Irony's Resistance to Theorypragmatism in the text of deconstruction
Abstract
Oh, I'm missing all the things I knew, Yet wish I knew nothing at all. Massive Attack, “Three” I Given the resistance to theory that has helped to define pragmatism as an “American evasion of philosophy,” to use Cornell West's well-known formulation, it is not without a certain irony to discover pragmatism having undergone a process of critical reevaluation and as a result gradually drawn into the theoretical orbit of poststructuralism. The year 1993 alone saw two significant academic conferences on this subject, the one a symposium entitled “Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” which was organized by Chantal Mouffe for the Coll ge International de Philosophie in Paris, and the other a colloquium entitled “Deconstruction is/in America,” organized by Anselm Haverkamp for New York University. 1 It may be argued that the interest in effecting a rapprochement between pragmatism and deconstruction is due in no small part to the bipartisan methodological outreach of the neopragmatist Richard Rorty, who has long since argued that “Pragmatists and Derrideans are […] natural allies” whose “strategies supplement each other admirably.” 2 Indeed, it is largely as a result of Rorty's enthusiastic appropriation of deconstruction as an ally of pragmatism that various points of complementarity