rida, see Peter Burgard, ed.,Nietzsche and the Feminine(Charlottesville: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press, 1994 ).
9. Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony and Solidarity(New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989 ), 129.
10. See Mark Edmundson,Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in
Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Sigmund Freud(Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990 ).
Chapter 4
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger
- Maurizio Ferraris in Jackie Derrida, Ritratto a memoria(Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 2006 ), 16 , notes that Derrida, an anxious traveler, habit-
ually arrived at airports hours before his plane was due to depart. For a few
years, 1969 to 1973 , his anxiety about flying led him to avoid air travel alto-
gether. Another major event of these years was Derrida’s affair with Sylviane
Agaçinski, who worked with him in the organization of philosophers,
GREPH, that he had helped found. When she was 39 , in 1984 , Agaçinski bore
a son by Derrida. - As Fred Dallmayr puts it in his commentary on the Gadamer-
Derrida debate, “Derrida’s key notion of ‘difference’ shades over into a cele-
bration of indifference, non-engagement, and indecision.... By stressing
rupture and radical otherness Derrida seeks to uproot and dislodge the in-
quirer’s comfortable self-identity; yet, his insistence on incommensurability
and non-understanding tends to encourage reciprocal cultural disengage-
ment and hence non-learning” (Dialogue 90 , 92 ). - When the Paris exchange was published in a German edition,
Gadamer supplied a response to Derrida in which he heatedly protested
Derrida’s wish to align him with Kantian ideas of morality. There is ab-
solutely nothing moral, Gadamer claims, and also nothing “metaphysical” or
“logocentric,” about the desire to understand. Instead, understanding is
what allows one to make a good argument. “That is to say, one does not go
about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to
prove that one is always right” (Dialogue 55 ). In Gadamer’s account, a real
conversation (with a person or with a book) means trying to grasp another
point of view, and even to strengthen that point of view, so as to have some-
thing real to struggle over. We need to lean toward someone else’s way of see-
ing things: this is the only way we can really have something to say. - Paul Celan, “Meridian” lecture, tr. Jerry Glenn, printed as an ap-
254 Notes to Pages 172 – 89