Contingency, irony, and solidarity RICHARD RORTY.pdf

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Contingency, irony,
and solidarity
RICHARD RORTY
University Professor of Humanities,
University of Virginia
~;,~
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 lRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
©
Cambridge University Press 1989
First published 1989
Reprinted 1989 (thrice), 1990, 1991 (twice), 1992, 1993
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
British Library Cataloging in Publication applied for
ISBN 0-521-35381-5 b1U"dback
ISBN 0-521-36781-6 paperback
In
memory of six liberals:
my parents and grandparents
The
agelastes
[Rabelais's word for those who do not laugh}, the non-
thought of received ideas, and kitsch are one and the same, the three-
headed enemy of the art born as the echo of God's laughter, the art that
created the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth
and everyone has the right to be understood. That imaginative realm of
tolerance was born with modern Europe, it is the very image of Europe-
or at least our dream of Europe, a dream many times betrayed but
nonetheless strong enough to unite us all in the fraternity that stretches
far beyond the little European continent. But we know that the world
where the individual is respected (the imaginative world of the novel,
and the real one of Europe) is fragile and perishable .... if European
culture seems under threat today, if the threat from within and without
hangs over what is most precious about it - its respect for the individual,
for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life -
then, I believe, that precious essence of the European spirit is being held
safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of
the novel.
Milan Kundera,
The Art
0/
the Novel
Contents
Pre/ace
Introduction
Part I: Contingency
I
page
xi
X111
The contingency of language
The contingency of selfbood
The contingency of a liberal community
Part II: Ironism and Theory
3
23
2
3
44
4
Private irony and liberal hope
73
5 Self-creation and affiliation:
Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger
6
From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida
Part III: Cruelty and Solidarity
7 The barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on cruelty
8 The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty
9
122
Solidarity
Index
0/
names
199
IX
Preface
This book is based on two sets of lectures: three Northcliffe Lectures
given at University College, London, in February of
1986
and four Clark
Lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge, in February of
1987.
Slightly revised versions of the Northcliffe Lectures were published in
the
London Review of Books
in the spring of
1986.
They have been further
revised to form the first three chapters of this book. A shortened version
of Chapter 7, on Nabokov, was delivered as a Belitt Lecture at Ben-
nington College and published by that college as a Bennington Chap-
book on Literature. The other chapters have not been published previ-
ously.
Parts of this book skate on pretty thin ice - the passages in which I
offer controversial interpretations of authors whom I discuss only brief-
ly. This is particularly true of my treatment of Proust and of Hegel -
authors about whom I hope someday to write more fully. But in other
parts of the book the ice is a bit thicker. The footnotes in those parts cite
my previous writings on various figures (e.g., Davidson, Dennett, Rawls,
Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas), writings which, I
hope, back up some of the controversial things I say about them in this
book. Most of the items cited will
be
reprinted in two volumes of my
collected papers (provisionally entitled
Objectivity, Truth, and Relativism
and
Essays on Heidegger and Others)
to be published by Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
I am very grateful to Karl Miller, Lord Northcliffe Professor of English
Literature in University College and Editor of the
London Review of Books,
for his invitation to lecture at University College, as well as for encour-
agement and advice. I am equally grateful to the Master and Fellows of
Trinity College, both for their invitation to give the Clark Lectures and
for generous hospitality during my visit to Cambridge. lowe a great deal
to the three institutions which granted me the leisure to compose these
lectures: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Cen-
ter for Advanced Study of the University of Virginia, and the Wissen-
schaftskolleg zu Berlin. The MacArthur Fellowship which I held from
198
I
to
1986
made it easy for me to branch out into new areas of reading
Xl

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