Rorty’s belief in the priority of democracy over philosophy severs the connection between liberal politics and the transcendent. By recovering the political potential of the Freudian death drive that is missing in Rorty’s poetic culture, this article aims to reveal how Rorty’s ironist theory is the symptom of his failure to gentrify the transcendent. Embodied in obscene enjoyment, the abyss of freedom, the imagination, the primordial crime, the traumatic kernel, and the destitute subject, Žižek’s transcendental materialism helps understand how Rorty’s public/private split fails to restrict radical subjectivity to the private sector, how Rorty’s ironist culture is a liberal hope rather than the reality, and how Rorty himself oscillates between the ironist as the destitute subject and the ironist as the hysteric.