John Rawls at the ends of politics1

I would like to acknowledge my debt to the incisive commentary and suggestions for revision provided by Angelaki's anonymous reviewer – also to be thanked are Bruce Robbins and Dennis Patterson for their invaluable criticisms of earlier versions of this manuscript. Most of all, I wish to thank Derek Attridge, who has contributed his wisdom and patience to the idea presented here from its beginnings.

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Notes

Ethan H. MacAdam

Department of English

University of Miami

PO Box 248146

Coral Gables, FL 33124‐4632

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

I would like to acknowledge my debt to the incisive commentary and suggestions for revision provided by Angelaki's anonymous reviewer – also to be thanked are Bruce Robbins and Dennis Patterson for their invaluable criticisms of earlier versions of this manuscript. Most of all, I wish to thank Derek Attridge, who has contributed his wisdom and patience to the idea presented here from its beginnings.

Let us say for now, then, that this reading is a deconstruction according to one of Derrida's more undemanding characterizations of this discourse as “attack[ing] the systemic … constructionist account of what is brought together, of assembly” ( Memoires: For Paul de Man 73; hereafter abbreviated Memoires).

• While the question of the hypothetical status of the original position, and of how this status translates into real policy, is in some sense the focus of this essay (as well as Rawls' most significant revision of contractarian discourse's earlier versions of the state of nature), we will not broach it yet – for now, see Rawls' most important exposition of this matter in A Theory of Justice 120–21 (hereafter abbreviated TJ – all references to Rawls are made to this volume unless otherwise noted).

• More generally, too, I will not be able to pause in this presentation to consider the strange and fascinating history of the state of nature's varied historicities and fictionalities as reflected by the original‐position idea. As much a fleeting reality to Locke and Hobbes as it was a crucial fiction to Kant (so important to Rawls in A Theory of Justice ; see pages 251–57 and throughout TJ) and to Rousseau (so important, of course, to Derrida's corpus as a whole), the state‐of‐nature idea crosses so many philosophical and literary vectors (via utopianism/dystopianism, mythology, natural‐rights theory, etc.) that its reimagining by Rawls must be accounted as creating an indispensable discursive nexus for multiple branches of contemporary theory (not least for what remains of deconstructive theory). Some key fragments: Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Two Treatises of Government , sects. 100–01; Hobbes, Leviathan 186–87; Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice’” 79ff.; Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” 38–39.

Rawls' preoccupation with the workings of this type of procedure will become important further on: “pure procedural justice obtains when there is no independent criterion for the right result” of a decision concerning “distributive shares,” or quantities of fundamental social goods allocated to each person in a given society, according to a method of determination to which all persons agree (86).

• Never defined explicitly, this is justice concerning the “distributive shares” of n. 4; see also Rawls 88–89 and passim. Specifically, I am concerned here with the “two principles of justice” in which Rawls believes his procedure would result. Though I will not address their specific content in this essay, I cite them now so as to be able to refer to them freely from here on (two attached priority rules and a “general conception” also follow this passage in Rawls' text (302–03)):

• First Principle

  • Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar liberty for all.

• Second Principle

  • Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both:

  		to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and
  		attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. (302)

See, for example, Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia 197) on the question of how an actual individual might be viewed as complaining against the decisions of his originally positioned self (though, as we shall see, there is also the question of how much “self,” let alone how much decision, persists in the original position).

Ronald Dworkin, “What is Equality?: Part 2: Equality of Resources” 316.

I am using the perhaps somewhat obscure term “nominalist” here simply to designate that which is structured by the name, and not only by the proper name but by the naming function of the signifier in general, that which is inaugurated precisely at the expense of what is named – this economy has, of course, been laid out by Derrida (see n. 12 below).

See n. 3 above.

I do not intend here a substantive engagement with Heidegger, and I have chosen to employ the term “ontic” only to specify that I am speaking of facts about persons in the original position as we (perhaps as other such persons ourselves) encounter these individuals (see Heidegger, Being and Time 28–35, 31 n. 3) – no ontology or metaphysics of being in such a hypothetical state, then, is suggested.

In Political Liberalism, this representative capacity (in ideological terms) becomes explicit (Rawls, Political Liberalism 24ff.).

• Well before we come to our examination of Derrida's own concern with the nature of justice, then, our reading of A Theory of Justice moves within the structure of Derrida's seminal meditations on the fundamental alienation of this “I,” this speaking “self.” From “La Parole soufflée”:

  • Henceforth, what is called the speaking subject is no longer the person himself, or the person alone, who speaks. The speaking subject discovers his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is always already eluded; for the origin is always already eluded on the basis of an organized field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing. (178)

• That Derrida's speaking subject has, of course, been alienated from itself long before a device like Rawls' original position – that is to say, long before, at the very advent of language – makes no difference to our argument at this point. Though it goes without saying that Rawls is no deconstructivist thinker, these tendencies of the original position begin to provide an ideological simulacrum of a field of deconstructive thinking about justice in which, I will shortly show, Rawls' presentation is more deeply implicated. (The same is true, to take another example, of any comparison that could be made between the account of the occlusion of proper names in the original position, and Derrida's own account of the effacement of truly “proper” names in Of Grammatology 110ff.)

The “thin theory” of the good is the next‐to‐noncontingent moral theory which Rawls believes would be widely accepted by those seeking to structure their assumptions in the original position (see Rawls 339–407).

A comparison of “one” in English with the analogous German pronoun man (an analogy explored also by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (see Heidegger 149 n. 1)) is instructive, since Heidegger may come closest to Rawls' impossibly generic “one” with his hypostasization of the latter pronoun as das Man (see the fourth section of Being and Time's Division One, 149–68).

• Rawls 13. With regard to this dimension of Rawls' theory, the idea of a hypothetically empirical uniformity in the original position (reflecting our own autonomous discursive one), we are certainly obliged to be fair to Rawls in noting remarks like the following, on the choice of principles from among different alternatives in the original position:

  • Even if there is a best alternative, it seems difficult to describe the parties' intellectual powers so that this optimum, or even the more plausible conceptions, are sure to occur to them. Some solutions to the choice problem may be clear enough on careful reflection; it is another matter to describe the parties so that their deliberations generate these alternatives. Thus although the principles of justice may be superior to those conceptions known to us, perhaps some hitherto unformulated set of principles is still better. (Rawls 122)

• This suggestion, i.e., that the original position might produce different principles for others than it has for Rawls, contradictory as this suggestion is of his more typical way of speaking, is made here and at several other points in Rawls' text, and this brings to light the valuable point that Rawls is concerned to maintain the appearance of a genuine procedural process which is important, theoretically and practically, precisely because, Rawls assumes, the outcome of such a process is not fixed, because political possibility for any society (qua its first principles) is bound up in that process. Our notion that political possibility is instead foreclosed by the discursive nature of the original position, then, is founded on the double truth of Rawls' conviction that, given the original position as it is, “the same principles are always chosen” – where this main current in A Theory of Justice comes into conflict with passages like the above, it is really, so to speak, simply Rawls' word against Rawls', and we must decide where necessity lies. Neither are we critiquing Rawls here for obtuseness, let alone duplicity, concerning the logic of his own construct – rather, we are concerned with how the interaction of Rawls' text with this logic means that the original position functions in a far more powerful mode than Rawls intends.

By way of clarifying the full extent of the original position's hypothetical nature according to Rawls, we can note an interesting and powerful deferral in Rawls' handling of this nature: as hypothetical, Rawls is clear that “[n]othing resembling [the original position] need ever take place” (120), i.e., nothing resembling an actual meeting and contracting of persons. Instead, one (and only one, precisely) need merely reason about a given problem as one would from the standpoint of the original position (13 and passim). The stability of Rawlsian society, therefore, depends on the assumption that all persons (or, in the nonideal realm of political actualities (see n. 46 below), a majority (354–55)) working to render a decision about the problem will reason in the same way, to the same conclusions, in virtue of reasoning as they would under this constraint (“The principles must be specified so that they yield a determinate conclusion” (65)). The consensus integral to any literal contract situation is thus really moved one rung up the ladder into the post‐contract realm of the state, and there is therefore no need to transfer or translate agreement from the original position to actual political states – it is already there, and it is possible that this prolepsis runs parallel to the one we are currently tracing.

Robert Frost, “‘It Will Always Be About Equally Hard to Save Your Soul’: A Letter to The Amherst Student” 344.

Rawls seems recently to have been more aware of this necessary truth in his continued assertion that the original position's conception of political justice is what would be accepted by “you and [me], here and now” (Rawls, The Law of Peoples, with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” 30) – though the “you,” as we are now investigating, remains a lingering fiction of the ideology.

• Or rather – since, all things considered, we can probably justify at this point the use of the gender‐specific noun – any rational man. As for the rationality of the “man” in question, we will not be concerned here with critiquing any particular notion of rationality that Rawls may be deploying (see his own account on pages 114–17) – the point is rather that once we have accepted Rawls himself as rational, the issue is moot.

• I should note at this point that the notion of a contractarian political theorist's impersonation of a political subject is the logical extremity of Hanna Pitkin's observation regarding an earlier social‐contract theorist who, of course, remains highly important to Rawls' thinking in TJ (see, for example, 32–33 and passim):

  • In truth, the original contract could not have read otherwise than it did, and the powers it gave and the limits it placed can be logically deduced from the laws of nature. Not only does Locke himself confidently deduce them in this way, sure that he can tell us what the terms of that original contract were, must have been; but he says explicitly that they could not have been otherwise …

  • If the terms of the original contract are, as I am arguing, “self‐evident” truths to Locke which could not be or have been otherwise, then the historical veracity of the contract theory becomes in a new and more profound sense irrelevant. (Pitkin, “Obligation and Consent: Part I” 996)

• Pitkin goes on from here with a consent‐theory argument which is no less able ultimately to escape the original contract's various historicities (we will shortly introduce yet another) than it is able to escape treating John Locke's writing of politics as merely writing about politics, about individuals' choices and obligations in real‐world, everyday circumstances. It is our task here to delay this jump from theory to the real world long enough to realize (with increased clarity from Locke to Rawls) that the writing of contractarian theory actually intrudes, materially and directly, upon that world, that the state‐of‐nature‐type construct constructs (and crosses) its own bridge to the everyday – and surely, as we have seen, Rawls seems to intend that the original position take place “every day”!

This is, of course, only the year of publication – we might want to be more precise by asking during how many of the preceding years, indeed at what times over the span of an entire thinking life, Rawls' performance was already begun and moving forward, and indeed unceasingly until such a comparatively recent moment.

It will probably not be too dramatic to say that this movement in Rawls' text breaks Lyotard's problem of how to legitimate the move from a description of justice to a prescription (see Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming 21–24; hereafter abbreviated JG). As a process which executes itself as it proposes itself, A Theory of Justice (the title is really now almost taunting) is simply both simultaneously.

In “The Law of Genre” 236ff. – and it is certainly matters of genre that we are considering here.

We do not on this account, however, censure this Rawls‐subject for thus “going it alone” – any authorial subject must in some sense always account itself as “on its own,” and it is part and parcel of Derrida's account of such a subject as alienated “self‐presence which has never been given but [is] only … always already split” (Of Grammatology 112) that this subject always has the resource of an illusory interiority which can, so to speak, “take counsel with itself,” and we have seen the Rawls‐subject do this to great effect (this interiority, of course, variously incarnated, also serves as Derrida's primary object of deconstruction in a number of texts, for example in the case of Artaud's attempted restoration of an unalienated self laid out in “La Parole soufflée”). Justice, however, would also seem to be at least partially a question of how far discourse can proceed thus isolated, how far a particular text can be singly authored before it must surrender to other authorships (and, of course, it is crucial that A Theory of Justice surrenders such authorship – if ever – far later than it claims to).

An expanded treatment of the latter is, of course, the primary subject of The Law of Peoples.

Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” 35; hereafter abbreviated “Force.”

“[N]o one has ever said that deconstruction, as a technique or a method, was possible; it thinks only on the level of the impossible and of what is still evoked as unthinkable” (Derrida, Memoires 135). We shall see that Derrida's rejection of a deconstructive methodology, his concern that deconstructive reading not be allowed to generate, in Derek Attridge's words, any “abstractable or applicable argument, concept, or method which could be laid out independently of [particular] readings” (Attridge, “Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature” in Derrida, Acts of Literature 14), remains as important as ever in the case of justice, precisely for reasons of “the irreducible singularity of each situation” (“Force” 51) (as Derrida discerns it in Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” in an analysis claiming the lion's share of “Force of Law,” one for which I will regrettably not have space here).

Derrida, “Declarations of Independence” 10; hereafter abbreviated “Declarations.”

Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political 99.

Cf. Derrida on the “good people” of the USA: “They do not exist as an entity, it does not exist, before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in the act of the signature. The signature invents the signer” (“Declarations” 10).

Derrida, “Limited Inc abc …” 208; hereafter abbreviated “Limited Inc.”

I hope it will be emergently clear that, various potential conventional/radical dividing lines aside, when I speak of “conventional political argument” in this context I am simply referring to the discourse of Rawls and many of his contemporaries (the majority of them in university political science departments), of the logical, ideological register in which many of the arguments for and against the original position – given and accepted as a hypothetical, heuristic construct that “works” or does not – have been played out since A Theory of Justice's publication. It should go without saying that this is not to imply some fictitious intellectual homogeneity among scholars in the discipline of political science proper – all the less so as we move from 1971 to today, where political scientists like Aryeh Botwinick, William Connolly and others have, in different contexts, long opened this discipline to anti‐ or nonideological stances (from analytic philosophy, literary theory, etc.), stances with some forms of which, indeed, thinkers such as Hanna Pitkin were already experimenting decades earlier.

Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute 7–8, also addressed on pages 56–58 and passim (all subsequent references to Lyotard are made to this volume unless otherwise noted). As a variant of Derrida's own founding vision of a structural “center” which both is and is not part of the structure it produces (see Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” 278ff., hereafter abbreviated SSP), this idea is Lyotard's brilliant calling of Derrida's bet on the autonomy of the sign: the “last phrase” is one more such “center” of discourse (and these centers are, of course, Lyotard's own earlier concern, differently framed, in The Postmodern Condition ), but this time the discourse is that of language itself. As can be seen in the case of the differend at Auschwitz, this last phrase is also a ratifying, validating force for Lyotard, where the Derrida of Memoires makes such “ex‐centric center[s]” (Memoires 73) the very “lever” of deconstruction (Memoires 72) – this apparent divergence is a matter for further investigation.

Again, see pages 154–57 for the stunted dialectic of Auschwitz.

Or rather that it functions not as a “last phrase” but as the “last instance” of the Declaration's God: prescriptive (authorizing) not descriptive (synthesizing).

Beyond even considerations of utopian versions of the state of nature (in Milton et al.), I believe that this is an element which is available to readings not only of Kant's and especially Rousseau's commentary but also of Locke's, thanks to his active use of biblical and classical sources – but this point will need to be developed elsewhere.

• I invoke Derrida's remark at the birth of deconstruction, from the conclusion to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” where it seems likely that he is speaking of deconstruction itself as “the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (SSP 293). Derrida apparently felt that philosophy was “catching a glimpse” of this birth (SSP 293) in 1966 (see Bass' source notes on the original lecture (Writing and Difference 342)); here we are close to regarding A Theory of Justice and the state‐of‐nature discourse it recreated, only five years later, as a specimen of this birth, of deconstruction itself, of the newly and treacherously performative skepticism of which Derrida warns.

• Warning, of course, remains intimately connected to the idea of the “monster” (derived from the Latin monstrum originally meaning “divine portent or warning,” itself from monere, “to warn” ( Oxford English Dictionary (OED)); for the web of variants, definitions and etymologies presented in this paragraph, see entries for the relevant words in the OED). And yet “monster” in English (also “monstre”) is also a variant of “monstre” in another definition (“sb.¹” entry for monstre”), i.e., as itself a variant of “monstrance” (“[d]emonstration, proof” (def. 1)), this time from monstrare (actually from monstrant‐em in the OED – I am completing this link via the verb “monstrate” (from monstrare proper in the OED)). Monstrare means to “show by example” or “demonstrate” (def. 2, Oxford Latin Dictionary) – and this is the all‐important trope of the original position as monster, as a warning of a deconstruction which it itself constitutes – but also to “reveal” or “betray” (def. 4). That which “shows,” then, that which demonstrates as Rawls' text claims to do, must in some sense always be “monstrous,” treacherous, worthy of warning, itself a warning. See the OED for further uses of “monstrance” (“monstre,” “monster”), some of them fascinating in relation to Rawls as I am reading him: e.g., an open vessel for carrying the host (def. 2), or (as a “monstrance of right” in Chancery) a legal writ returning “lands or tenements” to the rightful owner from a deceased person (def. 1b).

And so I am bound to note that I have begun this presentation, in unpublished form, in the chapter of my doctoral dissertation from which this essay is adapted (see MacAdam, “The Republic in the Air: State of Nature Theory and the Dreaming of the State” 187–205). Such a presentation remains a crucial extension of this project.

“The place for justice” is not one “for calculable and distributive justice. Not for law, for the calculation of restitution, the economy of vengeance or punishment …” (Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International 22, hereafter abbreviated Specters).

• From Memoires:

  • As we have seen, the very condition of a deconstruction may be at work, in the work, within the system to be deconstructed; it may already be located there, already at work … One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day; it is always already at work in the work … (73)

• Whether or not one would agree with Derrida that all that is therefore left for the “deconstructing” reader is perhaps “to do memory work” (73), I believe that this claim gets to the heart of Derrida's rejection of a deconstructive “methodology” (see n. 26): if any deconstructive reading on “our part” is really only a hearkening to that immanent reading, the structure of which each particular text (as the true deconstructing “agent”) carries within itself, then no reader could exercise his or her own agency in applying a methodology “derived” from instances in which the reader exercises no decisive agency to begin with.

That is, of static law in the conventional sense – by droit, Derrida designates such an everyday jurisprudence, opposed to justice though derived from and aspiring to it (we will come to this shortly), a jurisprudence which we may associate with his remarks on “concepts of justice, the law and right … that have been imposed and sedimented,” concepts “remaining more or less readable or presupposed” (“Force” 19) – and Rawls' law, qua A Theory of Justice , is nothing if not readable.

Why does this elision come to the fore here? Perhaps simply because its time has come. This elision's semi‐covert aura, added to the strange transitivity with which Derrida defers the announcement of deconstruction's undeconstructibility (a mediation also observable in the claim that “justice in itself … is not deconstructible [, n]o more than deconstruction itself”), clearly bespeaks a philosophically consistent reluctance to grant deconstruction a privileged position which perhaps would be not unlike that once prevalently accorded to metaphysics – and yet in “Force of Law” Derrida does seem more intent than elsewhere that deconstruction in its incarnation as justice remain ultimately inviolate, invulnerable to its own “principle” relative to the morass of discourse it must adjudicate. (Contrast, for example, his reading of Paul de Man on allegory as the self‐alienated principle which structures signification as a whole (Memoires 72ff.), and yet which still remains “one figure among others” (Memoires 78) in certain contexts.) Having witnessed over time a succession of surrogates for deconstruction's agency – various aspects of “the literary,” of Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis, of Marxist theory, etc. – we might wonder whether the surrogate “justice” has finally brought deconstruction into an undeniable inheritance, one which cannot risk self‐effacement (is this why deconstruction has always “done nothing but address” the question of justice (“Force” 10)?).

And even if this law does arrive with its declaration, the justice it promises, in Derrida's sense, remains always to come, more precisely, it remains “à venir” (see “Force” 27 for this term of Derrida's) – as Derrida puts it in the case of democracy in particular in Specters, “the idea … of democracy to come … is the opening of this gap between an infinite promise … and the … necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise” (65). Droit (the two principles of justice or any other form) always contains this promise as well as its own violence to that promise – we shall not have space here to do more than allude to the crucial work which remains to be done on such an “eschatology” (Specters 65) in relation to a parallel one which I believe to be discernible in Rawls (see n. 54 below).

See all of Lyotard for the full scenario of this mutilated dialogism.

Clearly I am taking a significant liberty here in accounting Lyotard's reading of the silenced “last phrase” at Auschwitz as a “deconstruction” – I should reiterate that I do so only in the local sense which I hope I have demonstrated, i.e., Lyotard's reading is such a deconstruction, and therefore “just,” insofar as it reads this prolepsis of right which appears always to be present in acts of self‐authorization, whether the authorization to create a people or to destroy one.

Cf. Derrida on the sign in “Signature Event Context” (where I consider him to be investigating the sign as the autonomous agent of deconstruction – again see n. 39): “No context can enclose it. Nor can any code …” (317).

For Rawls' initial statement of the idea of nonideal theory, see TJ 245ff.

In fairness to Rawls, we should note page 310, where “[j]ustice is happiness according to virtue”; even leaving aside the question of Rawls' use of such a moral element in the definition, this idea seems as much at sea in the rest of Rawls' argument as one would expect of a definition which arrives on its own scene so late.

On this concept see TJ 20–21.

The interaction of these varying conceptions is, of course, Rawls' chief subject in Political Liberalism .

Since, as an ab ovo device, the original position cannot itself admit of any grounding. Intuitionism offers such a grounding, to the original position as well as to its “product” of justice as fairness (see Rawls' remarkable account of those features of the original position “that we do in fact accept” (21) on pages 17–22; the preceding sections, of course, address our intuitions as to why a contractual viewpoint is the best approach to social justice to begin with); intuitionism achieves this by giving in to a certain circularity necessary to the justification of beginnings (beginnings which, original‐position theory has the virtue of recognizing, are always artificial). This is a different order of circularity from that which we have seen otherwise at work in Rawls, or in the Declaration of Independence, etc. – conceptual, even metaphysical, and not discursive – but its reflection of those more skeptical investigations betrays a sophisticated perspective ripe for a new critique of political argument.

See, for example, TJ 180–83 for one of the strongest moments of Rawls' challenge to the utilitarian perspective.

On Wittgenstein and political philosophy, see Hanna Pitkin's important work, namely Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought , or more recently Alice Crary, “Wittgenstein's Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought”; on Wittgenstein and deconstruction, see Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida , and Martin Stone, “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction”; in this abbreviated discussion, I have made some use of Stone's and Crary's positions below.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , sect. 116. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Wittgenstein are made to this volume; paragraph numbers in the text refer to Part I of this volume.

In considering whether anything like democracy (whatever that may be like) is recoverable from Rawls' deconstructed text, we will not have the opportunity here to consider Derrida's contention that democracy as it currently exists “is a degeneracy of droit and of the violence of droit,” that “there is not yet any democracy worthy of this name. Democracy remains to come: to engender or to regenerate” (“Force” 46). This remark in “Force” and its considerable elaboration in Specters (65–66), from which I have quoted above (n. 42), will likely present the greatest challenge to any recovery effort, except perhaps for a certain surrendering of theory which remains to be explored in Rawls' own treatment of the nonideal (see n. 46 above) – and perhaps, in these confrontations too, Wittgenstein will have a role to play.

And Rawls does indeed himself invoke Wittgenstein twice in TJ, in discussions of discernments about sensations (480 n. 17, 558). For the purposes of this discussion, these invocations perhaps run no deeper than Derrida's own reference to Rawls (“Force” 14), but it is instructive in either case that Rawls and Derrida seem to circle, from “opposite” sides, the ravine between skepticism and metaphysics, both conscious of the need, most urgently in matters of justice perhaps, for a crossing.

I am deliberately deferring here a discussion of the embattled “meaning is use” reading of Wittgenstein examined by so many commentators (including, among the texts cited above, Crary 119, 130ff., and Staten 87ff.). For present purposes, I will say only that it may be best to conceive of use as “conferring” meaning rather than as “meaning” meaning (I believe such an idea would stand opposed to that suggested by Staten (87); nevertheless, see the above discussions in Crary and Staten for a more detailed consideration of this issue of a possible reinstatement of fixed reference).

I will not ask here whether Wittgenstein would give his blessing to such an interrogation or count it as “nonsense” of the type he returns to throughout the Investigations (e.g., in sect. 40 – see also Stone 94, where his analysis appears importantly to touch upon deconstruction as a potential Wittgensteinian nonsense, and passim; this issue is in one sense, of course, emblematic of the whole question of the relation between deconstruction and the later Wittgenstein, a question with which Stone's essay as a whole is largely occupied).

For one of the most important discussions of rule‐following in Philosophical Investigations, and probably the most relevant here, see sect. 198ff.

As has, of course, in a significantly divergent argument, Lyotard – I cannot detour here into his importantly related account of why judgments in general are made “without criteria” (JG 14) – see Just Gaming 14–18 and passim.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty , sect. 204.

Crary 125. Much of Crary's argument is occupied precisely with questioning “Wittgensteinian” pragmatism of Richard Rorty's stripe (“cope better” is Rorty's phrase); the example of “neo‐fascism” (125) vs. human rights Crary attributes to H. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Crary 125 n. 29).

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ethan h. macadam

Ethan H. MacAdam Department of English University of Miami PO Box 248146 Coral Gables, FL 33124‐4632 USA E‐mail: [email protected]