Bodies of Responsibility: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida

Abstract

Richard Rorty's essay Deconstruction and Circumvention divides Jacques Derrida's career into two phases. first is Derrida's so-called phase. For Rorty this period is a kind of misstart, a failure to see that any attempt to overcome metaphysics will always be bound to offer an explanation of the other side of metaphysics which is itself metaphysical, i.e., it will offer conditions for the possibility of sense and meaning that are themselves beyond sense and meaning.' Rorty writes, tries, like Heidegger, to have it both ways: to eff the ineffable by decreeing that a word [like differance or trace] which he puts into is not the sort of thing which can be put into circulation (CIS, 124). However, Rorty also holds that there is a significant transformation in Derrida's middle period. After Post Card , Rorty explains, Derrida essentially gives up being an author of philosophy in favor of becoming a creative scribbler on philosophy. That is, sensing the futility of overcoming metaphysics metaphysically, Derrida drops the serious philosophical talk in favor of play. He develops a style rather than a method. This Derrida, argues Rorty, should be admired as a creative force rather than as someone capable of, or even interested in, furthering the ends of social justice, for such ends, asserts Rorty, require arguments, and require that the participants share a common vocabulary from which to argue. Since Derrida is privately self-actualizing through his own new metaphorics, he should not be held accountable for solving the social ills of culture. Those kinds of debates simply fall outside the scope of his project. But the decade following Rorty's initial analysis has witnessed the emergence of another Derrida, one who considers his ethical work very serious. Take, for example, Derrida's reply when posed the following question in a 1997 interview for Die Zeit: Question: The ethical of your theory was always, if perhaps a little too hidden, recognizable. But why for some time now has justice occupied the premier place of your texts'? Derrida : That which you are calling an underlying plan was always readable. Since the beginning. But to know what is readable one must read. (DZ, 8)2 Such disagreement between Rorty's reading of Derrida and Derrida's own understanding of his project stems from the very different nominalist frameworks the two authors use to approach their concerns about ethics and social justice. Rorty's pragmatic nominalism is fundamentally confident that language more or less adequately serves in getting things that are useful and just accomplished. His future is open and optimistic because the limits of justice are creative limits. maximum gain in social justice is a function of marshaling the creative forces to address the specific problem at hand, i.e., to build a better mouse trap. In contrast, Derrida's deconstructive approach is more skeptical. future is not open. It is mostly the unconscious repetition of the past, thus the possibility of a future cannot be asserted willy nilly, but can only be faced by laying the conceptual framework of the past bare. On this account Derrida's critique bears more than a little resemblance to early Heideggerian hermeneutics. So while Rorty thinks that if Derrida wants to influence social concerns he needs to provide an ethical position that is both less allusive than his previous work and more explicit in its ability to address practical social concerns, Derrida, for his part, thinks Rorty misses the point. Concepts like arguments and shared vocabulary, which are the keys to Rorty's approach to social justice, beg the important question of the grounds from which they may be deployed. Without laying their conceptual basis bare such notions may at the very least prove to be aporetic, and at worst may promote injustice in the name of justice. Thus when Derrida makes assertions about social justice, they are by design not the kind of practical solutions to specific problems Rorty craves. …