Semantic and Political Revolutionaries – A Critical Commentary on Hütter-Almerigi’s Defence of Rorty’s Strong Poet

This article critically examines Hütter-Almerigi’s defence of Rorty’s strong subjectivity and the possibility of complete detachment from the normativity of public language. She presents two arguments: although public normativity is necessary for a new vocabulary to be recognised, it is unnecessary at the moment of its emergence; and a robust subjectivity and normative detachment advance Rorty’s aim to arouse political action and redescribe liberal culture. I contend that normative detachment is unnecessary and impossible for language creation, for triangulation conserves and transforms language simultaneously and is a condition of private languages. I also question the direct political goals Hütter-Almerigi attributes to Rorty, proposing instead that his cultural politics seeks to indirectly cultivate a metaphysics-free sense of community through vocabulary redescription.