Ironia, tragedia, wspólnota: Richard Rorty w oczach barbarzyńcy

Irony, Tragedy, Community: Richard Rorty in the Eyes of a Barbarian Abstract in English The essay is a perverse attempt at interpreting Richard Rorty from the perspective of a barbarian, that is, a person whom the author of “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” excludes from the conversation of civilised people. For Rorty, the basic criterion of barbarity is adherence to a culture which has retained distinctly pre-modem characteristics, i.e., those which predate “the process of civilisation.” The author, by identifying herself with the excluded "barbarian," seeks to indicate the merits of the pre-modem paradigm which has been unjustly disparaged by the leading philosopher of American postmodernism. Thus the author wants to redress the postmodernist tum from a pre-modern position; by evoking those categories that modernity has made to sink into oblivion - e.g. ritual un-differentiation and the catharsis experience – Agata Bielik-Robson argues that they are a natural supplement to Rorty's “call for universal solidarity.” Without this supplement, Rorty's call is just a vacuous declaration.