ABSTRACT
A comparison: texts are sometimes hung on the wall. But not theorems of mechanics. (Our relation to these two things.)1
Wittgenstein is the authority most often appealed to by those in search of a philosophic case against the claims of deconstruction. For the later Wittgenstein, scepticism could only take hold through the kind of conceptual delinquency which philosophers created when they somehow lost touch with the commonsense bases of ordinary language. The real business of philosophy, he taught, was to coax the mind down from its self-imposed toils of sophisticated questioning and guide it back to a proper sense of linguistic wisdom and health. Philosophic problems were mostly brought about through ‘the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’.2 The most effective cure would be to demonstrate that such problems could be made to disappear-or to seem merely marginal and perversewhen restored to a proper linguistic context. The paradigm case for Wittgenstein was that species of radical scepticism, or epistemological doubt, which had long been a major cause of philosophical perplexity. Deconstruction is at present the most rigorous and (to its opponents) the most perverse of all attempts to reckon the consequences of sceptical doubt. It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein should be called upon to witness the dangers, the irrelevance, or-as some would have it-the sheer illogicality of deconstructionist thinking.3
