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[ 219 ] 12 ] Meanings, Communication, and Politics: Dewey and Derrida Antonio Calcagno The literature devoted to the connection between poststructuralism, deconstruction , and pragmatism is as rich as it is divided.1 Richard Rorty claims that John Dewey and Jacques Derrida share hope and optimism for changing humanity, but whereas the former provides concrete pragmatic solutions, the latter is more of a conversant, fashioning a private self. Rorty remarks, “In my own writing about Derrida I have urged that we see him as sharing Dewey’s utopian hopes, but not treat his work as contributing in any clear or direct way to the realization of those hopes.”2 Derrida responds to Rorty’s challenge by maintaining that his work is politically relevant. He argues, “Deconstruction is hyper-politicizing in following paths and codes which are clearly not traditional, and I believe it awakens politicization in the way I mentioned above, that is, it permits us to think the political and think the democratic by granting us the space necessary in order not to be enclosed in the latter. In order to continue to pose the question of the political, it is necessary to withdraw something from the political and the same thing for democracy, which, of course, makes democracy a very paradoxical concept.”3 John Stuhr points out that the traditional discourse between pragmatism and poststructuralist and postmodern thought in general can be divided along two lines.4 First, there are those pragmatists who bring the two schools of thought together, seeing in them a relevant dialogue. The second line is dismissive and is critical of the attempt to bring the schools together. Stuhr maintains that thinkers like Vincent Colapietro, Kai Nielsen, and John Ryder have made remarkable advances, showing how both pragmatists and postmodern thinkers converge but also displaying how the significant differences between them open a potent philosophical discussion. Stuhr, however, believes that the debate has been too one-sided. The focus has been on the pragmatists, that is, on what the pragmatists can offer the poststructuralists. More work needs to be done, so claims Stuhr, in the opposite direction, namely, what can )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 220 Antonio Calcagno the postmoderns and poststructuralists offer pragmatists? Rereading Michel Foucault and Dewey, Stuhr argues that the thinkers like Foucault challenge pragmatist politics; Stuhr ultimately calls for a genealogical pragmatism: Instead, the real challenge of postmodernism to pragmatism is the challenge to recognize and critically consider the differences, distances, destructions , violence, interests, agonies and foreignness at work in pragmatism ’s own will to intimacy. This is the challenge to make explicit the exclusions, oppositionalities, and single-mindedness embedded in pragmatism ’s own notions of community, inquiry and pluralism. It is the challenge to pragmatists to recognize the delimitations and violence of all ideals even as they engage in the reconstruction of those ideals. It is the challenge to recognize the formations of subjects, the discourses of rationalization, and the perspectival political differences at work in pragmatism’s own will to intimacy. Finally, it is the challenge to refrain from privileging in a final or closed manner this intimacy, association and community among subjects.5 Given Stuhr’s insight, this chapter takes up this very same challenge, albeit not from a Foucaultian genealogical perspective; rather, I will focus on the Derridean challenge to Dewey. In particular, I wish to focus on the relation between language and politics . Both Dewey and Derrida maintain that language, understood here in its broader context as communication as opposed to a merely logical analysis of linguistic meaning, signs, and reference, is critical for understanding and acting. Derrida and Dewey recognize that philosophy in its attempt to communicate universally and make metaphysically present realities, especially political ones, has caused violent and deplorable situations. Dewey remarks, “The difficulty is that philosophy, even when professing catholicity, has often been suborned. Instead of being a free messenger of communication it has been a diplomatic agent of some special partial interest; insincere, because in the name of peace it has fostered divisions that lead to strife, and in the name of loyalty has promoted unholy alliances and secret understandings. One might say that the profuseness of attestations to supreme devotion to truth on the part of philosophy is a matter to arouse suspicion.”6 The democracy to come is Derrida’s political response to Dewey’s insight. The democracy to come entails a double bind of possibility and impossibility; a true democratic state is simultaneously possible and impossible as outlined in Voyous, where Derrida...

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