Rorty: I use ‘ironist’ to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance… In my view, an ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom’s ‘strong poet’ rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, ‘logical,’ ‘objective’ scientist… Whereas the liberal metaphysician thinks of the high culture of liberalism as centering around theory, the liberal ironist thinks of it as centering around literature (in the older and narrower sense of that term — plays, poems, and, especially, novels)… Within ironist culture, by contrast, it is the disciplines which specialize in thick description of the private and idiosyncratic which are assigned the [political goals of binding human beings together and eliminating cruelty]…” Source: http://theamericanscene.com/2009/04/15/are-there-hipsters-in-dc

For Rorty, Derrida most perfectly typifies the ironist. In his, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, especially, Derrida free associates about theorizers instead of theories, thus preventing him from discussing metaphysics at all. This keeps Derrida contingent, and maintains Derrida's ability to recreate his past so that his past does not create him. Derrida is, therefore, autonomous and self-creating, two properties which Rorty considers most valuable to a private ironist. While Derrida does not discuss philosophies per se, he responds, reacts, and is primarily concerned with philosophy. Because he is contained in this philosophical tradition, he is still a philosopher, even if he does not philosophize.