Pragmatism, Rhetoric, and History

What is it about?

Does Richard Rorty’s notion of pragmatism account for patently false arguments such as those of the so-called revisionists, who pretend that the Nazi gas chambers never existed? Is it enough merely to announce that someone who proposes such arguments is simply “not one of us,” or is a member of another “interpretive community,” or that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed and that the only answer to a redescription is a re-redescription? This essay concludes that the answer is yes: the necessary linguistic and narrative mediation in all accounts of the Shoah might well induce us to accept Rorty’s version of pragmatism. But as a consequence, we would have to reject Paul de Man's arguments about the “inhuman” nature of language and history. The revisionists have their own vocabulary, their common obsession, their particular madness. While we may never uncover the contingent or unconscious reasons for their advancing such outrageous beliefs (or “strong” interpretations), we can pin down these beliefs and paraphrase them, comprehend and counter them, and hold their authors responsible for their intended meanings, rather than postulating the inhumanity, non-phenomenality, and uncontrollably figural nature of language.

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