Living Antagonistically: Lorenzo Fabbri’s Domesticating Derrida

 
To choose security is to choose death. That such a lesson comes at the expense of Richard Rorty in a book on the relation of French deconstruction to American pragmatism is only one of the more compelling paradoxes in Lorenzo Fabbri’s impressive The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. At first glance Fabbri, a young Italian academic, appears to be working within the tradition of continental critiques of American pragmatism and in particular the work of Richard Rorty, a critique begun almost three decades ago first by Michel Foucault and then by Derrida himself.¹ The title of Fabbri’s book is drawn from Wlad Godzich’s important reading of de Man, “The Domestication of Derrida,” which appeared in the 1983 volume The Yale Critics. There Godzich describes (and circumscribes) the intellectual encounter between Derrida and de Man in ways that inform Fabbri’s own take on Rorty. Building on and diverging from Godzich’s essay, Fabbri recounts his own coming to terms with Rorty’s reading of deconstruction as an anti-philosophy in an itinerary that moves from contingency, to irony, to—and in my view most decisively—a final engagement with Foucault and the implicit question of biopolitics. Fabbri’s concluding chapter on modernity, politics, and monstrosity registers the fundamental break between deconstruction and pragmatism, one centered on the features of a truly political form of life. On Fabbri’s read, deconstruction brings in its wake radical possibilities for “favouring new possibilities of existence and of being-together” (4).
 
To get at those radical possibilities, Fabbri naturally begins where one would expect him to: with a cogent summary of Rorty’s reading of deconstruction across well-known texts like Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In a series of marvelous close readings, Fabbri brings his own profound knowledge of Derrida’s works to bear on Rorty, laying out in convincing fashion the real strengths of Rorty’s interpretation of deconstruction, and examining point by point the areas of contact and contamination between contemporary American pragmatism and deconstruction. Fabbri is always attentive in these comparisons to the role writing plays for both Derrida and Rorty, a writing that skirts in and out of the ironic. The place of writing becomes decisive in the second chapter, when Fabbri puts to the test his earlier readings of Rorty’s supposed alliance with deconstruction by taking up the question of the doubly “private” in Rorty’s understanding of the political. Of particular interest for Fabbri is the function of autobiography in Derrida’s thought and more generally the relation between theory and the “person” espousing it. In the final chapter Fabbri pivots from the private and the philosophical to the question of forms of life and their relation to political solidarity. Fabbri’s damning if familiar conclusion is that Rorty remains, alas, a stubborn liberal who cannot see how easily pragmatism allies itself with normalizing strategies meant to contain radical political possibilities for life. When Rorty, in Fabbri’s gloss, chides Derrida for not having been decent enough to keep philosophy within the boundaries of private life, it is precisely with a view to denying philosophy’s vocation as a practice of civil disobedience, a possibility Derrida himself puts forward in a series of essays from the 1980s and 1990s.²
 
There is much of interest in Fabbri’s account of the limits of linking pragmatism and deconstruction too closely, but I’d like to focus especially on two areas. The first becomes visible in the margins of the introduction and the opening chapters but really comes into view in the book’s final pages. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy in particular, Fabbri speaks of an underlying anxiety on Rorty’s part when the topic moves to thinking community. He writes that Rorty “is locked within the boundaries of a given theoretical and political community, confiding in narratives and philosophy to prevent the coming of monsters. Deconstruction, instead, plays in blindfolds. It bids on possibilities for an existence to come” (127). In this insistence on political and theoretical communities, Fabbri is able to track, in a way others before him have not, how the dispositifs of Rorty’s pragmatism—principally tolerance and the private—align Rorty again and again with a liberal form of community. Fabbri is nothing short of devastating here. Making great use of Foucault’s essay “What is Critique?” to buttress his claims against Rorty, as well as of Derrida’s seminal readings on the university in “Eyes of the University,” Fabbri offers a ringing defense of an ontology of actuality, making the case for “doing theory” as a way of de-anchoring the “presence of the present” (114). His reading of “the presence of the present” as that which undergirds the liberal form of community becomes the privileged site for deconstruction (4). It is by adopting deconstruction that unexpected futures become visible, ones sacrificed by Rorty’s incessant policing of the private and public. Indeed, Fabbri speaks of Rorty as proffering a sort of “reductive vitalism” (74). This seems exactly right: a vitalism addressed to fencing off private lives from community is one not only reductive but also destined to wither. In other words, what Rorty fails to see in Derrida’s work is how deconstruction raises truly important questions for a future radical politics. On that note, I couldn’t help thinking when reading The Domestication of Derrida that what Fabbri has done essentially is to have Rorty play Sterling Hayden’s brigadier general Jack D. Ripper to Derrida’s Group Captain Mandrake (as played by Peter Sellers) in a theoretical remake of Dr. Strangelove. The difference would be that in the new version vital communities are substituted for vital bodily fluids.
 
The second point follows closely on the question of community and concerns how Rorty responds to the vulnerability of public space. In Fabbri’s view, his response really comes down to security measures. Why the recourse to the police? Fabbri writes that Rorty “needs to have assurance that at the end of the day he will return to the exact same form of life from where he moved in the morning. And when such a happy ending cannot be guaranteed, the fear of the unpredictable makes him create protective barriers that ensure the security of his home” (126). On this score, Fabbri deploys to great effect a Nietzschean reading of security, which resonates especially with those pages from Daybreak in which Nietzsche recognizes how easily security comes to dominate society, creating those who can do nothing else except worship security “as the supreme divinity,” who can judge their actions according to one criterion alone: whether these actions tend “towards the common security and society’s sense of security” (105-106). Fabbri is relentless in the final chapter in keeping a ledger of the high price Rorty pays to have his home protected and his security maintained, measured in a missing politics and an absent philosophy to come, in a normalized and normalizing form of political life that Foucault critiqued so deeply in The Birth of Biopolitics. In this, Rorty’s perspective on deconstruction becomes a window on how extensively he nullifies the political generally, neutralizing the capacity of critique—deconstruction is the privileged critique though implicitly others are included in Fabbri’s analysis—to uncover the history of normalization, and what in turn links normalizing strategies to citizenship and to the state. Worse still, Rorty’s hopes for securing public space from unexpected (and therefore dangerous) forms of life produce, through Derridean auto-immunity, monsters that pop up repeatedly in Rorty’s work. In a series of strange doublings, it is a monstrous Derrida who comes to stand in metonymically for other monstrous forms of collective life when security has failed and vulnerability comes to characterize all human groupings. Fabbri suggests something else here too: that in the coming together of security and community—community as the subject and object of security—Rorty’s pragmatism is disclosed as a biopolitical machine whose function is to produce nothing short of a liberal form of life as a political form of being-together that wants (and ultimately fails) to secure its citizens. Fabbri instead insists repeatedly on the possibility of liberating all forms excluded from such a secured space by emphasizing “those struggles which aspire to favour antagonistic ways of living the now” (124). In this combination of antagonism and life, Fabbri echoes in important ways the recent work of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection.³
 
In refusing Rorty’s reading of Derrida, which transforms “philosophical reflection into a private matter,” Fabbri sees possibilities for future antagonistic forms of life (50). Deploying a reading of Derrida’s other writings—not only Specters of Marx, as one might expect, but The Post Card as well—Fabbri shows how deeply Derrida was aware of the impropriety of the private and of the possibilities the private offered for future antagonisms. Although others, especially Geoffrey Bennington, have repeatedly focused on the centrality of contamination in Derrida’s work, Fabbri’s reading of Rorty reminds us again of its importance and of Rorty’s continued failure to come to grips with the concept.⁴ Not surprisingly, given his deconstruction of the political malfeasance of Rorty’s private/public divide, Fabbri doesn’t shy away either from including his own private moments of reading Rorty. Say what you want about this choice, it’s undeniable that Fabbri takes Rorty seriously. In fact Fabbri essentially offers a model for how to take thought seriously by weaving narratives of a private nature with his literal “coming to terms” with Rorty. This fearless attempt to bring deconstruction and pragmatism together through the inclusion of the private is one of the best things about the book, as it progressively dawns on the reader that the bridging between the private and the political happens thanks precisely to the critique offered by deconstruction. There’s also something compelling about Fabbri’s insistence on the shared vulnerability of the private and the public; it is as if the ruins of public space are created precisely by bracketing the private from contact and potential contamination. Fabbri’s is an urgent call to return deconstruction to its rightful place in public debates.
 
There are many other eloquent pages here: Fabbri’s deconstruction of metaphor in the first chapter as reinforcing the rule of the transcendental; the implicit third person perspective in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other; the taking up and elaborating of Caputo’s perspective on Derrida for his own political reading; and Fabbri’s wonderful discussion of the potentiality that inheres in any deconstruction of actuality as “suspending” the way in which we are directed towards an object. With that said, Fabbri does move quickly and sometimes misses opportunities. For instance, I would have loved to read more on the differences between Derrida and Rorty over the function of the intellectual. Certainly Fabbri’s discussion recalls Gramsci’s famous notion of the organic intellectual and might have made for another point of contact between Derrida and Rorty (as well as their divergence). One might also wish that Fabbri had discussed at greater length the relation of political indocility and critique in that other figure who today so dominates discussions and critiques of governmentalization, namely Giorgio Agamben. But these are quibbles. What Fabbri has done is to offer the reader a map of the long-standing differences not simply between Rorty and Derrida, but between a kind of liberal politics that only knows how to secure itself and its “we” from threats to its position of dominance, and another more anarchic possibility in which one attempts to imagine an “alternative we.” In short, Fabbri’s important book demands serious attention not only from those interested in the relation between Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, but from those interested in thinking together a future radical politics.