Subjectivity as a Tool – Advocating Strong Notions of Individual Subjectivity in Rorty

There is a well-known tension in Rorty when it comes to our linguistic agency. Famously, Rorty follows Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson and others in that there are no private languages. However, in Rorty, the innovator of our language is an individual - the “strong poet” - who Brandom calls Rorty’s “genius self”. This tension in Rorty is well described and has been problematized many times and from various angles. Going against the common compulsion to mitigate Rorty’s commitment to individuality and normative detachment, this article provides a rationale for what I will call Rorty’s “vocabulary of rupture” which follows a) from fully implementing Rorty’s particular version of antirepresentationalism and b) from taking temporality into account. Concerning a) once we embrace that words and theories do not represent the world as it is in itself but rather function to serve particular aims, there are contexts in which insisting on the possibility of normative detachment becomes interesting and worth pursuing. This is the case when the aim of writing is to motivate people to engage in democratic practices and embark on creative endeavors. As for b) once we bring temporality into play, we can switch between the Davidsonian perspectives of triangulation and radical interpretation and freely choose which perspective to favor for describing the moment of emergence of new vocabularies – that is either the first or the third-person account of meaning.