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  • The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction
  • Flavia Loscialpo
The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. By L. Fabbri. London, Continuum, 2008. viii + 150 pp. Hb £65.00.

Far from being an apologetic attempt to preserve deconstruction from Rorty, The Domestication of Derrida carefully seeks to understand and contextualize Rorty's pragmatist reappropriation of Derrida's thought. Anyone interested in the relation between deconstruction and pragmatism, or in the topic 'Derrida in America', will find Lorenzo Fabbri's book to be a provocative and essential resource. While recognizing the merits of Rorty's reading protocol —primarily, the bridging of Analytical and Continental traditions —Fabbri challenges some of its problematic yet crucial features: Rorty's privatization and aestheticization of deconstruction is convincingly described as a defensive strategy seeking to contain the risks of Derrida's philosophical practice, as well as of any radical critique of authority. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty argues that the merit of deconstruction consists in playing with philosophy without being conditioned by serious political or epistemological constraints. According to this reading, in the later Derrida a significant passage is fully accomplished: the transition from theory to fiction, to a realm of pure fantasies in which philosophy is deprived of any transcendental aim and its political efficacy is completely revoked. However, as Fabbri's work demonstrates, in reducing philosophy to literature, the pragmatist rearrangement of deconstruction falls into the worst contradictions. Indeed, the movement towards a 'beyond' philosophy, towards a purely singular and contingent language, is destined to be inextricably aporetic. Rorty thus fails to embrace the problematic relevance of the issues raised by Derrida, and to recognize that the disruptive force of deconstruction does not reside in merely overcoming, or forgetting, the categories of the philosophical tradition. It rather involves a reconsideration of philosophy's debt to its own historicity and facticity. The Domestication of Derrida goes on to discuss Rorty's solution to the intricate relationship between theory and practice, which Fabbri connects with the Kantian disciplinary division founding the modern paradigm of the university. Fabbri argues that the fracture between positive sciences and fundamental theoretical research, between performative and constative languages, is an artificial structure anchored in the past, a structure which deconstruction is trying to dismantle. While Derrida aims to develop a theoretical practice which would simultaneously serve as a form of critical resistance, Rorty ultimately re-enacts Kant's confinement of critique to the ivory tower of academic speculation. As a matter of fact, Rorty operates as a 'political epidemiologist', argues Fabbri, who is brought by the longing for security far away from the radicality of deconstructive operations. Fabbri's subtle analysis also highlights the proximity between Derrida's deconstruction of actuality and Foucault's ontology of the present. Recalling the key points of Foucauldian studies on the Enlightenment, the author shows that for both Foucault and Derrida philosophy works as a critical lever that unsettles the consistency of the present and exhibits its intrinsic contingency. As Fabbri's important book compellingly [End Page 498] concludes, such an opposition to actuality —which is at the heart of what Derrida had called the 'university without condition' —is the foremost task of deconstruction, and exactly what Rorty tries to neutralize at all costs.

Flavia Loscialpo
Sapienza Università di Roma
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