Within the succession of paradigms of knowledge and learning, deconstruction seems to have succeeded in opening up a new space for transformation within which pragmatism has to be replaced, its mortgage transcribed and its hopes, not to forget them, reiterated. In settling his account with Limited Inc, the linguistic orthodoxy of ordinary language politics, Derrida had already identified the tentative perspective of his Grammatology as “a sort of pragmatics,” or future “pra[gma]-grammatology (to come)”; a grammatologically articulated pragmatism that would also have to account for “the possibility of transgression [which] is always inscribed in speech acts”—and not just for the limitations usually associated with these speech acts’ institutionalized uses.14 Justice, again, is the most prominent, and most urgent, domain of application here, although the sphere of the “literary” would lend itself much more readily to a congenial linguistic analysis.
If the sphere of the “literary” (for the sake of a better term) was an exemplary case in point, the point consisted precisely not in opening up the aesthetic possibility of a “living in beauty,” set free from all normative expectations, or even from the strain of being ironic all the time.15 The rare uses that analytical philosophy and analytically minded critics have made of deconstruction in adapting the “literary” to the pragmatics of a democratically open, public sphere cannot, or should not have to, contend with shrugging off the obsolete aesthetic normativity and its hermeneutic twin, semantic holism. With a payoff like this, the “nihilistic” temptation of an advanced liberalism would have proved to be much greater than the all-pervasive fear of deconstruction’s destructive force.
Quite to the contrary, one must face frustrations like Cavell’s in Disowning Knowledge: the “failure to acknowledge” and “avoidance of love” in Shakespeare, encounters not to be compensated for in advance.16 An “aesthetics” of undisturbed living cannot compensate for philosophy’s failure to come to terms with what is, nor for skepticism’s desperation about what is to be done.
Rather, the skeptic’s acknowledgement of the possibilities of transgression asks for an ethics of reading prior to an ethics of what there is to be done or not to be done (and, finally, to be denied). However multiple the interpretations may be, and however flexible interpretors may become, there is simply no point in Doing What Comes Naturally, if it is only to console us with, and relieve us from, the burden of reading. To turn the tropes of persuasion into tropes of reasonable conviction asks for a responsibility beyond and, that is, before the mechanism of what comes naturally; it needs analysis in the first place. And no pathos can, in the second place, compensate for what has been missed in the first place—although one has to put up with the pathos in the first place, along with the loss of pathos in the end.17
It would be an extra task, and would take another time, to reconsider the reception of deconstruction in America in the light not so much of its detotalizing strategies, but of its pragmatic impact on the rethinking and rereading of crucial concepts. Not only the necessary defiguration of the old, but also the opening of new possibilities—call it refiguration. Deconstruction’s sensitivity to pragmatic issues is best documented in its growing interest in the performativity of acts and their institutional setting, a perspective more crucial than the much bedeviled, or else applauded, antiessentialism, not to mention the now out-of-fashion “play of signifiers.” I think, the once-feared danger of “domesticating” de-construction’s philosophical impact into a domestic brand of pragmatism—certainly a thing to be avoided—is less relevant than the opposite danger of taking the pragmatic acuity out of deconstruction and turning it back into a merely critical, even hypercritical “theory.” Deconstruction is a kind of pragmatism, insofar as it is able to replace a disabled pragmatism. It may even turn out to be pragmatism’s better equipped, and more pragmatic, version.
Deconstruction, however, is also more than a kind of pragmatism, if only in that it aims beyond pragmatism’s anxieties of influence and desperation. The literary and philosophical issues of deconstruction have had, among many other important academic effects, a political effect and outcome, in which reading—the reading of difference—arrived at working results far from the alleged effects of mere irony and mere play. As it turns out, the terms “irony” and “play” are not what they merely seem. In literature’s ways of exposing rhetorically what in philosophy was meant to persuade “naturally,” authentically, difference turns up in the undisguised undecidability of figuration. Reading the literary and philosophical double bind: deciphering, more precisely, philosophy’s difference inscribed within literature’s indifference to this very philosophy’s authority was the model, and is still a model, for reading difference beyond the quests for identity. The “irony” needed in acknowledging what has to be decided, as well as the “play” needed in dealing with the consequences, are not merely tropes of a stimulus-response-like reaction-formation; they have to be taken on as figures of response, as responsibility.
The legal debate should be mentioned first here but also, and not without legal implications, sexual politics. It was through the difference of the sexes, and not by coincidence, that this model of metaphor, or transference, was to be applied in the most rigorous way and delivered pragmatic impact.18 Deconstructive Feminism has practiced this mode of reading to the extent that there is, at present, hardly any other direction of criticism that could compete with it both in analytical refinement and pragmatic pertinence. Compared to this, the encounter of deconstruction with the Critical Legal Studies Movement was bound to remain metapragmatic; but as I have indicated there may be an additional point of constitutional importance to the metapragmatic role of legal theory in a country where the law is the law.
Not that we can ever be too sure about the “critical function” of literature’s disfigurative work. Not that we can ever be too clear about philosophy’s task “as such.” What is to be elaborated are the problems, if the responsibility of solutions is ever to be met. Therefore, a topology of impossibilities is needed rather than a system of the restricted possible. According to the much older pragmatism that was rhetoric (an art whose analytical potential has been on the agenda of deconstruction from the beginning), topology has to map the relevant topoi under consideration; a heuristics of differences to be reconsidered in their manifestations and underlying mechanizations—the gift, for example, or the crypt, or the secret. As far as inventiveness is concerned in these matters, poietic imagination in the precise sense, I see nobody to whom we owe as much as we owe to Jacques Derrida for his unfailing dedication to America.
Take the gift, for example. “For finally, if the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it.”19 America is by now the age-old name for the thought, the desire, and the intention towards the impossible, like the gift (not a given, but to be given). Like that “other cape,” Cape Europe, as Derrida has called a collection of recent writings on deconstruction in Europe, America has become a paleonym, the recitation of an old name for some hope not altogether lost. Or is it lost, after all? Answering the French President François Mitterand’s hopeful remark on the future of Europe as “returning in its history and its geography like one who is returning home—chez soi,” Derrida asks, “Is it possible? Desirable? Is it really this that announces itself today?”20 Cavell did not hesitate to confront “the place or the topic of the place” that America