What Wittgenstein and Derrida have in common is:

1. An antipathy to philosophy.  Not only an antipathy to (almost) the entire history of existing philosophy, but an antipathy to philosophy per se, an antipathy to the figure of the philosopher.  And especially, an antipathy to what they (perversely) call "metaphysics".

2. A delusionally over-broad generalization, a grand sweep of philosophy since Ancient Greece, shoehorning the vast diversity of different ideas and thinkers into their schematic, c account - a universalizing account that elides historical, material differences, as though all philosophy were the same, thus effectively making philosophy into a kind of personality type.

3. A ridiculously ineffective, if not non-existent, solution for a problem that doesn't exist.  A self-defeating, self-undermining responsibility, reduced to the level of language alone, that is ultimately more of a vague sense of morality - a kind of loosely implied guilt - than it is a convincing argument, let alone a program for real material change.  As this supposed struggle is utterly immaterial, there is no impartial way of measuring progress toward any goal.  The goal, such as it exists, is only that no one asks questions, no one questions them, no one questions their authority.  The goal is to unask questions.

4. A contemptuous disdain for any questions.  Any criticism is dismissed as only showing that the reader failed to understand them - as if that were solely the reader's fault.

Thus, the work of Wittgenstein and Derrida is simultaneously absolutizing and vacuous. For all intents and purposes, their positions and concepts are exactly the same.  Beneath their outward, buttoned-down, rationalist personae, they are both romantics.  I see them both, fundamentally, as mystics.

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