Abstract

In Contingency, irony and solidarity, Richard Rorty advocates the project of pursuing personal freedom through the finitization of the authority figures of one's relevant past. For people like Rorty and, according to Rorty, Jacques Derrida, these figures are roughly identifiable with the major names of the western philosophical canon. Rorty's promotion of personal freedom plays on his use of linguistic metaphors for the self, and ironist metaphors for the project of freedom-enhancing self-recreation. ;In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard has given expression to some basic intuitions regarding the phenomenon and concept of irony, including its reliance on the representational appearance/reality distinction. Through an analysis of Kierkegaard, I illustrate that although Rorty finds in the word "irony" an apt vehicle to advocate breaking with the past, it also has associations that he wishes to avoid. I motivate the tension in Rorty between the representational associations belonging to irony and his long-time negativity toward representationalism in particular and toward epistemology in general. Further, I suggest that Rorty, through his use of ironist metaphors for self-recreation and their connection to a linguistic notion of self, unwittingly encourages an unsympathetic, yet very popular, reading of Contingency, irony and solidarity. This interpretation sees Contingency, irony and solidarity as a self-undermining pronouncement of, among other things, the essence of what it is to be a self. I motivate a more sympathetic, and Rortean, reading of the book as an edifying work about human possibility. ;As a means for resolving the tension between Rorty's anti-epistemology and his chosen metaphors for the self and for self-recreation, I outline a redescription of autonomous self-recreation in the aesthetic and anti-epistemological terminology of "camp" as found in the work of Moe Meyer. I redescribe the Derridean behaviors and attitudes that Rorty has selected as ironically significant as moments of camp. Having offered an alternative to the epistemologically weighty term "irony," I outline a new, less weighty, way to break ties with the past