Abstract

The primary focus of this dissertation is Richard Rorty's "firm distinction" between the public and the private. I argue that Rorty's opposition to notions of privileged access necessitates his recasting the public/private distinction as political rather than as epistemological. ;I then focus on Rorty's admiration for what Harold Bloom calls "the strong poet." Rorty's Romantic strong poet cannot be a public figure because Rorty conceives of creation as an oedipalized, violent, and humiliating practice. The strong poet provides even more support for a firm distinction between the public and the private. ;The second section of the dissertation focuses on a short passage from Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence in which the strong poet is described. I analyze this passage from several viewpoints to show that Rorty's acceptance of this figure is flawed. He misunderstands the process of creation, he fails to live up to his own liberal principles, and he replicates precisely the problem he is trying to alleviate--the problem of humiliation. I argue further that not only does the distinction fail to do what Rorty wants it to do, it is, further, logically untenable. In this section, I refer to G. W. F. Hegel, Rorty himself, Sandra Lee Bartky, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. ;I conclude by arguing that a politics of friendship provides a space that is neither public nor private and so transcends Rorty's distinction. I argue that it is precisely in a friendship that there is no humiliation, that there can be shared creation--poesis. In constructing this model of friendship, I make use of Habermas' work on communication, Lyotard's work on the the differend, and Derrida's work on the gift, on "work," and on the politics of friendship. I argue that Rorty's account cannot allow for friendship, and that is only through friendship that we can deal with the problem of humiliation