophy was inspired by the need to define the par-
ticularity that could distinguish philosophy from empirical sciences.
While ecclesiastic institutions dominated the European intellectual
scene, philosophy found its reason for being in the alliance with
empirical sciences against ecclesiastic obscurantism. But, once the
battle against religion was won, philosophy urgently felt the need to
mark its distinctiveness from the scientific inquirers in order to avoid
being extinguished by them. Kant’s attempt to secure philosophy’s
survival consisted in identifying its essence with epistemology.

Exceeding every specific relation with things, philosophy shows the
conditions of possibility for the very knowledge of the world. Philoso-
phy thus self-justifies its existence by affirming that it is the only
transcendental science insofar as it is the only science that reflects on
the structure of the faculty of knowledge producing judgements that
are both (i) synthetic, because their contents are not already logically
contained in the definition of the object considered, and (ii) a priori,
since they do not have any involvement with any kind of empirical or
physiological research.
The second answer to the question about the essence of philosophy
arises instead from the conviction that no epistemological discourse
can succeed in the transcendental task of unveiling the truth of the
mind–world interaction. Moreover, as Donald Davidson argues in his
‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, the very Kantian belief that
the world of phenomena would be organized by the schematic activity
of the mind is something we cannot make good sense of. Therefore, it
is impossible for a discourse to find its justification in the reference to
the schematism of the mind. For this second tradition of thought,
which for Rorty started with Hegel, the only ‘thing’ that makes a sen-
tence true is another sentence: the Truth is just what a certain his-
torically situated community believes in. Thinking of the truth not as a
timeless being that can be discovered, but rather as a human artefact
that is constituted through the flow of history, the strong authors
belonging to the Hegelian tradition are obsessed by the desire to
create something new: by every means they want to avoid reproducing
that which already exists, because this would coincide with falling vic-
tim to another author’s system. It is in the space opened up by
Hegelian philosophy that Rorty proposes to collocate Derrida: Derrida
would help us lose interest in Kantian vocabulary and in its
The Domestication of Derrida2

adjournments (i.e., analytic philosophy) and get interested in experi-
menting 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 whole pragmatist rearran-
gement of deconstruction – that Derrida’s greatest merit consists in
transforming philosophical reflection into a private matter, therefore
bridging the gap between theory and literature. When Derrida realized
the inconsistencies of any epistemological project, he got rid of the
craving for generality that still haunted his earlier works. He dropped
theory and started exploring the mental associations produced by a
thought 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 fanta-
sies which do not claim to have any epistemological or public rele-
vance. I will argue that Rorty’s reading ends up assigning to the
deconstructive operations two kinds of privacy: deconstruction is pri-
vate because it breaks free from every metaphysical and transcendental
demand, privatizing itself in the autobiographical genre, but it is also
private because it deprives itself of any political pretension.
It is precisely this double privacy that I will challenge in The Domes-
tication of Derrida. After tracking the context and tone of Rorty’s prag-
matism, I will confront the two key features of his privatization of
deconstruction: on the one hand, the reduction of deconstructive

writing to a sort of autobiographical drift, an activity liberated from the
presuppositions on which the whole philosophical tradition, from
Descartes to Kant and beyond, is grounded; on the other hand, the
belief that Derrida dismisses the endeavour to engage philosophy with
political struggle, a concern that has deeply dominated French con-
temporary thought (Sartre, Foucault, 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 use a fortunate expression coined by
Rodolphe Gasche´ – which one can see at work in Ernst Tugendhat: is
Derrida really a hero in the virtuous and strenuous resistance to the
temptation of falling back into the much maligned presuppositions of
transcendental philosophy? To answer such a question, I comment on
two of Derrida’s texts that Rorty heavily relies on. While Rorty gives the
idea that ‘White mythology’ and ‘Envois’ are the places where the
Introduction 3
passage from theory to autobiography is clearly announced and fully
accomplished, I will argue that what is at stake in these important
essays is a contamination of the private with the public. That is to say,
an intermingling of biography with philosophy, and not the reduction
of theory to literature. From a deconstructive point of view, the post-
philosophical and postmodern desire of stepping beyond philosophy is
both necessary and impossible: how could it be possible to create a
language so purely singular and private that it avoids any general
claims? Rethinking the actual possibility of a passage from philosophy
to literature, of a mode of living that has no relation with reflection
and theory, Derrida’s operation dwells in an aporetic dimension that is
far from the euphoria that organizes Rorty’s gestures. I will conclude
the chapter by arguing that Rorty evades the real depth and range of
the problems addressed by Derrida, and in so doing, his neo-pragma-

tism falls victim to the worst contradictions.
In the third and conclusive chapter of the book, ‘The resistance of
theory’, I will question Rorty’s exile of deconstruction away from the
public sphere, an exile intended to save Derrida from the charges filed
against him in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Habermas, in the
twelve lectures delivered in Paris in the early 1980s, condemned post-
structuralism for being politically dangerous because its radical cri-
tique of reason undermined the very possibility of a universal and
rational grounding democracy. Rorty claims, quite surprisingly, that
one should not worry about the possible effects of deconstruction
because post-structuralism does not have any public relevance at all. By
stating this, Rorty is trying to persuade us that theory and politics are
two realms totally separated from one another. Being actively and
positively a ‘political animal’, means neither thinking nor caring about
what is achieved in the activity of philosophical critique: I connect this
belief of Rorty’s to the distinction between the public and the private
drawn by Kant in his 1784 ‘An answer to the question: what is
enlightenment?’. My aim is to demonstrate that Rorty tries to draw a
line between university and the ‘real’ world, between theory and life,
that is even more conservative and policing than the one Kant had
himself proposed. Discussing in detail Derrida’s essays on the institu-
tion called ‘university’ and relating them to Foucault’s work on
Enlightenment, I will argue that, pace Rorty, it is impossible to forge
such a strict and clear separation between theory and practice, the
private and the public. Following Derrida, I will argue that philosophy
and the Humanities are intrinsically political spaces because in the
practice of a constant and radical problematizing lies the potentiality of
favouring new possibilities of existence and of being-together: doing
‘theory’ is a matter of disjointing the presence of the present in order
to let unexpected futures come. While Derrida confirms the structural

necessity for philosophy to be critically engaged in the weakening of
The Domestication of Derrida4
actuality, Rorty – in essays such as ‘The priority of democracy to phi-
losophy’ – suggests that everything must be done to enforce the ‘now’
and defend it from any radical modification. For Rorty, philosophy
should not try to disturb what we are today: it is surely true that the
pattern of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies has imposed
on its members many different constraints, but the advantages pro-
voked by this pattern compensate by far for the constraints. The only
political task philosophy should thus assume is to reinforce the solidity
and the solidarity of the form of life we were trained to be. Working for
the security and the sanity of the social body as a perfect epidemiologist
would do, Rorty believes in a politics whose sole objective is to manage
social tensions in order to sustain our actual form of life.
The Domestication of Derrida might at first appear as a hostile critique
of pragmatism. But I hope that one will recognize in it the signs of my
admired and grateful homage to the late Richard Rorty.
Introduction 5
Chapter 1
The Contingency of Being
Two Ideas of Philosophy: Kant and Hegel
What is the discipline commonly known as philosophy concerned with?
Which fields of research must a scholar investigate in order to be
admitted in the circle of philosophy? Richard Rorty claims that for such
a question to be answered, one has to go back to Kant and understand
his mode of concerning philosophy. Once in fact the faculty that
legitimizes the discipline of philosophy is recognized, so too will
the existence of Philosophy as a faculty.
1

According to Rorty, Kant had to define the specificity of philosophy
to assure its difference and autonomy from natural sciences. As long as
ecclesiastical institutions dominated the European intellectual scene,
philosophy was content with finding its raison d’eˆtre in the alliance with
science against the obscurantism of the Church.
Looking backward we see Descartes and Hobbes as ‘beginning modern
philosophy,’ but they thought of their own cultural role in terms of what
Lecky was to call ‘the warfare between science and theology.’ They were
fighting (albeit discreetly) to make the intellectual world safe for Coperni-
cus and Galileo.
2
It was only after the battle against religion was won that philosophy
started feeling the exigency of claiming a significant difference from
the sciences: once the mission of clearing the path for scientific revo-
lution had been accomplished, philosophy risked being left without a
purpose. Kant was the first consciously to identify the essence of phi-
losophy as ‘theory of knowledge’, thus allowing for the survival of
philosophy and securing it as an autonomous discipline.
The self-understanding of philosophy as the science able to evaluate
the legitimacy of other scientific discourses is not a characteristic lim-
ited to modern philosophy; this self-understanding continues, for
example, all the way until modern phenomenology. The influence of
the Kantian identification of philosophy as epistemology is especially
clear in Martin Heidegger’s claim that Being is the proper and sole theme of
philosophy.
3
Whereas positive sciences have a positional character, that is,
they deal with beings or domains of beings that are given, determined
and posited, philosophy posits nothing. Philosophy does not relate
positively a specific and limited domain of being, but rather investi-

gates the activity of positing itself, and it does so immune from any
involvement with empirical-physiological inquiry. As Heidegger
explains in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: ‘The positive positing of
any being includes within itself an a priori knowledge and an a priori
understanding of the Being’s being, although the positive experience
of such a being knows 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 beings. For this reason, philosophy – a ‘totally
different science’ as Heidegger calls it (p. 52) – reserves for itself the
task of unveiling the hidden presuppositions of the activity of knowing.
However, philosophy alleges its discourse to be distinct from science’s
not only in light of the theme it deals with, but also for the absolute
rigour that drives its investigation. By simply positing beings, positive
sciences end up leaving unseen the act of positing itself. The other
tekhnai – that is to say, all the argumentative techniques besides phi-
losophy – are naive, for they cannot enlighten their own functioning.
Positive sciences are surely productive, but they can only produce
knowledge on the basis of some unquestioned presupposition. In this
vein, Heidegger states that sciences can only dream about their the-
matic objects since their slumbering eyes are not open enough to be
conscious of their own grounds (p. 54). Philosophy, by contrast, does
not assume anything to be obvious; in its relentless advance, it never
succumbs to spells of drowsiness. Not tolerating oversights, philosophy
boasts a clear and profound vision.
Philosophy – says Rorty – comes to be characterized on the basis of its
rigorous method and epistemological interest. One can only be con-

sidered a true philosopher when he awakens from the science-induced
nap and alertly reveals the assumptions of scientific positions. Philoso-
phy is the presuppositionless and rigorous science – the only true sci-
ence, that is – because it confronts the problem of the very possibility of
knowledge.
4
Facing such a problem meant, for Kant, instituting a court
which would eventually distinguish reason’s fair demands from the
groundless ones. Kant calls this activity critique rather than doctrine,since
its aim is not to expand the existing knowledges, but to rectify them.
Thereby, the ‘critique of pure reason’ transforms itself into a critique of
culture. Philosophy assumes the position of choosing which areas of
culture enjoy a special relation to reality.
5
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the
Kantian trial is set in motion by the distinction between intuitions and
The Domestication of Derrida8
concepts. ‘Looking inside us’ we discover that, through concepts, the
intellect synthesizes the data gathered by sensation in its original
receptiveness, making representation possible: ‘Sensory intuitions
are identified first of all as the source of knowledge of contingent
truths, and concepts as the source of knowledge of necessary truths.’
6
Two different kinds of knowledge, whose propositions are character-
ized by two different degrees of truthfulness, correspond to two genres
of beings. A fracture within the realm of the real is evident: outside,
there is a multiplicity simply given to us, from which we obtain con-
tingent and trivial truths; inside, an inside though neither empirical nor
physical, lies a superior level of reality, which enables the world ‘out
there’ to appear. The truthfulness of this unconditioned yet con-

ditioning stratum of reality is incontestable not because of a stable
agreement on the propositions used to describe it, but because these
propositions, in their mute transparency, maintain a privileged relation
with a non-human reality. When we think ‘philosophically’ we cannot
evade the sovereignty exercised upon us by such a reality. The idle
chatter fades away, leaving room for a silent observance of the truth. To
locate the place where every argument meets its end, is to reach the
foundation of knowledge.
Yet the transcendental project of knowledge foundation, which
claims itself to be presuppositionless, can take place only if the authority
of one single presupposition remains unquestioned. Rorty, in his 1979
‘Transcendental arguments, self-reference, and pragmatism’, describes
such a ‘transcendental presupposition’ as the belief that certain lan-
guages do not hopelessly depart from factual truth but accurately mir-
ror the very structure which governs the world.
7
This presupposition has
transcendental value for any transcendental argument, since the
assumption of a structural identity in the relation between logos and
reality is the only guarantee of the possibility for a statement to repre-
sent a given domain of being. Modern philosophy is held in check by
the transcendental presupposition and, with it, by the optical meta-
phors that connote the interaction between mind and world:
The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as
a great mirror, containing various representations – some accurate, some
not – and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. Without
the notion of the mind as a mirror, the notion of the knowledge as accuracy
of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion,
the strategy common to Descartes and Kant – getting more accurate
representation by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to

speak – would not have made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent
claims that philosophy could consist of ‘conceptual analysis’ or ‘phenom-
enological analysis’ ‘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 9
Rorty wonders if we can still exploit the image of the mind as mirror:
did the mirroring theories succeed in their effort to explain how lan-
guage reflects reality, or did they fail? If we are unsatisfied with the way
in which philosophy has tried thus far to legitimize the transcendental
presupposition, we can choose among three options:
1. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way to
demonstrate the transcendental presupposition. In this case, we
would engage with the Kantian question on the possibility of
knowledge.
2. We can search for a transparent, accurate and definitive way to
demonstrate the fallaciousness of the transcendental pre-
supposition. In this case we would still be engaged with the
Kantian question on the possibility of knowledge.
3. We can decide that it is a waste of time either to attempt to
legitimize or to invalidate the transcendental presupposition.
9
The first two options share the belief that philosophy’s goal is to
enlighten the true structure of knowledge, the relation between factual
reality and propositions. The third one instead concludes that it does
not pay to keep working within the sophists–Plato–Hume–Kant
mechanism, and hopes for a philosophy that will not be a theory of
knowledge. This third track leads, according to Rorty, to ironist
theory.

10
What clearly differentiates irony from traditional philosophical
thought is that the former does not acknowledge the vocabulary used to
criticize the Kantian approach as closer to the structure of reality than
other vocabularies. Thus, irony should not be confused with the rela-
tivistic position: Rorty argues that relativism is self-refuting because it
claims that all beliefs have the same value, and that such a belief is not as
relative as the other beliefs.
11
Since any attempt to demonstrate cor-
rectly and clearly the fallaciousness of the transcendental presupposi-
tion is inconsistent, one is therefore left with two of the three previously
mentioned possibilities: either one tries to demonstrate the transcen-
dental presupposition along with the advocates of realism, or one just
stops talking about it. But is realism actually possible or is it, in its turn,
unsustainable? First, we must understand what we mean by ‘realism’.
Rorty specifies three criteria for a theory to be defined as ‘realist’:
a. Realism assumes a distinction between scheme and content, such
as the one between concepts and intuitions, representations and
objects, language and world.
b. The internal coherence of the elements on the side of the
‘scheme’ is not sufficient to assure that genuine knowledge has
been reached; further legitimation is necessary.
The Domestication of Derrida10
c. The required ‘further legitimation’ can be obtained while seated
in an armchair.
12
The ironist makes a move which is considerably more anti-Kantian
than the one attempted by the relativist, for instead of contesting the
possibility of ‘further legitimation’ requested in (c), he contests (a)

both to the realist and to the relativist. Rorty points to the essay ‘On the
very idea of a conceptual scheme’ as paradigmatic of this anti-realist
radicalism.
13
In this famous essay of 1974, Donald Davidson argues
exactly against the possibility of (a), that is, against the sustainability of
the dualism between scheme and content. Such a distinction is
essential to all those who claim (b) as true, that is, for those who believe
coherence on the side of the scheme is not sufficient to sanction the
truthfulness of a theory. For those who believe in (b), even a theory
that satisfies the justification requirements for an ideal theory (i.e., to
be simple, elegant, coherent, with perfect predictive power) could be
false. The additional legitimation (c) required to demonstrate that a
justified theory is also true can be obtained wearing slippers and a
robe, seated in an armchair next to the fireplace in the parlour. It is
evident that, once (a) is demonstrated to be unsustainable, (b) and (c)
would also automatically fall.
Following Alfred Tarski, Davidson claims that all the theory we need
for understanding the concept of truth in a certain language is con-
tained in the assertion, made in that particular language, that ‘ ‘‘the snow
is white’’ if the snow is white’. Both realists and relativists are com-
mitted to substituting Tarskian trivial principle with the more exotic
and exciting idea that there is something which organizes or adequates
to worldly experience.
14
In Davidson’s opinion, the idea that the
scheme (i.e., language) organizes the content (i.e., world) is unsus-
tainable, for only pluralities can be organized: ‘Someone who sets out
to organize a closet arranges the things in it. If you are told not to
organize the shoes and shirts, but the closet itself, you would be

bewildered.’
15
Furthermore, nothing is added to the banality of Tars-
ki’s principle if one claims that the scheme adequates to (or fits)
experience. If we are unable to imagine an experience not adequated
to a scheme, we also cannot conceive the scheme’s adequacy to
experience. Inspired by Davidson, Rorty states:
If we have no idea (as, ex hypothesis, in Kant, we do not) of what unsynthe-
sized intuitions are like, we do not know what it is for concepts to synthesize
them. If we do not know what an un-pluralized experience is like we do not
know what it would be like to organize it. If we do not already know lots of
sentences which are true of reality, we shall not gain understanding of this
word-world relation by evaluating ‘fit’ or ‘correspondence’.
16
The Contingency of Being 11
Rorty and Davidson’s distance from both relativism and realism is
underlined by the fact that their aim is not to advocate the possibility of
taking apart scheme and content (‘For we have found no intelligible
basis on which it can be said that schemes are different’
17
), nor to unite
them (‘It would be equally wrong to announce the glorious news that
all mankind – all speakers of language, at least – share a common
scheme and ontology’
18
). With Davidson, Rorty argues ‘against the
whole problematic of legitimation created by the scheme-content dis-
tinction’.
19
He does not claim that the anti-transcendental arguments

reveal the intrinsic nature of reality to be either intrinsic – as realism
pretends – or extrinsic – as relativism does – but that intrinsic natures
do not exist. To say that there are no intrinsic natures, for the ironist,
is to say that the term ‘intrinsic nature’ is one which it would pay us not to
use, an expression which has caused more trouble than it has been worth.
To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be
discovered is not to say that we discovered that, out there, there is no truth.
It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a
deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest.
20
The ironist, unlike the realist, does not believe that the credibility
demonstrated by certain beliefs is granted by their different relation
with a presumed reality. Rather, he trusts certain beliefs to have a more
remarkable authority since we are not willing to challenge them: they
are necessary to our form of life because they are very useful and are
largely agreed upon. Rorty considers the realist charge of being of the
same species as the relativists absolutely unacceptable. It is not true
that everything is relative, insofar as there are alternatives to our cul-
tural perspective so distant from our own way of thinking that we
cannot even seriously consider them. In the spirit, if not in the letter of
‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, one might affirm that in
giving up the dualism of scheme and content one does not give up the
world but only the presupposition that what makes our opinions true is
their correspondence to reality rather than to history and language.
Rorty thus wishes for his argument to be recognized as a form of
ethnocentrism. His intent is not the relativization of truth but its
banalization: the snow is indisputably white if the proposition ‘the
snow is white’ is true for the particular historical linguistic community
in which we find ourselves speaking.
21

For Rorty, the ironist is convinced that anything can look good or
bad depending on how it is ‘redescribed’. Accordingly, she keeps
placing the vocabularies which she does not approve in a negative light
so that her proposal to switch vocabularies becomes more seducing
and less indecent. She is substantially a parasite who devours the great
texts of the philosophical tradition, nibbling and chewing on them
The Domestication of Derrida12
until they become disgusting. Her actions are either annoying or
roguish, for instead of working in the production line enforced by
classical philosophy, she tries to interrupt its functioning. Not inter-
ested in being exploited for the construction of grand philosophical
discourses inspired by the ‘transcendental presupposition’, the ironist
spends her time proving that those discursive systems are not as
grounded as they pretend: it takes just a little effort to make them
collapse as if they were card castles. Here, sabotaging the philosophical
plant is a woman’s job. In fact, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty
uses the feminine pronoun to refer to the ironist, while the masculine
is reserved for that evil metaphysician. Whereas he, the metaphysician,
wishes to say how things really are, she, the ironist, never misses a
chance to underscore that philosophy is nothing else but a tired
repetition of the worn-out Platonic vocabulary, according to which the
division between appearance and reality is fundamental. The ironist is
greatly unsatisfied with such a vocabulary and wonders if ‘the process
of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a
language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her
into the wrong kind of human being’.
22
The right language is the one
which would allow her to become who she wants.
Even if the ironist is a ‘she’, the history of irony is exclusively about

men. The first great ironist in Rorty’s manly Western philosophy is
Hegel. Instead of looking at things, Hegel looked in fact at philoso-
phical texts; instead of philosophizing, he was engaged in writing a
history of philosophy. To map out a phenomenology of knowledge is
not to scrutinize past vocabularies in search of the one which will reveal
who we really are and what the world really is. Rather, it is to imagine
how humans from the past have behaved and what they believed in, so
as to decide if we would like to behave in a similar manner and believe
in similar things. The Hegelian dialectic begins a new genre of philo-
sophical writing, a genre which can be compared to contemporary
literary criticism. The ironist is not too different from the critic who
confronts various poets’ terminologies (which equate to ways of living
in the world) to decide in whose image he should recreate himself. If
we know only the people from our own neighbourhood, we risk getting
trapped in the provincial vocabulary we were raised in. To avoid run-
ning that risk, it is necessary to ‘get acquainted with strange people
(Alcibiades, Julien Sorel), strange families (the Karamazovs, the
Casaubons), and strange communities (the Teutonic Knights, the
Nuer, the mandarins of the Sung)’.
23
The Phenomenology of Spirit shows how fast one can change vocabulary
and ideas, how one can get lost in a world populated by surprising
gestaltic twists, of ducks that turn out to be rabbits and vice versa. It is
not interested in trying to bridge the presumed abyss that separates the
subject from the objects. Hegel’s narrative demonstrates how every
The Contingency of Being 13
vocabulary, even those that claimed to be absolutely definitive and
impossible to overcome, is destined to become outdated and, thus,
abandoned. Every time the Kantian philosopher universalizes and
eternalizes his theories, the ironist reminds him that those are only the

world-views of a certain moment in history, and are therefore tem-
porary and contingent.
24
Hegel cautions against believing that beyond
or beneath the various changes of language and vocabulary lies
something like a common and unchanging way of being directed
toward the world. The alternative vocabularies do not inhabit the same
world, so it does not make sense to judge which of these languages
represents the world more accurately. Moreover, as Davidson persua-
sively claimed, it does not make sense to speak of a language and a
world at all.
Rorty feels it is productive to graft Darwin’s evolutionary terminology
onto the Hegelian discourse on the exchange of vocabularies. In this
way, he is confident he can produce a convincing account of how new
vocabularies are formed. Rorty’s version of the history of culture might
sound more or less like the following:
Once upon a time, at a certain moment in the history of a certain
community of animals, were born some elephants with long prehensile
trunks instead of regular noses. This new group of elephants with long
prehensile trunks happened to be better adapted to the surrounding
environment. It was easier for them to find food and defend them-
selves from predators. The other elephants faced extinction and
eventually only the ones with trunks survived. In the same way, at a
certain moment in the history of the world, a new vocabulary was
proposed. As time went by, we realized that our words were losing their
force of habit, and we were about to pick up a new language. This fight
for survival rewards the vocabulary that is most convenient, the most
useful and the most economical. As we would never claim that ele-
phants acquired trunks because of a destiny intelligently designed for
them, Rorty thinks we should avoid thinking that the newly adopted

vocabulary is bringing us closer to the place where language and world
will be reconciled. Did we create a new language? We have forged a
new means to pursue our ends. But whereas the craftsman invents a
new tool having already in mind the goal he wants to reach, usually he
who develops a new vocabulary does not clearly foresee what he will
accomplish with it. He can only feel the need for something that does
not yet exist, something whose necessity is imposed 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 self-
consciousness is the mise-en-sce`ne of the eventful route that led
Romanticism to dominate European culture, eliminating the compe-
tition of other forms of language:
The Domestication of Derrida14
What the Romantics expressed as the claim that imagination, rather than
reason, is the central human faculty was the realization that a talent for
speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of
cultural change.
26
In a given community, the German bourgeoisie of the eighteenth
century, a subcommunity appeared, growing larger and larger, which
did not settle for old redescriptions. Groups of young people, before
becoming adults, went through a half-dozen spiritual revolutions. The
story that Hegel tells is of an ever-faster change of social practices and
language-games. It is the story of a community that is not satisfied with
talking like everybody else, that perceives the traditional vocabulary as
a cage from which to escape towards a new and different destiny. To
sketch the features of this new social group, Rorty relies on the
reflection of the Yale critic Harold Bloom.

The Desire for Autonomy and the Anxiety of Influence
You’ll soon create the sun and the
heavenly bodies, soon create the earth,
soon create yourself, other living creatures,
furniture, plants, and all the things
we’ve just been talking about.
(Plato, The Republic)
Rorty mostly relies on Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of
Misreading. In these books, Bloom attempts to define the poet’s psy-
chology, to penetrate the peculiar trait that sets apart poets from other
human beings. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom describes the
Romantic poet as an individual who dwells within the space of the post-
Cartesian tradition. This tradition accepts the dichotomy between res
cogitans and res extensa, but does not believe in the existence of the
pineal gland. Without faith in the mediation between the two spheres
of nature, it is impossible to recompose the dramatic dualism which
Descartes himself introduced; res cogitans and res extensa are infinitely
and definitively afar. Bloom thinks that the Cartesian separation
between mind and world, between a mathematic machine extended in
space and a thinking spirit without extension, caused a mutation in the
meaning of ‘being influenced’.
27
Such an expression originally meant
to receive from the stars a fluid which determined one’s behaviour and
character. Yet, after Descartes, it makes no sense to fear the influence
of spatial objects on thinking spirits. The anxiety of being influenced
then shifts from its originally spatial context and assumes a temporal
connotation. The threat is from that which is far away in time – the past
The Contingency of Being 15
– rather than the distant in space, for time is the means through which

spirits influence each other.
The poet is terrorized by the fear that the tradition has been
implanted so deeply in him as to deny him any possibility of differing
from how he is. This anxiety does not derive from perceiving some
worldly beings as fearsome. Rather, the absorption in worldliness
provides precisely the means of turning away, getting distracted, from
anxiety. The peculiarity of the anxiety of influence is that the only
entities that are truly threatening, those that provoke anxiety and not
just fear, are those who share our mode of Being. The threatening
character belongs, therefore, not to things (res extensa), but to thinking
spirits (res cogitans) since ‘they’ are of our own genre. We flee away
from others of our own kind because we fear we will become just like
them. We do not want to be – to put it with Heidegger’s Being and Time
– as ‘they are’.
Bloom argues that the faces by which the poet feels threatened are
those of the great authors of the past. Since writing has acquired the
symbolic meaning of coitus – as an act which ‘consists in allowing a
fluid to flow out from a tube upon a piece of white paper’
28
– the fear is
of insemination by the liquids spilled into the muses of Poetry. Having
conquered the Muses with their creations, tradition’s strongest poets
cast their spell on us, obliging us to speak with their voice, to 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 of ‘poetry’, the more
plausible is the assumption that such a literary genre has exhausted its
task; that all which needed to be said has been said. If one arrives five
hundred years after Shakespeare, it is not likely that Calliope would still
be available. With so many suitors already taken and deceived, among
so many flirts she ‘whored’ with – as Bloom says
30
– why should I be
special for her? The presence of other poetical egos wounds the young
author’s narcissism since his uncontaminated solitude is disturbed by
the discovery that he is not alone, and even less that he is not the one.
Broadening the scope of Bloom’s inquiry, transforming his theory of
poetry into a theory of poiesis, Rorty claims that not only the poet, but
anyone engaged in a poiein, in a production, in the activity that aims to
posit an unexpected event, is terrorized by the demon of belonging to
the continuum of history. Modern man’s fear is to be belated, to have
come afterwards, to have been thrown in that bankruptcy of time in
which no original task can be undertaken because debts have imposed
themselves as unclearable.
Thus the expression ‘poet’ should refer to all those men (such as
The Domestication of Derrida16
Nietzsche or Heidegger) who fear being unable to be innovative and
creative. Rorty attempts to show that, from Hegel on, every ironist
(exactly like Bloom’s poets) has been chased by a sort of performance
anxiety. Since truth depends on time rather than on space, meaning
that truth is a human product whose fundamental traits change
through the flow of history, ironists fear not being able to produce
radically new truths and phenomena never before experienced. One
keeps hoping for a task to undertake, for a discontinuity to impose on
history, because that is what would make him special and original, in

spite of tradition’s majesty.
The words (or shapes, or theorems, or models of physical nature) mar-
shaled to one’s command may seem merely stock items, rearranged in
routine ways. One will not have impressed one’s mark on the language but,
rather, will have spent one’s life shoving about already coined pieces.
31
Rorty insists that language is the privileged means through which the
past enforces its aggression. The vocabulary inherited from tradition
can be conceived as a vast cemetery haunted by ghosts. If one cannot
allow oneself to be possessed by such spectres, then one needs to forge
a language capable of liberating oneself from the eternal return of the
same. It is impossible to break out of the language in which we are
contained, as much as it is impossible ‘to step outside of our skins’.
32
But we can still choose whether to leave our skin untouched or to
modify it according to our will. If we are terrorized by the angst of
being influenced by the spectres of language possessing us, we have to
elaborate strategies to exorcize them. The intention of the maker is to
create his own language, a language which would free him from being
the heir of any tradition. As Bloom would put it: he wants to be his own
father.
The original sin, whose burden some men feel, is to be, from the
very moment of conception, indebted. As Nietzsche suggests in the
second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the feelings of guilt and
shame connected with this debt have their mundane origin in the most
ancient and original relationship between people: the relation between
seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. One feels guilt (Schuld) if one
cannot settle the debts (Schulden) incurred with others.
33
Rorty, fol-

lowing Nietzsche, believes that it is through poetic creation that such
indebtedness can be overcome: the poet is he who owns himself, he
who has liberated himself from every mortgage and thus owes nothing
to tradition. If one could switch from ‘this is how I was thrown’ to ‘this
is how I throw myself’, the bills of the past would be paid off and no
jury could pass a verdict of guilty. Redemption is not a matter of
reproducing a past model; redemption is the creation of something
radically original. One is saved if an absolute new future is instituted.
The Contingency of Being 17