MARJORIE GRENE
269
goodness knows , is
meant
to
make things easy, as too many of his
presumed disciples have too readily supposed . He wants to oil the
machinery and declare our philosophical holiday over. Derrida, on
the other hand, decidedly wants to make things difficult. He too
complexifies the traditional account, but so that we feel both its
power over us and its impotence to find its own , and our, fulfillment.
Wittgenstein adjures us: treat the philosophic illness with constant
exercise; make language games work! The ice of logic is slippery: back
to
the rough ground! Derrida plays
with
language. He takes it apart
("deconstruction" is his own name for his own enterprise), and finds
it not working better, more wholesomely , than philosophy dreamed ,
but much less well. We are ensnared in language, trapped at once by
the philosophic vision and its impossibility of fulfillment . Speaking
is not playing games in the world, as Wittgenstein wants us
to
dis–
cover; it is the game
of
the world
(Ie jeu du monde)
, it plays with us .
As flies are to wanton boys , we could almost say, are we to our words .
Yet Derrida's path, too , I think, is meant in a way to be one oflibera–
tion. Spinozistically, perhaps , we should learn to see our destiny for
what it is and
to
turn the games words play with us into an inwrought,
reflexive, never-ending and ever paradoxical game we play with
them. I hope what follows may clarify somewhat these enigmatic
pronouncements. For a start, I am contrasting, as I've said , the re–
construction of a reality with the deconstruction of a dream: games in
the world with the game of the world .
But I must stop to insert a warning note here. Contrasting Witt–
genstein's language games with Derrida's "game" or "play" of the
world, I am doubtless contrasting also the divergent resonances of
Spiel
and
jeu,
complicated further, indeed, by
our
thinking of
Sprachspiele
as
language-games.
How Wittgenstein himself thought
of them, as between the German and English "Spiel" and "game"
(which are by no means equivalent), who can possibly say? Maybe
there's a Derridaan lesson here. If one of the most profoundly influ–
ential philosophers in the English-speaking world thought and wrote
in a foreign tongue, what can we really know of his thought , or he of
ours? Indeed, John Findlay has argued surprisingly but convincingly,
I think, that Wittgenstein was at bottom a solipsist , that all those
games were licensed to go on in the hearty , public world while
he
struggled with an inner striving that
wouldn 't
come out. Be that as it
