much current theory) that anything contingent is unworthy of
our belief. (As I explain in chapter 2 , Derrida’s embracing of
Nietzsche in the late sixties turns such skepticism inside out:
suggesting the apocalyptic promise of contingency, which ap-
pears in the form of the utterly unpredictable and unanchored
statement. Such an emphasis requires him to deny the specific
weight of the contingent, its place in a context, as his opposi-
tion to Austin demonstrates.) The poet and philosopher John
Koethe points out that doubting the contingent is one means
that theorists rely on to partition themselves offfrom the rest
of us. Koethe emphasizes that poets, in particular, value the
contingent and consider it worthy of our trust. For the poet,
who sees meaning in the fleeting and the elusive, mutability is
no argument against importance. Not for nothing does Wal-
lace Stevens include “It Must Change” as one of the desired
aspects of his supreme fiction (in “Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction”). Koethe remarks that “locating the source of our
notions of language, thought, and the mind in contingent
human practices does not automatically render them illusory”
(Poetry 46 ).
Skeptics like Derrida claim that if a thing is not absolute—
if it is contingent, its meaning changing over time—then it has
proven unreliable. The skeptic reaches toward an impossible
standard of evidence, and as a result breaks faith with the fa-
miliar world, the one we all live in. Just because we know that
some societies have approved of murder does not mean that
we cannot consider murder wrong. The mere fact of social di-
versity does not prove moral relativism.
When Derrida began to assert the centrality of ethics in
his thought, in the last decade of his career, his assertions
about justice could not be coherently combined with rela-
tivism (the natural child of his skeptical approach). For years,
From Algeria to the École Normale 35