The Dishwasher Dialogues: Philosophy

Derrida, Wittgenstein and Love in Paris  

By: Gregory Light and Rafael Mahdavi - Jul 07, 2025

So Much for Philosophy, Eh?

Rafael: On slow nights we also talked philosophy at the bar. Sometimes you and Don would join us from the kitchen.

Greg: It would be unlike me to miss a conversation on philosophy. Even if it meant leaving the darker, danker, and deeper intellectual domain of the kitchen sink.

Rafael: We talked politics too, and as already mentioned, Don was oddly quite far to the right politically, which surprised us repeatedly. We discussed Auschwitz and the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we talked about the war in Vietnam which had just ended. Everybody had an opinion. About God, suicide, love, death, family, socialism, communism, atheism, sexism, feminism, art, history, poetry, literature, film, plays.

Greg: There was always discussion. Everywhere and always. And most of it was civil and good-natured. But the details and finer points would sometimes trip us up. Especially you and me. We would invariably find a raggedy thread of an idea to disagree and debate and raise our voices over. It was our sport. But deep down we were wrangling with more than ideas. Self-driven angsts? The others usually vanished around then. Nevertheless, propelled by a 13F bottle of Chez Haynes reserve, we excessively pursued some utterly trivial and inane detail. The wine had long since silenced our brains as it simultaneously urged on our mouths. Which, as everyone knows, is when philosophy is done best. I remember we would get into these marvelous discussions about a new book with a new theory. Koestler’s books Janus and The Ghost in the Machine or Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind were published around then. As was Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. And I think Jacques Derrida’s book Writing and Difference was published in English around then. I remember longish discussions about it with Bruce (of the aardvark story) who I think was in Paris studying with Derrida for a year as part of his doctorate. I can hardly remember the thrust of our arguments now, but it swept up a lot of our restaurant small talk and much of our café big talk.

Rafael: I remember going with Stephen to one of Derrida’s lectures on Plato’s Timeaus. I didn’t understand much. I had read Iris Murdoch’s The Fire and the Sun, about Plato’s fear of artists and poets, but Derrida didn’t connect with me, and I had only read his intro to Husserl’s Origins of Geometry and had a hard time with that too.

Greg: Stephen loved philosophy. I remember he and I arguing over Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations during the rehearsals for One Day in May. Well, it wasn’t so much an argument as me shouting ‘Wittgenstein, what do you know about Wittgenstein?’ He was humble enough not to respond, and I was ashamed enough not to continue. Maybe that description is too kind to both of us. Nevertheless, it was a moment we later laughed about on more than one occasion.

Rafael: I want to add something here which was important later on for me. I’m alluding to Wittgenstein’s private language argument which says, in a nutshell, that you can’t express private feelings in a public language, which is what language is––public.

Greg: In the spirit of civility, I will try not to engage here, other than to say I don’t think he said that.

Rafael: Some private languages exist, as between twins, but I don’t count that.

Greg: Good, because I think the nub of his argument is that private languages cannot exist. But feelings can.

Rafael: All this, for me meant that every language, including dance, photography, film, painting, writing, etc., has limits. You can’t say what you really want to say. As in this book. Or in painting.

Greg: Oddly, I can agree with your conclusion. Although, I am not sure I am saying what I want to say.

Rafael: Accepting this was a liberation for me.

Greg: The novel that thoroughly captured our imagination for a few months was William Wharton’s novel Birdy; largely for the timely link we had with the author, and the timely link the author had with getting it published. For a while, his story was a touchstone because he lived in Paris, we knew his daughter, the book was a best seller and Wharton (his pen name) was over 50 when it was finally released. I do not recall if I met him, but his daughter, Danielle, was a friend of ours for a time. I think she was friends with one of the waitresses. For my 27th birthday you all arranged a surprise party for me at her family’s apartment in Paris. I remember it was your task to get me there without raising my suspicion.

Rafael: On the corner of Passage Charles Dallery and Rue de Charonne, in the 11th.

Greg: Wow. You remember the address? I remember you devised an elaborate ruse which included blindfolding me in the car on the way to the apartment. And it worked! I was completely fooled and surprised.

Rafael: Your birthday party was a bit later, but I remember that party very well. My son was born the following day!

Greg: Yes. My godson. Less of a surprise but of much greater excitement. It was an auspicious twenty-four hours. And it all stimulated more ideas and talk and debate. Wharton symbolized some of the art-type tensions with which we were struggling. Here was a painter who had been writing novels for years but, like most writers, had been unable to publish any of them. Then Birdy, so the story went at the time, was discovered in a slush pile of old manuscripts, years after it had been submitted, was published with a major publisher, and became a huge success, with awards, a film adaptation and so on. All the other overlooked novels he had written were then published rather quickly in succession. It was an inspiring story which we were watching as it spilled out. Here was a writer whose personal story suggested that success was always just a flip of the coin away. Of course, he also had talent. Which helps but is not sufficient. A Confederacy of Dunces by J. K. Toole also entered our talk around then. It was also just published—eleven years after the author’s suicide—mainly because his mother doggedly chased down Walker Percy and the literary powers that be. With a grubby carbon copy of the manuscript, no less. (Whose mother does that?) So, it takes talent and good fortune—if you can call suicide good fortune. Which I do not. Nevertheless, as all these events spilled out into our lives, they kindled many a good conversation about art, recognition, and life.

Rafael: We also talked about our fears and hopes and the little things we liked, like the crackling sound when cutting into a pie crust or standing on a bridge and looking at the bulky barges maneuvering their way up the Seine, against the current.

Greg: Or the smile of a new baby the day after a surprise party?

Rafael: Sometimes at the bar, we’d go on rattling away even as clients came through the door, and Leroy would have to tell us to get back to work.

Greg: It was unfair of Leroy to interrupt the colloquium of friends with the squalor of commerce. Even if that commerce kept the friends alive.

Rafael: And other times, quite rarely though, either during one of those bar conversations or at the dinner table, one of us would break down and cry. Or nearly cry. Did you or I cry? Probably. There were tears brushed away in shame. And there were times when our words caused other tears, tears mixed with a woman’s mascara. There were muffled sounds, and the face turned away.

Greg: A weeping woman? This sounds like a confession.

Rafael: The reasons for such torments were always about love going south as they say. Later in life, we usually acquire a different and longer perspective.

Greg: The sheer exhaustion of love lengthens our horizon.

Rafael: We thought and talked about other things too, of our parents, our childhood, the good and terrible moments, feeling abandoned, alienated. But at the age we were then, all past difficulties were bearable, we could take it all in, or nearly all in. Love could and would conquer all. Even my feeling of exile. Loving and feeling loved then in our splendor of youth was our fortress against all that had been awful of our past. And when that kind of love broke or disappeared or betrayed me––I broke down. I maybe didn’t sob and weep, but I broke. Yes, I broke, and it was the first of many cracks that zigzagged through me, sharp and cutting. In my youth love was enough for all of me and my living; later I, and maybe others too, found nimble excuses for the mistakes and failures. I became adept at trinket psychology and blaming my shortcomings on my past. When one of us broke down, none of us had had any helping words because no words could help. What one needed then and there was for love to come back, to say the breakup wasn’t real, he loved her more than ever, she loved him more than ever.

Greg: I went through it all in the first four months I was in Paris. A turbulent relationship which thankfully ended quickly. She went onto another man and a child. I got Paris and the solitary chambre de bonne. The classic betrayal and end of relationship experience. It happened early on in my stay in Paris, which, in hindsight, was a good thing. I had something to experience, to feel, to reflect on and, I suppose, to write about. Back then writing was not just about writing but living something to write about. Living love and its discontents was top of the list. Not perhaps the richest or most original seam of material, but by far the pushiest and most demanding.

Greg: And then, afterwards, after the upheaval subsided, came a real sense of reprieve. I would not truly experience love for another six years. The following years were not without their romantic ups and downs with various lovely women, but they were also awash in that exhilarating sense of freedom which I will always associate with those days in Paris.

Rafael: The manageress would then swoop out from the kitchen and tell us to get a move on. Clients would be arriving at any minute. She’d notice the tears on someone’s face and say, ‘it’ll be okay, you’ll see, hon, you look great anyway, the tears make your eyes glassy, like a movie star’. So much for philosophy, eh? That’s what I told myself.

Greg: Yes, so much for philosophy, indeed.

NEXT WEEK: LES DROITS DE L’HOMME