But as the “death of God” of the 1960s gave way to the “death of the author” movement of the 1970s and ’80s, Rorty found himself engaged with Nietzschean interlocutors very different from Kaufmann—French theorists like Jacques Derrida—who had grave doubts about even the possibilities for conversation. Rorty too would come to argue that conversation—and contributing to the proliferation of languages with which to conduct it—was philosophy’s signal contribution. And though neither he nor the decon-structionist and poststructuralist Nietzsches with whom he conversed prized agreement or even
...more
