Self control is a quality I do not have enough of. If I had more self control, then my life would be under the guidance of reason. I would have better health, smaller debts, a better reputation, and fewer enemies. However, as I am, dim and unsteady, reasonable and unreasonable by turns, at crucial moments I do not hear the voice of reason. Instead, I follow the ideas arising spontaneously in my mind. They activate my muscles. They move my lips, tongue, and vocal cords. Instead of following my plans I follow their impulses, and as a consequence I have worse health, larger debts, a worse reputation, and more enemies.

At those crucial moments, the moments when the voices of harmony debate with the charms of impulse, I need help. Names are one of the sources of my help. I say to myself, for example, "Howard, be reasonable!" thus invoking my own name. Or I pray, for example, "Jesus, help me!" thus invoking someone else's name. Or I ask myself, for example, "What would my mother say?" thus using the noun "mother", which, although it is a common noun and not a proper noun, functions as a name referring to a particular person, invoking her presence. My life is a tissue of voices, and the voices have names.

In ancient Greece, 2300 years ago, Plato devoted himself to defining the idea named by the Greek word dikaiosyne, which we translate as "justice" or "righteousness." Aristotle, his student and successor, tried to define an even more abstract name: "being." Both of them used a premise which I believe is true: that the voices which have authority for an individual are similar to the voices of authority which organize groups. To extend the same point a bit further: they are more than similar. They are the same voices. The voice of mother. The voice of justice. The voice of being. The voice of reason.

Applying this assumption to my own case: I lack a voice of reason which would give me the self control I need. Similarly, Americans as a group often do not know who speaks for reason, or, to say the same thing in other words, through whom reason speaks. If, in the tissue of voices which is our common life, the various voices which have authority, those of mothers and fathers, of justice and fairness, of laws and ideals, were articulated and made coherent by a guiding reason, that is to say, by a viable metaphysics, then we could pursue the common good, together as a nation, in an orderly way. To extend the same point a bit further: If I lack sufficient self-discipline to follow my plans it is partly because the plans themselves do not speak with much authority, and that, in turn, is partly because the culture which formed my mind is disoriented, no longer able to orient itself with the no-longer-viable metaphysics of economic society, formless, grasping for straws, charmless, poor in motivating symbols. There are too many reruns of old movies, too many bogus cure-alls, too many commercial advertisements selling things I can't afford; there is too much truth decay; too little communication.

In all of this struggle and confusion the relationship betwen names and reason seems to play a crucial role. Reason seeks to speak with the voice of authority; we need its authorit. But the voices which speak with authority are originally, primordially, persons with names. Mothers and fathers, doctors and deities. Not for nothing Plato has the laws say to Socrates, "We are your parents." Not for nothing St. Thomas Aquinas names Being as god and God as Father. If I could understand names, names of persons, names of things, names of abstractions, then perhaps I could do a better job of using reason to get a handle on myself and my situation.

Now let me tell you a little about my usual situation. I am a tall and awkward person, mas largo que vivo[1], as we say in Spanish. If you like my type you could consider me as good-looking, or as having been good-looking when younger, or as someone who would have been good-looking when younger if he had dressed better. I hang out in pharmacies searching for remedies for ailments I do not have but might someday develop. In general, cures of all kinds appeal to me, since I regard life as a disease. I try them all -- evangelists, Rosicrucians, New Age, new diets, new therapies, weekend seminars on relaxation techniques... I try them all.

For the past several years I have been trying the diet devised by Morton Anderson of Bozeman, Montana, a former employee of the nutrition service of the United States Army. According to the National Enquirer, a national tabloid sold at the checkout counters of major grocery stores, Anderson's diet cured a famous movie star of cancer. I do not remember her name, but I do remember that it was a woman actress, that she had cancer, that she was cured by the diet, that she was famous, and that it was reported in the Enquirer. I do not have cancer, but as a precaution I take a tablespoon of pectin a day because it is called for by Anderson's diet. I could go on endlessly mentioning one and another feature of my usual situation for in its infinite concreteness it is susceptible of infinite description. Everything about me could be stated in minute detail and restated from different points of view endlessly, as could everything about you, or about anybody. It is awesome, when you stop to think about it, that so much could be said.

However, I will mention only that I am employed. Why? Most of my acquaintances are toward the less employable end of the labor supply since they are unusual and sentimental like myself. They are either unemployed or working part-time in such fields as, for example, waitress. Since I consider myself, too, to be part of the dud majority who have average or below average ability, I feel surprised because year after year I continue to rank among the chosen few who have a steady income. My job consists to a large extent of teaching contemporary critical social philosophy, and the question I ask myself about it -- i.e. about Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction, French post-structuralism generally, the Nietzsche revival, feminism, and critical neo-Marxism -- is, "What have we done?" Apparently we have done something that keeps us employed. The students keep coming back for more, and senior professors and administrators are so little alarmed that they tolerate us. My dentist's secretary has a list of names above her desk with the heading "Do Not Reappoint." It is a list of people who do not pay their bills. Sometimes I pay late, but I have never been on the list.

My usual situation is to be a philosophy professor in one of the capitalist industrialized countries, a card-carrying member of the marginal intelligentsia, salaried and tolerated. Like everyone else who is employed, in whatever profession, I do what I need to do to survive, and like every other jobholder, in whatever profession, I run the risk that by doing what the system requires, I am contributing to the system's self-preservation, and, consequently, to humanity's destruction. Now, just because I think the preservation of the system is incompatible with the continuation of homo sapiens as a species, do not conclude that I am a pessimist. I am not a pessimist; no, I believe that with sufficient doses of socialism and goodwill it is possible, just possible, that homo sapiens will transform the global village it live in, and so will get itself off the endangered species list. Humans might, just might, become easygoing and cooperative, unlikely to destroy their species, either directly in war or indirectly by destroying the environment. Of course the survival of the species is not likely, but at this point anybody who, like me, still believes it is possible for the human species to become viable, is not a pessimist. While not pessmistic, I am, however, suspicious.

My suspicions are about the kind of contemporary philosophy I have generally labeled as "critical," and especially about the philosophical leader of post-structuralism, Jacques Derrida. Perhaps my focus is too specificl there are, after all, many things in this world which merit suspicion, everything from trouts in milk to cats in birdcages to economists on television, but, you see, since I like to think of myself as a person with good intentions, I take a personal, self-centered interest in the subjects I am paid for teaching so that even though the planet may be careening toward catastrophe for a thousand reasons more important than the activities of teachers of critical philosophy, I tend to focus more on my own corner of the world, in a vain, and probably vain -- that is to say, vain in the sense of proud and probably vain in the sense of futile -- effort to reform philosophy so that my profession will be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. My suspicions, however, are not without a reason. Here is my reason, adapted and schematized from David Hume's discussion of miracles:

Suppose the natural and usual course of events is x1 x2 x3 x4 . . . xn .

Then suddenly there appears a sequence of the form x1 x2 y x4 . . . xn .

There are then two explanations of the unexpected appearance of y, which we can call y and y'.

y -- There was a miracle, an exception to the usual course of events.

y' -- There appeared to be a miracle, but in fact there was an error in our observations, so that the event was not the miracle it appeared to us to be.

Hume's point is that when we are confident that the natural regularity x2 x2 x3 x4 . . . xn holds generally, then y' is more probable than y. The probability of a false appearance is higher than the probability of a miracle.

Contemporary critical social philosophy appears to be an exception to the natural course of events. Imaginary visitors to our classrooms coming from other centuries, together with real visitors from the second world and the third world, are astonished to witness the systematic attacks on the privileges of dominant elites, which are regularly practiced by critical 20th century first world academic philosophers, and by teachers in related fields. Authoritarian ideologies, race and gender discrimination, anti-semitism and homophobia, are initial targets, but their destruction is a mere whiff of theoretical smoke compared to the demolition of the traditional ethics which legitimates or fails to delegitimate the fundamental discrimination against the propertyless, otherwise known as capitalism, whose theoretical downfall is itself a mere skirmish compared to the philosophical devastation of the even older and more basic exploitation of women and children by men, otherwise known as patriarchy, whose overthrow is in turn reduced to the dimensions of the capture of an outpost by comparison with the annihilation (at a theoretical level) of the first and greatest of rapes, the rape of the earth by humans.

The arsenal of philosophical artillery which, when skillfully applied to social issues, serves to level every domination, privilege, hierarchy, discrimination, and inequality includes the idea that science ( = control) should be replaced by receptivity to being (late Heidegger), the ideal of a communicative society where messages are not distorted by unequal power relationships (Habermas), the transvaluation of values (Nietzsche), the unmasking of the pretensions to knowledge of bureaucratic establishments (Foucault), skepticism, the demonstration of the complicity of traditional knowledge paradigms in patriarchy and environmental destruction (Merchant), and the deconstruction of traditional and modern metaphysics (Derrida).

But the revolutions-in-the classroom, of the sort we conduct every day, are not natural. Our visitors from other times and places are more aware than we are that in the natural course of events educational systems reproduce the social systems that they serve. To find a substantial portion of a professon, that of university teacher, whose tendency is, at a given point in time, to undermine every ruling myth, and to find that he underminers are paid by society for their services, is to stumble upon a miracle.

That is the reason for my suspicion. Contemporary critical philosophy is probably not what it appears to be.

All of which brings me back to the question of names. This letter will concentrate on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, although I have secret hopes (everybody should have some secrets) that the seeds of doubt I am planting will germinate, sprout, grow, flower, and bear fruit in the neighboring rows and beds of the philosophical garden. The history of western metaphysics can be looked upon as a history of names and naming, from Socrates who tried to find the idea named by "piety," to Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein who tried to find the logically proper name of the simple fact, to Martin Heidegger who never really gave up on the project of naming Being (because to be preoccupied by the impossibility of naming Being is still to be captured by the project of naming it [2]). Derrida's philosophy is the deconstruction of the history of western metaphysics. It is the deconstruction of naming.

Josette Rey-Debove, in her Lexicon Semiotique [3], gives a definition of "to deconstruct."

"Deconstruire v. tr.

(Derrida) De faire, par un analyse semiologique, une construction ideologique herité."

Translated, that is:

"To deconstruct, transitive verb

(Derrida) To unmake, by a semiological analysis, an inherited, ideological construction."

Let us look at the parts of this definition one by one.

To unmake, that is to say, to un-do, to un-construct something that was previously done, constructed, made. [4]

by a semiological analysis, that is to say, by examining the words and other signs used in the construction.

an inherited, that is to say, left to us by ages past.

ideological, that is to say, undesirable. There are many definitions of "ideology", most of the perjorative. One of them is, "a systematic distortion of reality in the interest of a ruling class."

construction, the last word of the definition, reinforces the sense of the first words, to unmake. At some time in the past, somebody or some group constructed something; now, by deconstruction, we are going to take it apart.

To achieve a broader understanding of how Derrida uses the word "deconstruction," let us now consider some sentences where the word occurs in his fundamental work De la grammatologie. "Operating necessarily from the interior, borrowing from the old structure all the strategic and economic resources of subversion... the enterprise of deconstruction is always in a certain manner carried forward by its own work." What I think this means: It is the text itself which provides the materials for its own deconstruction. The work of deconstruction consists of examining the text carefully. The work of deconstruction consists of examining the text carefully. Careful examination will show how the ideological construction was put together, and, consequently, how to take it apart.

An important qualification to what I just said is emphasized in the words I omitted (indicated by the ellipsis "..." after the word "subversion") in the quotation above. The words I omitted are "borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolate the elements and the atoms." What I think that means: The careful examination is not done word by word. Deconstruction always reveals the organization of a text, its form, the pattern of its set of relationships, what Derrida sometimes calls its "grid." (For example, you would not deconstruct a Cartesian plane number by number, but rather by noting that it is constructed in such a way that every ordered pair of numbers is related to the x axis and the y axis.)

Here is another passage from the Grammatologie:

"That the logos was at first borrowed and that this borrowing was the scripting resource of language, means, certainly, that the logos is not a creative activity, nor the element providing unity, full of the divine word etc. But one does not take a step outside metaphysics if one draws from this only a new motif of 'return to finitude,' of the 'death of God' etc. It is this way of thinking and this problematic that it is necessary to deconstruct." [5]

Commenting on this passage line by line will illustrate important features of Derrida's deconstruction.

That the logos was at first borrowed...

There is a primordial ordering activity (called variously trace, archi-trace, archi-*criture, differance) which memebrs of the human species, including ancient human and remote tribes, engage in. The word, glorified by the ancient Greek name logos, borrows its capacity to bear meanings from this fundamental ordering.

...this borrowing was the scripting resource of language...

Linguistics and the human sciences generally have been misled by the metaphysical tradition of philosophy into thinking that writing is just a way of recording real, i.e. oral, language. (Derrida calls this error phonocentrism.) The spoken word (or the structure which permits words to be spoken) has mistakenly been given a higher status. The truth is that there is no hierarchical relationship of speaking-more-real-than-writing. Both are equally made possible as communication systems by more fundamental orderings.

...means, certainly, that the logos is not a creative activity, nor the element providing unity, full of the divine word etc.

Deconstructing all the constructions made with logos, the word, overturns western metaphysics, which has always drawn its notion of being, hence of God, from mistakenly attributing to the word qualities it does not really have -- most importantly the quality of naming something. "Metaphysics has always consisted, one could show, of trying to get presence from meaning..." Derrida says elsewhere. [6] In other words, the very meaning of a word, any word, is taken to be drawn from a name; the name is of something; the something is at the moment of naming present; this presence is being, and being is God. Moreover, the speaker who does the original naming is psychoanalytically, theologically, and sometimes philosophically (e.g. Plato in Phaedrus [7]) identified with the father.

But one does not take a step outside metaphysics...

Derrida is in competition with other philosophers who are, like him, also trying to get outside metaphysics. My opinion: economic society requires for its legitimation the destruction of the love ethic, hence of the traditional Greek-Christian metaphysics which supported it, the social division of labor assigns to philosophers the job of carrying out the ideological work, and philosophers compete with each other in doing it with ever greater thoroughness and sophistication.

if one draws from this only a new motif of 'return to finitude'...

Derrida's target here is Heidegger, who failed to step outside metaphysics in spite of prodigious effort. Derrida shows, quite correctly in my opinion, that the voice of authority is always lurking mysteriously in the background of Heidegger's philosophy, and that the move in Being and Time which locates authenticity in finitude, i.e. in the call of the self to the self to be authentic, is a modern variation on the old Being = God = Father metaphysic, with the Kantian twist of making the self its own voice of the father. (Becoming autonomous, Kant says, is maturity. Kant's word translated as maturity is mundigkeit, which comes from mund = mouth and literally means "mouthness", a detail which supports Derrida's view that the hierarchy privileging the spoken voice is behind the whole tradition of metaphysics from beginning to end.)

of the death of God, etc.

Here Derrida's target is Nietzsche, another philosopher who tried to step out of metaphysics, but who failed to do it by announcing the death of God. However, in another respect Nietzsche succeeded. Nietzsche's way of writing "shook... the transcendental authority and the master category of knowledge: 'being'." (Grammatologie 139-40)

Derrida does not deny that Nietzsche was the scribe of upper-class Germans who advocated rule by a violent, self-glorified elite (themselves), and who therefore opposed everything that got in their way, namely God, democracy, reason, law, truth, morality, women, and kindness. [8] Derrida does not deny any of this because none of it pertains to his topic: Nietzsche's way of writing. If you, like Derrida, were preoccupied by the relation of archi-*criture to written and spoken language, and of both to the western metaphysical tradition, then you too would be capable of writing a book on Nietzsche's styles which does not mention what he said in those styles. [9]

It is this way of thinking and this problematic that it is necessary to deconstruct.

A problematic determines not just answers, but also questions and approaches to trying to get answers. So when Derrida calls for the deconstruction of the problematic, he calls for the destruction of the questions, not just the answers. Deconstruction is not a tool for any job; it is a tool designed for and devoted to Derrida's anti-metaphysical project. Like (in this respect) the positivists, Derrida wants people to stop asking metaphysical questions. We should not ask, for example, "What being does the word 'God' name?" and we should be as little concerned to give the answer, "no being at all," as we should be to give the answer "Our Father in Heaven."

The question I want to ask about deconstruction is, "Will this philosophy help me to bring my life under the guidance of reason, not just any reason, but a democratic reason, a new word of the people renovated by Freire's cultural action and Gramsci's moral and intellectual reform; a reason which will not just tell me, 'Be angry -- you are being exploited, defrauded and deceived!' but which will rather help me, like Aristotle's reason (his ortho logon, known in Latin as ratio recta and in English as right reason) to be angry at the right time, at the right person or object, to the right extent, with the right justification and in the right way; not a reason like Kant's which pretends to despise feelings so much that it appeals to one of the strongest feelings, and one of the feelings most strongly dependent on others from toilet-training onwards, the love of purity and hatred of dirt, to make me act from 'pure reason,' which means in practice that I must follow only a few strict rules, and for the rest am plunged into an empty freedom where I am allowed, indeed required to do, unguided, what I want -- but rather a reason like Augustine's and Aquinas's a true teacher of the true heart, which performs a stabilizing and socially integrating function by culturally interpreting my physiological arousal states, and not just my arousal states, but also my quiescent states, so that even on dull days, on days when I feel nothing, I can still hear the Holy Spirit present in the wind and in the silence; so that like Saint Teresa and St. John of the Cross I can interpret my anxiety and loneliness as a desert experience, a time of waiting and testing?" That is my question about deconstruction. I suspect that the correct answer to my question is "yes and no," but probably no more than yes, insofar as Derrida contributes to what appears to me to be a contemporary trend toward utopian ideologies of freedom, which exaggerate the value of freedom so much that their tendency is to make us at once even more extreme in our theoretical ethics and even more incapable of doing anything practical that would mesh with the cultural forms that exist, bring out the best in people, in institutions, and in ideas, and so transform society. As David Hoy has written in an article on Derrida, "One can see, then, why Habermas labels the French attacks on all authority as conservative. Their claims appear so extreme that resisting authority in practice seems either futile or simply sporadic and without direction." [10]

However, it is not quite right to call Derrida's philosophy an attack on all authority. Anarchy for Derrida is another blunder to which metaphysics contributes, since anarchist proposals rely, partly anyway, on the mystical presence of the spirit of cooperation to organize human interaction in the absence of government. Jean-Jacques Rousseau opposed many social institutions on the ground that they were unnatural, but Derrida deconstructs Rousseau's notion of "unnatural", showing that he systematically substitutes "voice of Nature" for "voice of God," which implicitly puts Derrida in the role of defending conventional authority against Rousseau's attack. Derrida also deconstructs another common form of generalized attack on authority -- the reverse ethnocentrism whose prejudice is that any other society is better than one's own. Derrida's views on the relation of authority and order to liberty are, in the respects just mentioned, moderate.

Nevertheless, there is a point to saying that Derrida contributes to utopian ideologies of freedom, and a point to agreeing with Habermas and others who read his work as an extreme attack on authority, conservative in its effects although not in its intentions. The point is not that Derrida opposes legal and moral order (he doesn't); the point is not that his jokes at the expense of authoritarians greatly outnumber his jokes at the expense of libertarians (they don't); the point is that he seems to deprive us of the resources we need to construct a solidary alternative to free market capitalism, or to construct any alternative to anything. When Derrida deconstructs Plato [11], for example, he portrays a "family scene" in which a dominant father gives authority to the written word, so that the Father's word is the Real Word behind the written word, and this Real Word leads to a vision of the world where everything ought to be in order, in its place and neatly labeled, because what everything really is and ought to be is determined in advance by the Real Word (i.e. by what Plato calls its eidos, its idea or form, which is the same thing as saying, if you accept Nietzsche's proposition that Christianity is Platonism for the masses, by the Creator). After reading Derrida's "family scene" are we not somewhat embarrassed to define our social roles in such a way that each of us has things he or she ought to do, a fixed and reliable identity? And if we can somehow bring ourselves to stabilize roles and identities, can we do it with old-fashioned cultural resources, like the word of the Father, or the abstract idea or form which defines a standard of what ought to be? When Derrida deconstructs Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we are reminded that he practiced masturbation all his life, and was quite ashamed of it. He regarded it indeed as the archetype of vice, associating vice with artificiality; masturbation is the archetype because the erotic imagination is an artificial (read: unnatural) substitute for true love. True love Rousseau identified always with his mother, and with a certain Th*r*se who came to replace his mother in his sentiments, and Derrida informs us that for Rousseau mother = nature. Now, after reading Derrida, can we still love our mothers? Can we still love nature? Can we still call the earth our mother and adore it because we need her so much? Again, when Derrida tells us that all clergies have always based their authority on texts, and re-tells, with expanded commentary, a report by Levi-Strauss of an illiterate Nambikwara tribesman who, having learned to pretend to read (but not to read), immediately used his apparent command of texts to lord it over his fellows, and when he deconstructs the very idea of meaning in such a way that it seems to be absurd to base authority on texts because texts have no definite meanings, then can we ever again have faith in the Bible? Or in the Constitution? Or in a code of law? Or a cookbook?

One can, evidently, take (at least) two sorts of attitude towards Derrida's deconstructions. One can, firstly, take the attitude that now that due to Derrida we know more about how names invoke presences, the game is over. We will now pull ourselves together as persons and as groups in some new way or not at all, since all the old tricks, having had their secrets revealed, have lost their efficacy. Secondly, one can take the attitude that Derrida, by taking symbolic structures apart, has contributed to our knowledge of how they were put together. Now we can put symbolic structures together, as humans have been doing for centuries. We will do our reconstruction using all the resources and techniques humans have ever used.

What the consequences of Derrida's insights will be depends, then, on their practical applications in the here and now. It is to the here and now that I now turn.

The here and now fills me with dread, and it moves me to try to make some useful contribution to the alleviation of its pain. The contribution I will offer below is an after-Derrida post-post structuralist philosophical seed story. For those who have been reading lo these many pages, only the phrase "philosophical seed story" is new, not the idea. First I will introduce its characteristics (why it is philosophical, why it is seed, why it is story); then I will introduce the parts (description of situation, inventory of resources, work with the resources); and then I will tell the story.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STORY:

Philosophical: The here and now is military, economic, psychological, medical, chemical, physical, biological, imaginary, rhythmic, social, historical, geological, agricultural, industrial, commercial, domestic, personal, international, global... and one could go on to mention more specific kinds of knowledge which are relevant to what is happening here, at this place, now, at this time. But all this special knowledge cannot be assimilated and processed, and so at any given point in space and time humanity will continue to guide its actions as it always has, according to a general everyday orientation called common sense, mores, moeurs, or ethos; its scientific name is "culture," and the cultural action which tries to be systematic about its rational criticism and reconstruction is called philosophy.

Seed: The context and purpose of philosophy (as of art) has always been given by the larger set of cultural practices, of which philosophy is a dependent subsystem. Until Freire (with important antecedents, such as Gramsci and the protestant reformation), philosophy was, nevertheless, an elite activity, in which the context was not humanity's problems but the problems of a governing elite, and in which the purpose was disguised or lost sight of as philosophers talked to each other about the technical details of their work. What is needed now is, as Hegel said, a Volkserziehung, an education of the people, in which, as Freire says, we all educate each other. My contribution is not, consequently, writing conceived as analogous to making (Greek: poein, to make, source of our word "poetry"); it is not the weaving of a text (Latin: textus, fabric), so that the result is a finished work, an oeuvre. It adopts instead a different political strategy: trying to promote conversations which collectively reconstruct discourse and practice. It can be thought of as a relatively free and easy way to do philosophy, which is accessible to the dud majority and to awkward, sentimental, marginal, intellectual proletarians, who lack ability and self-discipline. It can also be thought of as a social seed, an ovule for a social growth process; the growth process of the human symbolic function, through which culture becomes more adaptive as a means of coping with physical reality.

Being a Story

Traditionally philosophers have behaved like neurotics driven by an inner compulsion to impose their views of reality on others. Logical force has been treated as analogous to physical force. For example, Plato, himself a wrestler, often portrayed a philosophical dialogue as a wrestling match. Spinoza tried to demonstrate the principles of ethics mathematically, deducing theorems by strict logic from first premises, making them mentally irresistible. Many philosophers have tried to lock reality into a particular conceptual framework by establishing universal and certain truths; Kant, for example, claimed that only in terms of his categories was it possible to have any experience at all, and that only on his precepts was it possible to act rationally. Nowadays such conduct by philosophers is neither credible nor desirable. It is not credible because feminists have shown the gender bias, Marx has shown the class bias, Nietzsche and Freud have shown the will-to-power-and-glory bias, while Wittgenstein (among others) has shown the logical gaps in the remaining credible proofs. It is not desirable because it leads to rigidity when we need flexibility. So my contribution to our social growth process will be a candid story, one that does not pretend to be the only possible way to name the parts and string them together in a plausible order. It will be, nevertheless, a philosophical story, one that rationally reconstructs the ethos.

The Parts of the Story:

First a general description of the situation here and now; then an inventory of the different cultural resources we have to work with; and then two different philosophical treatments of the existing culture, according to the two different attitudes toward deconstruction previously mentioned, the "game is over" attitude and the "let's play" attitude.

Earlier when I told you I had a job in the first world I said the truth but not the whole truth because, actually, I am like a perverse robin who winters in the north and then flies to the southern hemisphere for more winter. In the course of repeated sojourns I have become a familiar visitor to Chilean pharmacies in the rainy season. The pharmacists and their clerks greet me with a cheery Hola! apparently unaware that in the interval since my last visit to their shop I have migrated to the northern hemisphere and been a professor of philosophy. Unlike their northern colleagues they are not hampered by the formality of a prescription, and they happily dispense upon request the newest German antiborborygmics.

One day as I was visiting one of my favorite pharmacies the police cordoned off the area and proceeded slowly down the street with a large olive-green bus, checking everyone's identity cards and throwing into the bus anybody who was on the wanted list, without identification, or shabbily-dressed and smelly. Mercedes, the assistant pharmacist with whom I had been discussing Lysine-L (an amino acid recommended for cold sores), was not wanted as far as she knew; she was neatly dressed and her papers were in order, but nevertheless she was nervous because she was a clandestine political activist. She was happy to have the company of a foreigner for the duration of the raid. As it turned out they did not take her or me.

Memories -- how bitter it is to separate the here and now from the traces of past bitterness.

The military dictatorship which rules us here and now (I am writing this in Chile in 1986) is in power partly because of traditional metaphysics, but mostly because of modern metaphysics. Traditional metaphysics was born and bred in societies where rule by military castes was normal; it builds hierarchy into logic, language, family, society, and hearts. It fits authoritarian regimes as pods fit peas; rank is the essence of one and of the other; it is their doctrine and their discipline. I would like to say, however, or rather to repeat, in praise of the western philosophical and theological tradition, that it was not historically as much the source of rank as it was rank's counselor and confessor; through it hierarchy was mitigated as it was sacralised.

The modern metaphysics of individualism provided the junta with its rhetoric and its opportunity. Its rhetoric is Anti-Communism. Anything and everything is justified by Anti-Communism because Communism is conceived as the enemy of the sacred ideal of the modern mind. The opportunity to take power was also due to freedom, although due to freedom's exercise more than to the threat of its extinction. The exercise of freedom led -- as it often does, and for various reasons -- to economic stagnation; the bottles of pills disappeared from the pharmacy shelves, while the price of pills went up and up. People had to stand in line for penicillin and for bread. Toilet paper was not available at all. Enter: machine guns, tanks, helicopter gunships, olive-green buses.

The here and now. Living with the consequences of our social structures. Of our symbolisms.

Derrida has no favorite between the ancient and the modern forms of metaphysics; he deconstructs the millenial hierarchies, and he also deconstructs the 17th and 18th century natural rights underpinnings of our modern ideal of freedom, and he does not spare more recent metaphysical projects which have enshrined the precious individual in a mysterious living present, producing a spirit of respect for liberty by more sophisticated means. The old exploitation, justified by a metaphysics favorable to the rhetoric of God and love, and the new exploitation, justified by a metaphysics favorable to the rhetoric of rights and freedom, are, for Derrida, two crimes with the same modus operandi = the mystical presence behind the name, the authoritative voice behind the presence.

An inventory of our cultural resources needs to put respect for rights first on its list -- rights both in the sense of "attention to needs" and the more traditional sense of "freedoms." In this respect sheer deconstruction is less than helpful.

By unmasking the mysteries behind the sacred dignity of the person, deconstruction depletes our defenses against the 5 a.m. knock on the door. The Holy Catholic Church, which must be at the top of Derrida's list of undesirable institutions, is in fact the principal bulwark of human rights here and now, and it is also -- not coincidentally -- the principal heir and bulwark of traditional metaphysics. The tradition has, however, undergone a transforming modulation in recent times, so that the teachings of the institution which -- more than any other -- traces its roots to the beginning of our Greek-Hebrew heritage, are not now the same as the onto-theology Heidegger (unsuccessfully according to Derrida) tried to destroy, either in practical social ethics or in pure metaphysics. The following is a longish quote from a catechism, which provides down-to-earth summary of what the Church is teaching nowadays on social issues:

• 511. What is the first principle of the social doctrine of the Church?

  The Church has a personalist social doctrine, that is to say, she advocates a social organization and a social life which respect the fundamental rights of the human person.

• 512. Does the Church work for peace?

  The Church does not cease to recall to men the supreme good of peace among persons and among nations.

• 513. What is the principal means the Church proposes toward peace among men?

  The Church proposes to men to be reconciled among themselves in reconciling themselves with God, who, being the Father of all men, can alone make them to live in sincere brotherhood.

• 514. Does the Church have an economic doctrine?

  The Church invites its faithful and all men of good will to an equitable distribution of wealth among the people of the same society and among nations.

• 515. Should Catholic workers belong to their labor union?

  The Church calls on its faithful to take on their temporal responsibility in contributing their Christian cooperation to labor organizations in a spirit of worker solidarity.

• 516. Does the Church accept violence?

  The Church condemns violence as a means of correcting social injustice and advocates love instead. The Church also condemns the violence of social injustice itself.

• 517. Does the Church condemn free market capitalism?

  The Church condemns free market capitalism because it accepts only principles of supply and demand in view of the greatest possible profit, neglecting the needs of people.

• 518. Does the Church condemn socialism?

  The Church condemns socialism if one understands by that term the transfer to the state of all economic initiative, to the neglect of the freedom of persons.

• 519. Can a Catholic be uninterested in temporal social problems?

  No, every Catholic should search in the light of Christ the means to contribute to solving the problems of the temporal life of persons. [12]

A careful reading of this catechism will show that it is a story about persons, their rights and their freedom. It is an ethical requirement that the pwoer of economic initiative rest with persons (note, by the way, that in law a corporation is a person) and not with the state because persons are in essence free (or, for existentialists, free precisely because they have no essence) and consequently ought to be free. The ethical principle rests on a theological doctrine: the sacred mystery of the person. Personalist theology, or more loosely "experience-centered theology," draws support from metaphysics, not so much from traditional metaphysics as from its contemporary heirs and successors: the phenomenologists, the process philosophers, the neo-Hegelians, and exponents of certain brands of linguistic philosophy and critical neo-Marxism.

The Church's social doctrine prolongs ancient traditions into the 20th century by reformulating them in liberal terms. In its supporting metaphysics and theology the fundamental values of the dignity of the person, human rights, and freedom are never in question. Whatis in question is whether these values are to be endorsed and justified by mysterious symbolisms representing ancient traditions, or whether one will arrive at the same fundamental values by a secular route. If the latter is the case, one arrives at the doctrines of the secular human rights organizations, whose offices form an alternative network financed by European and North-American well-wishers, here in Santiago, now in 1986, cooperating with the Church, and with the protestant churches, in practice, while waving a lawyer's edition of the human rights flag, a civil and enlightened edition which they believe to be laundered clean of metaphysics.

Jacques Derrida is, as usual, waiting in the wings to deconstruct everybody's illusions. The philosophers behind the secular doctrines of human rights are no less metaphysical than St. Thomas Aquinas, as Derrida has already demonstrated, in part, in his deconstructions of Rousseau [13] and Condillac [14], and which he, or anyone else, could demonstrate more fully and in greater detail by the continued application of deconstructive methods. As for the most important philosophical interlocutor of experience-centered theology, phenomenology, Derrida has devoted a book, The Voice and the Phenomenon [15], to deconstructing it. The presence of mysterious voices which the traditional metaphysician educed from a distinction between form and matter, is evoked again in modern dress and in the service of individualism, by Husserl's phenomenology of the "living present," seconded by the lesser phenomenologists and snollygosters, Scheler, Bergson..., a list to which one might add Cardinal Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II), author of The Acting Person.

What surprised me this morning as I rode on an orange and white bus, which passed another bus which was burning, flames pouring from all its windows, was that nobody on my bus had anything to say. You would have thought my fellow passengers would say something -- after all it could have been our bus and we could have been incinerated. You would think someone would say, "I hope they got the passengers off the bus before they threw the fire bomb!" Or, "Its those Communist terrorists again -- why won't they leave us in peace?" Or, "Thank God there are still some young men brave enough to resist!" In fact everybody's lips were silent. Hegel's prophecy was coming true -- in a world with an excess of rights, force was ruling. The army had put all its artillery on the side of rights as it understood them. The Church had put all its moral authority on the side of rights as it understood them. Fear was ruling. Here and now. [16] It was enough to make one think that something is so fundamentally wrong that Derrida's deconstruction might be necessary.

If I were an agronomist I would help unemployed people plant gardens. If I were a nurse I would probably do preventative medicine, now that the unpayable national debt has closed the doors of clinics. If I were in retail sales I think I would specialize in recycling used goods, or else in making basics available at low prices, or maybe in health foods. If I were an ordinary bum on the street I would beg enough money to get drunk, if I could, and if I couldn't I would become a protestant minister or a criminal. If I were a cook I would work in a soup kitchen, and if I were a musician I would sing hope. If I were a priest I would hear the confessions of torturers; if I were an army officer I would vote for democracy; if I were an economist I would plan. Since I am a philosopher I suppose I should deconstruct something.

It would, I believe, be useful to deconstruct the televised speeches of our ruling tyrant, whose name it is not necessary to mention because nothing distinguishes him from the common run of dictators of poor countries. His discourses are, moreover, little different from those of many elected officials in democratic lands where the persuasive force of the televised image is the source of political power rather than as here, merely auxilliary. The structure of his speeches is military, bipolar, like the structure of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or that of "Star Wars". Good vs. evil. Good is, in the first instance, law and order; and evil is, correlatively, the Communist subversion of law and order. Disloyalty, which has been the constant theme of tyrants since Thucydides first wrote about them, is defined in terms of betrayal of the tyrant personally, of the national and military institutions he directs, and betrayal of the project for putting the nation in order which justifies military rule.

If one analyzes in more detail the particular kind of law and order the general is (at the level of conscious self-presentation) defending and requiring everyone else to defend, it proves to be a slightly refurbished standard modern law and order, of the kind which was given a sophisticated formulation and a philosophical defense by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. The refurbishings make it contemporary and Chilean. Its structure is as follows:

Good	Evil
RATIONAL (= according to the laws of economics = laws of nature = laws of free market capitalism)	IRRATIONAL (= demagogic = projects of progressive politicians = inflationary = discourages investment)
PROPERTY (= legitimate = correct = natural)	CRIME (= theft = disorder = socialism)
FREEDOM (= private enterprise = absence of restrictions on imports, on luxury consumption, on business)	MARXISM (= subjection of the individual to the state)
CLEAN (= responsible = Chilean = loyal)	DIRTY (= criminal = vices, especially drug abuse)
CHARITY [17] (= us = women's sphere = our voluntary assumption of our social responsibility)	VIOLENCE (= them = subversives = will stop at nothing to get power for themselves)
RIGHT (= obedient to principle = loyalty to law and order)	WRONG (= violations of property, freedom, clean living, and charity, which are connected with irrationality and disloyalty)

The ideals of the tyrant's discourse -- loyalty, reason, property, freedom, charity, and righteousness -- describe a world that does not exist. The tyrant's good is not a status quo that he defends; it is a utopia [18] he is building, and he is well aware that he is trying to reshape the country by force to make reality coincide with his values, which are at once the values of his social class and the values of 18th and 19th century modernity. He leads a social project whose aim is to bring the nation into line with the simple ideals which constitute the basic legal and moral structure not only of Chile but of western society generally. While others might, at heart, wince at the social cost, i.e., cruelty, of the measures taken, our tyrant speaks as a man assured of the righteousness of his mission. Voices come to him in the night; they are the voices of the ideology of his social class. He obeys them, and the troops obey him.

Having finished the foregoing small deconstruction, for my next useful activity I would like to encourage doa Mercedes, the assistant pharmacist, to participate in the reconstruction of our global society's symbolic structures, together with the agronomists, the unemployed, the gardeners, the nurses, the retail sales persons, cooks, musicians, priests, army officers, ordinary bums on the street, drunks, protestants, criminals, the silent passengers in the orange and white bus, the prisoners in the olive green bus, the police, and everyone else. Reconstruction will require a nurturing attitude towards names, voices, presences, theology, and inherited constructions. Let us suppose, for example, that it is possible to work together on a concrete problem, such as finding a disappeared husband, in a way which establishes bonding, so that we will always be present one to another, even in our sleep. Let us suppose that reasoning, in its best sense, is not bipolar, not a process of differentiating between good-evil, us-them, right-wrong, true-false, but is a cooperative cultivating of shared insights. Let's suppose that communicating is sharing more than differentiating. Let's suppose that the human is a widely misunderstood species, which has been perceived as essentially hostile only due to a mistaken ideological construction. Let us suppose that human passions can be changed by giving them new names. Let's believe that people can change their personalities by falling in love.

Let us produce a rich and diversified culture, rich in rhythms and images as the goddess who carries the cornucopia is rich in autumn fruits and whole grains, diversified in spiritual life-supports as the shelves of the pharmacy are diversified according to each malady and malaise, with help for the awkward and the adroit, for ectomorph and neurasthenic, for the shaggy and bald, the oversexed and the impotent, for those tempted by alcohol and those tempted by money, the dreamy and the mesomorphic, for athletes and for endomorphs, for the impulsive, the obsessive, the anally retentive, the scatterbrained, the depressed, the moribund and the hyperactive. Let no one be abandoned at the critical moment when the worse self debates with the better self.

Let's give all children names -- this is, admittedly, not a new idea, but it is a good idea, and one well worth encouraging, because and not in spite of Roland Barthes' observation that to give something a name is always to sacralize it [19], and in spite of, not because of Alain Touraine's observation that before one can struggle against the enemy one must name the enemy. [20] What Proust said of children's trusting eyes could be said of children's names, for both the eyes and the names invoke the presence of the family circle where the children are loved. Let us suppose that rights come only with duties, that freedoms come only with responsibilities, and (as the Pope said to the Latin American bishops at Puebla) that private property is held subject to a social mortgage, property rights being valid only if, when, and to the extent that they serve social functions. Let us suppose that the new society will be built partly by subtracting from and partly by adding to the inherited constructions -- and let us give our added duties, responsibilities and social functions names, names that evoke voices, voices that evoke parents, voices that evoke the presence of the victims of our poorly designed institutions, voices that evoke the still-living presence of all the martyrs who ever died for love and justice. Let us suppose that we have promises to keep, and that somebody cares whether we keep them.

[1] more long than alive

[2] "...like all other reversals (renversements), captive of the metaphysical edifice that it attempts to undo." Derrida, Jacques, De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967, p. 33. Derrida is remarking on an aspect of Nietzsche, but the remark applies, as it says, to all reversals. Cf. id. p. 100. "...sometimes I have the feeling that the Heideggerian problematic is the 'deepest' and 'most powerful' defense of that which I try to question under the heading of the thought of the presence." Derrida, Jacques, Positions. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972, p. 75.

[3] Paris: PUF, 1979, p. 40.

[4] Note, however, that Derrida specifies that deconstruction does not "demolish," which suggests that he wants to distinguish between good and bad, salutary and pathological, ways of unmaking inherited constructions. Grammatologie p. 21.

[5] Op. cit, p. 99. The preceeding quotation is from p. 39.

[6] "La m*taphysique a toujours consist*, on pourrait le montrer, vouloir arracher la pr*sence du sens, sous ce nom ou sous un autre, la differance; et chaque fois qu'on pr*tend d*couper ou isoler rigoreusement une region ou une couche du sens pur ou de signifi* pur, on fait le m*me geste." Positions. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972, p. 44.

[7] Derrida, Jacques, "La Pharmacie de Platon," in La dissemination. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972, pp. 69-198, especially pp. 164-179, 193.

[8] I do not add Jews to this list because it appears that most of the anti-semitic polemics found in Nietzsche's writings were added to the texts by Nietzsche's sister and her husband. Some people argue that Nietzsche was, in spite of his apparent identification with a faction of the German upper-class, nevertheless progressive because he was an internationalist who despised nationalism. But since when has the capitalist elite been nationalist? Since its beginnings in the expansion of European markets beyond national boundaries, capitalism has been international. Capital uses its mobility as a means to exercise control over governments, and as a way to avoid control by the nation-state. It is true that Hitler and Nietzsche disagreed on this point, but only becauseHitler was to the left of Nietzsche.

[9] Derrida, Jacques. perons: les styles de Nietzsche. Paris: Flammarion, 1978.

[10] Hoy, David, "Jacques Derrida," in Quentin Skinner (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 1985, p. 62. Note, however, that Derrida's position leads him to oppose anarchy, and to make fun of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for attacking all conventional authority in the name of Nature.

[11] "La Pharmacie de Platon," op. cit.

[12] Le Catechism des Provinces Ecclesiastiques de Qu*bec, Montr*al et Ottawa. Qu*bec: 1888, 1924, 1944, reissued 1976 by Editions St-Raphal, Sherbrooke, Qu*bec, in conformity with recent modifications of canon law. I have translated "liberalisme economique" as "free market capitalism" because in American English "economic liberalism" means what Europeans call social democracy.

[13] De la grammatologie, op cit. the second part. Note the deconstruction of freedom pp. 238-39.

[14] L'archeologie du frivole. Paris: Denol/Gonthier, 1973.

[15] La voix et le ph*nomene. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. "...l'idealit* de l'idealit* est la pr*sent vivant, la presence soi de la vie transcendentale."

[16] "quoi du reste aujuord'hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, d'un Hegel?" -- the opening line of Derrida's Glas. Paris: Denol/Gonthier, 1981.

[17] In Spanish: "obras sociales." "Right" as a Spanish adjective is derecho which means "straight", while "wrong" is chueco which means "crooked." "Rational is sometimes equivalent to serio, "serious."

[18] Mannheim would call it an ideology.

[19] Barthes, Roland, Le degre zero de l'ecriture. Paris: Seuil, 1972. p. 74. Barthes refers to sacralizing psychological objects, such as la sincerité, by naming them, but I think his insight applies nicely to naming children too.

[20] Touraine, Alain, Pour la sociologie. Paris: Seuil, 1974.