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Introduction Pragmatism has once again become a worthy and formidable philosophical movement, after having been eclipsed during most of the twentieth century1. Yet, the revival and rescue of pragmatism is linked to some of the same reasons that have made poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory the vogue of the academy and the talk of highbrow journalism. So, the revival is neither fortuitous nor adroitly forced. There is a logic to it. Indeed, there is a strong family resemblance between pragmatism’s rejection of foundationalism, logocentrism disguised as a philosophy of consciousness, a strong concept of theory and philosophy, a correspondence theory of truth, a museumlike theory of language (in which there are things, and language just names them, like labels on diaramas in museums), and similar rejections by deconstruction, postmodernism, and related philosophical and literary criticism currents. Such convergences and elective affinities have been explored with great acuity and perspicacity by writers like Rorty, Bernstein, Fraser, and West.2 What has not been analyzed and made explicit is that underlying the various projects of the re-functioning and renaissance of pragmatism, whether as simple neopragmatism or prophetic pragmatism, is the project of the reconstitution and reframing of national identity. Curiously , many have noted that there is a relationship between the projects of the total critique of reason and the critism of the West.3 The postmodern critique has been assimilated to a critique of the West as such. The idea is that the totalitarism of the West is rooted in the totalitarianism of monological and instrumental reason, at which is aimed the deconstructive onslaught of postmodern criticisms. Such criticism arose from two sources: internally, from the 9 Which Pragmatism? Whose America? On Cornel West This chapter first appeared in George Yancy, ed., Cornel West: A Critical Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 83–102. 169 demise of Western credibility and claim to historical privilige due to the horrors of the holocaust and two bloody World Wars; and externally, from the decolonizing countries that had suffered Western colonialism. To what extent, it should be asked, is the revival of pragmatism related to these crises and critiques of the “West,” and the internal and external criticisms of the United States, who unquestionably has taken over the civilizing project of the West? Pragmatism emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century partly as a response to the question, What has the United States become, and what should it become after a traumatic and devastating Civil War? Today, when “American” philosophers reach back to nineteenth-century pragmatism as an autochthonous philosophical tradition, they do so in order to partly and sometimes covertly answer the question, what has the United States become, and what should it become after at the end of a century and the beginning of a new one? In other words—and this is the core of these reflections —how American pragmatism is reconstructed and portrayed, which figures are foregrounded and given prominence, and what philosophical importance is attached to specific insights and arguments seeks to develop and project a new national imaginary, that is, a new image of the nation. To use West’s language, we might say that which America we are able to visualize and project depends on which genealogy we trace. Which pragmatism, thus, also means, which America? The title of this chapter therefore is to be taken as suggesting that there is a deep link between these two questions, that to attempt to answer one is, in a very unequivocal sense, to attempt to answer the other. The vision that we may posses of what “America” was, is, and should become, informs and guides our reconstructions and interpretations of its intellectual biography. By the same token, how we reconstruct and interpret the history of this intellectual , philosophical, and cultural inheritance will give a very concrete content to our own anticipatory and prospective images of who we are and who we would like to become. It is precisely this entwinement that reveals itself in the contemporary debates concerning, let us say, Robert Westbrook’s reading of Dewey, or John Smith’s, in contrast to Richard Rorty’s; or in the much broader debate between Richard Rorty’s privately ironic and publicly solidaristic neopragmatism and Cornel West’s publicly and privately prophetic pragmatism.4 This subterranean connection between how we reconstruct our so-called autochthonous philosophical inheritance and what we claim we have become as a nation, as a country, and as a culture that faces...

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