Copyright

Heidi Salaverria

Published On

2025-12-02

Page Range

pp. 123–146

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

6. Creative Doubts against Authoritarian Certainty

Rorty through Reparative Critique

Chapter of: Solidarity in Contingency: Rorty’s Constructive Project (pp. 123–146)

The text examines Richard Rorty’s concept of self-creation through the lens of reparative critique, proposing that creative forms of doubting—rather than irony—offer a stronger response to authoritarian certainty. Drawing on Melanie Klein, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, it argues that reparative doubt integrates dependency, empathy, and ambivalence into a non-humiliating model of autonomy. By contrasting paranoid and reparative

positions, the paper suggests that solidarity arises not from shared power but from acknowledging vulnerability, relational dependence, and the transformative potential of doubt in overcoming cruelty and humiliation.

Contributors

Heidi Salaverría

(author)
Philosopher and Chair Professor for Art Theory and Artistic Practice at Medical School Hamburg
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4522-7730

Heidi Salaverria is a philosopher and Chair Professor for Art Theory and

Artistic Practice at the Medical School, Hamburg. She is a philosopher,

art theorist, and cultural worker, living in Hamburg, Germany. She

is working on an Aesthetics of Doubt. She has published widely on

ideas of non-identitarian subjectivity and critical common sense, the

problems of recognition, the intersection of aesthetics and politics, and

the question of agency.