Wittgenstein as Conservative Deconstructor

D ECONSTRUCTIVE LITERARY THEORY has been an important part of literary thinking for some time. Belatedly, philosophers are coming to realize that deconstruction has common ground with analytic philosophy both in presuppositions and in strategies.' This realization typically starts with reading Derrida but leads to an interest in literary theory generally. Literary thinkers have led some philosophers to read philosophy in the shade of different questions. Some philosophers have thus come to appreciate the possibility of rhetorical readings of philosophical texts and the relevance of such readings for philosophy. More kinds of reading than getting the argument are beginning to seem interesting. More directly, there are some parts of the philosophy of language on which literary thinking is vastly more subtle and sophisticated than that of philosophy. On a topic such as metaphor, learning from literary theorists and critics can remove the under-practiced, self-confident naivet6 with which philosophers have dealt with figuration.2 Among the connections between literary theory and philosophy are very strong affinities between deconstructive thought and the thought of the later Wittgenstein. The single most striking difference is that Wittgenstein does not take his deconstructions to have dramatic consequences outside philosophy. Wittgenstein's diagnoses of incoherence in philosophical theories seem to leave the application of the deconstructed concepts untouched. I call this Wittgensteinian reaction to the dissolution of a dualism conservative deconstruction

Epistemology · Philosophy · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

• The dilemma with dichotomies

  Open Access•Katharina Barbe•Language & Communication•2001

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