Summer 1996
Volume 22, Number 4

The term essentialism is used today as a charge against any thinker's work whenever the thinker takes his or her categories to be more stable than the imposition of temporary political tactics. And since acts of essentialist thinking are taken to be blind to difference, the "essentialist" behind the essentializing act of thought is criticized not only for faulty reasoning but also for the ethical lapse of becoming complicit in the exclusion of others. Such charges ought to be taken seriously, but, with essentialism used against any stable set of distinctions, the charge of essentialism seems more like a political smear than a cognitive claim.1 Indeed, in a recent book, William Connolly concedes that even so thoroughgoing a neo-Nietzschean constructivist as Foucault may be accused of being an essentialist and can only be defended by a tu quoque argument.2

We all know, at least dimly, how we have arrived at this state of affairs. Derrida's deconstruction of logocentrism includes within it not only an argument against essentialism but also against nonessentialisms whose distinctions lie within the telos of essentialism.3 So, for instance, a thinker who agrees that one may never achieve full clarity about the meanings of one's assertions but who nevertheless writes as though one may approximate such clarity would count, for Derrida, as writing within the telos of essentialism or logocentrism.4 And the consequences of such thinking are taken to be as inimical to recognitions of difference as is full-fledged essentialism.

In this essay, we attempt to account for the effectiveness of Derrida's complicated argument by showing how it builds on many of the intuitions that also support Wittgenstein's arguments against essentialism.5 We then show how this form of antiessentialist argument provides good reasons for criticizing nonessentialist arguments that remain within the essentialist telos. Consequently, if this is the only valid form of antiessentialism, then those of us with antiessentialist intuitions must remain imprisoned in the current state of affairs where virtually any thinker will have to condemn him- or herself for essentialist thinking. In other words, we would have to give up some of our most robust intuitions that tell us that we can make stable distinctions with rational justifications grounded in something more than political tactics and that these distinctions need not have repellent ethicopolitical ramifications.

1. Throughout this paper, we use stable to describe types and distinctions that may sensibly be used without indeterminacy or undecidability in most everyday contexts. Stable types and distinctions cross what we tend to call practical everyday contexts but are not metaphysically fixed. They do not have a determinate use in all possible worlds.

2. For the comment regarding Foucault, see William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality (Newbury Park, Calif., 1993), p. 161 n. 21. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York, 1989), pp. 6-18, claims that even the thinking of Lacan and Derrida has important essentialist moments, Lacan when he thinks about The woman (even with the "The" under erasure) and Derrida when he speaks of woman's essence as undecidable. She thinks nominalists, who claim that kind names simply refer to collections of contingently similar individuals, are linguistic essentialists; see p. 5. Moreover, she seems to think that any recourse to irreducibles--such as Wittgenstein's in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus--amounts to essentialism; see p. 18. As part of her strategy to avoid acting as though essentialism has an essence (see p. 21), Fuss uses essentialism to designate a much wider range of phenomena than our form of antiessentialism would warrant.

3. Fuss provides a good account of how Derrida's thinking has led to the various antiessentialist discourses prominent today. We use antiessentialist to designate anyone who argues against essentialism and nonessentialist to designate thinkers who believe the claims of essentialism are wrong but who do not develop arguments against them.

4. Writing within the telos of essentialism or logocentrism (the broader notion) is more commonly called writing with an essentialist or logocentrist longing, but Derrida prefers speaking in terms of a telos. See Jacques Derrida, "Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion," Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Ill., 1988), pp. 111-60, esp. pp. 121-22

5. We are using the term argument in the loose sense of a group of reasons or considerations that should lead to adopting a particular belief or action. Hence, we shall speak of plausibility arguments--this looser kind--and of in-principle arguments, where the reasons and considerations given are so tightly organized that, on the basis of some firmly held belief, some other set of beliefs must be embraced or rejected. Of course, there is no sharp boundary between the two kinds of argument.

Also, insofar as Derrida's argument draws on intuitions shared by Wittgenstein, Derrida also shares important intuitions with philosophers as far apart as John Searle and Richard Rorty. We shall bring out these widely shared intuitions over the course of this essay. Henry Staten has already recognized Wittgenstein's affinities with Derrida. He, however, sees Wittgenstein as closer to Derrida than we do. See Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln, Nebr., 1984), pp. 64-130

Charles Spinosa is assistant professor of English at Miami University in Ohio. He writes on Shakespeare, Heidegger and post-Heideggerian philosophy, and early-modern common law. He is the author, with Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus, of Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (forthcoming). Hubert L. Dreyfus is a professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (1992), Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division I (1991), and, with Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982).