Irony is inseparable from the evolution of the modern consciousness. In one respect, irony is a traditional subject, as old as human speech, codified in manuals, defined in its structure, but as unexciting as these scholastic topics are. In another regard, however, irony is virtually identical with that self-reflective style of poetry that became accentuated during the romantic age, and it is a decisive mark of literary modernity. In a move typical of romantic thought, however, irony was then turned around and discovered in works of literature where it had never before been surmised and thus became almost coextensive with literature itself. There is general agreement that this decisive extension of irony to a basic critical term took place toward the end of the eighteenth century and coincided with the formation of the romantic theory of literature. Until then, irony had been understood mostly as a figure of speech, firmly established and registered in rhetoric. We can even specify this turning point much more precisely by referring to a fragment written in 1797 by Friedrich Schlegel and expressing, to all appearances, the new feature of irony for the first time.
The fragment begins with the statement, “Philosophy is the true homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty” (FS, 2:152, no. 42; LF, 148)1—obviously referring to Socratic irony as the first manifestation of the ironic mood in the West. Schlegel goes on to say that there is also a “rhetorical species of irony,” which “sparingly used, has an excellent effect, especially in polemics” (FS, 2:152, no. 42; LF, 148). This phrase of the fragment apparently relates to the dominant usage of irony from Cicero to Swift and Voltaire as a rhetorical device or figure of speech that is good in polemics because it attacks indirectly and not in a vulgar way. Yet compared to the philosophical type of irony, to the “sublime urbanity of the Socratic muse,” this rhetorical kind is more pompous. There is one possibility, however, of approaching and equaling the lofty Socratic style of irony, and that is in poetry. For this purpose, however, poetry should not restrict irony to “isolated ironical passages, as rhetoric does,” but be ironic throughout, as Socrates was in his dialogues. As a matter of fact, Schlegel continues, there is a poetry that accomplishes precisely this task: “There are ancient and modern poems that are pervaded by the divine breath of irony throughout and informed by a truly transcendental buffoonery. Internally: the mood that surveys everything and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art, virtue, or genius; externally, in its execution: the mimic style of a moderately gifted Italian buffo” (FS, 2:152, no. 42; LF, 148).
In another fragment of the same year, Schlegel describes the ironic mood of Socrates more fully and indicates how such irony should animate poetic works. This irony is an “involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation” (FS, 2:160, no. 108; LF, 155) impossible to convey because for one “who hasn’t got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed.” In such an ironic performance, “everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden.” This irony originates from both naiveté and reflection, nature and art, and is the “conjunction of a perfectly instinctive and perfectly conscious philosophy.” The most compact statements about this kind of irony occur in the middle of the fragment and read: “It contains and arouses a feeling of the indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary” (FS, 2:160, no. 108; LF, 156). These few quotes already indicate the close link between the new notion of irony and the consciousness of literary modernity that marked the beginning of romanticism.
When Schlegel decided to term the mood which permeates certain works by Boccaccio, Cervantes, Sterne, and Goethe ironic, he caused indeed a fundamental change in Western critical thought. The authors just mentioned would have been somewhat astonished to hear him interpret their literary creations as displaying irony—to say nothing of Shakespeare and other older models of the ironic style. For until Schlegel, irony had retained its classical meaning as a figure of speech, and the only reason why we today do not find anything remarkable in Schlegel’s formulations is that his usage of the term took root and became established. Until then, far into the eighteenth century, the word irony had kept its strict and consistent connotation of an established form of speech or communication which could be reduced to the simple formula: “a figure of speech by which one wants to convey the opposite of what one says.”2 This is a quote from the French Encyclopedia of 1765 and contains the essence of the definitions of irony found in numerous handbooks of various European literatures as they had developed from older manuals of rhetoric concerning the art of public speaking and persuasion.
If in the schematized structure of classical rhetoric we were to seek the place for irony, we would find it first in the column of the tropes, that is, among indirect modes of speech (including metaphor, allegory, metalepsis, and hyperbaton); and second under the rubric of figures of speech, that is, of particular verbal constructions (including question, anticipation, hesitation, consultation, apostrophe, illustration, feigned regret, and intimation). The most basic characteristic of all forms of classical irony is always that the intention of the speaker is opposed to what he actually says, that we understand the contrary of what he expresses in his speech. We should perhaps add to this description that according to ancient opinion, in order to distinguish irony from mere lying, the entire tenor of speaking, including intonation, emphasis, and gesture, was supposed to help reveal the real or intended meaning. Irony is mostly discussed by the classical rhetoricians in the context of peculiar idiosyncrasies of style. Aristotle mentions irony in the third book of his Rhetoric, which is devoted to style, and presents it as a “mockery of oneself”: “Some of the forms befit a gentleman, and some do not; irony befits him more than does buffoonery. The jests of the ironical man are at his own expense; the buffoon excites laughter at others.”3 From other passages of his works, especially his Ethics, we know that Aristotle conceived of irony as a noble self-deprecation. “Irony is the contrary of boastful exaggeration,” he said; “it is a self-deprecating concealment of one’s powers and possessions—it shows better taste to deprecate than to exaggerate one’s virtues.”4
Cicero, who introduced the term into the Latin world and rendered it as “dissimulation” (“ea dissimulatio, quam Graeci eirōneia vocant”),5 discussed irony in his work On the Orator in connection with figures of speech. He defined irony as saying one thing and meaning another, explaining that it had a very great influence on the minds of the audience and was extremely entertaining if it was presented in a conversational rather than declamatory tone.6 Finally, Quintilian assigned irony its position among the tropes and figures discussed in the eighth and ninth books of his Oratorical Education, where its basic characteristic is that the intention of the speaker differs from what he actually says, that we understand the contrary of what he expresses in speech (“in utroque enim contrarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est”).7 In addition to these two formal modes of irony, however, Quintilian mentions a third which transcends the scope of mere rhetoric, or what Schlegel would call single ironic instances, and relates to the whole manner of existence of a person. Quintilian refers directly to Socrates, whose entire life had an ironic coloring because he assumed the role of an ignorant human being lost in wonder at the wisdom of others.8
As this observation indicates, Quintilian, as well as Cicero and other rhetoricians, regarded Socrates as the master of irony, the eirōn. Originally, however, the words eirōneia and eirōn had a low and vulgar connotation, even to the extent of being an invective. We come across these terms in Aristophanes’ comedies, in which the ironist is placed among liars, shysters, pettifoggers, hypocrites, and charlatans—in other words, with deceivers.9 Plato was the first to present Socrates as an ironic interlocutor who by understating his talents in his famous pose of ignorance, embarrassed his partner and simultaneously led him into the proper train of thought. With the Platonic Socrates, the attitude of the ironist was freed from the burlesque coarseness of classical comedy and appeared with that refined, human, and humorous self-deprecation that made Socrates the paragon of the teacher.
Yet even in Plato’s dialogues, where the attitude of Socratic irony is so obviously present, the term irony itself still retains its derogatory cast in the sense of hoax and hypocrisy and as such, evinces the Sophist attitude of intellectual deception and false pretension. In his Republic, for example, Plato depicts the scene in which Socrates deliberates, in characteristic fashion, on the concept of dikaiosunē, that is, justice. At a crucial point in the discussion, his conversational partner Thrasymachus explodes, requesting Socrates to desist from his eternal questioning and refuting and finally to come out with a direct statement and reveal his own opinion. Again assuming his stance of ignorance, Socrates replies that it is utterly difficult to discover justice and they should have pity rather than scorn for him. At this point, Thrasymachus bursts out: “By Heracles! Here again is the well-known dissimulation of Socrates! I have told these others beforehand that you would not answer, but take refuge in dissimulation.” The Greek term rendered here by dissimulation is of course eirōneia, irony (337a).10
From many other instances in Plato’s dialogues we know that the pretended ignorance of Socrates was considered by many of his contemporaries as chicanery, scorn, or deceptive escapism, all of which made him deserve the epithet eirōn. Only through Aristotle did the word irony assume that refined and urbane tinge marking the character of “Socratic irony.” This significant change in meaning can be detected in Aristotle’s Nicomachian Ethics, where eirōneia and alazoneia, understatement and boastfulness, are discussed as modes of deviation from truth. Aristotle, however, held the opinion that irony deviates from truth not for the sake of one’s own advantage, but out of a dislike for bombast and to spare others from feelings of inferiority. Irony was therefore a fine and noble form. The prototype of this genuine irony was to be found in Socrates, and with this reference irony received its classical expression.11 Some of the other few instances in which Aristotle mentions irony also reveal a Socratic image. In his Physiognomy, Aristotle describes the ironist as possessing greater age and having wrinkles around his eyes reflecting a critical power of judgment.12 In his History of Animals, Aristotle considers eyebrows rising upward toward the temples as marks of the mocker and ironist.13
These physiognomical features which predestined Socrates as the master of irony can also be discovered in Plato’s writings about the philosopher. This aspect of Socrates comes forth in the Symposium in the speech delivered in Socrates’ honor by Alcibiades when he compares Socrates with the Sileni, those carved figurines with satyrlike and grotesque images on the exterior, but pure gold inside. This is obviously a reference to the contrast between the philosopher’s outer appearance, his protruding lips, paunch, and stub nose, and his personal rank and intellectual quality. This contrast can also be seen as a form of ironic dissimulation, as a “mask,” and has become a famous and continuous theme in European literature. Toward his fellow citizens, Socrates assumes the mask of one who tends to appreciate handsome young men and convivial symposia, who is to all appearances universally ignorant and unfit for any practical activity. But once beneath the surface, we discover that he is above the attractions of physical beauty as well as those of wealth and popular esteem, and that he possesses an unparalleled degree of self-control. Using the Greek term eirōneia for this type of dissimulation, Alcibiades explains to his drinking companions: “He spends his whole life pretending and playing with people, and I doubt whether anyone has ever seen the treasures which are revealed when he grows serious and exposes what he keeps inside” (216d).
Schlegel obviously had all these different elements in mind when in 1797 he portrayed Socratic irony, intending to utilize this model for an understanding of literature and poetry. At that time he was deeply impressed by Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, which had just been completed (1796) and became famous through Schlegel’s review for the “irony hovering above the entire work” (FS, 2:137). In one of his notebooks Schlegel wrote: “Meister = ironic poetry as Socrates = ironic philosophy because it is the poetry of poetry” (FS, 18:24, no. 75), that is, self-conscious and self-reflective poetry. He was also aware that Socratic irony had been extinguished in the classicist tradition of the ars poetica by a glossy and formal device of rhetorical irony that followed established rules and, in its firm strictures of truth-oriented relations, constituted almost the opposite of what Socratic irony once had been. Although in rhetorical irony the intention of the speaker is contrary to what he actually says, rules insure that we actually understand the intended meaning. This irony is based on complete agreement, perfect understanding between speaker and listener, and an absolute notion of truth.
A good illustration of the transition from the classical concept of rhetorical irony to that type of romantic irony which Schlegel had in mind can be found in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann was an authority on matters of irony, not only through his literary practice, but also in theory, and liked to blend historical-critical disquisitions with his fiction. The following piece, part of one of the endless discussions between the Italian Settembrini and the engineer Hans Castorp in a Swiss sanatorium, is a good example of this technique. It begins when the Italian retorts to a remark by Castorp:
“Oh heavens, irony! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here: Guard yourself altogether from taking on this mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classical device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, a vice. As the atmosphere in which we live is obviously very favorable to such miasmic growth, I may hope, or rather, I must fear, that you understand my meaning.”14
Schlegel’s position can be exactly characterized as replacing that “direct and classical device of oratory not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind” with a different type of irony characterized in Mann’s text in ironic fashion as “slovenly, anarchic, and vicious.” In one respect, this is the most modern type of irony coinciding with a heretofore nonexistent style of literary modernity. Yet in another regard, this is the oldest type of irony in the West, deriving from Socrates and Platonic dialogues.
In varying formulations, Schlegel attempted to rescue the Socratic-Platonic irony of a configurative, indeterminable, self-transcending process of thinking and writing and to integrate it with the modern style of self-reflection and self-consciousness as the decisive mark of literary modernity. In his late lectures about Philosophy of Language and Word (1829), he characterized irony as the “astonishment of the thinking mind about itself which often dissolves into a gentle smile” and “beneath a cheerful surface” incorporates “a deeply hidden sense, another higher meaning, and often the most sublime seriousness” (FS, 10:353). In Plato’s presentation of this thoroughly dramatic development of thought, Schlegel saw the dialogue form as so essentially dominant “that even if we eliminated the titles and names of persons, all addresses and responses, and the entire dialogue format as well, and stressed only the inner thread of thoughts in their cohesion and progression—the whole would still remain a dialogue in which each answer calls forth a new question and which in the alternating flow of speech and counter-speech, or rather of thought and counter-thought, moves forth in lively fashion” (FS, 10:35).
The “alternating flow of speech and counter-speech, or rather of thought and counter-thought,” seems to constitute an essential aspect in Schlegel’s view of an ironic configuration of thought or writing. We should be careful, however, not to construe this movement in dialectical or Hegelian manner as a goal-oriented, teleological process, but to consider instead a bottomless sliding as its main feature. Again referring to Plato’s manner of writing, Schlegel in his Lessing’s Thoughts and Opinions ( 1804) described this character of modern prose with the image of an infinite trajectory:
A denial of some current prejudice or whatever else can effectively surmount innate lethargy constitutes the beginning; thereupon the thread of thought moves imperceptibly forward in constant interconnection until the surprised spectator, after that thread abruptly breaks off or dissolves in itself, suddenly finds himself confronted with a goal he had not at all expected: before him an unlimited wide view, but upon looking back at the path he has traversed and the spiral of conversation distinctly before him, he realizes that this was only a fragment of an infinite cycle. (FS, 3:50)
Schlegel’s most famous formulations for the alternating flow of speech and counter-speech or thought and counter-thought are his manifold paraphrases of a constant alternation of affirmation and negation, of exuberant emergence from oneself and self-critical retreat into oneself, of enthusiasm and scepticism in fragments from before the turn of the century. These phrases are all but different formulations for his theory of “poetic reflection” and “transcendental poetry,” which coincides with his notion of irony often rendered as a “constant alternation of self-creation and self-destruction” (FS 2:172, no. 51; LF, 167). A similar and recurrent formulation of the same phenomenon is the phrase “to the point of irony,” or “to the point of continuously fluctuating between self-creation and self-destruction” (FS 2:172, no. 51; 217, no. 305; LF, 167, 205). This is the point of the highest perfection for Schlegel, that is, of a perfection which is conscious of its own imperfection by inscribing this feature into its own text. Another and perhaps better way of formulating the counter-movement of self-creation and self-destruction inherent in the status of “to the point of irony” would be to say that this is by no means a deficiency but rather the highest level we can reach, and in an aesthetic consideration, also one of charm and grace.
In his early writings on Greek poetry, Schlegel represented the counter-movement of self-creation and self-destruction as a self-inflicting movement against a primordial Dionysian ecstasy and said, “The most intense passion is eager to wound itself, if only to act and to discharge its excessive power” (FS 1:403). One of his favorite examples for such action was the parabasis of classical comedy, that is, the sometimes capricious, frivolous addresses of the poet through the chorus and the coryphaeus to the audience that constituted a total disruption of the play. In a fragment from 1797, Schlegel says summarily, “Irony is a permanent parabasis” (FS 18:85, no. 668),15 taking the emergence of the author from his work in the broadest sense and relating it to ancient and modern literature in all its genres. With specific reference to the comic exuberance exhibited through parabasis in the comedies by Aristophanes, Schlegel said: “This self-infliction is not ineptitude, but deliberate impetousness, overflowing vitality, and often has not a bad effect, indeed stimulates the effect, since it cannot totally destroy the illusion. The most intense agility of life must act, even destroy; if it does not find an external object, it reacts against a beloved one, against itself, against its own creation. This agility then injures in order to excite, not to destroy” (FS 1:30). In the medium of modern literature, Schlegel described the ironic mood in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister by referring to the author’s “air of dignity and self-possession, smiling at itself,” or to the occurrence of the most prosaic scenes in the middle of the poetic mood, and adds, “One should not let oneself be fooled when the poet treats persons and events in an easy and lofty mood, when he mentions his hero almost never without irony, and when he seems to smile down from the heights of his spirit upon his master work, as if this were not for him the most solemn seriousness” (FS 2:133).
Within the field of philosophy, Schlegel’s irony attempts to bring to our attention the “inexhaustible plenitude and manifoldness of the highest subjects of knowledge” (FS 13:207) and to unmask the “idol of the highly praised omniscience” (FS 13:208). With this critique, however, Schlegel provoked that contemporary philosopher who like no one else before claimed to have access to “absolute knowledge” and indeed considered irony the greatest challenge to his own position—Hegel. In an extremely sharp polemic, certainly constituting one of the main intellectual events of the romantic age, Hegel singled out Friedrich Schlegel as the “father of irony” and the “most prominent ironic personality” (GWFH 11.233)16 in the modern age and chastised irony as annihilating scepticism, as irresponsible arbitrariness, as the apex of isolated subjectivity separating itself from the unifying substance (GWFH 7:278).17 In his lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel criticized the artistic aspects of that irony “invented by Herr Friedrich von Schlegel” as a “divine ingenuity for which everything and anything is nothing but an insignificant creation, unrelated to the free creator, who feels himself rid of his products once and for all because he can just as well create as annihilate them” (GWFH 13:95).
Of particular importance in this regard is Hegel’s critique of irony, ironic consciousness, and Schegel’s theory in his Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. To be sure, Schlegel’s name does not occur once in this text, but in a now famous investigation of 1924, Emanuel Hirsch established that the concluding passage of the part on morality dealing with conscience is an encoded critique of philosophers contemporary with Hegel.18 The section on the “moral view of the world” (GWFH 3:464–94)19 refers to Kant, whereas the following sections take on the representatives of the romantic generation one by one: “moral ingenuity” related to Jacobi, “absolute certainty of oneself” to Fichte, the “beautiful soul” to Novalis, “dissemblance” to Schleiermacher, the “heart of stone” to Hölderlin, and the “avowed evil” to Friedrich Schlegel. In the figure of “forgiveness,” however, Hegel depicted his own position reconciling the split of consciousness into “beautiful soul” and “dissemblance.” Taken together, all of these figures manifest a progression, an enhancement of self-consciousness, one after the other. The culmination of this process is that “reconciling yes” which unites all particular forms of certainty and is “God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge” (GWFH 3:494).
If the position of the avowed evil actually represents Friedrich Schlegel, this strange hierarchy expresses an extremely high regard for irony. All previous forms of consciousness are not yet fully conscious of themselves. They are diffuse manifestations, based on illusions, and lacking the last mental awareness of themselves. The form of evil consciousness, however, has the function of driving conscience to its last consequence by avowing evil in the statement “It is I” (GWFH 3:490). For Hegel, this is “the highest revolt of the mind conscious of itself.” According to the Hegelian principles of dialectic, however, this highest form of negativity precisely motivates the “activity of the idea” and is thereby essential for the reconciling yes (GWFH 3:492). Yet seen in itself, the evil stage of consciousness is the purest negativity, the spirit that always negates, the apex of isolated subjectivity separating itself from the unifying substance.
Although such encoded texts always maintain a certain indeterminateness as far as historical points of reference are concerned, Hegel’s other writings, especially his Philosophy of Law, make it sufficiently obvious that he had Schlegel in mind when he depicted the position of “absolute evil” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. For these texts relate such assumptions directly to irony and Schlegel (GWFH 7:279–80). They make these references, however, no longer in apocalyptic images but in direct polemics and are often not free from strong animosity and outbursts of hatred (GWFH 18:461). In Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, for instance, Schlegel’s irony is “not only the evil, that is, the entirely general evil in itself, but also adds the form of evil, subjectivity, vanity, by proclaiming to know itself as the vanity of all content, and to know itself in this knowledge as the absolute” (GWFH 7:279). As a participant in Hegel’s Berlin lectures, Kierkegaard observed that “on every occasion” Hegel seized the opportunity to speak up against irony and scolded Schlegel and his disciples as “incorrigible and stubborn sinners.” Kierkegaard said: “Hegel always discussed them in the most disparaging manner; indeed Hegel looks down with intense scorn and disdain at these ‘superior persons,’ as he often calls them. . . . But the fact that Hegel has become infuriated with the form of irony nearest to his own position has naturally distorted his concept of the concept. And if the reader seldom gets a discussion, Schlegel, on the other hand, always gets a drubbing” (CI, 282).20
The proximity of Schlegel’s irony to Hegel’s own position noticed by Kierkegaard seems to relate to Hegelian dialectic, which also appears to be animated by a constant yes and no, a permanent construction and suspension, an alternation of self-creation and self-destruction, an inherent “negativity.” Some of the most recent interpretations of Hegel today indeed tend to link Hegel very closely with the romantic theory of Friedrich Schlegel,21 although Schlegel’s irony certainly lacks the teleology and goal-oriented drive of Hegel’s dialectical thought process. The entire structure of Hegelian thought appears to be oriented toward some kind of landing or arriving in a completed philosophy, a system, providing the ground for the perfected philosophy of law and the perfected human society, the State, the unifying substance. To keep the opposite tendencies of Schlegel and Hegel apart, one should characterize this as a relationship of two fundamentally contradictory types of knowledge that cannot be reduced to a common ground and therefore form a complete and unresolvable opposition. The Hegelian type of knowledge claims a total intellectual comprehension of the interpretation of the finite and the infinite. Schlegel insists that this relationship can never be reduced to a structure or a dialectic comprehensible by finite knowledge, but constitutes an infinite process graspable only in aspects. To relate these discourses of the early nineteenth century more to our manner of thinking, we could also say that in Hegel and Schlegel respectively, we encounter models of thought, forms of knowledge, and modes of philosophical certitude that correspond to the entirely different discourses of structuralism and poststructuralism of hermeneutics and deconstruction in our time.
Yet even if we insist on a fundamental difference between Hegel and Schlegel, we come across irony in the center of Hegel’s own philosophy. In his lectures on The History of Philosophy, Hegel, as usual, engages in enraged diatribes against irony, negating this attitude as mere play with everything, which dissolves all higher and divine truth into nothingness, into ordinariness, and so on (GWFH 18:460–61). At this point, however, all of a sudden, Hegel draws a parallel between irony and dialectics by saying in one single parenthesis, “All dialectic respects everything that should be respected as if it were respected, lets the inner destruction generate on it—universal irony of the world” (GWFH 18:460). Heine and Kierkegaard, who attended Hegel’s lectures, took notice of this remarkable incident. Kierkegaard tried to explain this irony using the world-historical individual, the tragic hero of world history. Such a hero has to bring about a new level of historical reality by displacing the old order, but is bound to an actuality that will equally become subject to change (CI, 276–77). Kierkegaard thought that Hegel had quite correctly described this “universal irony of the world”: “Inasmuch as each particular historical actuality is but a moment in the actualization of the Idea, it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction” (CI, 279). Indeed, Hegel himself had made the tragic fate of the “world-historical individualities” a central theme of his lectures on the Philosophy of History (GWFH 12:45–50).
Yet more precisely speaking, it is not so much the dialectical and world historical destruction of noble individualities as such which creates irony, but rather the eye, the observation, the consciousness of the one who views this destruction as a necessary concomitant and precondition of world historical development and of life in general. It is first of all the philosopher’s, Hegel’s, consciousness that is ironic because he observes the dialectical evolution of world history which moves on through contradictions and out of necessity destroys forms of life, so that other, higher forms can emerge. Hegel sensed irony in this dialectical consideration according to which existing historical forms appear as both firmly respected and yet at the same time subject to necessary destruction. In a second consideration, however, Hegel was, of course, convinced that this entire process was governed by reason and meaning and that the world spirit moved on, despite all destruction, “exalted and glorified” (GWFH 12:98). This consciousness of a higher meaningfulness increased the irony on the part of the philosopher in a certain way, especially since the agents on the world historical stage did not share this overall view and quite often appeared duped by a higher destiny.
What about irony, however, if the conviction of an overriding meaningfulness is fading? The first to anticipate this problem was perhaps Benjamin Constant, who in 1790 toyed with the idea “that God, i.e., the author of us and our surroundings, died before having finished his work . . . that everything now finds itself made for a goal which no longer exists, and that we especially feel destined for something of which we ourselves have not the slightest idea.”22 Constant advanced this speculation in a letter which was not published until the beginning of our century and could hardly have occasioned the rise of topics such as world-historical irony, God’s irony, and universal irony of the world as they now developed on an anti-Hegelian foundation and from the position of God’s death. It was Heine who articulated these themes in a deliberately ironic context. In his The Book LE GRAND of 1826, for instance, he describes the world as the
dream of an intoxicated God who has stolen away surreptitiously from the carousing assembly of the Gods and lain down to sleep on a lonely star and does not know himself that he also creates everything he dreams, and dream images take shape, often madly lurid, but harmoniously sensible—the Iliad, Plato, the battle of Marathon, Moses, the Medicean Venus, the Strassburg cathedral, the French Revolution, Hegel, steamships, etc. are excellent individual ideas in this creative divine dream. Yet it won’t be long before the God will awaken and rub his sleepy eyes and smile!—and our world will have vanished into nothing, indeed, will have never existed. (SW 2:253)23
It is in this context that Heine uses terms such as “God’s irony” and the “irony of the world,” and refers to the “irony of the great poet of the world stage up there.” He calls God the “Aristophanes of heaven,” the “author of the universe,” who has “admixed to all scenes of horror in this life a good dose of merriment,” or he is of the opinion that “Our good Lord is still yet a better ironist than Mr. Tieck” (SW 2:424, 522, 282; 3:427). Contrary to Hegel, Heine’s notion of “God’s irony” and “irony of the world” results from the disappearance of the conviction of reasonable order in this world and derives from that “great rupture through the world” which has “torn asunder the world, right through the middle,” but also goes right through the center of the heart of the poet, which, like the “center of the world,” has been “badly torn asunder” (SW 3:304). “Once the world was whole,” Heine says, “in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and in spite of all apparent fights there was still a unity of the world, and there were whole poets. We will honor these poets and derive delight from them; yet every imitation of their wholeness is a lie—a lie discovered by every sane eye and then necessarily subject to disdain” (SW 3:304).
It was Nietzsche, however, who drew the most radical consequences from these discussions of a universal irony of the world. In one instance he even referred to the term with its Hegelian flavor, when he attempted to describe his own attitude in entirely classical terms, but then inadvertently added a decidedly modern ingredient to it, saying: “amor fati [love of my fate] is my innermost nature. But this does not preclude my love of irony, even world-historical irony” (FN 6:363; GM, 324).24 Yet Nietzsche usually avoided the term irony, which for his taste had too much romanticism in it, and preferred the classical notion of dissimulation which he translated as “mask.” In his unpublished fragments, for instance, Nietzsche regarded the “increases in dissimulation” as indices of an ascending order of rank among beings: “In the organic world, dissimulation appears to be lacking; in the organic, cunning begins; plants are already masters in that. The highest human beings like Caesar, Napoleon (Stendhal’s word about him), [are] the same as the higher races (Italians), the Greeks (Odysseus) [in this regard]; slyness belongs to the essence in the elevation of the human being” (FN 8:10, 159).
In the few instances where we come across the term in Nietzsche’s writings, irony has mostly a negative connotation. The early text On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), for instance, depicts irony as the attitude of “practical pessimists,” of historical scholarship in the sense of déjà vu, without any regard for the future. The “ironic existence” and the “type of ironic self-awareness” that come to light here have “indeed a kind of inborn gray-hairedness” and manifest themselves in “senile occupations,” those of “looking back, of reckoning up, of closing accounts, of seeking consolation through remembering what has been, in short, historical culture” (FN 1:303; UM, 101). Combined with such a retrospective attitude was the premonition that the future had little in store in which one could really rejoice, and thus people lived on with the feeling: “If only the ground will go on bearing us! And if it ceases to bear us, that too is very well.” Nietzsche adds, “that is their feeling and thus they live an ironic existence” (FN 1:302; UM, 100). He admits that everything human requires the “ironic consideration” as far as its “genesis” is concerned, but this is precisely the reason why irony is so superfluous in the world for him (FN 2:210; HH, 120). Habituation to irony spoils the character according to Nietzsche: “in the end one comes to resemble a snapping dog which has learned how to laugh but forgotten how to bite” (FN 2:260; HH, 146–47).
Historically speaking, the origin of irony was the “age of Socrates,” that is, a life “among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go—‘toward happiness,’ as they said; toward pleasure, as they acted—and who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer gave them any right.” In this world, irony was needed, Nietzsche said: “irony may have been required for greatness of soul, that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the ‘noble,’ with a look that said clearly enough: ‘Don’t dissemble in front of me! Here—we are equal’” (FN 5:146; GE, 138). Irony was also operative in the modern age as a necessity for existence. Nietzsche found it in the “morality of mediocrity,” a morality that spoke of “measure and dignity and duty and neighbor love” while pursuing only the continuation and propagation of its own type. Such a morality, he thought, “will find it difficult to conceal its irony” (FN 5:217; GE, 212).
Altogether, irony appeared to Nietzsche as one of the many forms of life that represented decadence. Irony was the shoulder-shrugging on the part of the scholar “who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and a prodigal effort that ‘does nobody any good’” (FN 5:130; GE, 122). Irony is that “Jesuitism of mediocrity which instinctively works at the annihilation of the uncommon man and tries to break every bent bow or, preferably, to unbend it” (FN 5:134; GE, 126). The ironist is a “person who no longer curses and scolds,” who no longer knows how to affirm and to negate (FN 5:135; GE, 126). Yes and no go against his taste. Instead, he likes to maintain a “noble abstinence” by repeating “Montaigne’s ‘What do I know?’ or Socrates’ ‘I know that I know nothing!’ Or: ‘here I don’t trust myself, here no door is open to me!’ Or: ‘Even if one were open, why enter right away?’ Or: ‘What use are all rash hypotheses? Entertaining no hypotheses at all might well be part of good taste. Must you insist on immediately straightening what is crooked? on filling up every hole with oakum? Isn’t there time? Doesn’t time have time? O you devilish brood, are you incapable of waiting? The uncertain has its charms, too; the sphinx, too, is a Circe; Circe, too, was a philosopher’” (FN 5:137–38; GE, 129–30).
As always when Nietzsche touches upon subjects of decadence, however, his straightforward evaluations begin to shift and soon let us notice his predilection for such phenomena. The last quote cited was taken from his aphorism on scepticism. This aphorism moves on to describe contemporary France, which for Nietzsche “now really shows its cultural superiority over Europe by being the school and display of all charms of scepticism.” In similar fashion, France has always possessed “a masterly skill at converting even the most calamitous turns of its spirit into something attractive and seductive” (FN 5:139; GE, 130–31). Decadence now appears in a favorable light. The aphorism, in turn, is only one of a whole series inspired by Baudelaire, French romanticism, and symbolism, all closely related to Nietzsche’s treatment of irony.25 For that investigation, however, we have to transcend the restrictions set by the word irony.
One good access point to the complex configuration of irony in Nietzsche’s writings, often presented as an art of living, an ars vitae, a savoir vivre, is the theme of the mask as he unfolded it in the sections “The Free Spirit” and “What Is Noble?” from Beyond Good and Evil. That this topic relates to the classical notions of dissimulatio and eirōneia is indicated by the impression that the most prominent aphorism on the mask, no. 40 of Beyond Good and Evil, seems to pick up the Socratic image of the Silenus, although the name of Socrates does not occur in the text. Nietzsche says in this aphorism: “I could imagine that a human being who had to guard something precious and vulnerable might roll through life, rude and round as an old green wine cask with heavy hoops: the refinement of his shame would want it that way” (FN 5:58; GE, 51). This contrast is one of the main points in the discussion—as are shame, avoidance of openness, and nakedness—and stimulates the question of whether “nothing less than the opposite” might be the “proper disguise for the shame of a god” (FN 5:57; GE, 50). With regard to human actions, Nietzsche continues: “There are occurrences of such a delicate nature that one does well to cover them up with some rudeness to conceal them; there are actions of love and extravagant generosity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give any eyewitness a sound thrashing: that would muddle his memory. Some know how to muddle and abuse their own memory in order to have their revenge at least against this only witness: shame is inventive” (FN 5:57–58; GE, 50–51).
Toward the end of the aphorism Nietzsche concentrates on the communicative actions of such a “concealed” human being who “instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence.” Such a person is “inexhaustible in his evasion of communication” and obviously “wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends.” Here we realize that the original reference points of semblance and truth, appearance and reality, concealment and shame are lost and cannot be reconstituted. Indeed, Nietzsche continues with regard to the desire for a mask on the part of the human being: “And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there—and that is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives” (FN 5:58; GE, 51).
Another form of masking and “one of the most refined disguises” is Epicureanism or “a certain ostentatious courage of taste which takes suffering casually and resists everything sad and profound” (FN 5:225–26; GE, 220–21). Other people “employ cheerfulness because they are misunderstood on its account—they want to be misunderstood” (FN 5:226; GE, 220). Science is another disguise which creates “a cheerful appearance,” and those who employ science do so “because being scientific suggests that a human being is superficial—they want to seduce others to this false inference” (FN 5:226; GE, 220–21). Free and insolent minds want to conceal that they are broken hearts (Hamlet, Galiani), and sometimes “even foolishness is the mask for an unblessed all-too-certain knowledge.” From all this follows for Nietzsche that it is “a characteristic of more refined humanity to respect ‘the mask’ and not to indulge in psychology and curiosity in the wrong place” (FN 5:226; GE, 221).
As a “hermit,” Nietzsche also did not believe that any philosopher “ever expressed his real and ultimate opinions in books” and indeed doubted “whether a philosopher could possibly have ‘ultimate and real’ opinions” (FN 5:234; GE, 229). Perhaps such a philosopher writes books precisely to conceal what he harbors, so that one wonders “whether behind every one of his caves there is not, must not be, another deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep ground behind every ground, under every attempt to furnish ‘grounds’” (FN 5:234; GE, 229). The conclusion to which we are driven by such considerations appears to be: “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hide-out, every word also a mask” (FN 5:234). Yet here again, it belongs to the marks of a refined style of humanity and philosophizing to respect the mask of the philosopher and not to indulge in skeptical thoughts such as: “There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and to look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it” (FN 5:234; GE, 229).
Such a will to truth at any price belongs to a youthful state of philosophizing which assaults “men and things in this manner with Yes and No.” This is the “worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional,” and one needs to be cruelly fooled and abused by this taste before one learns the “art of nuances,” puts “a little art into one’s feelings,” and “risks trying even what is artificial—as the real artists of life do” (FN 5:49; GE, 43). “No,” Nietzsche says in his preface to The Gay Science, “this bad taste, this will to truth, to truth ‘at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything” (FN 3:352; GE, 38).
We could go on to show the relevance of the mask to Nietzsche’s own existence, his life as a double, a Doppelgänger (FN 6:266; GM, 225), or to style: “long, difficult, hard, dangerous thoughts and the tempo of the gallop and the very best, most capricious humor” (FN 5:47; GE, 40–41). However, it already seems sufficiently evident that ironic dissimulation, configurative thinking and writing, double-edged communication, and artistry of living and philosophizing were his response to the universal irony of the world. Nietzsche took up this topic when, in The Gay Science, he raised the question of “what would happen if everything upon which our ultimate convictions rest would become incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?” (FN 3:577; GS, 283).
From this vantage point, Nietzsche was not certain whether “wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived” was really “less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous” than allowing oneself to be deceived, “whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or the unconditionally trusting” (FN 3:575–76; GS, 280–81). His answer to this dilemma was the admonition: “Let us be on our guard!” as he developed it in an aphorism with the same title. This aphorism takes its point of departure from the realization that the “total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms” (FN 3:468; GS, 168). To assume a “world of truth” that is supposed to have “its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations” and could be “mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason” was for Nietzsche “crudity and naiveté, assuming that it is not mental illness, an idiocy” (FN 3:625; GS, 335). Such a world is “not a fact, but an imaginative fabrication and elaboration on a sum of meager observations; such a world is ‘in flux’ as something becoming, but as an ever alternating falsity which will never approximate truth: because—there is no ‘truth’” (FN 12:114). To assume, however, that Nietzsche had reduced this “whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence” (FN 3:373; GS, 76) to a monistic principle such as the will to power or to the complementary interrelationship of will to power and eternal recurrence would certainly fall short of his rich deployment of the universal irony of the world.
It is indeed a widely shared opinion, even among his enemies, that Nietzsche was the “turntable” for the postmodern period, moving around the course and direction of modern intellectual history. The main evidence for this view is his radicalized critique of reason, truth, morality, religion, and all the ordering principles on which Western thought relied. This crucial position can just as well be attributed to Nietzsche’s manner of writing, his ironic affiliation of truth and illusion, mask and authenticity, life and decadence. Several modern authors borrowed their irony directly from Nietzsche and admitted this frankly. We have only to think of André Gide, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. Thomas Mann openly declared that the event which Nietzsche constituted in his life bears the single name of “irony.”26 In spite of the close proximity to Nietzsche among the writers who would consider themselves as candidates for postmodernism, however, they lack such a clear alliance with irony. This reluctance about irony and avoidance of the word could already be noticed in Nietzsche and in his case certainly had something to do with the anti-romantic campaign he believed himself to be conducting. In postmodernist writing, however, the shunning of irony seems to be related to the prominent position of irony in the modern intellectual world, its concomitant relationship to reason, and its mitigating function amidst a general rationalism. Irony seems to have compromised itself through this alliance and therefore appears unfit for describing the postmodern mood, although there is perhaps no better word for this complex phenomenon.
Paul de Man seems to be the only exception to this attitude. He described his theory of literature clearly in terms of irony and came to a position which equated irony with any type of text. De Man never considered himself a postmodern critic, however, but this can perhaps be attributed to the fact that this term was not yet in vogue at the time of his writing or simply explained by the observation that hardly any writer would apply this term to himself. Yet the entire structure of de Man’s thought, especially his convictions about the figurative character of language and the resulting polysemy of meaning in every human expression, perfectly qualifies him for such a status, not to speak of the application of his ideas by his students, whose techniques of “undoing a reading” or “letting the text fall back upon itself” have become stereotypes of postmodern criticism.
One reason for the prominence of irony in de Man’s writings may simply have been the new criticism. Just as irony had been the “principle of structure” in literary works for some of the new critics (e.g., Cleanth Brooks), irony was for de Man the principle of disrupture in a literary text. Whereas the new criticism saw irony, ambiguity, and paradox as forging together the multiplicity and variety of a poetic work to an organic whole of integrality, harmony, complete identity with itself, and self-presence, de Man conceived of irony in terms of a discrepancy between sign and meaning, a lack of coherence among the parts of a work, a self-destructive ability on the part of literature to articulate its own fictionality, and an inability to escape from a situation that has become unbearable. Irony practically coincides with his notion of deconstruction, his interpretative techniques according to the mottos of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading.
De Man also delved into the historical evolution of irony as a characteristic of modern consciousness from Friedrich Schlegel to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with its French correspondence in Baudelaire’s On the Essence of Laughter. Already in the essay on “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969), de Man comes close to his later version of “radical irony” (“you can’t be a ‘little bit ironic’ ”)27 when he describes the “absolute irony” which, in his opinion, all these authors have approached in terms of a consciousness of madness, a consciousness of non-consciousness, the end of consciousness.28 This irony is no longer a trope, not even “the trope of tropes,” but the innermost essence of literature for de Man: a rupture, an interruption, a disruption of language which makes it impossible for the author to master his text and for the reader to register unambiguous reading protocols. The problems with this concept of irony are that it brings us back to the classrooms of literary criticism and rhetoric and that it is exclusively preoccupied with the gloomy sides of writing in the sense of restriction, inhibition, and incapability. De Man’s irony practically coincides with every linguistic articulation and is, so to speak, an involuntary by-product of language. For Schlegel too, irony was involuntary, yet at the same time absolutely deliberate and conscious (FS 2:160; LF, 155). In de Man’s conception, irony loses all ambiguity in the sense of deliberate structuring on the part of the author and in this dull generality even appears to be diffused.
The heart of the problem is certainly that it is practically impossible to write about post-Nietzschean irony without being too narrow, or without openly contradicting oneself if one attempts to move beyond the limits of a simple yes or no. As in the case of Nietzsche, this type of irony is best conveyed in action, through performance, a kind of writing which in the mood of a joyful wisdom employs the logic of play and the rules of a game. This is perhaps best accomplished in the writings of Jacques Derrida. His texts, from this formal point of view, appear as a congenial contemporary correspondence to the tradition of irony in the modern period. Derrida too avoids the word irony, at least he does not accord any prominence to it in his writings. The closest we get to his concept of irony is perhaps in his discussion of the “dissimulation of the woven texture” at the beginning of Plato’s Pharmacy. “A text is not a text,” Derrida says in that instance, “unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.”29 The text among Derrida’s writings, however, that could be considered the most direct continuation of the discourse of irony in the style of our time and that unfolds a structure similar to that of universal irony in previous discussions, is his essay on Différance of 1968.30
In contrast to Schlegel’s and Hegel’s dialectical style of affirmation and negation and Nietzsche’s vitalistic antagonism of life and decadence, this text is cast in the medium of structuralism, of formal, differential, semiological functioning, and the concept of difference is directly derived from that formal tradition. By combining this discourse with the metaphysical or antimetaphysical discourses of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, Derrida gives the semiological discussion of “difference” new momentum. Taken in this broad sense, however, Derrida’s notion of difference seems to suggest a philosophical counterposition to the metaphysics of presence and identity as it has dominated Western thought since its origin. Yet such an approach would fundamentally misconstrue difference and differential thinking from the outset as an alternative to presence, as a mere upsetting of the previous system, or simply as an opposition to it. Such a relationship of difference to presence and identity would finally remain within the realm of the system and only create a new identity and presence in reverse of the former. The task is rather to exhibit difference not as an opponent but as an inhabitant of any structure of identity, not as the atomization but as the functioning of structure, not as a deprivation or suspension of meaning but as the mode of existence of meaning. A similar model of thought can be seen in the principle of negativity inherently operative in Hegelian dialectic or in Schlegel’s irony. To appreciate fully the functioning of all such operations, one has to leave behind the negative connotations that our language unavoidably attributes to phenomena such as negativity and difference in relationship to presence and identity, as well as any chronological or teleological type of relationship in the sense of prior and posterior among them.
Derrida’s thinking about difference is directly inspired by Saussure’s theory of language. Language, in Saussure’s conception, is a system of signs in which the relationship of the signs to what they signify—for example, of words to things, of sounds to ideas—is not natural, “ontic,” or in any other way unavoidable, but “arbitrary.” The signs of language, in other words, are not autonomous entities in themselves, but elements of a system, and they are not positively determined through their content, but negatively through their differences from other elements of the system. They are that which the others are not. Language, in this regard, is not a system of identities, but one of differences. This principle of a determination through differences became the decisive aspect of formal and differential functioning in semiotics and the guiding principle of modern structuralism. For Derrida, however, these modern attempts to think of the mere “structurality of structure” as a structure simply in its function and without anything outside of it did not fully accomplish their goal and eventually took recourse to an extrastructural ground on which one centered the display of differences.31 Saussure, for instance, gave the expressive substance, the human voice, a privileged position, and Lévi-Strauss assigned archaic and natural societies a special status. In a more general way, we can see the entire course of occidental metaphysics as successive performances of centering structures and take the various names given to these centers as chapters in the history of metaphysics: the world of ideas, God, transcendental consciousness, and so on (SSP, 279–80). Derrida’s own attempt could indeed be described, at least partly, as an avoidance of such grounding or as thinking of structure purely as a function, an operation, a display of difference in an infinite exchange of signs or in an unrestricted economy.
The notion of difference seems to point in this direction, and deconstructive enterprises such as the decentering of structures, the upsetting of taxonomies, or the reversal of meaning and signification appear to exemplify this intention. Yet Derrida’s inspirations are by no means only structuralist ones and have aside from “spacing” and “temporalizing” a number of distancing and dissociating techniques differentiating his attempt from the conception of a closed, controllable, systematized, or “structured” set of signs. To emphasize this multiple thinking of difference, Derrida mentions right at the beginning of his essay on Différance and several times during the course of the text that difference is a theme in which the “most characteristic feature of our ‘epoch’” (D, 135–36) can be thought out, in which we can see “the juncture—rather than the summation—of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our ‘epoch’” (D, 130). He also says that our “epoch” can be characterized “as the delimitation of ontology (of presence)” (D, 153). As instances of this thinking in terms of difference, Derrida cites besides “Saussure’s principle of semiological difference”: the “difference of forces in Nietzsche,” the “possibility of facilitation [frayage, Bahnung], impression and delayed effect in Freud,” the “irreducibility of the trace of the other in Lévinas,” and the “ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger” (D, 153). These names and topics indicate that the transgression of the occidental metaphysics of presence is not only at work in the new linguistics and semiotics of structuralism, but in the historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytical discourses of our time as well and that this transgression, this overcoming of the constrictions of the tradition, might very well be considered the mark of our epoch.
In his essay on Lévi-Strauss of about the same time (1966), Derrida laid out a similar image of the tendency of the epoch as a moving away from a centering ground, the unifying and ordering principle of traditional metaphysics. If we asked when this decentering occurred, Derrida argues in that text, it would be somewhat naive to refer to a particular “event,” a doctrine, or an author as the most visible mark of this break, because this occurrence is no doubt part of the totality of an era, perhaps our own, but has “always already” proclaimed itself and begun to work. Nevertheless, if we still insisted on choosing a few names, just as an indication, and recalled “those authors in whose discourse this occurrence has kept most closely to its most radical formulation,” we doubtlessly would come to the following three names. We would cite Nietzsche’s “critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of Being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without present truth).” Second, we would have to cite Freud’s “critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession.” And third, we would cite Heidegger’s “destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of Being as presence” (SSP, 280).
Derrida’s notion of a surpassing of metaphysics, however, requires the same cautionary attitude as his structuralist concept of difference in relationship to presence and identity and is in the last analysis only another expression of the same phenomenon, but in historical formulation. This surpassing or transformation of metaphysics rests on subtle distinctions of closure and end. What is comprised in the transgression of a closure—end of metaphysics, end of philosophy, end of man—can endure indefinitely. The transgression in the sense of closure does not land or arrive in a beyond of metaphysics, but in the grasp of metaphysics can go on endlessly, just as with regard to the beginning of this movement, we have noticed that it has “always already” proclaimed itself and begun to work.
Yet beyond the structuralist model of difference in relation to identity and the historical image of a transgression of the metaphysics of presence, there is still a third way of tracing out difference, which relates to the semantic aspects of signifying differential functions in language, in philosophical discourse, and in writing. Strictly speaking, we are moving here into a zone which our language actually does not permit us to articulate. Almost all of the words and concepts used to describe difference, and especially such terms as interval, dividing, retention, and protention, rest on the metaphysics of identity and self-presence which Derrida attempts to dislocate, to decenter, and to deconstruct. Difference thereby appears to be the most stringent example of the “impossibility and necessity of complete communication” which Schlegel listed among the characteristics of irony. This linguistic indisposition, if we call it provisionally by this negative name, is for Derrida only another sign of difference. Language, looked at from this perspective, is not derived from a speaking subject and is not a determinable function of this subject, but this subject is inscribed in language, is a function of language, conforms to the deployment of difference, and is part of the game.
Derrida is fully conscious that he is caught up in a circle as far as the task of designating difference is concerned and that he will never be able to transcend the thinking of presence and identity because his language will not permit him to do that. Yet he considers it as absurd to renounce the concepts of metaphysics if one is engaged in shaking metaphysics. “We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history,” Derrida says: “we can pronounce not a single deconstructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” We could not even pronounce the word “sign” without maintaining our complicity with metaphysics because sign always means “sign of” and thereby reestablishes the metaphysics of presence it wants to upset. These concepts are by no means isolated elements or independent atoms but integrated with a syntax and a system. Borrowing one of them conjures up the entirety of metaphysics (SSP, 280–81). This is the position of a bind, a double bind, requiring a double play, a double gesticulation. And it is with these techniques that Derrida’s writings accomplish a continuation and reformulation of irony in the modern discourse.
1. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler with the collaboration of Jean-Jacques Anstett, Hans Eichner, and other specialists, 35 vols. (Paderborn-München: Schöningh, 1958–). References to this text are designated FS. Translations are taken, when available, from Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). On Schlegel’s notion of irony and its historical context see Ernst Behler, “The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism,” in Romantic Irony, ed. Frederick Garber (Budapest: Kiado, 1988), 43–81. For an interpretation of this topic from the point of view of an intersubjective dialectic of consensus see Gary Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
2. Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, par une Société de Gens de Lettres (Geneva: Pellet, 1777), vol. 19, 86.
3. Aristotle Rhet. 3.18.1419b7. English translation by Lane Cooper (New York: Appleton, 1932), 240. Aristotle is quoted from Aristotelis Opera: Edidit Academia Borussica (reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960).
4. Aristotle Eth. Nic. 2.7.1108a19–23, 4.13.1127a20–26.
5. Cicero Acad. Pr. 2.5.15.
6. Cicero De or. 2.67.270.
7. Quintilian Inst. or. 9.2.44.
8. Quintilian Inst. or. 9.2.46.
9. Aristophanes Nubes 443.
10. Plato is quoted from the edition Platon: Oeuvres complètes, ed. Guillaume Budé (reprint, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1953). References to this edition are given with the counting according to Stephanus, a counting used in most editions of Plato.
11. Aristotle Eth. Nic. 4.13.127b22–26.
12. Aristotle Phys. 3.808a27.
13. Aristotle Hist. Animal. 1.491b17.
14. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1969), 220.
15. Schlegel uses the less usual term “parekbasis.”
16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1986). References to this text are designated GWFH.
17. This expression is not a literal quote from Hegel, who usually says “apex of subjectivity recognizing itself as the ultimate” (GWFH 7:278), but a compilation by Otto Pöggeler which very well expresses the line of thought in Hegel’s philosophy of law. See Otto Pöggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1956), 66.
18. Emanuel Hirsch, “Die Beisetzung der Romantiker in Hegels Phänomenologie,” in Materialien zu Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans Friedrich Fulda and Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 245–75.
19. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 365–74.
20. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Capel (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). References to this text are designated CI.
21. Otto Pöggeler, “Grenzen der Brauchbarkeit des deutschen Romantik-Begriffs,” in Romantik in Deutschland, ed. Richard Brinkmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), 341–54; Otto Pöggeler, “Ist Hegel Schlegel?” in Frankfurt aber ist der Nabel dieser Erde, ed. Christoph Jamme and Otto Pöggeler (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 325–48; Rüdiger Bubner, “Zur dialektischen Bedeutung romantischer Ironie,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1987), 85–95.
22. Gustave Rudler, La jeunesse de Benjamin Constant (Paris: Colin, 1909), 377.
23. Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Hanser, 1971). References to this text are designated SW.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980). References to this edition are designated FN. When possible, the following translations were utilized: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Random House, 1967); Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974); Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966); Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1969); Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1968).
25. See on this Karl Pestalozzi, “Nietzsches Baudelaire-Rezeption,” in Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978): 158–78; and Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsches Auseinandersetzung mit der französischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Nietzsche heute: Die Rezeption seines Werkes nach 1968, Amherster Kolloquium 15, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger, Susan L. Cocalis, and Sara Lennox (Bern: Franke, 1988), 137–48.
26. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Ungar, 1983), 13.
27. Robert Moynihan, “Interview with Paul de Man: Introduction by J. Hillis Miller,” Yale Review 73 (1983–84): 579.
28. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 216.
29. Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63.
30. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison and Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–60. References to this text are designated D.
31. See on this Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–94. References to this text are designated SSP.