approachable than ever the urgency seems desperate. As Cornel West expressed his frustration with Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism, “no philosophical case can be made for this civilization” as long as this pragmatism’s attitude is not up to coping with differences other than the European one.11 One cannot but ask for a pragmatism newer than the one given up by Rorty and added by West to the nuisance of philosophy’s old European, and now renewed American, identity. But where should it come from? Within neopragmatism’s own historical account of paradigm shifts, the exhaustion of one paradigm cannot account for the succeeding shift, nor can this shift be in any way commensurable with the preceding set of assumptions—except for the problems left over, the mortgage to be transcribed to a new account.
In America’s multifaced landscape of differences, the European tradition has turned into a mortgage of uncanny proportions. Quite against the grain of leaving it behind, the European difference returns as the repressed and reveals what had to remain repressed in its difference. That great design of America as a radically open space to newcomers meant more than just the erasure of these newcomers’ histories; it meant the retroactive idolization of one particular difference erasing all others—including and foreclosing those others already implied and foreclosed before.12 Thus, deconstruction in America may appear as the return of the repressed within America’s indifference to Europe, an indifference yet to be exhausted with respect to the differences yet to be expected. “Might one find some ground to deconstruct before there are any philosophical foundations in place?” wonders Stanley Cavell about America’s lack of metaphysical talent, its lack, as it were, of a philosophical homeground.13 This lack, as a matter of fact, has reproduced the ground to be deconstructed far more effectively than this ground, as a homeground, would have lent itself to deconstruction. In displacing the “Western Canon,” American literature and philosophy not only reproduced what they attempted to rewrite, but re-deconstructed what they found deconstructed (and, that is, already “in deconstruction”).
Within the succession of paradigms of knowledge and learning, deconstruction seems to have succeeded in opening up a new space for transformation within which pragmatism has to be replaced, its mortgage transcribed and its hopes, not to forget them, reiterated. In settling his account with Limited Inc, the linguistic orthodoxy of ordinary language politics, Derrida had already identified the tentative perspective of his Grammatology as “a sort of pragmatics,” or future “pra[gma]-grammatology (to come)”; a grammatologically articulated pragmatism that would also have to account for “the possibility of transgression [which] is always inscribed in speech acts”—and not just for the limitations usually associated with these speech acts’ institutionalized uses.14 Justice, again, is the most prominent, and most urgent, domain of application here, although the sphere of the “literary” would lend itself much more readily to a congenial linguistic analysis.
If the sphere of the “literary” (for the sake of a better term) was an exemplary case in point, the point consisted precisely not in opening up the aesthetic possibility of a “living in beauty,” set free from all normative expectations, or even from the strain of being ironic all the time.15 The rare uses that analytical philosophy and analytically minded critics have made of deconstruction in adapting the “literary” to the pragmatics of a democratically open, public sphere cannot, or should not have to, contend with shrugging off the obsolete aesthetic normativity and its hermeneutic twin, semantic holism. With a payoff like this, the “nihilistic” temptation of an advanced liberalism would have proved to be much greater than the all-pervasive fear of deconstruction’s destructive force.
Quite to the contrary, one must face frustrations like Cavell’s in Disowning Knowledge: the “failure to acknowledge” and “avoidance of love” in Shakespeare, encounters not to be compensated for in advance.16 An “aesthetics” of undisturbed living cannot compensate for philosophy’s failure to come to terms with what is, nor for skepticism’s desperation about what is to be done.
Rather, the skeptic’s acknowledgement of the possibilities of transgression asks for an ethics of reading prior to an ethics of what there is to be done or not to be done (and, finally, to be denied). However multiple the interpretations may be, and however flexible interpretors may become, there is simply no point in Doing What Comes Naturally, if it is only to console us with, and relieve us from, the burden of reading. To turn the tropes of persuasion into tropes of reasonable conviction asks for a responsibility beyond and, that is, before the mechanism of what comes naturally; it needs analysis in the first place. And no pathos can, in the second place, compensate for what has been missed in the first place—although one has to put up with the pathos in the first place, along with the loss of pathos in the end.17
It would be an extra task, and would take another time, to reconsider the reception of deconstruction in America in the light not so much of its detotalizing strategies, but of its pragmatic impact on the rethinking and rereading of crucial concepts. Not only the necessary defiguration of the old, but also the opening of new possibilities—call it refiguration. Deconstruction’s sensitivity to pragmatic issues is best documented in its growing interest in the performativity of acts and their institutional setting, a perspective more crucial than the much bedeviled, or else applauded, antiessentialism, not to mention the now out-of-fashion “play of signifiers.” I think, the once-feared danger of “domesticating” de-construction’s philosophical impact into a domestic brand of pragmatism—certainly a thing to be avoided—is less relevant than the opposite danger of taking the pragmatic acuity out of deconstruction and turning it back into a merely critical, even hypercritical “theory.” Deconstruction is a kind of pragmatism, insofar as it is able to replace a disabled pragmatism. It may even turn out to be pragmatism’s better equipped, and more pragmatic, version.
Deconstruction, however, is also more than a kind of pragmatism, if only in that it aims beyond pragmatism’s anxieties of influence and desperation. The literary and philosophical issues of deconstruction have had, among many other important academic effects, a political effect and outcome, in which reading—the reading of difference—arrived at working results far from the alleged effects of mere irony and mere play. As it turns out, the terms “irony” and “play” are not what they merely seem. In literature’s ways of exposing rhetorically what in philosophy was meant to persuade “naturally,” authentically, difference turns up in the undisguised undecidability of figuration. Reading the literary and philosophical double bind: deciphering, more precisely, philosophy’s difference inscribed within literature’s indifference to this very philosophy’s authority was the model, and is still a model, for reading difference beyond the quests for identity. The “irony” needed in acknowledging what has to be decided, as well as the “play” needed in dealing with the consequences, are not merely tropes of a stimulus-response-like reaction-formation; they have to be taken on as figures of response, as responsibility.
The legal debate should be mentioned first here but also, and not without legal implications, sexual politics. It was through the difference of the sexes, and not by coincidence, that this model of metaphor, or transference, was to be applied in the most rigorous way and delivered pragmatic impact.18 Deconstructive Feminism has practiced this mode of reading to the extent that there is, at present, hardly any other direction of criticism that could compete with it both in analytical refinement and pragmatic pertinence. Compared to this, the encounter of deconstruction with the Critical Legal Studies Movement was bound to remain metapragmatic; but as I have indicated there may be an additional point of constitutional importance to the metapragmatic
