A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus

Achieving the Impossible—Rorty’s Religion: A Response to Dooley

Achieving the Impossible— Rorty’s Religion: A Response to Dooley John D. Caputo I agree with my dear friend Mark Dooley, whose great generosity and Herculean efforts have made this volume possible, that Richard Rorty is the most interesting American philosopher of the day, the one voice in American philosophy whom someone other than academic insiders read and listen to, and the most important American thinker to read Derrida and take him seriously. That is why I said in the “Introduction” to More Radical Hermeneutics1 that: . . . the work of Richard Rorty’s pragmatic and upbeat, democratic and, as I call it, “Yankee” hermeneutics, plays an important role in what follows. For Rorty has given up on the classical metaphysical idea of philosophy as a kind of super-science that cuts through the soft surface of appearances and hits the hard rock of Reality, even as he has given up on the modern and transcendental idea of philosophy as . . . a higher meta-scientific tribunal before which the several sciences present their disparate findings for adjudication. So Rorty is to be included in my catalogue of the masters of non-knowing . . . a hero for those of us who think that we get the best results by disavowing any claims to any secret savoir absolue. Add to that my admiration for Rorty’s command of the idiom of American English and you would think Mark Dooley would be a happy man. But Dooley wants me to put my money where my mouth is, to walk the walk and not just talk the talk about having an “American voice.” My man in Dublin wants me to get behind this American or rather stand shoulder to shoulder with him and work for our common cause. Dooley is a hard bargainer, and I can see I will have to do a good deal more before I can put a smile on his face. He has made a rigorous argument that has put Rorty in a slightly different light for me, enlisting Rorty too in this religion without religion and making of him, if you can believe it, a believer in the impossible. Where will it stop? 229 Mark Dooley and I are agreed that Rorty and Derrida have similar projects : a non-foundationalist view of knowledge even and a deep commitment to a leftist democratic politics. I have tried to fine-tune Rorty’s non-foundationalism in a Derridean direction, by saying that we always need some account of why we cannot have a Final account of how things are, otherwise non-foundationalism is just a caprice of someone having a bad day. Such an account is what Derrida calls a “quasi-transcendental,” which Rorty thinks is just another philosophical gimmick. As regards politics, I have suggested that we ought to put a little more space between ourselves and “our country” or “America” (or “France,” or “Ireland,” etc.) than Rorty is willing to do. But Dooley tells me to leave well enough alone; if anything, it is Derrida who has a thing or two to learn from Rorty. Dooley has written a stimulating essay which has given me some pause, so let us take each point in turn. We need to avoid the suggestion that non-foundationalism is just a personality quirk of people with contrarian personalities and a dislike for absolutes, like preferring chocolate to vanilla. We need to support the idea that if someone contradicted Derrida or Rorty the latter would have a good response to make (as they always do). That means they have “good reasons” for saying that we have no access to some Pure Reason or an Ideal Meta-language in which to conclusively adjudicate competing claims. If challenged, Derrida can always point to the differential play of traces and the constitution of provisional unities of meaning through the endless process of iterability, even as Rorty can talk about endless recontextualization in virtue of which the same marks can mean different things in different contexts where they are put to different purposes. If marks were not indefinitely iterable or recontextualizable, Derrida and Rorty would be wrong and we would have to concede either that there are some overarching ahistorical assertions out there or find a better way of explaining why we doubt it. Otherwise, as I said in More Radical Hermeneutics, “the whole thing is crazy, and Derrida is just running off at the mouth.”2 That, of course, is exactly what Derrida’s worst critics say he is doing and...