In general, and independent of any specification according to historical time, the most crucial issues of irony reside in the area of self-conscious saying and writing and concern the problems of linguistic articulation, communication, and understanding in regard to truth. The ironic manner of expression can be described as attempting to transcend the restrictions of normal discourse and straightforward speech by making the ineffable articulate, at least indirectly, through a great number of verbal strategies, and accomplishing what lies beyond the reach of direct communication. This attitude, however, automatically constitutes an offense to common reason and understanding—an offense not necessarily intended by the ironist but somehow involuntarily connected with his claim and almost regularly taken as such by the public. Socrates was the first example for that constellation.
The implicit critique of reason and rationality in ironic communication likewise provoked very severe criticism in the modern age. Hegel not only criticized irony as vanity and destructiveness, but even mobilized the apocalypse to depict this attitude as the final incarnation of evil, the beast from the abyss. The opposition to Nietzsche is operative not so much in critical and polemical works written against his philosophy as in decisive reductions of his thought, in eliminating the rich ambiguities and infinite reflection from his text, in leveling out his multiple style to that of a habitual philosopher, the “last metaphysician,” who professed square doctrines such as the will to power as the ultimate result of his thinking. In the case of Derrida, the reaction is not so much manifest in a practice-oriented Marxist type of critique as in the hermeneutic indignation about the loss of continuity, agreement across borders, and unambiguous consent among discussion partners which is replaced by a discontinuous, fragmentary, and ironic mode of communication.
The particular reproach in which this critique is phrased is that of a performative self-referential contradiction necessarily implied in any totalized critique of reason and philosophy: one cannot criticize reason and philosophy in an absolute manner without pulling away the basis from underneath this critique, without disavowing this critique, which is itself an expression of reason and rationality. As one easily realizes, this reproach is directed not only against the deconstructive manner of criticizing reason and metaphysics but against the entire sceptical-ironical discourse of modernity as well. Characteristically enough, the ironic discourse itself, because of its highly self-reflective character, practices critical, deprecating observations of a self-referential nature as a constantly recurring technique. It has a particular predilection for toying with antinomies and self-contradictions imposed upon us by our being inscribed in language, by the subterranean determination imposed upon us through language. A self-critical awareness of our linguistic embeddedness has indeed been a characteristic mark of modernity since the romantic age and reached a new intensity with Nietzsche.1 The three authors chosen as representatives of this discourse, Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida, thematize the self-referential implications of their irony in their own text and through such reflections accomplish that which Schlegel circumscribed as the “irony of irony” (FS 2:369).2 After having deduced, with all possible rigor, the will to power as the ultimate reality, Nietzsche asks mockingly, “Supposing that this is only an interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better” (FN 5:37; GE, 30–31).3 Derrida’s reflections on an involuntary complicity of deconstruction with metaphysics have to be seen from a similar perspective.
Turning to difference and Derrida’s essay on Différance4 more specifically, we should first of all notice that the verb to differ has two distinct meanings in French (differ) as well as in Latin (differre)—to differ and to defer—and can therefore indicate difference in two basically distinct connotations: “On the one hand, it indicates difference as distinction, inequality, or discernibility; on the other, it expresses the interposition of delay, the interval of a spacing and temporalizing that puts off until ‘later’ what is presently denied, the possible that is presently impossible” (D, 129). Using the letter a from the present participle of “différante,” Derrida builds a noun with a visible, yet inaudible spelling error, “différance,” that is supposed to refer to differing in both senses “as spacing/temporalizing and as a movement that structures every dissociation,” that is, to difference as postponement and to difference as distinction (D, 129–30, 136–37). The a in the title and the following usage of the monstrous word is therefore no printing error, but a deliberate infusion by Derrida to make difference differ more from itself than it normally does (D, 129).
Such a creation, however, is “neither a word nor a concept” (D, 130). Attempting to sketch out the nature of différance and its multiple structure, we discover that its essence “cannot be exposed,” since we can expose only that which at a certain moment can be represented as present, as “the truth of a present or the presence of a present” (D, 134). Différance, however, has “neither existence nor essence” and cannot even be defined in the sense of negative theology, indeed it is “irreducible to every ontological or theological—onto-theological—reappropriation” and instead “opens up the very space in which onto-theology—philosophy—produces its system and history” (D, 134–35). Given the a-logical structure of différance, the phenomenon also does not permit any order of discourse, of procedure, in developing its content in a reasonable sequence and no longer allows “the line of logico-philosophical speech,” not even that of “logico-empirical speech.” What remains beyond these alternatives of a regular philosophical approach, however, is the activity of play, and one way of outlining the potentialities of différance is indeed through insisting on the semiotic dimensions in the notion of play.
In classical semiotics the playful character in the functioning of signs is extinguished by the “authority of presence.” Signs are mere substitutes for things and thereby of a secondary and provisional character. The sign is secondary, since it is “second after an original and lost presence,” and provisional “with respect to its final and missing presence” (D, 138). On the basis of Saussure’s new linguistics, however, Derrida can say: “Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences” (D, 140). Différance, in this regard, is the play of differences, the “movement of play.” The effects in this play or the productions of it are not the result of a “subject or substance, a thing in general, or a being that is somewhere present and itself escapes the play of difference.” They are rather “traces” that cannot be taken out of their context, cannot be isolated from the interplay of différance (D, 141).
When these effects appear “on the stage of presence,” they are always related to something other than themselves. Such an effect, such a trace “retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element” (D, 142). Its presence is therefore constituted in relation “to what it is not, to what it absolutely is not” (D, 142–43). In order to take full cognizance of the interplay of differences at work here, we should not misconstrue past and future as a “modified present” nor overlook the “interval” separating the present from the past as well as from the future. This interval also divides “the present in itself” and divides “along with the present, everything that can be conceived on its basis, that is, every being—in partieular, for our metaphysical language, the substance or subject” (D, 143). In brief, the present has to be seen, in the perspective of différance, “as a ‘primordial’ and irreducibly nonsimple, and therefore in the strict sense, nonprimordial synthesis of traces, retentions, and protensions” (D, 143). Différance in no case can be derived “from a being-present, one capable of being something, a force, a state, or power in the world, to which we could give all kinds of names: a what, or being present as a subject, a who” (D, 145).
We thus come to a notion of différance without origin, without archē (D, 145–46). At an earlier point, we had realized that according to the requirements of différance, the relationship of originality and derivation cannot be assumed between the subject and its language, that language is not a function of the speaking subject, and that the subject is rather inscribed in language. This elimination of origin, of archē has to be maintained with regard to everything in semiology and down to every concept of sign “that retains any metaphysical presuppositions incompatible with the theme of différance” (D, 146).
Yet the question remains whether the subject, before it enters the sphere of differences through speaking and signifying, does not enjoy a presence and self-presence “in a silent and intuitive consciousness” (D, 146). Consciousness, prior to speech and signs, then would grant us “self-presence, a self-perception of presence,” the status of a “living present” (D, 147). “This privilege,” Derrida says, “is the ether of metaphysics, the very element of our thought insofar as it is caught up in the language of metaphysics.” In our century, however, it was Husserl who, with the project of transcendental phenomenology, focused on this topic most directly and investigated the structures of pure consciousness most rigorously. In order to deconstruct this position, one would have to show that presence and specifically consciousness (“the being-next-to-itself of consciousness”) are definitely not the “absolutely matricai form of being” but a “determination,” ati “effect,” that is, an effect within a system “which is no longer that of presence but that of différance.” Derrida adds to the formulation of this task that the system of presence is so tight that merely to designate this proposal “is to continue to operate according to the vocabulary of that very thing to be de-limited” (D, 147).
Here one should notice, however, that Derrida himself attempted to carry out this task in an early investigation particularly devoted to Husserl, transcendental phenomenology, and pure consciousness.5 The main point in Derrida’s own critique of Husserl is that the basic principle of transcendental phenomenology, that is, spaceless and timeless self-representation of meaning in a “living present,” is shipwrecked because of the figurative character of language, the “stream of consciousness” and “inner time,” and all the relationships to a non-present implied in these experiences: that of a non-identity inscribed into the present as well as that of death written into life. We should add, however, that the conception of a transcendental consciousness independent of language, time, and the “life world” had become highly problematical for Husserl himself. Indeed, one major thrust in Derrida’s critique of Husserl is to point out discrepancies between the old metaphysical dream of pure self-presence and the actual results obtained through Husserl’s phenomenological investigations.
At this point in mapping out différance, Derrida leaves the semiological discourse and turns to Nietzsche and Freud who “questioned the self-assured attitude of consciousness” and in their own ways came to the conception of différance in regard to consciousness through completely different types of philosophical argumentation (D, 148). Nietzsche accomplished this turn through his “active interpretation” of the “evasions and ruses of anything disguised,” his replacement of “truth as a presentation of the thing itself in its presence” by “an incessant deciphering” (D, 149). The result of Nietzsche’s interminable deciphering or infinite interpretation is “a cipher without truth, or at least a system of ciphers that is not dominated by truth values” (D, 149). Différance, in the case of Nietzsche, is the “‘active’ (in movement) discord of the different forces and of the differences between forces which Nietzsche opposes to the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever that system controls culture, philosophy, and science” (D, 149).
With Freud, the questioning of the primacy of presence as consciousness assumes the particular twist of a “questioning of the authority of consciousness.” The two different meanings of difference embodied in différance, difference as distinction and as delay, are “tied together in Freudian theory” as is obvious in Freud’s concepts of trace, facilitation, breaching, memory, inscription, uncensored talking, and deferring (D, 149–50). Derrida concentrates on the particular notion of detour (Aufschub) as Freud developed it in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle and according to which the ego’s instinct of self-preservation motivates a momentary replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle. “This latter principle,” Freud argues, “does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road (Aufschub) to pleasure” (D, 150).6 We can of course also see the model of delay, of postponement, in the movement of life protecting itself through the deferment of death, or in the activity of memory, even in the operation of culture, and come to similar manifestations of différance in a Freudian context on the basis of Freud’s structural model of the psyche.
Yet under no circumstances should we interpret Freud’s economic movement of différance in the sense of Hegelian dialectics according to which the deferred presence will always be recovered, and which “amounts to an investment that only temporarily and without any loss delays the presentation of presence” (D, 151). Hegel’s system is one of a “restricted economy” that has “nothing to do with an unrestricted expenditure, with death, with being exposed to nonsense,” whereas the unreserved thinking of différance in the style of Freud is a “game where whoever loses wins and where one wins and loses at the same time” (D, 151). Freud’s unconscious is not “a hidden, virtual, and potential self-presence,” not “a mandating subject” that sits somewhere, not “a simple dialectical complication of the present,” but “radical alterity,” that is, “a ‘past’ that has never been nor will ever be present” and “where ‘future’ will never be produced or reproduced in the form of presence” (D, 152).
What is questioned through these various modes of thinking différance for Derrida is the “determination of being in presence, or in beingness” (D, 153)—beingness in the sense of a determinable principle, an ascertainable ground of all beings. This questioning almost immediately leads to the consideration of whether “différance finds its place within the spread of the ontic-ontological difference” as it was conceived in the “Heideggerian meditation” (D, 153) and proposed by this philosopher as ontological difference, as the difference between Being and beings. As Heidegger had maintained since the appearance of Being and Time (1927), the distinction between Being, as the ground of all beings, and the variety of beings had been the most general and universal presupposition of occidental metaphysics, yet was never questioned in its assumptions. All the metaphysical edifices of Western thought had been built on this foundation, but it was so shaky, according to Heidegger, that all buildings resting on it appeared to be brittle. The most questionable aspect of this ontological difference between Being and beings for Heidegger was that the notion of Being resulting from this difference necessarily remains so vague and abstract that only the most general things can be predicated about Being (HN 4:157).7 Being, in other words, instead of being thought, became excluded from our thinking and was involved in a process of oblivion and forgottenness of such boundless nature “that the very forgottenness is sucked into its own vortex” (HN 4:193).
This is for Heidegger the most crucial event in the Occident, in the face of which he expressed his bewilderment throughout his long writing career in an ever-varying fashion: “In the history of Western thought, from its inception, the Being of beings has indeed been thought, but the truth of Being as Being remains unthought; not only is such truth denied as possible experience for thinking, but Western thought, as metaphysics, expressly though unwittingly conceals the occurrence of this refusal” (HN 3:189–90). If we did not conceal this refusal, we would have to admit that the foundations on which we continue to build one form of metaphysics after another “are no foundation at all” (HN 4:163). Closely connected with this emphasis on the “ontological difference” in Western thought is for Heidegger the task of a critical removal of all the compounds of thought resulting from it. This project is first outlined in Being and Time with the title of a “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology,” a destruction of metaphysics.8 In this attempt, Heidegger’s project is directly related to Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics. In both cases, the critique of metaphysics does not at all imply the sense of a destruction and abolition of our tradition, but of an unbuilding, a taking apart and laying bare of the foundations upon which our thought is erected.
Derrida repeatedly paid tribute to Heidegger for his innovation in critical thought about metaphysics and emphasized that his own endeavor would not have been possible “without the opening of Heidegger’s questions,” and first of all, not “without the attention to what Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings, the ontico-ontological difference such as, in a way, it remains unthought by philosophy.” Because of his proximity to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, however, Derrida nevertheless attempted “to locate in Heidegger’s text—which, no more than any other, is not homogeneous, continuous, everywhere equal to the greatest force and to all the consequences of its questions—the signs of a belonging to metaphysics, or to what he calls ontotheology.” And among these “holds” of metaphysics over Heidegger, “the ultimate determination of difference as the ontico-ontological difference” appeared to Derrida “in a strange way, to be in the grasp of metaphysics.”9
To expose this crucial aspect in the critique of metaphysics more fully, we should add that Heidegger developed the notion of an oblivion, a forgottenness of being in two basic forms, structural and historical. The first is carried out from the basis of phenomenology, of transcendental hermeneutics, and consists in the “analysis of existence” (Dasein) which marks the early work, especially Being and Time. This plan changed, however, and led to a turning point (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought because he progressively realized that phenomenology, transcendentalism, and hermeneutics themselves belong to “the history of ontology and are thus by no means capable of ‘destroying’ or undoing that history.”10 This is why the project of a destruction of metaphysics was carried out in terms of what Heidegger called a history of Being as metaphysics. The history of Being as metaphysics seemed to permit a position outside of history, a position without self-referentiality. Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche are the most decisive texts on this theme.
From this point of view, the designation of Being as the truth of beings is “essentially historical” and “always demands a humankind through which it is enjoyed, grounded, communicated, and thus safeguarded” (HN 3:187). This is not because human history proceeds during the course of time, nor because of the actively developing and progressive character in the history of mankind, its movement in the sense of an enlightened emancipation, but because “a humankind in each case accepts the decision regarding its allotted manner of being in the midst of the truth of beings,” because a humankind “is transposed (sent) into metaphysics,” and because “metaphysics alone is able to ground an epoch insofar as it establishes and maintains a humankind in a truth concerning beings as such and as a whole” (HN 3:187). The historical occurrence of truth always requires from within such a humankind a particular thinker (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche) who is called upon, accepts truth’s preservation, and continues the way in which “the unitary essence of metaphysics unfolds and reconstitutes itself again and again” (HN 3:187–88). As is obvious, it is this later theme of a history of being that links Heidegger with the postmodern end-of-philosophy discussion most directly. Derrida’s image of Heidegger, however, attempts to keep the multifaceted character and always ambiguous attitude of the entire Heideggerian discourse in mind.
For the present purpose it will suffice to depict with only a few strokes the main stations in Heidegger’s history of Being as metaphysics. At the beginning of Western history with Parmenides, for example, the auxiliary verb “to be” (einai) became a noun, “Being” (to einai), and thereby a concept. The most decisive step in this development occurred when Plato distinguished this Being as the ground and foundation of all beings. Plato’s distinction of the Being of beings (ontōs on, Sein des Seienden) is precisely the ontological difference which Heidegger considers as crucial for the course of occidental metaphysics. All its implications in the sense of a prior and a later, a primary and a secondary, a ground and its surface, and also the division of being into two realms, two worlds, are already inscribed in this original distinction. Plato had determined the truth of Being as idea and specified it with the notion of agathon, the capable, of “what is suitable, what is good for something and itself, makes something worthwhile” (HN 4:169). The idea of value is implied in this conception. From now on, occidental metaphysics is idealism and Platonism, and even its earlier forms now appear as “pre-Platonic philosophy” (N 4:164). By determining the Being of beings as idea and ascribing to it the qualities of the good, the wellborn, the high-stationed in life, Plato introduced a valorization into the ontological difference with all the implied discriminations of spirit versus matter, soul versus body, speech versus writing, and so on.
Faced with the division into Being and beings, philosophical preoccupation focused more and more on the question “What is Being?” in the sense of something present, objectifiable, ascertainable, manageable, and the question about Being as Being (to on hē on, Sein als Sein) became silent. The suppression of Being for the sake of something tangible went hand in hand with the self-empowering of the subject as the source of perception, the ground and master for the scientific and technological domination of Being. Descartes and Kant transformed Plato’s idea to human perception and made transcendental subjectivity the condition of possibility for beings. The fateful thinking of subjectivity took hold in the West, humanizing and anthropomorphizing everything. Finally, Hegel and Nietzsche intensified the notion of human subjectivity (animal rationale) according to its two components—Hegel by making rationalitas in its speculative-dialectical form the determining principle and Nietzsche by declaring brutalitas and bestialitas the absolute essence of subjectivity (HN 4:148). With the progressive loss of Being, the forgottenness of Being, this process is now heading toward the end of philosophy, the end of the old world, and a total immersion in the technology and cybernetics of the “American age.”
In certain instances, Heidegger depicts a distant goal for humanity in the sense of a reversal of the traditional question about the Being of beings to that of the “truth of Being” (HN 3:191). He himself attempted to promote this trend by taking recourse to the poetic language of Hölderlin, the thought of the pre-Socratics, or his own sibylline usage of words—all providing examples of a language that had not been perverted by the dominion of beings over Being and thereby offering some hope for a final word which would denominate Being and be wedded to Being. Yet this remained for Heidegger the “farthest goal” of history, infinitely removed from the “demonstrable events and circumstances of the present age,” and belonged “to the historical remoteness of another history” (HN 3:191), a different age of the world. During the long interval between these ages, people will continue to think “metaphysically” and to fabricate “systems of metaphysics.” Heidegger usually depicts this transitional period in gloomy terms as a time of leveling and flattening out.11 Yet even in these dark moods, Heidegger’s thought remained oriented, structurally and historically, toward a “clearing,” a final word for the truth of Being as the Being as Being.
One can safely say that with this thinking of a Being which remains unavailable and totally unknowable, yet determines every structure of thought and poetic diction, Heidegger provided that pattern of a delayed and never fully realizable presence that is operative in post-Hegelian hermeneutics and communication theory. This is by no means the unlimited expenditure type of différance that Derrida is pursuing but still a cunning, ruseful type of restricted economy, of limited thinking—a thinking that has only stepped out of the strictures of dialectics and postponed the guaranteed final success of Hegelianism. This model of thought is operative in every “dialogical” type of thinking and understanding, in every form of hermeneutics and the human or social sciences that takes incompletion, failure, disruption as “structural elements of historical experience” by declaring these phenomena meaningful parts of a larger whole, links in a chain, steps toward self-fulfillment.
This model of thought, in other words, does not yet twist us out of Hegelianism. Its pattern can best be described with terms such as progressive coherence, gradual integration, genetic wholeness, enlarging of context, or ongoing continuity. This view of difference is determined by meaning and meaningfulness throughout, even if meaning is obscured in the past, does not fully occur in the present, and will not attain self-presence in the future. But the idea of a total congruity or a complete relationship of all historical phenomena is always operative in this manner of thinking. If one wanted to contrast this holistic thinking of difference, modeled after Heidegger’s ontological difference, with Derrida’s différance, one would have to use phrases like “discontinuous restructuring” for the latter and employ a model of thought that is based neither on a prospective nor a retrospective foundation of truth, that readily admits lack of coherence and congruity, radical unpredictability, and incomprehensibility, however, not as deficiencies but as the factual form of our knowledge.12
Yet, as his recurring impact upon our time manifests, Heidegger cannot be categorized and dismissed that easily. Through special strategies of double gesticulation, his thought escapes unilateral definition and is often a step ahead of the interpreter. As far as meaning and lack of meaning within the structure of ontological difference and the ensuing history of Being as metaphysics is concerned, Heidegger’s later writings present some baffling versions. They usually occur when he attempts to think “in Greek fashion” and gives familiar concepts an interesting new twist. Forgottenness is such an instance because, thought of in the Greek way, it has not only the active meaning of having forgotten (“I have forgotten my umbrella”) but also the passive one of an occurrence, a fate. Forgottenness of Being in this subtle sense is a destiny occurring to us because Being has withdrawn and is concealing itself.13 Although the concealment of Being is still based on the model of presence and clearing, it describes the absence of Being not as a result of human failure and historical condition, but as a structural relationship of absence.
Concealment can also be thought of “in Greek fashion” and it then manifests a disarming double gesture of concealing and revealing. Limit (peras) is another paradigm of Greek thinking, if one emphasizes not only that where something ends, but simultaneously, that in which something originates, in which something stands and is shaped in its particular form and made present as the same.14 With such modes of thinking, Heidegger anticipates Derrida’s conception of phenomena such as “trace,” that is, genuine forms of différance. Such models of thought also remind us of the fact that deconstructive thinking is not a mere negation of meaning and system but that fine line of thinking in between presence and absence, system and nonsystem, order and chaos, revealing and concealing. In this sense, Friedrich Schlegel said: “It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system, and to have none. One will simply have to decide to combine the two” (FS 2:173).
A similar double aspect is conveyed by Heidegger’s notion of Western metaphysics as progressive nihilism and his conception of the “utterly completed, perfect nihilism as the fulfillment of nihilism proper” (HN 4:203). At first glance, nihilism indicates failure, omission, lack, and defeat. By construing the highest possibility and the total perfection of metaphysics as an absolute manifestation of nihilism, however, and as the complete devaluation of all values so far declared as values, Heidegger’s thought assumes its characteristic shape. At the beginning of occidental metaphysics stands Plato’s declaration of the highest form of Being as heavenly ideas, at the end the revelation of Being as vital forces here on earth, as will to power, involved in a senseless reoccurrence of the same. That is the inner law of metaphysical thinking, its irreversible course. Nihilism, properly speaking, is therefore much more than the outcome, the result, the end of the history of metaphysics. Nihilism is not merely a “doctrine or an opinion,” not the simple “dissolution of everything into mere nothingness,” but the process of devaluating those highest values which in the history of metaphysics were declared, one after the other, as the truth of Being and then lost their capacity to shape history (HN 3:203).
This process is not one “historical occurrence among many others,” but rather “the fundamental event of occidental history, which has been sustained and guided by metaphysics” and drives in its last act to a complete “revaluation of previous values” (HN 3:203). Nihilism is the “lawfulness of this historic occurrence, its ‘logic’” (HN 3:205). Nihilism for Heidegger does not propel us into mere nothingness, but its “true essence lies in its affirmative manner of liberation” (HN 3:204). “Perfection of nihilism” is lastly nothing but another name for perfection of metaphysics, in that nihilism and metaphysics are congruent for Heidegger. Nihilism is the most decisive aspect in the history of Being as metaphysics.15 Because of this interrelationship, Heidegger, as perhaps no one before him, was able to think of the previous history of Western metaphysics as a unified whole. One will have to add, however, that the figures in Heidegger’s history of Being as metaphysics are little more than colorless abstracts and that the thoughts of the great philosophers are reduced not only to history, but worse, to a scheme.
Derrida is fully aware of this ambiguity in Heidegger and attempts to protect and maintain it more than any other of Heidegger’s contemporary readers. Already in Of Grammatology he saw Heidegger’s philosophy at once contained in and transgressing the metaphysics of presence. “The very moment of transgression sometimes holds it back short of the limit,” he said (OG, 22).16 By limiting the sense of Being to presence, Heidegger remained within the dominion of Western metaphysics for Derrida; by questioning the origin of that domination, however, Heidegger came to a questioning of what constitutes our history. Heidegger brings this up when in his writing On the Question of Being, he has the word Being crossed out in his text: 
.17 “That mark of deletion,” Derrida says, “is not, however, a ‘merely negative symbol.’ That deletion is the final writing of an epoch. Under its strokes the presence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible” (OG, 23). Such hesitation of thought is not “incoherence,” Derrida continues, but a “trembling proper to all post-Hegelian attempts and to this passage between two epochs” (OG, 24).
This is why in Différance Derrida sees no “simple answer” to the question of whether Heidegger’s thought is still an “intrametaphysical effect of différance” or the “deployment of différance” (D, 153). We could say that Heidegger’s ontological difference between Being and beings and the disappearance of the truth of Being is only a partial aspect of différance, that différance is a more comprehensive, more all-pervasive model of thought than ontological difference, or to use the historical way of putting it, that différance is “ ‘older’ than the ontological difference or the truth of Being” (D, 154). Yet nobody knew better about the “epochality” of his history of Being as metaphysics than Heidegger, and Derrida himself insists that “we must stay within the difficulty of this passage” and “repeat this passage in a rigorous reading of metaphysics wherever metaphysics serves as the norm of Western speech, and not only in the texts of ‘the history of Western philosophy’” (D, 154).
A more basic point concerning Heidegger is brought up by Derrida with the question: “How do we conceive of the outside of a text?” (D, 158). This does not refer only to the epochality of occidental metaphysics and to the problem of how “we conceive of what stands opposed to the text of Western metaphysics” (D, 158). This question relates to the much more fundamental attempt at going “beyond the history of Being, beyond our language as well, and beyond everything that can be named by it” (D, 157). This attempt was the motivating force of metaphysics and its successive efforts to denominate the truth of Being, and to ground the structurality of structure in a principle outside of it, or to transcend the rules of the game. Heidegger had been the most eloquent critic of these metaphysical attempts but still conceived of an outside of the text through his nostalgia and hope for the “marriage between speech and Being in the unique word, in the finally proper name” (D, 160). For Derrida, however, consequently, there is no “outside of a text” (“il n’y a pas de hors text” [OG, 158]), and there “will be no unique name, not even the name of Being.” Yet this situation must be taken “without nostalgia,” Derrida insists: “that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and a certain dance” (D, 159).
Formulating the same thought in contrast to the structuralist mode of thinking, Derrida distinguishes between the “saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play,” that of “broken immediacy,” and the “Nietzschean affirmation” of play, that is, “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered an active interpretation” (SSP, 292).18 The activity of this affirmation and interpretation consists precisely in determining “the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center.” In its security about play and self-assuredness about playing, this affirmation “also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace” (SSP, 292)—an adventure that is proclaiming itself “under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (SSP, 293).
Yet in spite of all this self-conscious reflectiveness and self-referential awareness in the subversion of inherited structures, the most fundamental charge against this discourse in contemporary thought is that of an implied self-contradiction in criticizing truth and philosophy: “The totalizing self-critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction, since subject-centered reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature only by having recourse to its own tools” (DM, 185).19 This is a quote from Habermas, one of the main critics of the deconstruction of reason and metaphysics. It is most directly pronounced against Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, but equally addressed to Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida. Indeed, Habermas sees a direct line of development in the destruction of reason from Schlegel to Nietzsche and Derrida. Adorno and Heidegger occupy special positions on this way. Adorno resolutely “practices determinate negation unremittingly, even though it has lost any foothold in the categorical network of Hegelian logic” (DM, 186). Heidegger, in contrast, “flees from this paradox to the luminous heights of an esoteric, special discourse, which absolves itself of the restrictions of discursive speech generally and is immunized by vagueness against any specific objections” (DM, 185). All the other critiques of deconstructive thought and ironic discourse—relapse into myth and religion, escape into literature and poetry, political disinterest, social aloofness, lack of practice—follow from this basic critique.
Nietzsche is considered the “turntable” for this development according to Habermas, since he is the first in history to renounce a renewed revision of the concept of reason and “bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment” (DM, 86). He rejected the very “achievements of modernity,” that “from which the modern age drew its pride and self-consciousness,” that is, subjective freedom realized in society (DM, 83), in order “to gain a foothold in myth as the other of reason” (DM, 86). With Nietzsche, “modernity loses its single status” and merely constitutes “a last epoch in the far-reaching history of a rationalization initiated by the dissolution of archaic life and the collapse of myth” (DM, 87). A utopian attitude now focuses on the “god who is coming,” and a “religious festival become work of art” is supposed to bridge the modern age with the archaic (DM, 87).
For Habermas, however, Nietzsche was by no means original in his “Dionysian treatment of history” (DM, 92). His thesis about the origin of the tragic chorus in the rites of Dionysus derives “from a context that was already well developed in early romanticism” (DM, 92), and the idea of a new mythology is just as much of “romantic provenance” as the “recourse to Dionysus as the god who is coming” (DM, 88). Habermas finds the expectation of a new mythology to replace philosophy in Schelling and in other texts from the turn of the eighteenth century, but especially in Friedrich Schlegel (DM, 88–89). Schlegel indeed published a Speech on Mythology in 1800 demanding the creation of a “focal point, such as mythology was for the ancients” (FS 2:312). Habermas understands this demand as postulating an absolute position of poetry above reason, a “becoming aesthetic of ideas that are supposed to be joined in this way with the interests of the people” (DM, 90), a surrendering to the “world of the primordial forces of myth” (DM, 90–91), a return into the “primordial chaos of human nature” (DM, 90; KFSA 2:319), a “messianic temporalizing of what for Schelling was a well-founded historical expectation” (DM, 90), and altogether an increased valuation of “Dionysus, the driven god of frenzy, of madness, and of ceaseless transformations” (DM, 91). To leave no doubt as to the position from which he argues, Habermas adds polemically: “The difference from Hegel is obvious—not speculative reason, but poetry alone can, as soon as it becomes public in the form of a new mythology, replace the unifying power of religion” (DM, 89).
Whereas the romantic recourse to Dionysus served as a byway to the fulfillment of Christian promises annulled by the Reformation and the Enlightenment (DM, 92), Habermas claims, Nietzsche cleansed the Dionysian of such romantic elements and enhanced it to the absolute self-oblivion of subjectivity in a blissful ecstasy. Only when all “categories of intelligent doing and thinking are upset, the norms of daily life have broken down,” and “the illusions of habitual normality have collapsed” (DM, 93), can the modern human being expect from the new mythology “a kind of redemption that eliminates all mediations” (DM, 94). Only then do we reach “reason’s absolute other,” that is, experiences that are displaced back into the archaic realm—“experiences of self-disclosure of a decentered subjectivity, liberated from all constraints of cognition and purposive activity, all imperatives of utility and morality” (DM, 94).
From now on, however, the Nietzsche of Habermas begins to resemble more and more a specter. Without any concern for textual evidence, Habermas depicts him as a pragmatic epistemologist who denied any difference between true and false, good and evil, and reduced such distinctions to “preferences for what serves life and for the noble” (DM, 95). The “transsubjective will to power is manifested in the ebb and flow of an anonymous process of subjugation” (DM, 95), and the dominion of “subject-centered reason” in the modern age is seen as “the result and expression of a perversion of the will to power” (DM, 95), as nihilism. Nietzsche attempted to give meaning to the nihilism of his time by supposedly declaring it as “the night of the remoteness of the gods, in which the proximity of the absent god is proclaimed.” Yet he could not “legitimize” the criteria of his aesthetic judgments because he had transposed them into the archaic and did not recognize them as a “moment of reason” (DM, 96).
These disclosures of power theories undertaken for the sake of the aesthetic, the “gateway to the Dionysian,” constitute for Habermas Nietzsche’s particular “dilemma of a self-enclosed critique of reason that has become total” (DM, 96). Habermas believes that Nietzsche could muster “no clarity about what it means to pursue a critique of ideology that attacks its own foundations” (DM, 96), a “totalized, self-consuming critique of ideology” (DM, 97). The two poles, reason and its other, do not stand in a dialectical relationship to each other, mutually negating and thereby enhancing each other, but in a relationship of “mutual repugnance and exclusion.” Reason is “delivered over to the dynamics of withdrawal and retreat, of expulsion and proscription,” whereas “self-reflection is sealed off from the other of reason” (DM, 103). Habermas’s final verdict on Nietzsche is: “His theory of power cannot satisfy the claim to scientific objectivity and, at the same time, put into effect the program of a total and hence self-referential critique of reason that also affects the truth of theoretical propositions” (DM, 104–5).
Whereas the self-referential contradiction in the case of Nietzsche is derived from an assumed theory of power for the sake of a Dionysian aestheticism, Derrida’s self-contradiction is construed from an alleged, yet futile search for an arche-writing on the part of the French philosopher—an arche-writing which has been lost and of which we find only traces in a strange, obliterated, Kafkaesque shape (DM, 164). The increasing degree of subject-centered reason, of the categorical network of Hegelian logic, of a dialectic of enlightenment, and of modernity from Schlegel to Nietzsche and Derrida is obviously accompanied for Habermas by an increase in self-contradiction which, with Derrida, now comes to a new height. Yet the special trait in Habermas’s image of Derrida derives from his assertion that the latter’s “program of a scripture scholarship with claims to a critique of metaphysics” has an alleged religious inspiration, is “nourished from religious sources” (DM, 165). Derrida’s thought of an “arche-writing prior to all identifiable inscriptions” (DM, 179) is seen by Habermas as the “remembrance of the messianism of Jewish mysticism and of the abandoned but well-circumscribed place once assumed by the God of the Old Testament” (DM, 167), more precisely, the Torah in its inexhaustibility (DM, 182) and the “mystical concept of tradition as an ever delayed event of revelation” (DM, 183).
This notion of an arche-writing drives Derrida back behind Heidegger (DM, 183), according to Habermas. He characterizes Derrida’s attempt as “going beyond the ontological difference and Being to the difference proper to writing, which puts an origin already set in motion [Heidegger’s Being] yet one level deeper” (DM, 181). Arche-writing, in other words, “takes on the role of a subjectless generator of structures,” of structures without an author (DM, 180). Yet Habermas regards Derrida’s distinction from Heidegger as “insignificant” (DM, 181) because Derrida “does not shake loose of the intentions of a first philosophy” and “lands at an empty, formulalike avowal of some indeterminate authority.” The only difference between the two philosophers is that in Derrida’s case this is “not the authority of a Being that has been distorted by beings, but the authority of a no longer holy scripture, of a scripture that is in exile, wandering about, estranged from its own meaning, a scripture that testamentarily documents the absence of the holy” (DM, 181).
The other main objection Habermas raises against Derrida also relates to the alleged self-referential contradiction and concerns the “leveling of genre distinction between literature and philosophy” in deconstructive theory (DM, 185). Derrida and his followers abolished the borderlines between philosophy and literature, as Habermas sees it, in order to escape the “consistency requirements” of scientific discourse. Derrida thereby “undercuts” the problem of self-referentiality and makes it irrelevant; he simply attempts to “clear away the ontological scaffolding erected by philosophy in the course of its subject-centered history of reason” (DM, 188–89). Yet he does this not “analytically, in the sense of identifying hidden presuppositions or implications,” as one usually does, but “by a critique of style, in that he finds something like indirect communications, by which the text itself denies its manifest content, in the rhetorical surplus of meaning inherent in the literary strata of texts that present themselves as non-literary” (DM, 189).
What is bothering Habermas, however, is that Derrida applies this reading technique not only to texts by Kafka, Joyce, and Celan, but also to those of Husserl, Saussure, and Rousseau, and interprets them “against the explicit interpretations of their authors” (DM, 189). The goal of this strategy appears to be obvious to Habermas: “As soon as we take the literary character of Nietzsche’s writings seriously, the suitableness of his critique of reason has to be assessed in accord with the standards of rhetorical success and not those of logical consistency” (DM, 188). Yet Habermas is of the opinion that such a procedure is legitimate only “if the philosophical text is in truth a literary one—if one can demonstrate that the genre distinction between philosophy and literature dissolves upon closer examination” (DM, 189). The positive result of such an examination would apparently constitute a dangerous and frightening situation for Habermas because it would lead to an upgrading of literary criticism to a critique of metaphysics and would grant literary criticism, horribile dictu, the status of a “procedure that takes on an almost world-historical mission with its overcoming of the thinking of the metaphysics of presence and of the age of logocentrism” (DM, 191–92). To avoid such mingling of departments and academic disciplines, Habermas devotes the rest of his Derrida critique to an elaboration of the distinctiveness and exclusiveness of poetic speech.
To reduce the discussion partner’s importance and eventually exclude him from the solution of the problem, thereby silencing him, is the most typical gesture for this type of consensus-finding through communication, especially if the other side stands in opposition to or is not easily accommodated by the intended purpose. This attitude can already be noticed in Habermas’s treatment of Friedrich Schlegel who, because of his Speech on Mythology, is put down as an irrationalist of the poetic sort. In reality, however, the Speech on Mythology is part of a larger text, the Dialogue on Poetry, depicting a group of animated and witty conversational partners who discuss possibilities of how “to bring poetry the closest to the highest possible poetry at all on earth” (FS 2:286). Four formal presentations are made outlining different approaches to this goal, one of which is the Speech on Mythology.
We can assume with good reason that the entire text attempts to convey an image of the Jena group of early German romanticism and that each conversational partner enacts a certain role in this scene. If this assumption is correct or even acceptable, however, the speaker for the new mythology is probably the philosopher Schelling because of Schelling’s own historical preoccupation with the theme and because of a certain rashness and impetuosity in his style (“I will go right to the point. . . .” [FS 2:312]). In this case the Speech on Mythology would not only constitute a programmatic, apodictic statement on the necessity of a new mythology and the desire to create one, but would also incorporate Schlegel’s critical assessment of such a project in a highly conscious though entirely indirect manner of communication.
In the last analysis, however, the Speech on Mythology remains Schlegel’s own text in spite of all this framing, distancing, and configuring, and it matters little whether Schlegel attributed the postulate of a new mythology to Schelling, himself, or to an entirely fictitious figure named Lothario. What matters, however, is the structuring of the text, namely, the integration of a highly self-critical and self-conscious attitude about mythology with a writing on mythology, that is, irony, self-creation and self-destruction. Yet all these sophisticated modes of communication are ignored in Habermas’s reading of the Speech on Mythology, and the text is reduced to a straightforward statement by Schlegel. Not even its character as speech, as a rhetorical expression indicated in the title, is noticed. Hegel called Schlegel by all sorts of names and considered him to be insolent, vain, destructive, and not really interested in the real concerns of humanity. Yet Hegel would never have characterized Schlegel as unreflective, as conceiving of poetry as “cleansed of associations with theoretical and practical reason,” as opening “the door to the world of the primordial forces of myth” (DM, 90–91). Even a restricted reading of the Speech on Mythology outside of any context should come to the discovery that Schlegel did not conceive of the new mythology in terms of a relapse into myth but as something “forged from the deepest depth of the mind,” as the “most artful of all works of art” (FS 2:312).
The neglect of style and of the “literary” mode of communication must lead to disastrous results in Habermas’s critique of Nietzsche, for whom the structuring of a text, the seriousness of the mise en scène, was a primary requirement for intellectuality, for writing. Habermas’s reading of Nietzsche indeed leads to the assumption of a ruthless Renaissance aestheticism in the style of “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” The active interdependence among all of Nietzsche’s statements is totally ignored. Nietzsche is reduced to someone who had “no clarity about what it means to pursue a critique of ideology that attacks its own foundations” (DM, 96)—as if an ideology critique that does not attack its own foundations were necessarily superior. The problem with this kind of argumentation is that whoever does not conform to a certain trend of philosophizing, here a revised Hegelianism, is excluded from philosophical discourse and declared a romantic, a protofascist, a Jewish mystic, or an American literary critic. A radicalized or “totalized” critique of reason appears to be prohibited because of the offense by such a critique against basic rules and conventions of “philosophical” argumentation. So coercion-free communication begins with coercion to accept these norms.
Rorty sees no problem with a totalized critique of reason and philosophy and would at the most question its usefulness. He also has no objection to breaking down the borderlines between philosophy and literature and considers such departmentalizations simply habits, which, however, often carry along wrong hierarchical concepts of knowledge. For him, the invention of romantic poetry was an event just as important in the modern world as any comparable innovation in the realm of the sciences and philosophy. Of the two types of philosophy, Kant and Hegel, Habermas and Lyotard, truth-oriented and interpretation-oriented thinking, decentering and disseminative thought, which he likes to play off against each other, Rorty seems to favor the latter because of its higher level of reflection and self-criticism. “The first likes to present itself as a straightforward, down-to-earth, scientific attempt to get things right,” he says:
The second needs to present itself obliquely, with the help of as many foreign words and as much allusiveness and name-dropping as possible. Neo-Kantian philosophers like Putnam, Strawson, and Rawls have arguments and theses which are connected to Kant’s by a fairly straightforward series of “purifying” transformations, transformations which are thought to give clearer and clearer views of the persistent problems. For the non-Kantian philosophers, there are no persistent problems—save perhaps the existence of Kantians. Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not have arguments and theses. They are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects or methods but in the “family resemblance” way in which latecomers in a sequence of commentators on commentators are connected with older members of the same sequence.20
In a recent book, Rorty presents these two types of philosophers with the names of “metaphysicians” and “ironists.”21 The tradition of “ironist philosophy” began with the early Hegel and continued with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida (CIS, 78), whereas metaphysical philosophy is an attempt at “grounding” one’s beliefs and presenting them as proven, as truth. Such a ground can be as shaky as Habermas’s communication theory and still qualify the proponent as a metaphysician (CIS, 82). It is the intention that counts. Ironists, in contrast, do not believe in grounds. They rename and redefine problems instead and engage in endless metonymies.
Rorty’s canon of ironist philosophy is almost identical to the one in our text. Instead of Friedrich Schlegel, he includes the early Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit, but the real difference is Heidegger, who in the present study appears as an ironist only in certain borderline cases such as his thinking “in Greek fashion.” This difference is of importance for the understanding of irony and should therefore be explained right away. Rorty knows of course that Heidegger “spent a lot of time being scornful of the aestheticist, pragmatist, lightmindedness of the ironist”: “He thought of them as dilettantish clatterers who lacked the high seriousness of the great metaphysicians—their special relation to Being. As a Schwarzwald redneck, he had an ingrained dislike of the North German cosmopolitan mandarins. As a philosopher, he viewed the rise of the ironist intellectuals—many of them Jews—as symptomatic of the degeneracy of what he called ‘the age of the world picture’” (CIS, 111–12).
Looked at from the perspective of the history of Being as metaphysics, the age of irony would have begun for Heidegger with the demise of metaphysics in the Occident, with the closure of the “epoch,” around the end of the Second World War, although he never described this development in terms of irony. This is a period of a general flattening out, of disbelief, of the degeneration of philosophy into anthropology and psychology, of its transformation into the individual sciences, of cybernetics and the computer. It is a period of a completely indeterminable length before a new age of the world can begin.22 We could also call it the postmodern age, because many postmodern features correspond precisely to Heidegger’s descriptions of the state of affairs after all “essential possibilities of metaphysics are exhausted” in the Occident (N 4:148). Yet Heidegger never wanted simply to brush off metaphysics as the ironist does in Rorty’s description, but maintained a most solemn memory (Andenken) of it and still attempted to say the ultimate word by uttering Hölderlin’s verses or the fragments by the pre-Socratics. This solemn, hymnical, spellbound attitude appears to be the opposite of irony and seems to exclude Heidegger from the ironic discourse of modernity.
The reason that Rorty includes Heidegger among the great ironists of our time is not so much his occasional twisting of words and concepts, which thereby assume a self-referential deprecation of his own position, but rather a special notion of irony or of ironist theory based on the idea “that something (history, Western man, metaphysics—something large enough to have a destiny) has exhausted its possibilities” (CIS, 101). For Rorty, the ironist assumes the role of “the last philosopher” (CIS, 106) and treats all the former ones as metaphysicians (CIS, 110). The ironist knows that there is no truth and that the role of philosophy now has to be played entirely differently.
The special point in Rorty’s new discussion of metaphysicians and ironists is, however, that he puts the two to the test of pragmatism and asks what they are worth in terms of social engineering, liberal politics, and human solidarity. His test turns out to be bad for both, but worse for the ironist. Habermas, for instance, sees the function of metaphysical philosophy as supplying “some social glue which will replace religious belief” and finds it in the “universality” of human rationality (CIS, 83). This is a good intention, but is based on the “ludicrous” assumption for Rorty that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs (CIS, 86). “Absence of metaphysics” is by no means politically dangerous, as one might assume, no more than atheism weakened “liberal societies” as people feared in the nineteenth century. On the contrary, it “strengthened them” (CIS, 85). Rorty easily dismisses Habermas’s fear that “ironist thinking which runs from Hegel through Foucault and Derrida” is destructive of social hope. He rather sees “this line of thought as largely irrelevant to public life and to political questions,” making the point: “Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida and Foucault seem to me to be invaluable in our attempt to form a private self-image, but pretty well useless when it comes to politics” (CIS, 83).
In pursuing this point more closely, Rorty asks questions such as whether ironism is “compatible with a sense of human solidarity” (CIS, 87), with a “universalistic ethics” (CIS, 88), or with hope (CIS, 91) and always comes to a negative result combined with the feeling that “there is something right about the suspicion which ironism arouses” (CIS, 89). One would readily admit in the intellectual climate of today, he argues, that public rhetoric in a “liberal culture” should be “nominalist and historicist,” that is, nonmetaphysical, and one should consider this “both possible and desirable.” Yet one would hardly go on “to claim that there could be or ought to be a culture whose public rhetoric is ironist” (CIS, 87). Rorty’s ideal candidate for public rhetoric in a liberal culture would be a “common-sensically nominalist and historicist” language (CIS, 87) that would produce “a kind of straightforward, unself-conscious, transparent prose—precisely the kind of prose no self-creating ironist wants to write” (CIS, 89). Philosophy, in the increasingly self-conscious culture of today, “has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection rather than of any social task” (CIS, 94) and should therefore not be asked “to do a job which it cannot do, and which it defines itself as unable to do” (CIS, 94).
Another good candidate for promoting human solidarity and the liberal cause of hope and political utility is poetry and literature, especially the novel (CIS, 94, 96). Ethnographic descriptions and other “non-theoretical literary genres” are also suited for this task because of their direct impact. We thereby come to a strong division, a “split,” as Rorty says, between the private and the public sector, theory and practice, literature and philosophy. Philosophy, especially in its contemporary sophisticated status of theory and irony, is assigned to the private realm, whereas the public domain is handed over to common sense and literature. In former times, while still pursuing the project of modernity during the period of philosophy as metaphysics, one had hoped “to bring together our private and our public lives by showing us that self-discovery and political utility could be united” (CIS, 120). Now we should “stop trying to combine self-creation and politics, especially if we are liberals” because the political part of a liberal ironist’s final vocabulary “will never integrate with the rest of that vocabulary” (CIS, 120).
The epitome of irony in this end-of-philosophy style is for Rorty, consequently, one kind of writing practiced by Derrida. Rorty does not, however, refer so much to the poststructuralist and post-Heideggerian Derrida whom we have discussed in previous sections. For in these early texts there is still too much talk of “infrastructures,” of “undercutting,” of “conditions of possibility,” of “presence as absence,” in other words, of very metaphysical sounding notions. These texts at least lend themselves to such readings and inspire research projects on grammatology or epochal distinctions in the sense of “the end of the book and the beginning of writing.” Rorty turns to later writings such as The Truth in Painting (1978), Glas (1981), but especially The Postcard (1980), and to the section “Envois” of the latter,23 in which interconnective thought processes are abandoned for the sake of freely spinning fantasies. According to Rorty, Derrida now gives “free rein to the trains of associations,” and such daydreaming is in Rorty’s view “the end product of ironist theorizing” (CIS, 125).
Derrida’s alleged retreat into “private fantasy” is for Rorty also “the only solution to the self-referential problem which such theorizing encounters, the problem of how to distance one’s predecessors without doing exactly what one has repudiated them for doing” (CIS, 125). Rorty says: “So I take Derrida’s importance to lie in having had the courage to give up the attempt to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring together a quest for private autonomy, and an attempt at public resonance and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful” (CIS, 125). Derrida thereby brings to conclusion a philosophical trend beginning with Hegel which had been haunted by ever deeper layers of foundation in its deconstructive drive. At least, this philosophical movement had been interpreted from outside as forever coming up with always new and profounder grounds for being: Hegel with reason, Nietzsche with the will to power, Heidegger with Being, and Derrida with an arche-writing. Rorty comments:
I am claiming that Derrida, in “Envois,” has written a kind of book which nobody had ever thought of before. He has done for the history of philosophy what Proust did for his own life story: He has played all the authority figures, and all the descriptions of himself which these figures might be imagined as giving, off against each other, with the result that the very notion of “authority” loses application in reference to his work. He has achieved autonomy in the same way that Proust achieved autonomy: neither Remembrance of Things Past nor “Envois” fits within any conceptual scheme previously used to evaluate novels or philosophical treatises. He has avoided Heideggerian nostalgia in the same way that Proust avoided sentimental nostalgia—by incessantly recontextualizing whatever memory brings back. Both he and Proust have extended the bounds of possibility. (CIS, 137)
We could just as well say that in this view Derrida has transgressed the realm of irony circumscribed earlier as walking the fine line inbetween system and nonsystem, chaos and order, self-creation and self-destruction—never succumbing to the one or to the other. Rorty offers us clear-cut divisions between the private and the public, reserving sophisticated theory for the personal and thumb-rule decisions for the social realm, and eliminating irony not only from the political but also from the individual sphere if the latter is seen in accomplished isolation. For what makes Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida ironic, beyond Rorty’s concept of “ironism” in the end-of-philosophy sense, is precisely that they never disentangle themselves from the entwining of metaphysics, that they never land in a value-free beyond, that they never hit rock-bottom but remain in the zone of the inbetween. Rorty’s notions of a full arrival or a complete separation, his thinking in ideal types of the truly practical and the genuinely theoretical appear to be “terribly metaphysical” and extremely close to Habermas only with inverted evaluations. Derrida appears like someone who threw away the ladder of deconstruction after he had arrived in the promised land of free-spinning writing without a trace of interconnectedness among his thoughts. Ironic writing has this trend as one essential element, that of self-destruction, but never constitutes itself without the opposite, self-creation. The interrelationship between the two is so intense that we do not know which is the destructive and which is the constructive part. This writing with two hands is not only exercised in one and the same text but also proceeds alternately and alternatively. Consequently, and with the rigor of a writing that is, in Schlegel’s words, entirely involuntary and yet completely deliberate, perfectly instinctive and perfectly conscious, Derrida takes up the problem of responsibility in one of his very “latest” texts, even that of political responsibility.24
In this context, but also in others and especially in that of postmodernism, it appears highly significant that the three star-witnesses for the discourse of modernity and irony as the main structural principle of that discourse, Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida, do not see irony in a developmental scheme as the last accomplishment of a late epoch, but assign it a much more fundamental function. One could even doubt, with good reason, that Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida actually believed in the origin of a modern period distinguishing us from the rest of the world. In the quote about the rupture or disrupture which marked our epoch, Derrida added that this rupture had “always already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work” (SSP, 280). Nietzsche used the term “modern” almost exclusively in deprecatory manner. And Schlegel, when pressed to give a date for the beginning of the modern age, first mentioned Euripides, soon added Socrates, and then shifted to Pythagoras because he was for him the one who for the first time thought about the entirety of the whole world from the principle of one single idea. What these examples suggest is that for Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida a radical type of reflective thinking was not the prerogative of an epoch but an eternal mark of man. If they had to date the postmodern period, and they are great authorities in matters of irony and the postmodern, they would have given an amazingly early date and let it coincide with the origin of man or, if there is no such origin, with the eternal transgression of man.
This does not exclude a sense for history. However, if we had to locate the ironies of Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida in any historical context, we would have to choose classical Greece and, strangely enough, Plato’s Academy. This appears to be strange because Nietzsche and Derrida, not Schlegel, are highly critical of Plato: Nietzsche by proclaiming Plato as the originator of the metaphysics of two worlds, which implied a defamation of our world and made Christianity “Platonism for the people” (FN 5:12); and Derrida by considering Plato the father of logocentrism and phonocentrism with all the implied binary discriminations of spirit versus matter, soul versus body, speech versus writing, man versus woman.
And yet, all three saw Plato also as the prototype of a philosopher whom, had they believed in a postmodern era, they could have very well prescribed for that time as a model. In a text that became the source for one of the most influential Plato receptions in modern history, Schlegel wrote: “Plato, although he very well had a philosophy, had yet no system, just as philosophy itself is altogether more a search, a striving for science than science itself. And this is especially the case with that of Plato. He never completed his thought. This continuously endeavoring movement of his mind for perfected knowledge and understanding of the highest, this constant becoming, shaping, and developing of his ideas, he attempted to write down artistically in dialogues” (FS 11:120). Nietzsche considered it the most revealing feature about Plato that a copy of Aristophanes was discovered under the pillow of his deathbed. “How could he have endured life,” Nietzsche exclaimed, “Greek life, to which he said no, without Aristophanes!” (FN 5:47; GE, 41). And in Derrida’s reading of Plato as the king of logocentrism with his sun-filled voice who condemned the arts, play, rhetoric, writing, and myth, the Greek philosopher does all this in a text, the very essence of which consists of art, play, rhetoric, performative writing, and mythical accounts. Plato’s text can justly be considered the prototype for Derrida’s own predilection for the dissimulation of the woven texture; it is indeed the text par excellence for him, and also a text which has been misread for millennia and has always new discoveries in store once we open it.25 When Heidegger declared Plato the originator of occidental metaphysics, he made the Greek philosopher, to a certain degree, the inaugurator of the modern age. Derrida, in his deconstructive reading, shows the contradictory overabundance in Plato and thereby makes him the initiator of the postmodern epoch—if there were such a thing.
1. See on this Constantin Behler, “Humboldt’s ‘radikale Reflexion über die Sprache’ im Lichte der Foucaultschen Diskursanalyse,” in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 63 (1989), 1–24; Josef Simon, “Grammatik und Wahrheit,” Nietzsche-Studien 1 (1972): 1–27.
2. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler with the collaboration of Jean-Jacques Anstett, Hans Eichner, and other specialists, 35 vols. (Paderborn-München: Schöningh, 1958—). References to this edition are designated FS. Translations are taken, when available, from Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), designated FS.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980). References to this edition are designated FN. When possible, the following translations were utilized: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Random House, 1967); Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974); Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966); Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1969); Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1968).
4. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison and Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60. References to this text are designated D.
5. La voix et le phénomène of 1967. See the translation listed in footnote 4, above.
6. Sigmund Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” in Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1982). vol. 3, 219–20.
7. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell and others, 4 vols. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979–85). References to this text are designated HN.
8. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. 15th Edition with the Author’s Marginal Notes (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979), 19–27.
9. Jacques Derrida, “Implications,” in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 9–10.
10. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans, with an introduction by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), ix.
11. Especially in Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 57–58.
12. See on this Ernst Behler, “Deconstruction versus Hermeneutics: Derrida and Gadamer on Text and Interpretation,” in Southern Humanities Review 21 (1983): 201–23.
13. Martin Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 243.
14. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982).
15. Especially in Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4, European Nihilism.
16. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). References to this text are designated OG.
17. See Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage.”
18. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978). References to this text are designated SSP.
19. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). References to this text are designated DM. For a critique of Habermas’s presentation of Nietzsche as a return to the archaic and a relapse into myth, see David E. Wellbery, “Nietzsche-Art-Postmodernism: A Reply to Jürgen Habermas,” Stanford Italian Review (1986), 77–100.
20. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 92–93.
21. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). References to this text are designated CIS.
22. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans, with an introduction by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
23. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–257.
24. Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 590–625.
25. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171.