Brent Matheny

Jacques Derrida deploys a type of argument throughout his oeuvre that goes something like this: “X is a normative concept. The conditions of the possibility of X make X impossible. Thus, X has a certain ‘impossible possibility.’” The purpose and meaning of these recurring argumentative structures remain obscure to many readers. The apparent opacity of these arguments exemplifies the seeming incommensurability between deconstruction and anglophone philosophy in the early twenty-first century. A pragmatist, the anglophone tradition perhaps most amenable to deconstruction, might ask: What does Derrida do with these impossible possibility arguments (IPAs)? How do they contribute to the position in which his later philosophy leaves us? This article employs the pragmatist metavocabularies developed by Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom to tease apart Derrida’s notion of the “impossible possibility” of the gift, hospitality, invention, and democracy and aims to demonstrate why these normative concepts are found impossible for Derrida, obviated from any retrospective story and forever deferred into the future of the “to come.” Taking as a point of departure Derrida’s problem of thinking the machine and the event “in a single gesture,” this article connects the theory of normativity present in Derrida’s philosophy to Brandom’s three ages of Geist.