More on Richard Rorty on Derrida

by Steve Rodgers

Richard Rorty thinks the key to understanding Derrida is to revel in his playful and poetic style. He divides Derrida's career into two phases: an earlier phase, which Rorty calls a "false start" ("Transcendental" 128), in which Derrida is mostly concerned with puns, "word magic" (Contingency 124), and, to some extent, more traditional modes of discourse; and a later phase in which Derrida relies less on word magic and more on a new way of writing, and a new way of thinking--in this phase, according to Rorty, Derrida drops theory altogether and ventures into more creative and more exciting realms of possibility.

In Rorty's mind, Derrida has in his late works created something entirely new and largely unphilosophical by defecting from "philosophy" and dispensing with its worn-out tools. Therefore, "rigor" simply does not apply to these works--and, indeed, need not apply: "You cannot see these leaps in the dark as the magnificent poetic acts they are and still talk about 'philosophical rigor.' Rigor just does not come into it" ("Transcendental" 123).

Furthermore, though Rorty admits that Derrida's subject is philosophy--more specifically, how the philosopher's dream of finding truth and meaning turns into a "nightmare," how just when everything seems sewn up, intelligible, controlled, it can be torn apart at the seams--he believes that Derrida cannot deal with philosophy's inconsistencies by refuting it or refashioning it, as he does in his early works, but by discarding it: "On my view, the only thing that can displace an intellectual world is another intellectual world" ("Transcendental" 121).

In his enthusiasm for this new intellectual world, however, Rorty denies that Derrida's late works can be rigorous, logical, public, or pedagogical. He makes it quite clear that Derrida has not just lifted philosophy into the realm of literature, and that we cannot evaluate Derrida's late works with any "conceptual schemes" used to evaluate literature or philosophy (Contingency 137). But, all the same, he still tends to treat Derrida's later writings as if they were entirely literary (at one point, in fact, he compares reading The Post Card to reading Finnegan's Wake). Furthermore, by stressing Derrida's renunciation of philosophy and by suggesting that his earlier, more obviously rigorous works were a "false start," Rorty unnecessarily divides Derrida's output in half.