Irony and the Logic of Modernity 9783110424423, 9783110302202

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Armen Avanessian Irony and the Logic of Modernity

Paradigms

Literature and the Human Sciences

Edited by Rüdiger Campe ‧ Paul Fleming Editorial Board Eva Geulen ‧ Rüdiger Görner ‧ Barbara Hahn Daniel Heller-Roazen ‧ Helmut Müller-Sievers William Rasch ‧ Joseph Vogl ‧ Elisabeth Weber

Volume 3

Armen Avanessian

Irony and the Logic of Modernity

Translated by Nils F. Schott

ISBN 978-3-11-030220-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-042442-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-042460-7 ISSN 2195-2205 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Andreas Töpfer, salon.io/vektorbarock Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Introduction | 1

Part One: Rhetorologies 1

Successful Reconciliation | 15

2 2.1 2.2

A Desire for Art | 23 Buffo | 29 Parekbasis | 30

3

Mad Consciousness | 35

Part Two: Ethica 1 1.1 1.2

The Irony of Evil | 50 Evil subjectivity (Hegel) | 51 The religious inversion of irony (Kierkegaard) | 54

2 2.1 2.2 2.3

Must We Aestheticize? | 58 “Aestheticization” as a self-fulfilling prophecy | 59 Romantic avant-garde | 63 Expanding the zone of aestheticization | 66

3 3.1 3.2 3.3

Masking Irony | 70 An art of life | 71 Aesthete, flaneur, dandy (Baudelaire) | 75 The economy of dandyism | 77

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

The Melancholic Subject | 82 On (Romantic) melancholia, gloom and despair | 82 Theories of mood | 84 Greek reciprocity | 88 Psychoanalysis: Lacan and Freud | 90 The emergence of the self from the spirit of irony | 93

VI   

5 5.1 5.2 5.3

   Contents

The Joy of Dissimulation | 99 Confusion, deception, hypocrisy: Of courtiers and libertines | 99 Seducer or seduction (Les liaisons dangereuses) | 103 From dissimulatio to simulation (Baudrillard) | 107

Part Three: Novel – Modernity – Irony 1 1.1 1.2

The Philosophy of History and the Poetics of Genre | 114 Georg Lukács | 116 Indirect-mimetic narration | 120

2 2.1 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3

The Language of the Novel | 125 The traditional narrator | 126 Reality and illusion | 127 Misjudging reality | 129 Literary irony as digressive refraction | 131 The three structural ironies of the novel | 133 Irony between the author-character and the reader | 133 Ironic relationships between narrator and hero | 135 Contextual irony | 138

3 3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.2 3.3

From Micro-irony (Quotation) to Macro-irony (Genre) | 140 The ironic destruction of quotations | 140 Proust: Quotation as constitutive of plot | 141 Musil: Quotation constitutive of personalities | 142 Joyce: Quotation as constitution of meaning | 146 Pastiche | 147 Parody | 150

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2

Novels of (De)formation and Ironic Autobiographies | 153 Educational decadence | 153 From hero to subject | 155 Romantic parodies of education | 157 Ironic autobiographies | 159 Thomas Bernhard’s aesthetics of language | 160 Long live death – Life and the art of the novel | 163

Contents   

Part Four: Ironic Politics 1 1.1 1.2 1.3

The Struggle with Irony | 172 Post-Marxism | 173 The systems-theoretical irony of the state | 177 Pseudopolitical totalization: Carl Schmitt | 182

2 2.1

Thesis and Antithesis | 188 Thesis: On irony’s structural political subversiveness (Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Butler) | 188 Antithesis: On Irony’s structural elitism (Eichendorff, Mann, Rorty) | 193

2.2

3

The Irony of the Law (Kafka and Deleuze) | 199

Bibliography | 213 Index | 227

   VII

Introduction Augustine’s puzzled statement about time applies to irony as well: What then is irony? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.¹ We can identify an ironic statement when we hear one but we encounter difficulties when asked to explain what it means. This is rather astonishing, especially since irony has been omnipresent in the last two hundred years, from Romanticism all the way to so-called postmodernity. Which brings us to the next question: How was it possible for a relatively plain rhetorical trope to become emblematic of the entire (post)modern age? We will see that these two questions – what irony means and why it acquires a fundamentally new meaning in modernity – are bound up with one another. When, in modernity, irony extends beyond the field of rhetoric and becomes more than a rhetorical trope, it certainly does not do so for the first time. Nor is it the first time that nobody knows what irony is or what it would mean to lead an ironic existence. Hence the contradictory judgments on the archetypical ironist, who, according to Kierkegaard, both invented irony and was its first victim: Socrates. For Aristophanes, Socrates is “a dissembler [eirôn], a slippery fellow, […] a twister, a troublesome fellow, a licker-up of hashes”² – all this despite the absence of any positive identification of Socrates with irony in the famously apologetic Platonic dialogues. On the contrary, Plato defends Socrates against the accusation of irony. One of the most salient examples is the exchange in the Gorgias in which Socrates and Callicles charge one another with hypocrisy and splitting hairs.³ Xenophon provides a different, more straightforward defense of Socrates against accusations of sophistry and atheism.⁴ For him, Socrates’ daimonion,⁵ his inner voice, is a useful advisor (e.g. to friends during battle), and Socrates’ dialectical questioning serves the purpose of providing a stronger foundation for the morals of the polis. On this reading, Socrates’ condemnation and death can only appear as a vexing misunderstanding.

1 Augustinus Aurelius, Bishop of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, 1997, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, vol. I/1, series ed. John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press, 1991), 295. 2 Aristophanes, Clouds, trans. William James Hickie (London: Bohn, 1853), ll. 449–451. 3 Plato, Gorgias, Collected Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 553–627, here 489e-490a, 583. 4 For a critical appraisal of Xenophon’s interpretation of Socrates, see Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 99–106. See furthermore Søren Kierkegaard’s chapter on Xenophon in his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15–27. 5 Plato, Apology, Collected Dialogues, vol. 1, 341–366, here 31c–d and 40a, 356 and 364.

2   

   Introduction

These diverging, and at first sight entirely disconnected, views on Socrates in Antiquity thus manifest three different appraisals of irony or of the ironic: the critical citizen in the service of the community (in Xenophon), the maieutic lover of an unattainable wisdom (in Plato), and the destroyer of the community’s moral values (in Aristophanes). For two thousand years after the death of Socrates, the possibility that irony might be a form of existence with consequences for ethics, art, and politics retreats to the background. Instead, irony becomes a topic for rhetoricians. As early as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, we find in the juxtaposition of modesty and boastfulness a relatively relaxed or at least more balanced assessment of irony.⁶ In the fourth century BCE, however, Anaximenes of Lampsacus describes irony in his Rhetorica ad Alexandrum as a rhetorical means – a means for ridiculing one’s opponents, to be sure, but nonetheless a mere means and no longer a medium of existence.⁷ Commentary on irony in late Antiquity increasingly moves away from the moral indignation of Socrates’ contemporaries. If it seems to do so with increasing determination, this may be due to the successful integration and control of irony in the study of rhetoric. Quintilian and Cicero introduce the Greek eironeia into Latin as dissimulatio. While they point out, again with reference to Socrates, that irony may express an entire personality,⁸ their main interest lies elsewhere – namely, in coming to a rhetorical understanding of irony. The ancient texts that discussed the ethical and political skandalon of Socratic irony are soon forgotten. The translation in the Renaissance of forgotten Platonic dialogs or of Cicero’s De oratore, for example, transforms the philological situation. There are now other means to neutralize irony’s ethical ambivalence or, more accurately, to keep it from emerging in the first place. The disciplinary continuity of rhetoric in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance also marks the persistence of a – from today’s point of view – restricted understanding of irony. Dilwyn Knox is right about the period following the end of Antiquity when he says that “the original meanings of είρωνεια were discarded, and the concept of irony, includ-

6 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, rev. J. O. Urmson, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollingen Series LXXI.2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 1729–1867, here 1108a and 1126b–1127b, 1749 and 1778–1780. 7 On this point, see Edgar Lapp, Linguistik der Ironie [The Linguistics of Irony] (Tübingen: Narr, 1997), 21. 8 See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, in: Quintilian: with an English Translation, ed. and trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922), book IX, ch. 3, 400–401. Quintilian distinguishes between irony as a trope (easily recognized, even in a single word) and irony as a figure of speech.

Introduction   

   3

ing Socrates’, became restricted to a figure of speech in which the speaker said or implied the opposite to his intended meaning.”⁹ From Antiquity via eighteenth-century French rhetoric¹⁰ to today’s linguistics, the exclusive – in both senses of the term – criterion for irony is opposition, a criterion “indispensable to any characterization of irony as a trope.”¹¹ Medieval rhetoricians adopt Aristotle’s distinction between different forms of contrarium¹² (opposite, opposition, etc.) to define irony, but even their most intricate distinctions are made to serve one main purpose: to provide an explanatory definition of irony so that irony might be deployed in ever more subtle ways. Irony thereby becomes a (more or less complicated) code for encrypting a proposition, a code that makes it possible to decipher what is really meant “behind” irony. When irony is reduced to an arbitrary, reversible oratory technique, it loses all meaning or at least has no significance beyond its restricted context. Why, one cannot help but wonder, would anyone speak indirectly, differently, in a complicated way and not just simply speak? Why did scores of medieval and Renaissance rhetoricians play the dubious game of defining and deciphering irony, of inventing ironic figures of speech and marking them with clearly decipherable (unironic) signs: mimicking a walking bird with one’s right arm, joining the two index fingers, forming a fist with the middle finger raised, sticking out the tongue, using a specific intonation (a marker still very popular with linguists today) and many others?¹³ There are historical as well as philosophical reasons for revising the rhetorical understanding of irony, reasons first noted by Friedrich Schlegel. If a “true critique of philosophy,” as Schlegel writes, is a “philosophy of rhetoric,”¹⁴ then this also means that in modernity every reflection about irony must go beyond the narrow confines of traditional textbook rhetoric. The how of ironic writing

9 Dilwyn Knox, Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1989), 145. 10 According to Pierre Schoentjes, there is “a similar ambiguity” in approaches to irony in both Latin rhetoric and eighteenth-century French rhetoric: “In both cases, the practice of irony does not stay within the limits theory has laid out: theory tries to limit irony to the relation of opposition [contrariété] while practice also works by way of contradiction” (Recherche de l’ironie et ironie de la recherche [Gent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 1993], 39). 11 Wolfgang G. Müller, “Ironie, Lüge, Simulation, Dissimulation und verwandte rhetorische Termini,” in Zur Terminologie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), 189–208, here 189. 12 Müller, “Ironie, Lüge, Simulation, Dissimulation und verwandte rhetorische Termini,” 19. 13 On the various rhetorical gestures, see Knox, Medieval and Renaissance Ideas on Irony, 59. 14 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe [KA], ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–), vol. 18, 75, no. 561.

4   

   Introduction

is relevant only in a literary context or in linguistic studies. This book focuses instead on the why and what for of ironic speech and propositions. The attempt, frequently made in the rhetorical tradition, to give unambiguous interpretations and explanations of ironic propositions – in the sense of translating them into what was “really,” unironically meant – is no longer useful for understanding the ironic logic of modernity. The irony with which this book is concerned is a genuinely modern phenomenon. It may sound paradoxical, but irony is an invention of modernity just as our modernity is an (ironic) invention of irony. And once this irony emerges around 1800, it becomes possible retroactively to recognize it in older texts as well. Irony is not (or no longer simply) a rhetorical tool but an ontologically distinct phenomenon; or, more precisely: irony has an ontological dimension. It thus calls for a rhetorological approach that combines rhetorical with ontological analysis. Paradoxically, this ontological difference, the difference of which modern irony is the product, is produced by irony itself. It comes about through a new, ironic perspective on rhetoric and language itself. As a phenomenon immanent to language, irony can remain a purely rhetorical means only so long as language remains a mere means, a vehicle for communication that can be arranged, dressed up, masked, or decorated however one pleases. Yet as soon as language is seen no longer as such a means but as an epistemological or ontological medium, irony acquires transcendental qualities. In this sense, irony is language as such; it does not merely modify it as it does within the rhetorical paradigm. Irony is the difference-to-itself inscribed in every utterance. This is crucial for understanding a first perspective on modern irony, a first logic of irony that does not operate according to a transparent logic of reference (not-A refers to A). Even where modern irony aims at indirectly creating understanding, it must not be confused with the simple irony of opposites extolled by rhetoric  – even if irony of course still appears in modernity both as a figure of speech and as a trope. It may be said that, in general terms, the transformation of (post-rhetorical) irony cannot be understood without insight into the constitutive role that aesthetic processes play for our thinking as a whole. The modern spirit of irony emerges from the narrow confines of rhetoric under the sign of aestheticization. That is also why irony – as long as it is not blamed for all the ills of modernity, as often happens in Hegel, Schmitt and others – is incessantly invoked whenever a correction, or at least attenuation, of the paradoxes of modernity is at issue. Irony – and this is the overarching claim of this book – is not just a manifestation and cata-

Introduction   

   5

lyst of aestheticization but also always acts as its pharmakon.¹⁵ This is apparent in Kierkegaard’s “aestheticist,” Baudelaire’s “dandy,” and Benjamin’s “flaneur” (however much they may differ in other respects). Furthermore, a psychoanalytic discussion of the cultural and social phenomena of “Romantic longing” and “melancholia” reveals that the self (and not just the modern self) arises ironically from the spirit of melancholic imitation and from a failure to attain selfhood. Against the background of early German Romantic and idealist theories, part one establishes and elaborates three modes of irony, three logics or ways of operating. The thesis of this book is that establishing these three modes of irony makes it possible to understand pertinent social and cultural phenomena in all their forms with sufficient clarity, which in turn allows them to be identified as ironic in the first place. This cannot be achieved with a merely rhetorical or linguistic analysis of irony as a mode of speech, for such an approach either loses sight of resistant ironic phenomena or ignores them as allegedly false or antiquated forms of irony in favor of definitions that suit a particular author’s purposes. It is characteristic of such a rhetor(onto)logical irony, as it is of its rhetorical doppelgänger, that what it says refers to an other that is not (directly) said. But, unlike rhetorical irony, this other cannot be decoded as what is “really” meant and cannot simply be said differently, unironically. At the risk of oversimplifying: rhetorological irony is characterized by something said differently, by something different being said. This other that “cannot be said” is something that all three forms of rhetorological irony share. They differ, however, in the way in which they refer to this other. We can identify, first, an irony of successful reconciliation, in which the fact that something cannot be said directly does not lead to a fundamental distrust of the communicative capacities of language. Language here serves as a medium that makes understanding possible, even if this understanding takes a “detour.” An utterance attains its goal even though it does not have access to the other it communicates, which, as its other, lies beyond the utterance. That is as far as this first understanding of irony goes. It ends where the goal of communication seems to have been achieved – not despite the detour but because of it. As indirect communication, the second rhetorical logic of irony outlined here also aims for intelligibility. Aware that it can no longer directly say anything authentic, it, too, functions under paradoxical conditions. Yet in this irony – and this is what distinguishes it from the first kind – understanding does not simply come about miraculously, as it were; the other – ungraspable and unattainable – 15 On the pharmakon, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 95–177.

6   

   Introduction

is rather the object of a desire-driven approximation, and, as such, is the center around which understanding circles. Potentiated reflection, which Walter Benjamin designates as the distinctive mark of Romantic irony, is evident in the third procedure of rhetorological irony. In a sustained reflexive potentiation of the difference between what is said and the other that cannot be said, this irony moves further and further away from its other. Such an irony, which we might call indirect-mimetic irony, becomes unruly and ungovernable, unintelligible, and sometimes, in its artistic manifestations, takes forms that seem to be indistinguishable from madness. Yet insofar as language itself manifests this ingraspability that essentially characterizes the other, these forms evoke the other precisely in their indistinguishability from madness. These three rhetorological modes of irony are not a grid that allows us unambiguously to assign texts or utterances to one of the three logics. Rather, they form a kind of matrix of modern irony. Modern irony cannot be tied solely to one of the three modes. It switches between them, which is why it cannot be reduced to an affirmative, neutral, or subversive function. This switching also occurs when we move beyond the epistemological question of the (un)intelligibility of irony, which I attempt to do in part one. If we leave abstract philosophical questioning behind and turn – as I do in the chapters that follow – to concrete examples, we see that the change of phenomena under investigation immediately changes the problems to which these phenomena give rise. In concrete everyday situations, hermeneutic-epistemological questions necessarily become ethical ones and subsequently, within a historical logic, become political ones. In these transformations, the three ironic logics always follow the particular practices of the field in which they manifest themselves. In this book, I will trace the effects that a series of specific cultural fields has on the three rhetorical-logical vectors of irony. The second part, “Ethica,” which investigates irony as an ethical phenomenon, shows how the three logics derived from rhetoric operate when we take the question of the objective givenness of the good in moral philosophy to be the ethical analogue of the hermeneutic question of intelligibility. Here, then, the three logics are transformed, first, into the positive claim that the morally good exists; second, into the melancholic simulation of the good; and, third, into attempts to expel the good once and for all. Moral self-confidence tends to identify this expulsion as a typical manifestation of evil. Yet by the same token – and here (if not before) we encounter the difficulty of any ethical engagement with irony – a fundamentalist insistence on a substantial good can appear as an ignorant and exclusionary position, while the destruction of the foundation on which such assumptions rest can appear as a defense of the good.

Introduction   

   7

There are analogous shifts on the poetological level, which I address in the third part, “Novel  – Modernity  – Irony.” In simplified terms: an irony that is epistemologically good (because comprehensible) can, as a poetic mode, abet conservative tendencies in writing. Conversely, the most extraordinary novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are often the most difficult to interpret. Without making any value judgment, we may say that – to name but one familiar example in this context – the clearly comprehensible irony of naive narrator-subjects in the work of Thomas Mann – an irony of opposition – has not necessarily produced better novels than Musil’s irony, which is sometimes resolved only with great difficulty. Finally, we can distinguish between ironic modes of parody, pastiche and quotation. To do so, it is necessary to historically differentiate three forms of narrative irony: a) irony between the author-character and the reader, b) ironic relationships between narrator and hero, and c) contextual irony. What I have said thus far regarding the domains of the ethical and the poetic is equally valid for the political field, as we will see in the last part, “Ironic Politics.” The lack of clarity in evaluations and judgments of irony is due in large part to the confusion that arises from the transfer of metaphors from an epistemological context (maieutics, the search for sense or non-sense) to other terrains. On the political terrain, it is impossible, if not meaningless, to judge irony in abstract terms (as productive, compensatory, or destructive). Judging in each situation whether irony has reactionary, conservative-compensatory, or subversive effects always requires an analysis of the concrete historical contexts in which the various ironic attitudes, procedures, and strategies arise. Because, as we will see, modernity has never freed itself from its genuinely ironic disposition in the political domain, debates between proponents of various theoretical persuasions – debates that are often confused and sometimes violent – rest on a shared (Romantic-modern) set of problems, concepts, but also paradoxes and unanswered questions. In a political field staked out by attempts to maieutically produce an infinite desire for and an anarchistic repudiation of clear structures of power, the abstract dichotomy between conservative or progressive political irony must remain an antinomy. Only a differentiated analysis of the positions of speakers can provide the basis for a conclusive explanation of how and why Romantic irony can simultaneously be criticized by Carl Schmitt, for example, as the first incarnation of the modern democratic spirit, hailed by Thomas Mann as an elitist apolitical attitude, and emerge as an important tool of subversive cultural practices, as it does in Mikhail Bakhtin’s “hybrid” or in Judith Butler’s discussion of queer strategies. This analysis will show that the (trinitarian) rhetorological matrix of irony is also manifest where irony is not explicitly at issue, that is, where the irony immanent to the political is obscured by a reduc-

8   

   Introduction

tionist interpretation of irony, even in the attempt to completely expel irony from the field of the political. Thus, modernity is ironically constituted throughout, both on the level of poetics and on the level of politics. To understand the inner logic of modernity, we will first need to come to terms with the no-longer-rhetorical function of irony. This task requires a rhetoro-logical analysis, to which I now turn.

Part One: Rhetorologies

In this first part, I argue that the new irony invented by Friedrich Schlegel acts as a pharmacological catalyst both of itself and of a new, positive (self-)understanding of modernity. Three different ways of looking at irony emerge. These three logical perspectives on the former rhetorical trope call for a rhetoro-logical analysis of modern irony that cannot be performed with the tools of linguistics alone. This is because from 1800 on, irony is no longer merely a rhetorical figure, no longer merely the ornament of an otherwise completely transparent content. Why exactly are purely linguistic or purely rhetorical analyses insufficient when it comes to exploring the potential for a theory of language that modernity has discovered in irony? In what follows, I will trace a double process of transformation. On the one hand, early Romanticism invests irony with new meanings and functions under the auspices of aesthetics. It is as if it ontologized the rhetorical trope of irony. On the other hand, an epistemologically-trained rhetoric transcends the idealist horizon within whose aesthetic framework modern irony becomes intelligible  – including to itself  – in the first place. The mediation between the understanding and sensibility that Kant considers to be necessary becomes a paradoxical task, and that means at the same time that it can only be accomplished ironically. In the next three chapters, I look primarily at how post-Kantian philosophical logic becomes rhetorical. First, then, it is necessary to justify why purely rhetorical or linguistic interpretations of irony prove to be insufficient for my analysis of irony. Wherever rhetoric is seen to be an ornament, that is, to be a kind of parergon, irony is always a rather simple affair. “My love, you know I can’t stand you” would be an example of an obvious oppositional irony of the “praise by blame, blame by praise” variety. Surely the most famous articulation of this sort of irony is Marc Anthony’s “and Brutus is an honorable man” in Shakespeare, whose repetition, furthermore, serves as an “irony mark” or “irony signal.”¹ This form certainly occurs quite frequently, and it is particularly justified where there is no freedom of speech. Yet to see in the oppositional theory of irony the only key to understanding how irony works, one would have to be either a medieval rhetorician –

1 On various attempts (formalist, intentionalist, pragmatist) to define irony, see Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 149. A particularly nice example is Alcanter de Brahm’s suggestion to mark irony by an inverted question mark at the end of the sentence.

12   

   Part One: Rhetorologies

or a modern linguist. The more one desires “stable irony,” the more reductive one’s understanding of irony becomes.² John Searle, for example, writes: Stated very crudely, the mechanism by which irony works is that the utterance, if taken literally, is obviously inappropriate to the situation. Since it is grossly inappropriate, the hearer is compelled to reinterpret it in such a way as to render it appropriate, and the most natural way to interpret it is as meaning the opposite of its literal form.³

Searle misses the point here about modern irony. For even when, in the next sentence  – preceded, interestingly, by the rhetorical phrase, “I am not suggesting that this is by any means the whole story about irony” – he seems to elaborate on irony in greater detail, he prejudges as a linguistic philosopher: “Cultures and subcultures vary enormously in the extent and degree of the linguistic and extralinguistic cues provided for ironic utterances.” This is not an individual blind spot that could easily be fixed through further linguistic analysis. Contemporary rhetorical definitions,⁴ such as those of structuralist or pragmatist linguists and speech act theorists like Searle and Brown, always feature a mix of simplifying oppositional definitions and intentionalism. Another component of the rhetorical-linguistic suspension of modern irony is the demand for so-called “irony markers”⁵ we find in H. Paul Grice, for example: Grice’s basic model of an intentionalist definition of communicative action rests […] on the assumption that in the process of communication, the intention of the speaker S becomes a mutual knowledge shared by the speaker S and the listener L, i.e. S knows that L knows that S knows that L knows (etc. ad infinitum) that S has this specific intention.⁶

2 “Stable irony” is a chapter title in Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, which is mainly driven by a fear of not understanding irony. Other chapter headings are equally telling, e.g. “The marks of stable irony” or “Learning where to stop.” For a critical discussion of Booth’s concept of irony, see Stanley Fish, “Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony,” Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 180–196, esp. 181. 3 John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), here page 113. 4 See Müller, “Ironie, Lüge, Simulation, Dissimulation,” 192. 5 See the discussion in Lapp, Linguistik der Ironie, 91. Change of voice, winking, excessively long sentences, repetitions of words and the like are some favorite examples. 6 Lapp, Linguistik der Ironie, 60; cf., for example, H. Paul Grice, “Meaning,” Philosophical Review 66 (1957), 377–388.

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Both the search for signals of irony and teleological intentionalism are driven by the same need to block an ironic progress ad infinitum and, ultimately, to arrest it in the prestabilized educational and emotional horizon of the other party. Another interesting example is the Echoic Mention Theory developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.⁷ In contradistinction to traditional pragmatic and semantic explanations, they emphasize a decisive particularity of ironic speech and, perhaps, of written texts in general. For them, the specific surplus value of an ironic utterance – e.g., “What great weather we’re having” as it’s pouring rain – does not lie in a witty assertion of the opposite but in the communication of its subjective content. Borrowing an example from Umberto Eco (“How can you tell a cultivated woman today that you love her”), I will later confront this important insight into the necessarily subjective character of ironic utterances with their subjectively necessary character. For even the first rhetorologic of modern irony, which I place under the heading “Successful Reconciliation,” functions only on the basis of a post-idealist disillusionment: in principle, we assume the failure of communication and understanding to be the default case. This epistemological radicalism naturally – and this is by no means intended to be polemical  – moves beyond any linguistic focus. For Sperber, the surplus value of irony beyond any semantic content lies, for example, in the transmission of a subjective attitude beyond the utterance made, or, in the example given, beyond the opposite affirmed in its “content.” Ironic statements thus become “implicit echoic mentions of meaning conveying a derogatory attitude to the meaning mentioned.”⁸ In this sense, the content of an ironic statement is no longer the easily deciphered opposite of what is stated. The manifest objective content of a statement is instead enriched with an element of subjective latency.⁹ In his Éléments de pragmatique linguistique [Elements of Linguistic Pragmatics], Alain Berrendonner has made yet another attempt to explain irony from the perspective of pragmatic linguistics. His reflections allow us to give a more precise definition of the “echo” evoked by Sperber. Since, for Berrendonner, contradiction is not a sufficient criterion for defining irony, this echo is not an oppositional echo, but an “auto-echo.” Ironic “antiphrasis is not a simple contradiction but, more profoundly, a paradox.” The specific paradoxical characteristic of 7 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, “Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction,” Radical Pragmatics, ed. Peter Cole (New York and London: Academic Press, 1981), 295–318. 8 Sperber/Wilson, “Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction,” 307. 9 Linguistic reflections hardly ever thematize the fact that this subjective moment would otherwise not be expressed at all. They do not raise the question most important to us here: why we speak ironically at all is not a concern for linguistic explanation. This is already apparent in the choice of banal examples (bad weather/good weather) that ultimately imply that in everyday language or everyday situations, there is no need for ironic speech.

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an ironic speech act is therefore “to challenge its own enunciation in this very enunciation.”¹⁰ Alain Berrendonner’s analysis of irony as a “polyphonic enunciation”¹¹ shows that the more closely a linguistic theory approaches ironic phenomena, the farther it moves away from intralinguistic analysis. As a pragmatic linguist, Berrendonner postulates a “phantom” as the necessary “verifier” of linguistic structure. “In the act of communication, the context speaks to give its opinion on the truth.”¹² An irony that is no longer merely rhetorical, however, aims at something else. Modern irony, admittedly over-simplified and polemically exaggerated in the question of whether there is any possibility of communicating love or of even loving at all, is more concerned with other things than with the contextual verification of weather changes.

10 Alain Berrendonner, Éléments de pragmatique linguistique (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 216–217. 11 Cf. Anne-Marie Paillet-Guth, Ironie et paradoxe: Le discours amoureux romanesque (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 111. 12 Berrendonner, Éléments de pragmatique linguistique, 61; on the phantom see 59.

1 Successful Reconciliation The possibility of establishing real contact remains the precondition for irony. Irony must come from strength and superiority. Karl Heinz Staecker¹³

It’s a commonplace in the study of German Romanticism that early Jena Romanticism can only be understood against the background of early idealist philosophy, in particular against the backdrop of, besides Kant, the philosophy of Fichte. With his concept of the “fact-act” [Tathandlung], Fichte was the first to try to bridge, for ethical reasons, the separation of mind and body, selfhood and will. This concept designates what Fichte’s philosophy strove for: the identity of the one who acts with the one who thinks, of reason and the understanding. In this sense, Fichte’s I posits itself, and is, thanks to this mere positing, through itself. Yet the ties of this I to the external world remain problematic in Fichte. Like Kant, Fichte seems to postulate rather than to really give a clear argument when he writes: Both, the absolute totality of the real in the self, and the absolute totality of negation in the not-self, are to be united by way of determination. The self thereby determines itself in part, and is in part determined… Yet both must be thought of as one and the same.¹⁴

Although the absolute, pure I is restricted by the external world, it is within this restriction that it dialectically obtains predicative determination. And it is in Fichte’s dialectical understanding of the “limit,” which is at the same time “the concept of reality and negation,”¹⁵ that Schlegel detects a hidden aesthetic imperative. “Aesthetic” here names a sphere that, above all, performs a mediating function. The aesthetic sphere is thought capable of reconciling apparently irreconcilable needs. Sociohistorically, these needs could be called bourgeois; thus, for example, the effort to preserve the particularity of subjective needs within the language of the universal. This is how, in Schlegel, irony can be tasked with maintaining the bourgeoisie’s peculiar and always endangered claim to autonomy: “In irony, self-limitation and participation in all of life unite. – Autonomy is the life of life.”¹⁶ For “wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by

13 Karl Heinz Staecker, Ironie und Ironiker, PhD thesis, Mainz, 1964, 99. 14 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge: with the First and Second Introductions, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 125. 15 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 108 [mod.]. 16 Schlegel, KA, 18: 218, no. 291.

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the world.”¹⁷ Meaning, then, is only possible on the basis of this self-restriction: “Meaning is self-limitation, thus a result of self-creation and self-destruction.”¹⁸ Schlegel’s reflections describe both an ironic relationship between interlocutors and an artistic dialectic of author and work. The ironic narrator, who for Schlegel is exemplified by the narrator of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, overcomes the problem of “idealism” and recovers his naiveté. This profound positivity of irony is later affirmed by Ludwig Tieck as well, who defends another Romantic, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, against Hegel’s attacks. According to Solger, irony is simultaneously joke and true cheerfulness […] It is the force with which the poet maintains power over his material; he is not to get lost in his material but to stand above it. Irony thus preserves him from onesidedness and empty idealizing.¹⁹

In keeping with an increasing dynamization of his conception of irony in the years before 1800, Schlegel’s definition in the Athenaeum fragments of 1798 sees irony less as a one-time manifestation of a higher level of consciousness than as a movement. Naive is that which is “natural to the point of irony,” that which “has intention and instinct at the same time.”²⁰ Characteristic of the increasing tension within the concept of irony is the phrase “to the point of,” employed particularly often in the Athenaeum fragments – for example in fragment 121: “An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts.”²¹ The changes this entails are even more apparent in fragment 51: Naive is what is or seems to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony, or else to the point of continuously fluctuating between self-creation and self-destruction. If it’s simply instinctive, then it’s childlike, childish, or silly; if it’s merely intentional, then it gives rise to affectation. The beautiful, poetical, ideal naive must combine intention and instinct.²²

17 Friedrich Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 143–159, here 147. 18 Schlegel, KA, 16: 102. 19 Quoted in Rudolf Köpke, Ludwig Tieck: Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Dichters nach dessen mündlichen und schriftlichen Mittheilungen, vol. II, (Leipzig, Brockhaus: 1855), 239. 20 Schlegel, KA, 16: 167. 21 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” Lucinde and Fragments, 161–240, here 176. 22 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” 167.

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What had previously been a “secret of the Greeks” and perhaps was hinted at in Goethe, namely, how “to be objective in the individual,”²³ was now to become a reality thanks to the ironic reconception of the work of art. One legitimate way of understanding irony is to read it as a synthesis, i.e. to read it as a component within Schlegel’s thinking he imported from idealist theory. From this perspective, modern irony transforms pre-modern, merely rhetorical irony by adopting Kant and Fichte’s “synthesis of the imagination.” In so doing, it modifies idealist thought and the aesthetic reconciliation idealism implies. Using Kantian terminology, Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger try to radicalize Kant’s aesthetics. They do not simply apply Fichte’s idealism to aesthetic phenomena. Rather, the early Romantics use Fichte’s reading of Kant to critique Kant’s aesthetics from the perspective of a theory of art. Kant’s Third Critique was meant to provide a foundation for his system. What was lacking was a connection between two absolutely heterogeneous worlds, between the faculties of pure (theoretical) and practical reason (morality). What was needed, to cite Jacques Derrida, who is skeptical of the possibility of this undertaking, was a “a third term to cross the abyss, to heal over the gaping wound and think the gap. In a word, a symbol.”²⁴ The exemplary third figure is the poet, the inventor of metaphors and metonymies, i.e. of symbols. His task is to mediate between theory and practice, nature and freedom. His aesthetic ideas can symbolize ideas of reason (e.g. the idea of freedom) because there is an analogous lack on both sides: “The conceptual frailty of the one symbolically represents the lack of visual evidence of the other.”²⁵ This is a methodological as if – not uncommon in Kant – whose subjectivist restrictions Schiller sought to remove. In direct opposition to the disinterested subject’s “sensing itself,” to the famous §59 of the Critique of Judgment, “On Beauty as a Symbol of Morality,” Schiller posits: “Beauty is freedom in appearance [Schönheit ist Freiheit in der Erscheinung].”²⁶ This allows us to understand Schlegel as turning his back on an idealist interpretation of Kant. As so often among the early Romantics, this occurs through an apparently paradoxical act, by means of going back to Kant and by going beyond Schiller’s idealist understanding of Kant. Schlegel goes back to Kant by claiming

23 Schlegel, “Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie,” KA, vol. 1. 24 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 36. 25 Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 103. 26 Friedrich Schiller, “Fragmente aus Schillers aesthetischen Vorlesungen,” Nationalausgabe, ed. Lieselotte Blumenthal and Benno von Wiese, vol. 21, Weimar, 1963, 66–88, here 83.

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a congruence of free imagination and indeterminate understanding – a congruence that can only be felt, not understood.²⁷ And for the same reason that the subject only finds pleasure in the extension of imagination (the extension of the mind [Gemüt]), the judgment of taste only reflects on the form, not on the content of the object. Yet Schlegel and Novalis also go beyond Kant in their understanding of the role the imagination plays. In Kant, this faculty was tasked with mediating between the understanding and sensibility since “we would have no cognition whatsoever” otherwise.²⁸ For Kant, the imagination is the faculty that is capable of endowing the categories of the understanding with meaning in the first place. It is a symbol, a bridge, yet it is not to interfere with the autonomy of the faculties between which it mediates. To conceptualize this, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of imagination: a blind and unconscious reproductive imagination on the one hand, which associates representations and allows for the synthesis of the manifold of intuition, and a productive imagination on the other hand, which synthesizes organized intuitions according to the categorical rules of the understanding, the faculty responsible for forming schemata. In addition, Kant relies on a further distinction within the set of functions indispensible for perception, namely, the distinction between an arbitrary facultas imaginandi, the faculty of intuiting an object even in its absence, and involuntary fantasy. In this, or, more precisely, in their tendency to remove these separations, the Romantics radicalize Kant’s reflections and go beyond them. For Schlegel and Novalis, truth ceases to be the mental reproduction of something given in advance. In keeping with their emphasis on the imagination as a productive faculty, they understand truth to be a category that is produced. “S[cience] may use symbols[,] truth can only be produced … All truth is relative [.] All knowledge is symbolic”²⁹ and, as we would say today, constructed. After Kant, Fichte serves as the point of departure for the early Romantics’ theoretical engagement with the imagination and for their project of pinning irony to a revolutionized concept of the imagination. As we saw, Fichte articulated the necessity of a reciprocal determination against an abstract self-positing of the I, or an abstract opposition of the not-I. Only by means of a reciprocal restriction of absolute, infinite I and not-I does the I acquire content, that is, a predicate.

27 On this point, see Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), esp. ch. 3. 28 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A78/B 103. 29 Schlegel, KA, 18: 417, no. 1149, Schlegel’s italics.

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This interplay […] that consists, as it were, in self-conflict […] in that the self endeavors to unite the irreconcilable, now attempting to receive the infinite in the form of the finite, now, baffled, positing it again outside the latter, and in that very moment seeking once more to entertain it under the from of finitude – this is the power of imagination.³⁰

Fichte thus defines the imagination as the faculty that wavers in the middle between determination and nondetermination, between finite and infinite […] This wavering is characteristic of imagination even in its product; in the course of its wavering, so to speak, and by means thereof it brings the latter to birth.³¹

And the ironic Romantics extend Kantian imagination in the same way. Solger, for example, conceives of the imagination as fantasy and thus as the aesthetic mediation of prereflective-infinite and temporal consciousness. “The beautiful can thus only be an activity that we conceive of in such a way that we recognize opposites in the act of transition. One such activity is art.”³² By means of fantasy, which must be granted understanding as well, by means of an “artistic dialectics,”³³ opposites become associable, and because they can be sublated, they become non-binding. Thus Solger can describe the moment of reciprocal transition with the effective formula that Hegel later merely turned into its negative: “This then is the place where the spirit of the artist must draw all tendencies together in one all-embracing glance. This penetrating glance, that hovers over everything, annihilating everything, we call irony.”³⁴ These high-flown formulas appear less extravagant when they are read together with Schlegel’s theories on irony in Antiquity. For Schlegel, Socratic irony already contains and arouses a feeling of 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 also the most lawful, or it is absolutely necessary.³⁵

30 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 193. 31 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 194. 32 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik (Karben: Wald, 1996), 109. 33 Solger, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, 187. 34 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, “From Erwin, or Four Dialogues on Beauty and Art,” German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 125–150, here 146. 35 Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” 156.

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The (ironic) I is always ahead of its communication and acknowledges this as a necessity of the pragmatics of speech, as it were. Thus understood, the ironist insists not on self-identity but on an irreducible difference from himself. Even in its reconciliatory attempt at successful communication, the first rhetorological determination of modern irony escapes the idealist universe. It therefore sees this constitutive self-difference not as a problem but as a means of successful mutual understanding. The I inherently and incessantly “expands and narrows in turn,” a movement that is congruous with the function of the imagination as the “faculty of expansion” and of “contraction.”³⁶ These descriptions then allow irony, in Manfred Frank’s work for example, to appear as the reconciliatory synthesis of (expanding) allegory and (contracting) joke.³⁷ On the one hand, then, irony consists in a melancholic reference to a unity aimed for but never attained, regardless of whether this unity is called “totality,” “connection of opposites,” or “complete communication.” The reason is that “all beauty is allegory,” Schlegel tells us. “The sublime, because it is unutterable, can be expressed only allegorically.”³⁸ Yet allegorein, saying things differently, is only one side of ironic performance, for, on the other hand, in the à propos joke, the ironic speaker employs fitting associations such that he achieves the communication aimed for after all, in a paradoxical speech act.³⁹ The ironic speaker in this sense follows in the footsteps of the Kantian genius (e.g., the poet as creator of symbols), and this also means that despite all the transformations it devises to escape idealism, modern irony remains oriented toward mediation and guided by comprehensibility. The metonymic gliding of the signifier can be stopped by joking. Irony thus does not simply break the idealism of comprehension but rather claims to provoke comprehensibility.⁴⁰ Within its first logic, re-rhetorized irony works through the sublation of oppositions and

36 Schlegel, KA, 12: 360–361. 37 Cf. Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, 302–303. 38 Friedrich Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poetry,” Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 51–117, here 89–90. 39 Oliver Kohns, Die Verrücktheit des Sinns: Wahnsinn und Zeichen bei Kant, E. T. A. Hoffmann und Thomas Carlyle (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), 65. 40 This first logic is not (yet) an expression of an emphatic impossibility of direct expression. The speaker is not confronted with the necessity to communicate indirectly but prefers a distinguished irony in order to mark him or herself off – in elitary fashion. This irony remains incomprehensible only for those who are to be excluded from comprehension. When it is practiced in this manner, irony serves as a means of distinction that operates by means of (in-) comprehensibility but, ultimately, remains relative to comprehensibility and presupposes it as its criterion.

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in the service of successful reconciliation. Irony here is not an obstacle to logos; instead, it is a meaning, a meaning conceived of as the real reference of the utterance. This becomes clear in an example that is not by accident a central topos in the rare remarks the late Schlegel makes on irony. It is therefore not a regrettable relapse into the radically anti-conciliatory stance of his younger years when Schlegel, in his later years, considers “the true irony” to be “the irony of love” and thinks that “the appearance of contradiction” should no longer be an incomprehensible “disturbance.”⁴¹ This formulation, too, is motivated by one possible logic of irony. The conception of conciliatory irony I’ve laid out so far thus offers a first reading of irony even if it describes only one of irony’s performative functions. In the first, almost loving way in which irony functions, the ironic utterance is transparent; it lets that which is really meant be seen. Within modernity, this function is timelessly available and cannot simply be equated with a rhetorical irony of opposition. What is really meant cannot be “said authentically,” it cannot be transformed salva veritate into an unironic utterance. A reversal into the opposite would not make what is to be communicated immediately communicable. On the contrary, it would vanish. This is evident, prior to attempts in linguistics and speech act theory, in Umberto Eco’s postmodern interpretation, which not coincidentally is preoccupied with the theme of unavowable consent, i.e. “love,” with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”⁴²

At first sight, it looks as if there is someone here who knows exactly what love is, knows that he loves, knows he is loved in return, still loves, and who, certain of himself and of the agreement with his interlocutor, now expresses this extralinguistic state of affaires in a somewhat more complicated way. But would someone who loves that way even need modern irony? Probably not. That is why I’d like to suggest a different conception of successful reconciliation. Are we at all still capable of love without irony? Can we today still imagine loving as beings that are not ironic, or imagine being loved by someone incapable of irony? This capacity for and necessity of irony is decisive for identifying a logic of modern irony in the 41 Quoted in Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977), 82. 42 Umberto Eco, “Postscript,” The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (Orlando: Harcourt, 1994), 502–536, here 530–531.

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form of “successful reconciliation,” an irony aware that the happiness of successful reconciliation is only to be had as irony. Ironic utterances make metaphorical allusions, shift utterances metonymically, and achieve their goal with precision. Yet irony is necessary not so much because the phrase “I love you” is a worn-out, exhausted cliché. Rather, the reflection and emphasis on employing the phrase as a quotation serves to highlight the inappropriateness of so general an expression – and thereby salvages the “real meaning” that could not be communicated by any unironic utterance. Comprehension is not produced by the ironic utterance but evoked as an understanding that already exists. That is why irony can serve as a means of distinction, of identification that signals membership in a circle that excludes all those who are not in the know. The bourgeois will always resort to wit to help him through. The real, the authentic, and the inauthentic utterance are thus happily reconciled, in analogy with a Romantic dialectic of finitude and infinity. Just as the expression of something infinite is to succeed in an utterance that is inauthentic and finite, so too is something inexpressible, something ‘infinite’ in Romantic parlance, ironically sublated in the finitude of the individual utterance. In its first rhetorological form, irony thus works conciliatorily insofar as it communicates an abstention from the doomed attempt to exhaust the inexhaustibility of what really is to be said. That is why the real, authentic, conciliatory content of the ironic utterance characteristic of this first rhetorological form of irony is captured in the often repeated but never pronounceable formula: “You know what I mean.”

2 A Desire for Art One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art. Friedrich Schlegel⁴³

But of course irony does not always tie into successful and positive processes of understanding or into successful syntheses that sublate and avoid the fundamental inauthenticity of speech. Solger’s “annihilating gaze” of irony hovers above everything, even the “sublime.” And since the sublime exists “for our actions only in a limited, finite form,” it is as “worthless as the least, and necessarily perishes with us and our worthless meanings.”⁴⁴ Solger thinks – and here there is a partial agreement with Schlegel  – he can locate the germination of divine life in this moment of tragic irony. Yet conceived of as “sublation of the idea through itself,”⁴⁵ this artistic irony can hardly conceal its own ambiguity. Schlegel is obviously aware of the negativity of irony. Within a certain dialectics – in Schlegel usually an artistic one – irony also plays a negative role. In one of the experimental fragments we read: “Irony is philosophically witty.”⁴⁶ This corresponds to a nuance of irony Schlegel emphasizes in the “Dialogue on Poetry” (1800), where he defines the great wit of Romantic poetry as the “perennial alternation of enthusiasm and irony.”⁴⁷ Writing elsewhere that “irony is not always witty but always enthusiastic,”⁴⁸ Schlegel once more seems to contradict himself. In addition to functioning as an enthusiastic-witty equalizer and a negative-witty “annihilator,” irony now also functions as the positive pole of an artistic dialectic. These different functions, however, do not necessarily contradict each other. Instead, it may well be the case that these contradictions, which did not go unnoticed by Schlegel, reveal the reasons for and the stakes of his willingness to experiment. For Schlegel, irony is not just an important theoretical tool. It is at the same time a catalytic medium that allows for new reflections on the connections between theory and irony, conceptuality and thought. The different theories of irony we find in Schlegel (and others) always also imply different conceptions of “theory” itself. The reason why so obviously divergent meanings are attributed to the philosophical concept “irony,” that is, the 43 Schlegel, “Lyceum Fragments,” no. 12, 144. 44 Quoted in Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, 334. 45 Cf. Solger, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik, 241. 46 Quoted in Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie, 36. 47 Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 86. 48 Schlegel, KA, 18: 203, no. 70.

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reason why contradictory meanings are assigned to central concepts, can be found in Schlegel’s (and Novalis’) novel theory of language. Schlegel’s experimental theses cannot be reduced to an attempt to nuance the concept of irony. Rather, they exemplify an early Romantic “ontosemiology,”⁴⁹ in which those contradictions “only” appear to be such to a traditional (philosophical) logic. The radicalism of early Romantic approaches to the theory of language is particularly evident when read together with corresponding reflections from (post-) structuralism. Long before Saussure, it is a commonplace in the early Romantic theory of language that signifier and signified, divested of any positive substantiality, are two faces of the same coin. Schlegel’s and Novalis’ theory of language, and, in particular, their insight into how signifiers attain meaning only in a negative-differential relation with one another, opposes a classical need to presuppose “this mode of expression in which the sign disappears completely in the thing signified and in which language, while giving expression to a thought, yet leaves it exposed.”⁵⁰ Prior to any aesthetic difference, the implications of allegory and irony for a theory of language move away from a Hegelian understanding of the symbol. The break with the metaphysical presupposition of a non-linguistic signified works along analogous lines. The core of the disagreement between Hegel and Schlegel, which ought to have been the subject of an aesthetic debate but instead, as we’ll see in the next chapter, played itself out in moralistic incriminations, is a fundamental theoretical difference. Hegel’s aesthetics follows Schiller’s reflections: “[T]he spirit becomes objective to itself on its own ground and it has speech only as a means of communication or as an external reality.”⁵¹ In order to speak of an early Romantic ontosemiology, we have to show how Schlegel diametrically opposes such a conception and show the extent to which his theses also pursue epistemological and ontological aims. One result of the correlative Romantic theory of reflection, in this regard, is that “everything speaks,”⁵² that silent thinking is also an “internal discourse.”⁵³ And for this reason, too, Schlegel considers the “true critique of philosophy” to be a “philosophy of rhetoric.”⁵⁴ It is only with 49 On the concept of “ontosemiology” or “semontology,” which Werner Hamacher adopts as well, see Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdopplung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 85. 50 Friedrich Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Pub., 1966), 99. 51 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. II, 964. 52 Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, ed. and trans. David W. Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), frag. 143, 24. 53 Schlegel, KA, 10: 350. 54 Schlegel, KA, 18: 75, no. 561.

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these definitions that the revaluation of rhetorical concepts becomes comprehensible. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, which presupposes a non-linguistically selfidentical I, is a favorite target of the early Romantics’ (linguistic) criticism. “[E]very fact-act presupposes another,” we read in Novalis. “[A]ll quest for the first [action] is nonsense – it is a regulative idea”⁵⁵ because “there is no such thing as the absolute point, the egg of the universe.”⁵⁶ Fichte’s argument about determinative predication is applied even to the most salient feature of his own philosophy, namely, the principle of identity of the absolute. Novalis puts it as follows: In order to make a more distinct, A is divided … The essence of identity can only be presented in an illusory proposition [Scheinsatz]. We abandon the identical in order to present it. […] [W]e represent it through its “not-being” [what it is not], through a “not-identical” [what is not identical to it] – a sign …⁵⁷

These theoretical reflections on language have consequences for early Romantic philosophy as a whole. The Romantics revise their earlier positions to set themselves apart from Jacobi’s account of “feeling” [Gefühl] as an additional sense organ and from any attempt at establishing an absolute idealism. Novalis’ statement, “That was a false concept, when you made form into antithesis, matter into thesis,”⁵⁸ serves as the central insight of his ordo inversus theory in which “feeling” and “reflection” “switch their roles.”⁵⁹ In keeping with the cross-reference to Fichte, “[w]e must thoroughly reflect upon the synthetic connection of the opposites.”⁶⁰ What Novalis calls “incipient reflection”⁶¹ is a verbal mediality structurally identical to Derrida’s différance. Nothing, neither the I nor any other absolute, lies outside of differential language. Nor does anything precede differential language: “it is a non-origin which is originary.”⁶² Early Romantic reflection, in analogy to this non-substantial origin, can be understood as a reflection in language.

55 Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. and trans. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), no. 472, 152 [interpolations Kneller]. 56 Schlegel, KA, 18: 409, no. 1062. 57 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 1, 3 [interpolations Kneller]. 58 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 39, 28. 59 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 33, 26; ordo inversus, no. 32, 26. 60 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 651, 190; on the parallelism between early Romantic and poststructuralist theories of language, see Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdopplung, esp. 115–131. 61 Novalis, Pollen and Fragments, trans. Arthur Versluis (Grand Rapids: Phanes, 1989), 30. 62 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, No. 48, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis (1972), 74–117, here 81.

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In this sense, Romantic melancholy is the desire  – eternally doomed to fail  – for an I transparent to itself. Novalis’ “absolute  – … what can only be known through action and what only realizes itself through eternal lack”⁶³ has a conceptual analogue in Lacan’s poststructuralist understanding of meaning, in which meaning “insists” in the chain of signifiers but none of its “elements consists.”⁶⁴ Doubts arise about an absolute that can only be known through action and that on account of this fails to properly manifest itself. It is increasingly apparent that this absolute is constructed poetically. And, on the subject’s side, the impossibility of complete communication entails a fragmentation often (and still today) described as “Romantic.” As an experimental setup and piece of an unattainable whole, the fragment is the most adequate formal expression of this second logic of irony. The fragment detachedly posits a particular position; because of its fragmented limitedness, this position is immediately negated and opens up a view of something else. This shows how the mode of “indirect communication” shifts. Unlike the first variant of irony, this second assessment and function of irony does not imply confidence in an indirect-ironic success. A former claim, no longer seriously defended, is only hinted at in an open exposition of its failure. Nothing is left but a reticent remark that one may have at some point made a claim to the absolute. Ironic reservation now functions as a kind of philosophical Bildverbot. “Irony is [the] duty of any philosophy that is not yet history, not yet system,”⁶⁵ Schlegel writes, aware of the “paradox” that is “the conditio sine qua non of irony.”⁶⁶ For nothing is more paradoxical than the insight that “he who has a system” is “as lost intellectually as he who has none.”⁶⁷ The addition Schlegel makes, “it is about combining the two,” highlights the meaning with which the ironic fragment is charged. Irony is “epideixis,” i.e. index “of infinity,”⁶⁸ “merely the surrogate of what is to attain infinity.”⁶⁹ Philosophy, accordingly, “is really more a searching, a striving for science than it is a science itself.”⁷⁰ Its “essence … consists

63 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 566, 168. 64 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2005), 412–441, here 419. 65 Schlegel, KA, 18: 86, no. 678. 66 Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente: Studienausgabe in sechs Bänden [Sta], ed. Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), vol. 5, 226. 67 Schlegel, KA, 18: 80, no. 614. 68 Schlegel, KA, 18: 128, no. 76. 69 Schlegel, KA, 18: 112, no. 995. 70 Quoted in Manfred Frank, Unendliche Annäherung: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 872.

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in the desire for the infinite,”⁷¹ a desire that has a corollary in the melancholy that language theory experiences when it confronts the (infinite) differential referentiality of signifiers. According to this second rhetorological dimension, irony is unable to come to rest; it proceeds ad infinitum. Arguing and philosophizing  – not only about irony – is henceforth possible only in paradoxes. Even the claim that “everything contradicts itself”⁷² is raised to a higher level by Schlegel. Even the principle of contradiction contradicts itself. What is “really contradictory in our self is that we feel ourselves to be simultaneously finite and infinite,”⁷³ simultaneously real and ideal, and thus find ourselves to be always at an ironic distance from ourselves. In this sense, the human being does not posit itself, as it does in Fichte’s fact-act, but seeks itself; the human being is essentially desire. When speaking of desire in the context of ironic early Romanticism, we have to be careful to avoid a common misunderstanding. Many readings of “Romantic desire” since Hegel lose sight of a decisive dimension: ironic distance from the absolute object ironizes desire and thus at the same time ironizes the desired object. Novalis’ revolutionary epistemology is exemplary in this regard: “The I signifies that negatively known absolute – what is left over after all abstraction,” i.e. it is merely a negative, no longer a positive entity.⁷⁴ The oxymoronic assessment of reflection as “arche-reflection [Ur-reflexion]”⁷⁵ leads early Romantic theories beyond a classical semiology that (mis)reads the replacement of the object by the sign as a mere substitution. This is another trait these theories share with poststructuralism. Just like Derrida’s “originary différance” and “arche-trace,” Novalis’ arche-reflection involves the rejection of a phantasmatic originary presence for which signs serve as a mere substitution. That is why whenever Schlegel’s and Novalis’ symphilosophical-avantgardistic agendas, so to speak, live up to their own intentions, they share a joyful approval of artistic semiotic play. In those instances, the figure of Marsyas is no longer an allegory of modern “literatorture,” as in Schlegel’s 1797 essay on Lessing.⁷⁶ The goal, instead, is an “apology of the letter, which is very much to be revered as the only true vehicle of communication.”⁷⁷ Even a merely regulative ideal now has to 71 Schlegel, KA, 18: 418, no. 1168. 72 Schlegel, KA, 18: 86, no. 673. 73 This is how Schlegel puts it in his 1804–1805 Cologne Lectures on “The Development of Philosophy in Twelve Books” (KA, 12: 334). 74 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 566, 168. 75 Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn und Richard Samuel, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–1975), vol. 3, 176. 76 Friedrich Schlegel, “Über Lessing”, Sta, vol. 1, 207–224. 77 Schlegel, KA, 18: 5, no. 15.

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confront the notion that in the world there is no space for the absolute. “In the world, one must live with the world,”⁷⁸ and that means living reflexively. Postulates that metaphysically absolutize anything are unmasked as empty concepts: “everything pure is thus a deception [Täuschung] of the imagination – a necessary fiction.”⁷⁹ The “letter is the true magic wand”⁸⁰ and an interplay “of two functions.”⁸¹ “All being, being in general, is nothing but being free – hovering between extremes that necessarily are to be united and necessarily are to be separated. All reality radiates from this light point of hovering.”⁸² The ironic reflection that hovers in Schlegel thus becomes the paradigm of all being, which is of necessity linguistic and reflexive. Linguification is thus understood no longer as bringing death but as bringing life, something to be raised to a higher power.⁸³ When Schlegel writes that philosophy “experiments […] with the life of reflection,”⁸⁴ he adopts Novalis’ ideas on living reflection. For Novalis, “every reflection presupposes the other – It is one act of rupture.”⁸⁵ Schlegel adds that life is possible only because of “a continual, ever-repeated disturbance,”⁸⁶ that is, only a life that is linguistically refracted in its very origin or that springs forth symbolically from its origin is possible. As always in these matters, philosophical reflections cannot be separated from aesthetic ones; Schlegel motivates his opposition to any kind of “chaotic over-all-philosophy” by claiming that “there is art” only “where there is some kind of living spirit bound in a formed letter [in einem gebildeten Buchstaben gebunden].”⁸⁷ The central artistic demand of early Romanticism, the demand to differentiate the work of art throughout, is first of all a formal demand: “Form is thus everything, the classically intellectual energetic letter. This leads to a living, magical terminology.”⁸⁸ The material fulfillment of this demand is, once again, elaborated in terms of apparently outdated stylistic procedures: buffo and parekbasis.

78 Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hanser, 2005), 223, no. 21. 79 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 233, 77. 80 Schlegel, KA, 18: 265, no. 846. 81 Schlegel, KA, 18:, 410, no. 1084. 82 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 555, 164 [mod.]. 83 According to Novalis, for whom “Romanticizing” is “nothing but qualitative potentiation,” this seems to be a genuinely romantic activity (Schriften, vol. 2, 545). 84 Schlegel, KA, 18: 419, no. 1186. 85 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 300, 111. 86 Schlegel, KA, 18: 419, no. 1181. 87 Schlegel, KA, 2: 290. 88 Schlegel, KA, 2: 384.

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2.1 Buffo Schlegel introduces the buffo with one of his usual provocative and extravagant descriptions of ironic works: 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; external, in its execution: the mimic style of an averagely gifted Italian buffo.⁸⁹

The divine breath of irony organizes the work completely from the inside out. The unity of the objective and subjective that defines Classicism can now only be achieved by the very reflexivity that in modernity is usually seen as a sentimentalist lack. Thanks to an ironic flip, self-reflection is now placed in the service of the infinite. The most succinct description of this second artistic logic of irony comes from Walter Benjamin: [I]n this kind of irony […] it is a question not of subjectivism and play [in the merely external manner of the buffo – A.A.] but of the assimilation of the limited work to the absolute … It is obvious that irony, like criticism, can demonstrate itself only in reflection.⁹⁰

At issue is not a subjective reflection of content; Benjamin identifies a positive and a negative irony of form instead.⁹¹ This formal irony, is not, like diligence or candor, an intentional demeanor of the author. It cannot be understood in the usual manner as an index of asubjetive boundlessness, but must be appreciated as an objective moment in the work itself. It presents a paradoxical venture: through demolition to continue building on the formation, to demonstrate in the work itself its relationship to the idea.⁹²

The movement Benjamin outlines is a dialectic of the poetics of genre and the theory of the novel, in which significant works both abolish genres and newly

89 Schlegel, “Lyceum Fragments,” no. 42, 148. 90 Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard-Belknap, 1996), 116–200, here 164. 91 So too would proponents of New Criticism. See Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” Literary Opinion in America, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 729–741. 92 Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism,” 165.

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institute them.⁹³ Romantic desire is now tied to an “idea of art” as the “medium of reflection of forms” and is thus productively employed in the service of an aesthetics.⁹⁴ Benjamin’s insight into the fragmentariness of modern art captures this logic of early Romantic irony with precision. Schlegel’s aphorism that the works of antiquity have come down to us only in fragments, whereas the new works are fragmentary in their very approach, is a precursor of Benjamin’s avantgardism.⁹⁵ Here, too, changes in how irony is conceptualized go hand in hand with general aesthetic differentiations. The new poetological meaning of “indirect communication” has a corollary in aesthetics, a modified understanding of the symbol. Conceived of as ruins, symbols become allegories that in their incapacity (to represent) refer to their unrepresentable object.⁹⁶

2.2 Parekbasis The facet of irony that emerges in the context of Schlegel’s theory of the novel genre, irony as Romantic reflection, is elaborated further through the concept of parekbasis.⁹⁷ In ancient comedy, parekbasis designates a buffoonish interruption of the plot, a means for establishing direct contact with the audience, and an illusion-shattering opportunity to reflect on the action on stage. In Schlegel’s aesthetic theory, parekbasis becomes an almost invisible veil, a kind of sublimated ecstasy. It does not punctually transgress the limit between two spheres, i.e. art and reality, but starts a permanent, universal movement instead, a movement in which this limit and with it the very meaning of “limit” continually shift. “In the novel, parekbasis must be veiled, not be obvious, as it is in Old Comedy.” In the novel, it must be “permanent.”⁹⁸ Only if it serves as a moment of distinction 93 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 44: a “significant work will either establish the genre or abolish it; and the perfect work will do both.” 94 Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism,” 164–165. 95 In early Romanticism the meaning of “refraction” goes beyond the result of the breaking off; it is more than an ironic reference to what is unrepresentable. Similarly, “objectivity of form” is to be understood in terms of an objective validity of form rather than in the sense of well-ordered classicism. For refraction can also mean reflection, all the way to (chaotic) potentiation. 96 From a systems-theoretical perspective, David Roberts has called this “paradoxicality of form,” which he considers typical of ironic modernity’s self-referential literature, the “key to the Romantics’ theory of the work of art […]. The individual work refers beyond itself to the absolute work of art” (“Die Paradoxie der Form in der Literatur,” in Probleme der Form, ed. Dirk Baecker [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993], 22–44, here 34). Romantic irony is thus the theory of (modern) literature in the form of a theory of literature’s self-referentiality. 97 See Ernst Behler, Ironie und literarische Moderne (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), esp. 70–91. 98 Schlegel, KA, vol. 16, 118 und 123.

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throughout does parekbasis give expression to a “progressive universal poetry,” and only then can it hover “on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors. It is capable of the highest and most variegated refinement.”⁹⁹ As “permanent parekbasis,”¹⁰⁰ irony in the modern novel is much more than the detached description of individual characters. Irony and the modern novel are genealogically linked. Thus understood, irony hovers above everything, and it hovers in a mode not unlike that of Derrida’s différance. Beyond activity and passivity, irony is a medium. “Irony is a means of art’s self-representation.”¹⁰¹ That is why Schlegel’s most important literary review, namely, his review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, is also the apex of his theory of irony, a manifesto of Romantic transcendental poetry, in which the transcendental reflection on the conditions of possibility of poetry is asserted as a poetological necessity – something that applies not only to the novel. For Schlegel, Wilhelm Meister is not “a novel in which the persons and incidents are the ultimate end and aim.” “Both the larger and the smaller masses reveal the innate impulse of this work, so organized and organizing down to its finest detail to form a whole.”¹⁰² For this reason, Goethe’s novel compels us to raise our reflection to ever-higher powers: “If there is any book with an indwelling genius, it is this.”¹⁰³ Presumably Schlegel considered the very thing he was reproached with – a lack of engagement with the content of the novel – to be a virtue. Before we turn to a related reproach  – one that sees the early Romantics’ theses on universal poetry as operating an apolitical aestheticization or amoral “derealization of the real”¹⁰⁴ – we have to take a closer look at one of their most important contributions to poetological theory, namely, the development and conceptualization of a work-immanent criticism that comes with the abandonment of traditional rhetoric. As early as Baumgarten, the founder of aesthetics as a discipline, pedagogical and moral effects are no longer the predominant components of a theory of rhetoric. But it is not until Schlegel that rhetoric advances “from a theory of how certain stylistic registers and intended effects are produced to a theory of the lin-

99 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” 175, no. 116. 100 Schlegel, KA, 18: 85, no. 668. 101 Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie, 70. 102 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 269–286, here 275 and 273, my emphasis. 103 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 276. 104 Raimar Zons, “Das Schöne soll sein,” Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn etc.: Schöningh, 1987), 208–218, here 208.

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guistic nature of [the] works as such.”¹⁰⁵ Schlegel increasingly conceives of tropes in their “text-producing function.”¹⁰⁶ “Self-less reflection” and “textual irony” now take the place of a rhetorical poetics of rules and its abstract counterpart, the valorization of the subject in the Sturm und Drang movement.¹⁰⁷ At the very moment in which the human sciences first bring the category of the “human being” into focus, this category begins to decline.¹⁰⁸ The early Romantics’ theory of an ironic foundation of art can be read as a reaction to these transformations. Goethe’s “Meister = ειρ[ironic] π[poetry] (like Socrat[es] ironic φ[philosophy]) because it π π [poetry of poetry].”¹⁰⁹ In opposition to a fixation on works in poetic genres, one of the aesthetically decisive theories of early Romanticism proposes an analysis of works of art according to the criteria intrinsic to the works themselves. Criticism is no longer a mere judgment; it is a constitutive component of progressive universal poetry with almost equal rights: “True criticism [is] an author raised to the second power.”¹¹⁰ A critical review conceives of itself as hovering reflection, a detached potentiating that works in analogy with Goethe’s way of taking “the characters and incidents so lightly and playfully, never mentioning his hero except with some irony and seeming to smile down from the heights of his intellect upon his work.”¹¹¹ Over against Goethe’s failing educational idealism, Schlegel emphasizes the novel’s basic ironic tendency. “The intention is not to educate this or that human being, but to represent Nature, Education itself in all the variety of these examples, and concentrated into single principles.”¹¹² The task of progressive universal poetry, we read in the 116th of the Athenaeum fragments, is “to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric.”¹¹³ Moving beyond Fichte’s moralizing epistemology, which imagined consciousness in the fact-act as an eye that sees itself, the early Romantics posit art

105 Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdopplung, 225. 106 Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3–20, here 15. On the text-producing function of irony, see below, chapter 3. 107 In systems-theoretical terms, Winfried Menninghaus even speaks of a “shift of autopoiesis theorems from the actor to the system-perspective” (Unendliche Verdopplung, 224). 108 Cf. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Stendhals nervöser Ernst,” Sprachen der Ironie: Sprachen des Ernstes, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 206–232, esp. 209–201. 109 Schlegel, KA, 18: 24, no. 75. 110 Schlegel, KA, 18: 106, no. 927. 111 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 275. 112 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 283–284. 113 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” no. 116, 175.

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as a selfless medium of reflection. In this understanding of art, the novel, for example, can act as a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age.[…] And it can also … hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors.¹¹⁴

This is also how we have to understand the claim that philosophy is “a science in need of help,” since reflection can only be “(wholly) known and practiced” from out of “poetry.”¹¹⁵ Critical reflection is a means to attain “the heights to which the work has yet to rise, where art will become a science, and life an art.”¹¹⁶ The ideal instrument for this purpose is an irony that not only maintains but also provokes the eternal strife between ideality and reality. At this point we have to inquire into the processes of understanding particular to a philosophy borne by poetic reflection and its correlative irony: can the meaning of ironic utterances be controlled? To what extent can they achieve comprehensibility? The second mode of ironic speaking and writing I propose is confronted with the question of whether or not this mode makes communication impossible, not least because it is both the trigger for and the effect of an oscillation or hovering between different propositions. As a mediation between sometimes contradictory poles, or as a sublime transition between conflicting extremes, this sort of ironic expression also isolates and amplifies the distance between the manifest content of the utterance and its latent meaning; it does not candidly convey the intended utterance, as rhetorical oppositional irony would have it. Nor is this type of ironic expression centrally concerned with the conciliatory “effect” of irony as in the first rhetorological dimension; it is not concerned with an appeal to consent and comprehension, which can be evoked but not produced by communication in language. Rather, it is concerned with the very structure, the paradox that is already at the basis of “conciliatory” irony. Characteristically, the second rhetorological dimension of irony is aware that any kind of meaning, sense, or knowledge is constituted in and by language nevertheless escapes complete communication in language. Irony shifts the focus to the mediality of language, which, as we saw, runs counter to the manifest content of every utterance. The paradigmatic form of this irony’s hovering movement is the early Romantic fragment, which oscillates between

114 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” no. 116, 175. 115 Schlegel, KA, 19: 25. 116 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 271.

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aphoristic brevity and claims to systematicity. On the level of content, its ambivalent movements appear as a transition between apparently distinct registers, i.e. between the tragic and the comic, between grief and joy. Romantic fragments are ironic movements that do not merely give expression to Romantic melancholy, but, long before Nietzsche, give expression to a joyful blending of science and poetry. This second modern view on what was formerly the rhetorical trope of irony thus focuses on the discrepancy between all (concrete) communication in language and the incommunicability of all (possible) meaning. But the radical consequences that can be drawn from the rhetorical constitution of all speech are not yet exhausted. There remains a third perspective that pushes irony to the limits of incomprehensibility.

3 Mad Consciousness Concept of philology – a sense for the life and the individuality of a mass of letters. A soothsayer from ciphers – augur of letters. A supplementor. His science borrows much from material tropics. The physicist, the historian, the artist, the critic, etc. … to get from One to All – rhapsodically or systematically – the intellectual art of travelling – the art of divination. Novalis¹¹⁷

The third rhetorological form of irony is that of a paradoxical awareness of madness. Is it not irrational, for example, to try to communicate something incomprehensible? On the one hand, irony in this third form tends toward incomprehensibility or nonsense; on the other, this crazed rhetorological figure is characterized by a detached awareness of the chasm in the theory of language it opens onto. This has to do with the function of irony as a pharmacological catalyst of discursive and cultural transformations; irony thus participates in its own genesis and peculiar career. For this reason, it is particularly helpful for outlining the third rhetorological form of modern irony to sketch the epistemic shift on which its genesis is predicated. One of the conditions of possibility for the invention of modern irony, which is no longer (de)limited by rhetoric, is the liberation of semantic problems from the straightjacket of grammar. According to Lilian R. Furst, this “new epistemological orientation of semantics,” which begins with John Locke’s linguistic relativism and culminates in Herder and Fichte’s dynamization of epistemological and linguistic theory, “is a signal precursor of the later parallel tendency of irony.” When “signification and meaning in themselves become matters of doubt, then it is no longer practical to say the contrary to what is meant in the supposition that meaning and counter-meaning will immediately be understood.” That is also why “rhetorical irony cannot function as the simple, stable device” traditional rhetoric wanted it to be.¹¹⁸ In my analysis so far, early Romanticism also figures as the third stage (following the Renaissance and Classicism) in a process of semiotic dissolution. Such a description highlights the close connection between the theory of the arbitrariness of the signifier, the return to rhetorical phenomena, and the radical expansion of theoretical problems typical of early Romanticism. All these are directed against a “metaphysics of similarity” based on a “thinking in analogies.” This has consequences for the category of “meaning” as such. There is “always already

117 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, 598. 118 Lilian R. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 40.

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a madness inscribed in meaning. The moment it speaks, the I is exposed to madness.”¹¹⁹ This understanding of being altered by language – and of language being altered – also relates to irony’s becoming philosophical as a result of its originary rhetoricity. Of a text as early as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, William Eggington writes: “[I]rony became philosophical when it ceased merely to refer to how one used language and began to describe a mode of being, an historical organization of consciousness.”¹²⁰ Foucault, too, turns to the not so much sad as ironic knight to describe a universe organized in analogies. Don Quixote, already, must endow with reality the signs-without-content […] [R]esemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon the visionary or madness; things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity.¹²¹

Up until this moment, “similitude” was roughly the element that mediated between signatum and signans. In subsequent epochs, in Classicism and in the Enlightenment, which, as Manfred Frank writes, are organized by the attributive principle of representation, reason becomes “analytical” and takes apart the complex syntheses of feudalism, of synthetic reason, and of correlations of similarity. The loss of a natural synthesis between things and signs forces reason, as it were, to develop – in a countermove – artificial orders, taxonomies, grammars, etc., in which the pertinence of the signs is based on positing, on arbitrary assignment.¹²²

Subsequently, repraesentatio is increasingly conceived of psychologically. Entities once considered to be fundamental increasingly appear to be the products of a synthetic activity and are questioned in a new way. At the latest in early Romanticism, the classical trivium of the science of language (grammar, logic, rhetoric) loses its theoretical balance, which could be maintained only as long as it was supported by a seemingly natural affinity between logic and grammar. 119 Kohns, Die Verrücktheit des Sinns, 21. Here, Kohns describes as “normal condition” something that, according to Foucault, is the privilege of a few outsiders (Hölderlin, de Sade, Nietzsche): “a sense [Sinn] that can always also – perhaps, as Derrida writes – be nonsense [Unsinn] and madness [Wahnsinn]; a sense as madness.” 120 William Egginton, “Cervantes, Romantic Irony and the Making of Reality,” MLN 117 no. 5 (2002), 1040–1068, here 1040. 121 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 47. 122 Manfred Frank, _What is Neostructuralism?_, trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 114.

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This changes when the long-neglected literariness of language and its everyday use move into the focus of theory. A theory of language that is no longer based on grammatical presuppositions seems to be a threat because it raises the question of how – if at all – there can be certain knowledge about the world. From this point on, the epistemological (and subsequently, the aesthetic and ethical) thrust of the rhetorical dimension of discursivity can no longer be ignored. Nonetheless, efforts to maintain “grammar […] in the service of logic, which […] allows for the passage to the knowledge of the world” continue to be made, from Cartesian linguists via the Port-Royal grammarians to today’s analytic philosophers. These attempts aim at reducing the overwhelming literary power of tropes to “a mere adjunct, a mere ornament within the semantic function.”¹²³ Lilian Furst describes a “shift” away from the Port-Royal grammarians for whom the “uncertainty” of a sign was only a question of the “deficiency of knowledge regarding the object it intended to represent.”¹²⁴ In the second half of the eighteenth century, it becomes increasingly evident that the uncertainty might reside in the ways in which individuals use words […] The discovery of ambiguities in all words is a potent factor impelling towards more radical and enveloping constructs of irony that mirror the essential paradoxality of existence. The intuition of the instability of meaning paves the way for the metamorphosis of irony.¹²⁵

In these epistemic transformations, irony becomes a subversive crystallization point. It is no longer merely a rhetorical or aesthetic phenomenon. Its subversion of discourse becomes apparent when phenomena that had been suppressed or circumscribed by the theory of art surface again in the irony debate. Yet what exactly does irony allow theory to see? In which processes does it play a catalytic role? What makes it possible for irony to become “the trope of the trope” (a definition offered by Paul de Man, which shows that what is at stake in the debate about irony is rhetoric as a whole and which also explains why irony became one of the most violently opposed tropes)?¹²⁶ It is easier to understand the epistemological and, at the same time, moral scandal of Romantic irony when we take a look at what it signals in aesthetics. Since aesthetics was their contemporaries’ main concern, the early Romantics

123 De Man, “Resistance to Theory,” 14. 124 Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 41. 125 Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 41–42. 126 Cf. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 163–184; and “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 187–228.

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were attacked mainly for their aesthetic theory. In their literary works something of the spirit of their semontological reflections becomes visible, especially in their contributions to a rhetorical understanding of language itself. The signified is a free effect[,] likewise the sign¹²⁷

or Insofar as the signifying [agent] is completely free either in the effect of the signified or in the choice of the sign […] then to the extent that both [signified and signifier] are there in mutual relationship only for the signifying [agent], and neither of them is necessarily related to the other for a second signifying [agent].¹²⁸

These are central insights of the early Romantics’ theory of language. Novalis adds to this arbitrariness the already-mentioned element of Romantic reflection: the raising of signifier and signified to a higher power, the reciprocal production of signifier and signified, are understood as implicit dimensions of language. “[E]very symbol” is “symbolized again” by “its symbolized.” The “symbolic function” is that the “products […] produce that which produces again.”¹²⁹ Not the least of the effects of Romantic semiotics is a reassessment of the artistic symbol. Whereas in Winckelmann, allegory and symbol were practically synonymous, an important discussion among early Romantics is triggered by precisely this distinction. The previous “valorization of symbol at the expense of allegory coincide[s] with the growth of an aesthetics that refuses to distinguish between experience and the representation of this experience.”¹³⁰ This is important because the early Romantics had posited two modes of presenting an independent aesthetic discourse as absolute. By itself, the assessment that the sublime is unspeakable and can be spoken about only through allegory means that this project of a poetic or poietic philosophy blocks Hegel’s attempt at sublation, that is, at supplanting the content of art with the rational project of philosophy. As we saw in Schlegel’s Meister review, this breaks with the cult of the genius, despite its reputation as a genuinely Romantic cult. This break is particularly obvious in contrast to a formulaic understanding of the genius as capable of bridging the gap between experience and its presentation and thereby transforming subjective experiences into general truths. Kant had defined genius as the “inborn disposition of the mind (ingenium) through which nature gives the 127 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 11, 8. 128 Novalis, Fichte Studies, no. 11, 8. 129 Quoted in Zons, “Das Schöne soll sein,” 216. 130 De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 188.

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rule to art”¹³¹ – and thereby brought to light another definitional problem: how the originality of the genius is to be delimited from the production of “original nonsense.” That is why Kant demands that the genius counteract the unlimited freedom of the imagination by bringing “clarity and order into the abundance of thought.” Just as the power of judgment, situated between the understanding and reason, mediates at the same time between the understanding and the imagination, so does taste, as sensus communis, now act as the “discipline (or correction) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished.”¹³² This is the kind of analogical convention the early Romantics refuse to follow. They not only unreservedly embrace imagination, fantasy and, by extension, nonsense, but also, and primarily, resituate aesthetics within rhetoric. In this third perspective on modern irony, the rhetorological scandal of irony (and allegory) is thoroughly reflected in the theory of language. It consists in making the splitting of any discourse transparent, which also includes aesthetic discourses about works of art. The discontinuity of the subject and its self-presentation discussed above is linked to an approach that understands language itself ironically. Every (ironic) utterance is also a quotation, i.e. a mimetic effect. Upon closer examination, the ironic effect is only indirectly mimetic and is so in two ways: first in its opposition to the representative order of classical epistemes; second in its awareness that there is a difference even between two utterances “with the same meaning”: counter-mimetic irony blocks organized continuities and analogically conceived kinships. Ironic theories of language are rhetorically oriented and therefore fully aware of their status as theories of language. The early Romantics dismiss the “dream of the standard theory of meaning” which “depended on the existence of a level of representation by completely present tokens.”¹³³ And the fact that they reject this dream in the name of irony casts moral suspicion both on irony and on the early Romantics. This explains the later debate about irony’s immorality. What ultimately turned irony into such a scandal is an understanding that sees language as a fundamentally rhetorical configuration and, in turn, sees reality on the whole as a linguistic structure. Because Schlegel’s experimental fragments are barely comprehensible even today – such as the fragment that claims irony to be the “Menstruum universale

131 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §46, 5:306. 132 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §50, 5:319. 133 Samuel C. Wheeler, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 90.

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and synthesis of reflection and fantasy[,] of harmony and enthusiasm”– he was (and is) suspected of fabricating irresponsible nonsense.¹³⁴ By ironically uniting what cannot be united  – e.g. in the attempt to bring Fichte’s Kantianism and Goethe’s Spinozism together – Schlegel goes all out: he aims both for a concept of Being through a paradoxical hybrid of monistic ontology and for a linguisticrhetorical epistemology.¹³⁵ My aim here is not to speculate about why this project failed. Instead I would like to take the form of the fragment just quoted as a guide for examining one more shift in the meaning of the trope of irony within Schlegel’s intellectual project, a shift that also signals one more change of guise, namely, the switch to incoherent nonsense. The ironic production of nonsense is, of course, an exemplarily unreasonable undertaking. But it is not pathological madness. It is not a madness to which the subject is helplessly exposed but a madness controlled by artistic calculation. Consciously or methodically calculated insanity tries to turn the effect of nonsensical verbal utterances into a satisfactory mode of subjective practice. This experimental method aims at an expansion of experience, which, in Schlegel as in others, can also be conceptual: to focus on how new concepts are created is to highlight how language makes new experiences possible and how these experiences can be captured in concepts in the first place. The element of “madness” methodically integrated in the ironic speech act consists in going ever further, in going beyond even the ironic speaker, to function beyond subjective intentions. This mediality inherent in ironic speech enters the picture when the spiral of irony continues irrespective of what might have been speakers’ earlier intentions. It no longer allows for deducing the speaker’s intentions, unconscious or not, but treats every utterance as an opportunity and encouragement to increase the absurdity of the discourse  – the infinitely progressing and ascending reflection of the mind as wit. This is made clear in Schlegel’s at first sight naturalist reflections on the “whole” as chaos. His original understanding of chaos is apparent both in his conception of the monistically organized chaos of fullness and in the notion of an “artfully ordered confusion” or “beautiful confusion.”¹³⁶ His interest in obscure 134 Quoted in in Moongyoo Choi, “Frühromantische Dekonstruktion und dekonstruktive Frühromantik: Paul de Man und Friedrich Schlegel,” Ästhetik und Rhetorik: Lektüren zu Paul de Man, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 181–205, here 194. 135 This question has hardly been raised in the specific context of early German Romanticism. On parallel monistic tendencies in England, especially in Coleridge, see de Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 191–193. 136 Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 86. Winfried Menninghaus distinguishes two meanings of “chaos” in Schlegel: one, fundamental, is a central term in a philosophy of nature, the other is particular to Romantic art. According to Schlegel, “[a]ll romantic poetry is chaotic in the narrow sense” (KA,

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concepts taken from the philosophical-aesthetic tradition leads him for a while to propagate the arabesque, “the oldest and most originary form of fantasy,” as positive.¹³⁷ For “the arabesque wit,” he explains, “is the highest – irony and parody [are] only negative.”¹³⁸ Yet there might be a difference between irony and parody that becomes significant thanks to Schlegel’s peculiar understanding of chaos: “parody = blending of what opposes each other = indifference;”¹³⁹ irony, however, might – Schlegel adds a question mark – equal “self-parody.”¹⁴⁰ Irony’s difference from parody would thus lie in an Enlightenment impulse inscribed in irony’s very movement of thought. “Socratic irony” is “shifting parody, parody raised to a higher power,”¹⁴¹ and precisely this potentiation makes it possible for irony to be “self-polemics overcome.”¹⁴² There is an analogous flip in Schlegel’s explicit thematization of “chaos.” The “Discourse on Poetry” articulates a demand for a new mythology that at first sight resembles the “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism.” But a closer look reveals that this same intertextual parallel makes the Romantics’ predilection for myth less plausible. Schlegel is after a more profound level of myth than other idealist approaches: he is interested in the chaotic rather than the organizing power of myth. He is after something original and inimitable which is absolutely irreducible, […] where the naive profundity permits the semblance of the absurd and of madness, of simplemindedness and foolishness, to shimmer through. For this is the beginning of all poetry, to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the original chaos of human nature for which I know as yet no more beautiful symbol than the motley throng of the ancient gods.¹⁴³

A primarily process-like language reveals itself to be the originary ground of poetic fantasy. In Schlegel’s words, “Poetry is an infinite rhetoric.”¹⁴⁴ Of course, Schlegel attempts to ironically bind this chaotic originary language as well:

vol. 16, 318). This points ahead, beyond E. T. A. Hoffmann, Brentano, and Tieck, to the Surrealists who would appeal to the German Romantics. On the reception history of this conception, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), esp. 39–61. 137 Schlegel, “Dialogue,” 86. 138 Schlegel, KA, 16: 119. 139 Schlegel, KA, 16: 131. 140 Schlegel, KA, 16: 152. 141 Schlegel, KA, 16: 128. 142 Schlegel, KA, 16: 127. 143 Schlegel, “Dialogue” 86 [mod.]. 144 Schlegel, KA, 18: 141, no. 232; in the same way, Schlegel’s philosophy is “nothing but a universal grammar” (ibid., 71, no. 506).

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“Irony is clear awareness of eternal agility, of infinitely full chaos,”¹⁴⁵ or “Irony is clear χα[chaos] in agility, intell[ectual] int[uition] of an eternal χα[chaos].”¹⁴⁶ But little would be learned if we took this “clear awareness” as a new form of domination. Ironic speech, especially permanently ironic speech, is inclined toward the chaotic. Constant interjections (parekbases), (self-)stylizations, exaggerations and understatements render any certain interpretation impossible. This affects the ironic speakers too, who, after a while, become incapable of assessing the content of their speech. In continual intellectual progression, the intellectual pleasure one takes in the witty activity – which should not be confused with the bawdy satisfaction derived from its content  – drives the ironic form of speech beyond itself, beyond itself as an independent, controllable figure.¹⁴⁷ This, too, is why Schlegel favors it in his experimental fragments, where he consciously runs the risk of incomprehensible writing. It comes as no surprise that Schlegel’s contemporaries hardly understood his irony. One indication for this is the short life of the journal Athenaeum he edited with his brother August Wilhelm and with Friedrich Schleiermacher. In the final issue, he writes a putative defense, an apology entitled “On Incomprehensibility.” Going even further than the scandalous fragment that had established a parallel between the French Revolution, Wilhelm Meister and the Wissenschaftslehre, Schlegel writes: Poetry and idealism are the focal points of German art and culture; everybody knows that. All the greatest truths of every sort are completely trivial and hence nothing is more important than to express them forever in a new way and, wherever possible, forever more paradoxically, so that we won’t forget they still exist and that they can never be expressed in their entirety.¹⁴⁸

But Schlegel does not stop at questioning his own theses or even the very logic he advocates. Once more, he ironically emphasizes how serious he is and proceeds to discuss the necessity of irony in order to then systematize irony in a kind of ironic self-parody  – again, allegedly to prevent misunderstandings. Finally, he confronts the hypertrophic systematization of irony with its peculiar impossibility:

145 Schlegel, Sta, Vol. 5, 69. 146 Schlegel, KA, 18: 228, no. 411. 147 On this distinction, cf. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol. VIII. 148 Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,” Lucinde and the Fragments, 259–271, here 263.

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Up to this point I have not been ironic and by all rights I ought not to be misunderstood […] To be sure, there is something else in the fragment that might in fact be misunderstood. This lies in the word tendencies and this is where the irony begins.¹⁴⁹

Schlegel’s essay is thus a work of applied irony, ironic écriture. The author no longer wants to simulate transparency. Instead, he puts his narcissistic, slightly sadistic pleasure in playing with the misunderstanding of others on full display. Irony, Schlegel explains to a non-comprehending audience, “contains and arouses a feeling of […] the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication.”¹⁵⁰ It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke.¹⁵¹

Subsequently, Schlegel provides an overview of the “system” of “great and small ironies of different sorts” that has “sprung up” “only since the dawn of the new century.”¹⁵² First, there is coarse irony, “[n]ext there is fine or delicate irony; then extra-fine.”¹⁵³ After listing more types of irony, Schlegel comes to a description of the “irony of irony” and of how it emerges. This form of irony, the most important for an understanding of Schlegel’s essay, arises [f]or example, if one speaks of irony without using it, as I have just done; if one speaks of irony ironically without in the process being aware of having fallen into a far more noticeable irony; if one can’t disentangle oneself from irony anymore, as seems to be happening in this essay on incomprehensibility; if irony turns into a mannerism and becomes, as it were, ironic about the author […]

But also if one has to produce [irony] against one’s will, like an actor full of aches and pains; and if irony runs wild and can’t be controlled any longer.¹⁵⁴

The text, which speaks from a decentered position and continually flaunts its own incomprehensibility, coquettishly drowns in an ecstatic, uncontrollable, savage

149 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 263. 150 Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” 156. 151 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 265. 152 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 266. 153 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 266. 154 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 267.

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irony. Even the gods who are called on to counteract these ironies are ironic: “The only solution is to find an irony that might be able to swallow up all these big and little ironies and leave no trace of them at all.”¹⁵⁵ Towards the end, the text makes yet one final turn by unmasking the claim to comprehensibility itself as its opposite, that is, as an unreasonable claim: Verily, it would fare badly with you if […] the whole world were ever to become wholly comprehensible in earnest. And isn’t this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos?¹⁵⁶

Yet Schlegel’s irony, whose flexibility makes it an antidote to “intellectual gout,” remains unsatisfied. The superior smile of someone whose irony is not understood is a laughter produced by contagion, oscillating between the repeated failure of its attempt to understand nonsense and the mad attempt to hold on to nonsense. The essay seems to present the opposite of the “loving irony” later preferred by Schlegel (and by many nineteenth-century interpreters who agree with him), a maieutic irony trained to work toward reconciliation.¹⁵⁷ Nowhere, therefore, do we find the last word on irony. On all three rhetorological levels, irony resists rhetorical deployment and theoretical appropriation. As conciliatory irony, it fails time and again to render transparent what it evokes; where it tries, as desiring irony, to achieve a balance between what can and cannot be said, it is itself thrown off balance. And when, finally, in a state of “madness,” it performatively aims for incommunicability, it is remarkably successful in communicating. The laughter irony motivates is not a divine laughter. It results from the joy of nonsense but also from an uncontrollable, though not necessarily diabolic, joy found in an intellectual tightrope walk over unfathomable depths. Aware of the impossibility of a meta-theory, of a meta-language or a meta-trope, “irony of irony” is, in Derrida’s words, “the madness of the regressus ad infinitum, and the madness of rhetoric […] madness because it has no reason to stop, because reason is tropic.”¹⁵⁸ This radical consequence of an origin-less-ness founded in and by a philosophy of language has a correlate in Paul de Man’s radicalized assessment of irony, according to which “absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself

155 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 267. 156 Schlegel, “Incomprehensibility,” 268. 157 Schlegel, KA, 15: 56. 158 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 153.

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the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself.”¹⁵⁹ Although de Man’s description is of irony in texts, what he describes can likewise be seen in ironic speech. Irony’s difference from pathological madness lies in its repeated reflection on its own insanity. It is this vertigo of self-irony that makes one seem invincible. As a manner of employing language, indeed as an intensifying moment of linguicity itself, irony amplifies the distancing moment of language. What could be more impressive than the wit of oppressed minorities – and how else are we to describe our conscious self – which is perfected by self-irony: without any deprecatory triumphal laughter, no joy over reconciliation, just laughter in proud defiance? Acknowledging its finitude, the self can laugh about itself. Yet in doing so, it no longer laughs about itself in the service of the infinite but rather laughs against itself, so to speak – this side of madness.

159 De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 216.

Part Two: Ethica

After the rhetorological analysis in the preceding chapters, this second part, for reasons of content and of chronology, emphasizes the ethical discussions of irony that followed early Romanticism. If epistemological questions seem to retreat, this is largely due to the overwhelming effect of Hegel’s criticism of irony, which shifts the nineteenth century’s discussion of irony almost completely onto ethical terrain. In fact – and probably against his intentions – Hegel’s succinct formulations, more than any other text, propagate the irony he criticizes as immoral. Hegel’s reduction of irony to an ethical problem is not simply the result of a narrow-minded misunderstanding. It derives from the fact that, as I’ll try to show in the second half of this part, the aesthetic regime of thought no longer allows for treating aesthetic problems separately from ethical considerations. The way that Schlegel rhetorologizes, and thus also de-rhetoricizes, irony goes hand in hand with its “aestheticization,” an aspect to which we will return later, and its “ethicization.” Subsequently, irony can appear in new guises (mask, melancholia), and the figure of the ironist can don different historical masks (seducer, flaneur, dandy, aesthete, to cite Kierkegaard’s inventory). Much of what I have discussed as epistemological problems in the rhetorological context can also be grounded psychologically, whereby they become more plausible. The famous Romantic desire, whether seen as depressive or melancholic, turns out not to be a deficient structure but rather the unavoidable signature of individuation.

1 The Irony of Evil The more recent irony belongs essentially under ethics. Søren Kierkegaard¹

Hegel’s intuitions concerning irony turn time and again to Schlegel’s only novel.² Published in 1799, Lucinde can be read, beside the Meister review, as Schlegel’s second, less direct ironization of Goethe’s “Hegelizing Bildungsroman.”³ This is the case in particular in the chapter “Apprenticeship for Manhood,” which takes up about a third of the novel and narrates the various erotic adventures of the protagonist, Julius. It is doubtful whether this apprenticeship actually serves to lead the hero to maturity. It seems, rather, to describe a succession of aimless episodes that follow a pattern of badly-infinite reflection. This impression is strengthened by the “Metamorphoses” chapter that follows, which seeks to extend the definition of love given by Plato/Socrates/Diotima and to shock (contemporary) readers: “Love is not merely the quiet longing for eternity: it is also the holy enjoyment of a lovely presence.”⁴ Even more shocking for an audience at the turn of the nineteenth century was the “Dithyrambic Fantasy on the Loveliest Situation in the World,” which Schlegel sees as “a wonderful, deeply meaningful allegory of the development of man and woman to full and complete humanity.”⁵ Irrespective of whether these descriptions of androgyny and sadomasochistic frivolities were calculated sensationalism or poetic necessity, his contemporaries’ disgusted rejection was unambiguous.⁶

1 This is thesis XI of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 6. 2 Hegel, we should note, did not have access to the centrally important trove of fragments produced by the early Romantics. 3 This is not the place for a thorough analysis of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister that would no doubt yield more differentiated results. Instead, I follow Lukács’s suggestion according to which “the road on which Goethe discovers his Faust or Wilhelm Meister is, broadly speaking, the same as that of the spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology” (Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone [Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976], 567). 4 Schlegel, Lucinde in Lucinde and the Fragments, 41–140, here 106. 5 Schlegel, Lucinde, 49. 6 Although a friend of Schlegel’s, Friedrich Schleiermacher took some encouragement to publish a defense. On the reception history, see Peter Firchow’s introduction to Lucinde and the Fragments, esp. 3–5.

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Yet the real scandal lies beyond the obscenities Schlegel seems to report from his private home:⁷ the decisive poetological scandal lies in the way the novel is written and in the permanent amalgamation of discursive forms and registers that ought to remain distinct. This is most apparent in a “meditation” by “the cultivated and meditative man […] on the lovely riddle of his destiny.”⁸ In Fichtian terminology, Schlegel offers a theory of copulation that could not but procure for the novel a reputation as obscene.⁹ In his reading of Lucinde, Hegel is of course less concerned with the text’s deeper poetological dimensions. His criticism targets specific formulations. He is particularly struck by a sentence from the first chapter: “I didn’t simply enjoy but felt and enjoyed the enjoyment itself.”¹⁰ The unsettling potential resides particularly in the second part of the sentence. Here, the ethical lapse consists in the conscious affirmation of an otherwise merely salacious enjoyment. Hegel then goes on to define evil in analogous terms: as explicitly self-conscious affirmation.

1.1 Evil subjectivity (Hegel) The discussion of evil occupies a prominent place in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. In the Phenomenology, Hegel lays out a negative view of Romanticism, which he revises only minimally in his subsequent works. The absence of any explicit mention of irony does nothing to alleviate his basic condemnation of Romanticism according to a schema that resurfaces time and again. Hegel sees in the dichotomy of ancient morality (the Greek polis and its philosopher, Aristotle) and modern Enlightenment (Kant as the exemplary theoretician of a budding bourgeois society with all its ambiguities) the starting point of contemporary philosophy. The central distinguishing characteristic, for Hegel, is conscience. Conscience is a sign of subjective singularization in bourgeois society and is out of sync with the given historical situation: “Conscience does not recog-

7 Even his wife’s resistance to the novel’s publication is worked into the text: “‘How can you want to write what you should hardly talk about, what you only should feel?’ My answer: if you feel something, then you should want to tell it too, and what you want to tell, you should also be allowed to write” (Lucinde, 50). 8 Lucinde, 119. 9 “The universe itself is only a plaything of the definite and the indefinite; and the real definition of the definable is an allegorical miniature of the warp and woof of everflowing creation” (Lucinde, 120). In this parody of Fichte, Bernd Bräutigam sees in this the beginning of a turn to Schelling; see Bernd Bräutigam, Leben wie im Roman: Untersuchungen zum ästhetischen Imperativ im Frühwerk Friedrich Schlegels 1794–1800 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1986), 154. 10 Schlegel, Lucinde, 144.

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nize the absoluteness of any content, for it is the absolute negativity of everything determinate.”¹¹ What here is only a formal condition, however, changes into an “immediate certainty of self, conceived as content, i.e. this truth is in general the caprice of the individual.”¹² The term “immediate” already signals the sublation to come. The purity of “the contemplation of the ‘I’ = ‘I’, in which this ‘I’ is the whole of essentiality and existence”¹³ turns out, in a critical evocation of Fichtean terms, to be a poverty of substance: the “absolute certainty into which substance has resolved itself is the absolute untruth which collapses internally.”¹⁴ Insofar as conscience alone is not enough, the result is an unhappy consciousness. What is lacking is “the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure [mere] being.”¹⁵ Evil thus results from the abstractness of duty, which makes it accessible to any content whatsoever, and emerges out of inner necessity from reflective self-detachment. If consciousness is constituted by “the self and the in-itself,”¹⁶ there is, in the case of self-certainty, a shift to the detriment of the in-itself, of the general. From the perspective of general duty, conscience must appear as evil and thus as hypocrisy because it “declares its action to be in conformity with itself, to be duty and conscientiousness.”¹⁷ Following Hegel, the point where evil emerges is located exactly where reflection meets the refusal to accept the general, where evil admits to itself and to others: “It is me [Ich bin es].”¹⁸ There are passages that are practically identical in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, namely in the chapter on the “Main Forms Connected with Fichte’s Philosophy,” where we also find irony mentioned explicitly. The literary provocation and theoretical sacrilege of Schlegel’s self-conscious enjoyment, expressed in Fichte’s philosophical terminology, is too comprehensive, too irritating for Hegel. Hegel cannot integrate (Romantic) irony into the rational structure of his speculative teleology, which is why it has to be eliminated from his steadily advancing history of philosophy. For Hegel, the “Fichtian standpoint of subjectivity has thus retained its character of being unphilosophically worked out,”¹⁹ and

11 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 643:390. 12 Hegel, Phenomenology, 643:391. 13 Hegel, Phenomenology, 657:398. 14 Hegel, Phenomenology, 657:399. 15 Hegel, Phenomenology, 658:399–400 [interpolation Miller]. 16 Hegel, Phenomenology, 660:401. 17 Hegel, Phenomenology, 660:401. 18 Hegel, Phenomenology, 667:405. 19 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), vol. 3, 507.

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it finds one of its main forms in Schlegel. Schlegel only conceived of a “merely negative resting” in itself, which Hegel now identifies, once and for all, as irony, the “leading exponent”²⁰ of which is Schlegel. The appeal to shared values, which in conservative cultural criticism often goes hand in hand with a criticism of differentiated individuality, is well known – as is the corresponding bogeyman: The subject here knows itself to be within itself the Absolute, and all else to it is vain; all the conclusions which it draws for itself respecting the right and good, it likewise knows how to destroy again. It can make a pretence of knowing all things, but it only demonstrates vanity, hypocrisy, and effrontery. ²¹

On this question, we read in the semi-stenographic accounts of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Therefore if the individual subject as such does evil, the evil is purely and simply his own responsibility,”²² because “[o]n its formal side, evil is most peculiarly the individual’s own.”²³ The “most abstruse form of evil,” to be sure, is the “stage at which subjectivity claims to be absolute,”²⁴ where ironic subjectivity enjoys itself as absolute. For the ironist, it is not the thing that is excellent, but I who am so; as the master of law and thing alike, I simply play with them as with my caprice; my consciously ironic attitude lets the highest perish and I merely hug myself at the thought.²⁵

Since Hegel, the question of irony is also always a question of its attitude toward legitimacy: “You actually accept a law, it says, and respect it as absolute. So do I, but I go further than you, because I am beyond this law and can make it to suit myself.”²⁶ Negativity is thus defined as the quintessence of irony. It only takes a slight grammatical change to get from Hegel’s verdict that irony “plays with all forms” and is “serious about nothing”²⁷ to Kierkegaard. When “nothing” is turned into a noun, this sentence demonstrates like no other how smoothly Kierkegaard transitions from Hegel in his dissertation On the Concept of 20 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:507. 21 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:507. 22 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 139:93. 23 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 140:95. 24 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 140:94. 25 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 140–141:102. 26 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 140–141:102. On the question of the relationship of irony and law, see part 4, chapter 3, below. 27 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:507.

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Irony. For much of his analysis of Romantic longing, Kierkegaard sticks to Hegel’s terminology: “Irony is the infinitely light playing with Nothing that is not terrified by it but even rears its head once more.”²⁸ What is decisive, however, is the self-conscious, confident gesture made “once more”; this gesture not only indicates a playfully pleasurable dealing with Nothing, it also affirms it. Particularly in discussions of Romantic art, this reproach of extreme individualism comes up time and again. It constitutes a criticism of the solipsistic consequences of radical “irony, as this concentration of the I in itself, for which all bonds are broken and which is able to live only in the bliss of self-enjoyment.”²⁹ The irreality of enjoyment rests on the subjective freedom that at all times has in its power the possibility of a beginning and is not handicapped by earlier situations. There is something seductive about all beginnings because the subject is still free, and this is the enjoyment the ironist craves.³⁰

This abstract subjectivity is the central point of friction in Hegel’s reflections on the subject. “In its abstract form, as not sublated in morality, irony blocks the access to politics,”³¹ and indeed to any actualization in the general, as today’s Hegelian critics of the early Romantics’ “Nietzscheanism avant la lettre” continue to claim.³²

1.2 The religious inversion of irony (Kierkegaard) Kierkegaard’s 1841 dissertation can be read as a textbook example of an ironically refracted academic text; not, by any means, because of its mocking style but precisely because of its ultimate failure to provide an appropriate assessment of Romantic irony.³³ 28 Kierkegaard, Irony, 270 [mod.]. 29 “True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:65). This paraphrase of “On Incomprehensibility” still seems to echo the resentful envy the young Hegel felt toward the stars of the literary salons. 30 Kierkegaard, Irony, 253. 31 Ludwig Heyde, “Politik und Ironie,” in Hegels Ästhetik: Die Kunst der Politik – die Politik der Kunst, ed. Andreas Arndt (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), 30–35, here 33. 32 Heyde, “Politik und Ironie,” 32. 33 I have already mentioned the first part of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, “The Position of Socrates Viewed as Irony;” we now turn to Part Two, “The Concept of Irony.”

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The detours of the dissertation in the three years of its composition give a first indication of Kierkegaard’s various interests and approaches to his subject. From very early on in his philosophical “career,” Kierkegaard’s existential philosophizing is closely linked to his biography. He begins to work on Socratic irony in 1837–1838 and completes the book in 1841. In the meantime, Kierkegaard becomes engaged, the engagement is broken off, he reads Hegel intensively, and his father forces him to study theology. Hence the first of the theses with which Kierkegaard prefaces his philosophical dissertation: “The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity.”³⁴ From the outset, it is clear that the text goes beyond the task of clarifying the concept “irony.” Kierkegaard’s goal is to articulate, with a view to theological sorts of questions, a (self-) criticism of his age. Most of his invectives against Romanticism are offered with this goal in mind.³⁵ The key to both the problematic inner structure of the dissertation and to its failure, which ultimately was liberating for Kierkegaard, lies in its relationship to Hegel’s philosophy and in particular in its assessment of (Romantic) irony. Kierkegaard summarizes the problem in the twelfth thesis as follows: “Hegel in his description of irony has considered only the more recent form, not so much the ancient.”³⁶ Kierkegaard’s radicalized understanding of irony is no longer content with a simplistic solution that attempts to separate a good, Socratic irony from an evil, Romantic irony. Kierkegaard’s dissertation is ironic first and foremost in the way it surreptitiously sets up its dismissal of academic-Hegelian philosophy. Its irony consists in how Kierkegaard criticizes Hegel in Hegelian terms. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that the last chapter (“Irony as a Controlled Element, the Truth of Irony”) is meant to be read as non-serious, i.e., as an ironic chapter. Piling one Hegelian platitude upon another, Kierkegaard, at the end of his study, suddenly calls for controlling irony. It is not necessary to decide whether the doctoral candidate intended this call to ironically conflict with his own assertion that controlling irony is impossible or whether it conflicts with his later suspicion that Goethe, in whose “work irony was in the strictest sense a controlled element,”³⁷ nevertheless produces immoral inanities. Here, it suffices for us to note an ironic tension within the dissertation and show why it is a necessary tension within Kierkegaard’s theory in

34 Kierkegaard, Irony, 6. 35 The thrust of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Romanticism is apparent already in thesis XIV: “Solger, not moved by piety of soul but seduced by envy of mind because he could not think the negative or subdue it by thought, adopted acosmism” (Irony, 6). 36 Kierkegaard, Irony, 6. 37 Kierkegaard, Irony, 325.

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general. For, on the one hand, Kierkegaard follows academic rules in condemning Romantic irony in conformity with Hegelian convictions (self-controlling reason, dialectical synthesis). On the other hand, Kierkegaard displays an everincreasing anti-Hegelianism that goes hand in hand with his religiosity, evident in the attempt to break up the masses for the sake of individual salvation. In the dissertation, however, this is of no concern, since Kierkegaard writes in a final reversal: “all this lies beyond the scope of this study, and if anyone should wish food for thought, I recommend Prof. Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s Nye Digte [New Poems].”³⁸ There are three possible readings of this conclusion, which is difficult to take seriously today. First, it can be read as a last ironic-dismissive tipping of the hat to the academics who will from now on be the target of his open scorn. Yet, second, we have to take seriously the indecisiveness of Kierkegaard’s compromise, which already points to his real, religious interests. These, however, lie beyond the explicitly articulated questions of Kierkegaard’s book. The book on irony, therefore, has maieutic character.³⁹ Third, in its entirety, the book is split between Hegel and the Romantics. Kierkegaard cannot rest in Hegel’s universal for very long; nor can Romantic individualism simply be converted into the religious individualization Kierkegaard develops in subsequent years. In later works, Kierkegaard operates with the “conceptual personae”⁴⁰ that already figure in the dissertation. The starting point of Kierkegaard’s reflection is an exaggerated image of Socrates. It provides a contrast that highlights Hegel’s opponents all the more clearly. Yet little by little, Hegel’s system of criticism also disintegrates. Once more, it is irony that is of particular significance for Kierkegaard’s approach, which places subjectivity at its center. In his later works, Kierkegaard turns against Hegel the very performance of irony he lays bare and criticizes in Hegelian terms. This move constitutes the ironic flip of Kierkegaard’s theory of irony. As his attempts at settling down in bourgeois fashion fail (this

38 Kierkegaard, Irony, 329. 39 Kierkegaard’s analysis of Socrates thus applies to his own works. In 1851, he writes retrospectively: “It began maieutically with esthetic production, and all the pseudonymous writings are maieutic in nature” (“The Accounting” in The Point of View, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press], 7). In this sense, his texts are nothing but a “pedagogical deception in the service of Christianity” (Edo Pivcevic, Ironie als Daseinsform bei Sören Kierkegaard [Gütersloh: Mohn, 1960], 96; cf. Pivcevic, Ironie als Daseinsform for a chapter on Kierkegaard’s “inversion of irony”). Over against this attempt to characterize the aesthetic works as merely ironic-deceptive, my aim here is to bring out their value as independent reflections. 40 On the idea of “conceptual personae,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tominlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 197.

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seems to be how he thought of his short-lived engagement), he proclaims himself an “emigrant from the sphere of the universal.”⁴¹ What becomes obvious from the solipsistic religious point of view is the hidden nihilism of Hegel’s secularized theology of a World Spirit implementing divine plans – indeed, nothing is more alien to Hegel’s proud efforts than Kierkegaard’s contrite submission. The full radicalization of the inversion (of subjectivity) is apparent in the reading of the Biblical Abraham that Kierkegaard offers under the pseudonym (itself of ironic interest) Johannes de Silentio in his 1843 Fear and Trembling: “Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal […] the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal.” This definition of the individual, too, is further set in contrast to Hegel’s “universal,” “[f]or if the ethical – that is, social morality – is the highest” then “there is in a person no residual incommensurability[…] that […] is not evil”⁴² and the individual cannot be completely expressed, captured or understood by the universal. Irony participates in a decisive transcending of the ethical, and it does so precisely in the dimension that Kierkegaard conceives of as immoral. Evil is the condition of possibility for sincere belief. Simply put, Kierkegaard adopts Hegel’s definition of evil but then deploys it against Hegel’s attempt to assert the general (as the sphere of the ethical) over against the subjective (as the sphere of the aesthetic).⁴³ Without immoral irony, there can be no participation in the divine, since the hegemony of the general leaves no room for transcendence. In their common opposition to ethics, the inner kinship of aesthetic interiority and religiosity comes to the fore. Religious belief (or the leap into it) must necessarily remain incomprehensible. For “to understand” is to make universally accessible. The most radical counter-position to a (Hegelian) understanding of speaking as universalizing – in the sense of a universality created by thought – is embodied in Abraham’s silent resolution to sacrifice his own son. The later fanaticism of the fundamentalist believer has an antecedent in the sadism of the seducer fantasies of the early texts under discussion here.

41 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 115. 42 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 55. 43 In general, we have to doubt whether Kierkegaard ever described ethics as a possible autonomous sphere. Even the most explicit ethical formulation cannot do without an evocation of transcendental arguments. Not so in the aesthetic sphere. Although a permanently “aesthetic existence” is not possible for Kierkegaard, his pseudonymous authors (and these are decisive) describe this sphere as largely autonomous.

2 Must We Aestheticize? Indeed, it seems as if the time of consensus, with its shrinking public space and effacing of political inventiveness, has given to artists and their mini-demonstrations, their collections of objects and traces, their dispositifs of interaction, their in situ or other provocations, a substitutive political function. Knowing whether these “substitutions” can reshape political spaces or whether they must be content with parodying them is without doubt an important question of our present. Jacques Rancière⁴⁴

The central role of irony in Friedrich Schlegel’s elaboration of an independent aesthetic discourse already led to charges against him, anticipating today’s reproach of an “aestheticization of discourse.” Without this “aestheticization” of domains of discourse and action, it is impossible to grasp how irony could become appealing beyond aesthetics. In Schlegel’s conception, irony goes beyond the limited field of rhetoric precisely to the extent that his theory of language considers reality to be linguistically configured. Formerly understood as a trope, irony benefits from these discursive shifts and can subsequently be considered the emblematic expression of several (Romantic, modern, post-modern) eras. This also accounts for why, after this moment, irony can no longer be understood independently of its sociological dimensions without, however, being reducible to them. This all-pervasive aestheticization is not merely a one-time beautification, one that would also make visible what the scandal of the “Apprenticeship for Manhood” chapter in Lucinde really is. As noted, the novel’s frivolities obscure the real sacrilege committed by Schlegel, namely to have self-consciously and confidently demonstrated an independent, Romantic, and therefore, in this context, aesthetic teleology. For it is only through the female Lucinde, who has “a decided bent for the romantic,”⁴⁵ that Julius’ paintings acquire a soul such that “it really seemed that he had surprised the fleeting and mysterious moment of the most intense being with a silent magic and seized it for all eternity.”⁴⁶ For Julius, the production of something like reality only takes place aesthetically, which shows the existential stakes of his “romanticizing”: “He, too, recalled his past, and by telling her about it saw his life for the first time as a connected whole.”⁴⁷ Romantic “telling” or narrating thus names an increasing identification of life with the novel, such that there is no longer any difference between

44 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity Press, 2009), 50. 45 Schlegel, Lucinde, 98. 46 Schlegel, Lucinde, 102. 47 Schlegel, Lucinde, 98.

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life and art. The artistic process of narrative association becomes the only way to produce a biography that is in any way coherent: Just as his artistic ability developed and he was able to achieve with ease what he had been unable to accomplish with all his powers of exertion and hard work before, so too his life now came to be a work of art for him, imperceptibly, without his knowing how it happened.⁴⁸

The addition “without his knowing how it happened” may very well mark the decisive difference between Schlegel and many of his critics. We would be severely underestimating the provocative potential of Lucinde if we read this “romanticizing” merely as a kind of “aestheticizing” that (illegitimately) applies aesthetic principles to a non-aesthetic domain, i.e. to an anaesthetic ethical reality. If we assume, in contrast, that there is a narrative component in every constructiveformative process, then there is no longer any point in talking about a “post facto aestheticization.” This point, however, is in fact often ignored in (moralizing) discussions of irony. We first have to discover, then, what the content and heuristic value of the polemic use of “aestheticization” – in the sense of an external beautification – is. Put critically: what are the unquestioned, perhaps unjustified art-theoretical or even contradictory epistemological presuppositions of such a polemic? We shall see that the reproach of post facto aestheticizing frequently made in connection with irony considerably limits the conceptual purview. Instead of understanding irony itself, various critics of aestheticization have considered irony in terms of a philosophy of history and prematurely judged it on that basis.

2.1 “Aestheticization” as a self-fulfilling prophecy The clearest and most blatant instances of this sort of historico-philosophical amalgamation of irony and aestheticization can be found, in ever-new variations, in the work of Odo Marquard.⁴⁹ His argument, in short, is the following: Kant’s “turn to aesthetics”⁵⁰ in the Critique of Judgment was a first break with an alleged philosophical tradition of enmity toward artists. Kant’s dubious solution for the tension or latent conflict between his first two Critiques, according to Marquard, 48 Schlegel, Lucinde, 102. 49 My discussion here focuses on his Transzendentaler Idealismus – Romantische Naturphilosophie – Psychoanalyse (Cologne: Dinter, 1987) and the collection of essays published under the title Aesthetica und Anaesthetica (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1989). 50 Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, 137.

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is to conceive of artistic symbols as sensual images of morality.⁵¹ This opened the door to an exaggerated subjectivism, a subjectivism that thought itself capable of avoiding any engagement with Being and history by emphasizing the I, the medium in which the transition from Being to history takes place. It is only logical, then, for the philosopher of history to perceive decay everywhere he looks. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud: they all powerlessly privilege the drives and, in Marquard’s diagnosis, turn “the duty to fail” into an “inclination to fail.”⁵² This leads to a “rejection of the everyday and of the day generally – a turn to the night, to the time of sleep and of dreams, which are seen as the authentically human time,”⁵³ i.e., ultimately, a turn to sickness and gloom as expressions of a dominant death drive. In Marquard’s explicit statements on irony, we easily recognize paraphrases of Hegel and Kierkegaard, for example in his criticism of any aesthetic attitude or position. According to Marquard, such an attitude, such an aesthetics of failure, flees reality and seeks Nothing. Irony, then, is the means of putting this attitude into practice, for only irony can establish Nothing as an effect.⁵⁴ What becomes apparent here is the two-fold shortcoming, both aesthetic and philosophical, of grand theses in the philosophy of history. On the one hand, Marquard does not recognize the specificity of the aesthetic, a historical specificity that cannot be reduced to a mere theory of art. On the other hand, he is unable to appreciate the innovations of the early Romantics. In contrast to Marquard, Karl Heinz Bohrer has rightly insisted on the necessity to distinguish between “philosophy of art” and “aesthetic theory.”⁵⁵ A literary studies perspective, which operates more with aesthetic sensitivity than with abstract periodizations, makes it possible to read early Romantic theories and

51 Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, 139. 52 Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, 189. 53 Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, 189. 54 Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, 192–193. 55 Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetische Theorie: Das Problem der universalistischen Referenz,” Das absolute Präsens: Die Semantik ästhetischer Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994, 121–142). To agree with Bohrer’s criticism of a specific form of a (residually) idealist philosophy of art does not, of course, mean agreeing with his general criticism of philosophy. That is why I do not proceed from an “aesthetic” criticism of the philosophy of history to a rejection of philosophical aesthetics as a whole. Specifically, I will demonstrate how the theory of language in early Romanticism and, even more explicitly, in Nietzsche presents us with a philosophical analogue to the Romantics’ aesthetic power of innovation. On the limits of idealist aesthetics in this context generally, see Peter Bürger, Zur Kritik der idealistischen Ästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983).

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aesthetics as more than derivatives of idealist philosophy. The more the aesthetically as well as philosophically innovative character of early Romanticism is understood, the more the criticism of “aestheticization” directed against it radically changes its meaning. Talk of art’s conciliatory and pacifying intentions only makes sense in the idealist realm. Thus we read in the “Oldest Systematic Program” (which is now attributed to Schelling rather than to Hegel) that “poetry will gain a higher dignity” by becoming “again what it was at the beginning – the teacher of humanity.”⁵⁶ In this way, poetry continues to function rationally and ultimately continues to function as a stand-in for reason. In Schlegel’s “Discourse on Mythology,” which is often read together with the “Program” as an expression of the Romantics’ attempts at reactualizing mythology, there is, in contrast, an important aesthetic difference that changes both the argument and the organization of the essay: For this is the beginning of all poetry, to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the original chaos of human nature for which I know as yet no more beautiful symbol than the motley throng of the ancient gods.⁵⁷

It must be stressed that the “Discourse on Mythology” is integrated “in an aesthetic discourse, not a historical or historico-philosophical one.”⁵⁸ In Schlegel’s heaven, irrational chaos reigns. The gods appear only as the confused mass of a motley throng and are for that reason unfit to serve as symbols in the classical sense. Just as he quotes the classicist conception of symbol only by refraction – the chaos of divinities precisely does not serve the representative function of presenting human confusion – Schlegel, in this radical phase of early Romanticism, undercuts the very discourse of mythologization in which he ironically participates. Schlegel’s conception of aesthetics, which he articulates by marking his differences with Schiller, is of particular interest here: “There is no error more dangerous for art than to look for it in politics and universality as Schiller does.”⁵⁹

56 “The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism,” in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–5, here 4. 57 Schlegel, “Dialogue” 86. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Metaphorik und Häresie: Die romantische Entstellung des Geistes,” in Die Grenzen des Ästhetischen (Munich/Vienna: Hanser, 1998), 58– 88, esp. 62–65. 58 Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Friedrich Schlegels Rede über die Mythologie,” in Mythos und Moderne, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 52–82, here 57. 59 Quoted in Bohrer, “Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetische Theorie,” 129.

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Bohrer summarizes the opposing points of view: “Whereas the sentimentalist utopian (Schiller) aimed back from literature at the utopia of the human being, the modern maker of myths aimed back from the human being at the objective artifact.”⁶⁰ The concept of aestheticization as reconciliation is thus more likely to be found in the idealist Schelling and the Enlightenment thinker Schiller than in the early Romantics to whom it is usually attributed. When (early Romantic) aesthetic theory breaks with traditional philosophy, it does not just vaguely suspend philosophy’s traditional criticism of artists. Rather, it does away with the “ageold legitimization of the beautiful by the true (Plato’s Phaedrus).” And only then can the symbolic paradigm of art be overcome. Only then can the term “symbol” (at least where it is not replaced by terms like “arabesque,” “allegory,” etc.) stand for more than a felicitous balance of form and content. There is of course no need for such a differentiation if, like Marquard, one understands aesthetics generally to be a doctrine of reconciliation in disguise and art to be a means of anaestheticization. From that perspective, any attempt at understanding aesthetic questions as generally artistic must appear as “aestheticization” in the sense of a merely external beautification, as fleeing from the demands of history or the prosaic everyday to the counter-reality of art and the world of beautiful semblance. In contrast, Jacques Rancière has sought to understand aesthetic processes according to their contributions to various “distributions of the sensible.” From this perspective, it becomes clear that talk of a “post facto aestheticization of reality” is not only misleading but also prevents us from understanding how the modern “aesthetic regime of art” functions. For within this regime, the perception of reality is irreducibly aesthetic and thus, at the same time, discontinuous. Aestheticization thus understood necessarily has political implications: Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible which defines the common of a community, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals.⁶¹

According to Rancière, the origin of the aesthetic regime of art can be traced back to Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education. The aesthetic regime demonstrates the political dimension of art “because it defines that which comes within the province of art through its adherence to a sensorium different to that of domination.”⁶²

60 Bohrer, “Friedrich Schlegels Rede über die Mythologie,” 73. 61 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 25. 62 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 30.

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In this vein, we can read Schiller’s aesthetic reflections as implicitly criticizing conditions in post-revolutionary France. Even if Schiller does not revisit the explicit political reference he makes at the beginning of the Letters, he places the dialectic of two social classes – the creative power of the educated classes against the sensual passivity of the classes that can be shaped – in parallel to the problem of artistic production. Harmonizing society is a goal to be pursued through the reconciliation of aesthetic material and an intellectual will that imposes form. Schiller favors another, truer freedom to the abstract freedom of the French Revolution, a revolution conceived of by a bunch of socially uprooted intellectuals, a revolution whose abstract freedom leads to chaotic results: Both the material constraint of natural laws and the spiritual constraint of moral laws were resolved in the higher concept of Necessity, which embraced both worlds at once; and it was only out of the perfect union of those two necessities that for them true Freedom could proceed […] [I]t is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once.⁶³

Mimetic imitation of Greek Antiquity, which could still happily derive its ideal from nature, allows Schiller to outline the modern production of the unity of the faculties – modern insofar as it belongs to an epoch that can derive its ideal only from art. Against this background, both the aestheticist continuum conjured by Marquard, stretching from Kant and Schiller via the Romantics to postmodernism, and the differences noted by Bohrer between the “sentimentalist utopist” Schiller and the “modern maker of myths” Schlegel, take on a different aspect: even if Romanticism’s aesthetic transgressions contradict time and again the conciliatory character of its aesthetic starting points and even if its poetic ludic drive pushes it further than is appropriate for the purposes of a successful harmonization, both Schiller and Schlegel remain orientated toward a utopia.

2.2 Romantic avant-garde Judging Romantic aesthetics is made more difficult by the possibility that there is a utopian promise inscribed in every aesthetic experience. Moreover, not the least of the functions of the sublime, which Kant conceived of as a Geistesgefühl, a “feeling of the mind,” is to acquaint the human being with another faculty in addition to reason and the understanding, namely, with “the imagination,” as

63 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 109 (Fifteenth Letter).

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Paul de Man has shown.⁶⁴ The Critique of Pure Reason situates the decisive role the imagination plays between the passivity of sensitivity and the spontaneity of the understanding. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant elaborates in more detail two mediating faculties or powers: on the one hand, the power of judgment, which mediates between the pure, spontaneous cogito and practical reason; on the other, the power of the imagination, which mediates between receptive sensibility and organizing understanding. The imagination is symbolic in two ways. Just as the poet can be understood as a creator of symbols,⁶⁵ so too can “the ‘free play of the imagination’ serve as the symbol of the ‘free lawfulness’ of practical reason.”⁶⁶ This clarifies the stakes of the Romantics’ bit-by-bit questioning and dissolution of the distinction, clearly outlined in Kant, between fantasy and imagination in the wake of Fichte’s thinking in terms of production. Novalis’ declaration, “The more poetic, the more true,”⁶⁷ underlines the productive role of the imagination in the emergence of knowledge and, by aestheticizing this insight, tends to abolish any sharp distinction between understanding and imagination. This conception of a “creative imagination,”⁶⁸ which results from blending normal sense perception and imagination, is symptomatic of the way thinking works in the aesthetic regime – and of the aestheticization particular to this regime, which sees the imagination as “generative and productive.”⁶⁹ 64 On this point, see Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” Aesthetic Ideology, 70–90, here 76. And compare Lyotard’s postmodern view in The Inhuman: “the sublime is none other than the sacrificial announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field” (The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 137). In this book in particular, Lyotard emphasizes the importance of the imagination, the faculty of presentation, in Kant’s complex architecture of the faculties. 65 According to the famous §53 of the Critique of Power of Judgment, the “art of poetry […] expands the mind by setting the imagination free and presenting, within the limits of a given concept and among the unbounded manifold of forms possibly agreeing with it, the one that connects its presentation with a fullness of thought to which no linguistic expression is fully adequate, and thus elevates itself aesthetically to the level of ideas” (5:326). 66 Cf. Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, 105. 67 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, 647. 68 In Romanticism, this “creative imagination” is identified with what we think of as “fantasy” on the basis of a particularly charged conception of “imagination.” Oliver Kohns has shown how, already in Kant’s early writings, the blending of sensibility and imagination is conceived of as normal and even, in the Critique of Pure Reason, as necessary. Die Verrücktheit des Sinns, 60. The transcendental character of self-affection also implies “a new conception of the I. Imagination is no longer something external to the I, something that could ‘seduce’ the I” (Die Verrücktheit des Sinns, 64). 69 Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology, trans. Gerrit Jackson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 5. Going back as far as Descartes, Menke,

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The early Romantics are thus quintessential representatives of what constitutes our aesthetic regime of art to this day. We must keep in mind, though, that the “becoming-sensible of all thought and the becoming-thought of all sensible materiality” is not necessarily to be understood in terms of a successful reconciliation.⁷⁰ Instead, the aesthetic theory and practice of early Romantic modernity essentially, and in ways entirely its own, exceeds idealist theories of art. This is particularly true of its attempts  – which of course are prominent in Schlegel’s work, too, especially after 1800 – to employ the objects of art to mediate social contradictions. The ethical and/or anthropological elements of the early Romantics’ discourse cannot be sidelined as aestheticist eccentricities but are a typical moment for the aesthetic regime of art. This moment is the promise hidden in every experience of art, in every choc d’aistheton, the promise that there are forms of experience entirely different from the ones we are familiar with. It is at the same time the condition of possibility for avant-garde projects and their notions of a different life beyond activity and passivity, of a medial life as art. The aesthetic imperative they aim for time and again is not a category mistake (say, a confusion of reality and aesthetic fiction), for which the Romantics could be reproached. Rather, their aesthetic imperative constitutes a fundamental insight into a structural moment of the experience of art and reality.⁷¹ The concept avant-garde⁷² thus has to be redefined to include this sense of extending artistic practice to the concrete life-world. Beginning with the aesthetic deployment of even the most everyday objects, the avant-garde is the attempt to abolish the delimitations previously enforced between two allegedly noncommunicating spheres. Peter Bürger has given a description of this phenomenon in the case of surrealism,⁷³ a movement whose attempts at linking aesthetic like Rancière, considers the “antithesis of passivity and activity” to be misleading: “This double conceptual inadequacy – of linking the concept of passivity with sensibility and the concept of activity with the intellect – are both rooted in the operation of the imagination. The imagination belongs to the domain of sensibility, for it is incapable of endowing its ideas with any representational capacity or its images with any cognitive capacity. At the same time it is not just purely receptive, the mere imprint of an impression” (5). 70 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 41. 71 According to Niklas Luhmann, Romanticism replaces the ontological master distinction between Being and non-Being with that between finite and infinite and at the same time begins to play with “reality” (Luhmann, “Eine Redeskription ‘romantischer’ Kunst,” in Systemtheorie der Literatur, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller [Munich: Fink, 1996], 325–344, here 336–337). 72 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have good reasons to cite the Romantics as the first avant-gardists; see The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 73 Cf. Bürger, Peter, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).

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and ethical or everyday practices both inherit and elaborate on early Romantic conceptions of art. Both “artistic currents” share the dream of life not in art but as (the experience of) art, the dream of a life of intensity whose every moment reveals intensified aesthetic experiences. This parallel also reveals, beyond philosophy and the history of theory we have examined so far, new aspects of the Romantics’ potentiation of reflection in the life-world. This potentiation is not a Hegelian reflection of reflection as determination but rather a potentiation of reflection in the sense of discovering relations of forces. The aesthetic dream not only means that everybody can have their fifteen minutes of fame – it also means that everyone must be creative at every moment of life. What is behind these aesthetics dreams, behind the idea of an aesthetically regulated thinking, is the social dream of abolishing the (class) separation between active artist and passive recipient. It is the political dream of creating, through play, truly human conditions. Yet this dream is at the same time ironically refracted: even the melancholia that comes with knowing that the equality of all human beings is only the result of (ironically) positing an isolated I is romantic. We’ll have occasion to return to these reflections when we discuss how irony emerges in ethical personifications and disguises (e.g. the ironist as flaneur or dandy); we will also see then how this oneiric edifice collapses. For the moment, however, it is important to emphasize that Schlegel’s programmatic statements on universal poetry must not be misunderstood as the ideas of an eccentric obsessed with art. Rather, these statements are among the first formulations of a paradigm for producing and experiencing art that remains in force for two centuries.

2.3 Expanding the zone of aestheticization Early Romantic semontology had to wait for Nietzsche to give it both a rougher and more radical form; only then does it make its theoretical breakthrough and achieves practical popularity. Nietzsche applies his concept of rhetoric to language in general and subsumes the rather vague category “life” under his specific concept of aesthetics. He, too, does not simply inherit a kind of aestheticist understanding of art; he undercuts modernity’s neat theoretical and practical distinctions between separate spheres with an explicit philosophy of language.

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“Rhetoric is more honest because it recognizes deception to be a goal.”⁷⁴ The notion of rhetoric’s superior honesty is aimed both against fundamental presuppositions of metaphysics – the Platonic search for true episteme as opposed to rhetoric’s sophistic will to doxa – and against Nietzsche’s own prior philosophy. As early as The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche attempted a turn away from Plato, yet the book’s inherent dualism of Apollonian semblance and Dionysian essential ground prevented him from articulating it: “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further something is from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in illusion as the goal,”⁷⁵ Nietzsche notes in 1871, even before he turns to the study of rhetoric. That is why the two worlds doctrine of the Birth of Tragedy still implies a conventional model of beautiful semblance and post facto aestheticization – as if (ironic) language could be merely ornamental. Later, Nietzsche will abolish the world of semblance along with the real world. Inscribed in the rhetoricity of language, in Nietzsche’s conception of rhetoric, is a positive conception of aestheticization as an always already aesthetic perception of the world. Ever the classicist, Nietzsche follows Aristotle here, for whom rhetoric is neither episteme nor tekhne but a dynamis that can be raised to the level of a tekhne. Nietzsche’s interpretation of dynamis as “force” is significant here. It picks up on Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric as the ability “to discover the persuasive facts in each case.”⁷⁶ Nietzsche concludes that the “force, which Aristotle calls rhetoric, to find and bring out in every thing that which is effective and impressive” is “at the same time the essence of language.”⁷⁷ This moves Aristotle closer to the Roman, Ciceronian rhetorical tradition that emphasizes, along with objective and reasonable argument guided by logos, the pathetic means that belong to a rhetoric of affect.⁷⁸

74 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, in: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden [KSA], ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: dtv, 1988), vol. 7, 758, fragment 32[14]. 75 Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, ed. Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 52. 76 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. II, 1355b, 2154. 77 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Lecture Notes for the Summer Semester 1874 [“Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik”], Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe [KGW], ed. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari et al., vol. II.4, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1995), here 425. 78 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Le détour (Nietzsche et la rhétorique),” Poétique 2 (1971), 53–76. I elaborate on the connection between pathos and logos or reflection in “Von Formeln und Formen des Pathos – ‘bei Gelegenheit’ von Goethes ‘Über Laokoon,’” Bewegte Erfahrungen: Zwischen Emotionalität und Ästhetik, ed. Anke Hennig et al. (Berlin/Zurich: Diaphanes, 2008), 41–54.

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Nietzsche’s rare explicit treatment of questions of rhetoric and phenomena like irony is thus due to the fact that these questions merge with other phenomena and come up at almost every turn in his works. For Nietzsche, language and rhetoric are structurally identical. What he observes in the Greeks’ excessive speeches (and later, in the context of his concept of power, in life itself) holds for language as well: language “no more than rhetoric refers to the true, to the essence of things, it does not seek to instruct but to transfer a subjective stimulation and supposition to others.”⁷⁹ This means that it is not “things” that enter “into consciousness but the way we relate to them.”⁸⁰ His attempt to think in an extra-moral sense amounts to a search for a discourse that is no longer structured teleologically by a dogmatic core of truth. In the eyes of the ironist who knows about the contingent configuration of truth, truth is rhetorically constructed and rhetorically deconstructable. Nietzsche defines such truth as a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropormorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, decorated and which, after lengthy use, seem firm, canonical and binding to a people: truths are illusions that are no longer remembered as being illusions, metaphors.⁸¹

To remain flexible (even if not to liberate oneself), new interpretations, originality, and productive conceptions of oneself are called for. Faced with the lethargy of allegedly eternal truths, all that is justified is the “artistically-creative subject.”⁸² Only a subject that plays ironically with the contingent meanings of given (linguistic) norms can, to a certain extent, resist the pressure to conform. And the fact that (rhetorical and linguistic) analysis reveals purely mental operations – if only allegedly so – to be subject to aesthetic conditions only serves to amplify the ironic potential of modernity’s epistemic divisions and systematic differentiations. Ethical distinctions can only be made, if at all, between successful and liberating self-interpretations on the one hand and interpretations imposed from the outside and hostile to life on the other, “for between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic attitude.”⁸³ As was the case for the early Romantics, epistemology and moral reflection condition one another as they emphasize their contingent-ironic formation in each new context.

79 Nietzsche, KGW, II.4, 425 80 Nietzsche, KGW, II.4, 426. 81 Nietzsche, Early Notebooks, 257. 82 Nietzsche, Early Notebooks, 259. 83 Nietzsche, Early Notebooks, 260.

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As early as in Friedrich Schlegel’s understanding of irony as ars vitae, as the “art of all arts, the art of living,”⁸⁴ we find signs of an intensification of Romantic universal poetry and of a dissolution of its limits. Yet it does not come into its own until Nietzsche explicitly and radically thinks the possibility of an aesthetic conception of the world. Nietzsche enacts what Schlegel and Novalis intimate in their fragments: Nietzsche’s “aesthetic attitude” consciously emphasizes the act of endowing something with meaning as a poietic act. His radicalization of the Romantics’ theory of language leads to a theory of the subject and of perception that allows him to conceptualize a correspondingly aesthetic conception of reality. This conception of reality is an affirmation of aestheticization insofar as it aggressively takes on the fundamental metaphoricity of our apperception of the world, a metaphoricity which today is articulated in a much less radical way and accepted almost universally.⁸⁵ Like the early Romantics, Nietzsche gained notoriety among his contemporaries less for his little-known reflections on language than for the far-reaching consequences of his reflections for ethics and cultural sociology. Nietzsche’s ironic questioning of metaphysics is only accessible by way of his rhetorical philosophy of language. The primary question here is: “Aren’t we allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate and object? Shouldn’t philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?”⁸⁶ Once these rhetorical questions have been asked, irony can become (ethically) concrete and materialize in lifestyles and figures such as the socio-historical types “dandy” and “flaneur.” In these disguises, the “ironist,” which Kierkegaard constructs as both a prophecy and provocative mirror-image of his superficial age, plays the most effective role.

84 Schlegel, KA, 2:143. 85 Cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. 272. 86 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35.

3 Masking Irony Listen to me! I am the one who I am! Above all, do not mistake me for anyone else!⁸⁷ Friedrich Nietzsche

Arguing against the “tendency of critics […] to regard irony as little more than a series of techniques and strategies,” Alan Wilde points out that irony, since Kierkegaard at the latest, manifests itself “as a mode of consciousness, an allencompassing vision of life.”⁸⁸ The features of the “ironist” first described in Kierkegaard’s dissertation also stand out when we look at the aesthete, the flaneur, and the dandy. According to the pattern discussed above in rhetorological and linguistic terms, irony’s comprehensive claim to validity and its increasing conquest of social terrain trigger shifts, nominal differentiations, and variations in the case of ethical irony as well. Those aspects that are critically discussed first in the context of irony eventually become general characteristics of an entire age. Their implementation is so complete or, more precisely, their immersion so smooth that they are rarely openly visible as manifestations of irony. In fact, culturally and historically differentiated transformations of irony partly came with the nominal disappearance of irony and therefore first have to be reconstructed. But how exactly does irony transform itself into its various aesthetic or aestheticist manifestations? How does irony, within only a few decades, change from a philosophico-linguistic construct of a few eccentric early Romantic aesthetes to become a matter of fierce controversy? To answer these questions, we have to show how and according to what inner logic Schlegel’s fragmentary, preliminary thoughts on irony – insights Hegel tried to banish from official philosophy in his accurate albeit ill-informed criticism  – are later picked up by a critical literary and artistic discourse more closely in touch with the currents of its time.⁸⁹ This, too, is nowhere more evident than in Nietzsche.

87 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 69–149, here 71. 88 Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 3. 89 In the second half of the seriously philosophical nineteenth century, figures on the boundary of philosophy and literature (the “aesthete,” “ironist,” “flaneur” or “dandy”) are hardly thematized in academic philosophical discussions. And the tension that had built up between the two domains (exemplarily in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or) almost led to a cessation of communication. In that sense, then, Hegel’s exclusion of an otherwise pervasive irony from the rational (history of) philosophy was successful. The middle of the nineteenth century also marks a shift in the

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3.1 An art of life According to Kierkegaard, to “compose oneself” and then to “poetically enjoy” one’s life are central features of the ironist.⁹⁰ In his dissertation, he claims that the reason why “Goethe’s poet-existence was so great was that he was able to make his poet-life congruous with his actuality. But that in turn takes irony, but, please note, controlled irony.”⁹¹ Yet as early as Either/Or, a radicalized understanding of irony does away with the distinction between real and poetic existence: there is no need for a “poet” to make two (separate) spheres “congruent.” The editor of The Seducer’s Diary can answer the question of the tautological structure of self-enjoyment (the seducer’s poetic surplus) with great precision: “The poetic was the plus he himself brought along. This plus was the poetic he enjoyed in the poetic situation of actuality […] This was the second enjoyment, and his whole life was intended for enjoyment.”⁹² Kierkegaard’s seducer experiences something similar to the pattern that Hegel disliked in Lucinde: the seducer’s “personality was volatilized, and he then enjoyed the situation and himself in the situation.”⁹³ For the “aesthete” (in Either/Or, the “ironist” has become “the one who lives aesthetically”), reality is no longer anything more than a mere occasion to finally drown in the poetic.⁹⁴ Still, Nietzsche is the first to attempt a coherent integration of the concept of philosophical life into a project of a philosophical ars vivendi.⁹⁵ His call for the discourse of irony that is also a dismissal, on the part of philosophy, of problems primarily concerned with the literary or the life-world. 90 Kierkegaard, Irony, 281 and 284. 91 Kierkegaard, Irony, 325. 92 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), part 1, 305. 93 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 305. 94 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 305. Despite the clear distinction Kierkegaard makes between the poetic Christian who lets himself be created by God and the ironist who fashions himself in the Greek sense of poeisis – “becoming a fool in the world – this the ironist actualized in his own way, except that he feels nothing akin to martyrdom, because to him this is the supreme poetic enjoyment” (Irony, 281) – both figures can be called on for a hermeneutics of poetic life. 95 Nietzsche’s theory of an art of life only makes sense in correlation with his transformation of morality into ethics. His philosophy of life, like that of his predecessors in Antiquity (Epicurus, the Stoics, etc.), is embedded in a skeptical ontology. To overlook this is to run the danger of reducing Nietzsche’s philosophical concepts to practical suggestions, to a ‘technique for life.’ One salient example of such a reduction is Alexander Nehamas’ reading of eternal recurrence as a “theory of the self.” See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Paradoxically, the practical non-applicability of Nietzsche’s radical “aesthetics of existence” seems to have no effect on the attraction it exerts. Cf. Richard Schacht, “On Self-Becoming: Nietzsche and Nehamas’ Nietzsche,” Nietzschestudien 21 (1992), 266–280, and,

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conscious formation of metaphors is not an expression of artificial arbitrariness but a precise ethical imperative to become “who you are.”⁹⁶ Thus spoke Zarathustra: “You should follow your own senses to the end! And you yourselves should create what you have hitherto called the World: the World should be formed in your image by your reason, your will, and your love!”⁹⁷ For such a philosophy, the question of presentation is not an external question. As he writes in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche sees himself as having “a lot of stylistic possibilities – the most multifarious art of style that anyone has ever had at his disposal.”⁹⁸ Like rhetoric, style is nothing external. Rather, it is a possibility of internal appropriation. Nietzsche ironically creates himself from the material he either comes across or has written himself. His books, which are always also books about the art of life, are all characterized by a formal problem, namely, a wavering between excess and the classical idea of coherence. Nietzsche employs a constructive stylization, one that has to be distinguished from a post facto idealizing aestheticization. He moves further and further away from transparent coherence, which is the precondition of general intelligibility. This stylization, because it is aware of the contingency of its undertaking, is ironic; in its insight that the self-image it produces could have been completely different, it is melancholic. Nietzsche’s styles multiply the precepts of the text through parody; the figure of Zarathustra is only one example of this. The chauvinist is another, a role that Nietzsche slips into time and again. Jacques Derrida uses this figure to analyze the stylistic strategies deployed by Nietzsche and to show how a deconstructive reading of the effects of the text, a reading aware of language and metaphor, runs counter to the author’s misogynist platitudes.⁹⁹ On the level of content, this has a corollary in the affirmation of acting, a decadent phenomenon, which Nietzsche often (with macho cynicism) opposes to half-hearted straightforwardness. This affirmation comes at precisely those points in Nietzsche’s writing where his thought is on a par with his insights and, ultimately, his style. What he praises as the Greeks’ “superficiality – out of profundity!”¹⁰⁰ he considers to be downright essential in women: “There are women who, however you may search them,

on Nehamas’ teacher Rorty, Daniel W. Conway, “Disembodied Perspectives: Nietzsche contra Rorty,” Nietzschestudien 21 (1992), 281–289. 96 This is the subtitle of Ecce Homo. 97 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1969), II.2, 110. 98 Nietzsche, Ecce homo, 104. 99 See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Stefano Agosti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 109 and 111. 100 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9.

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prove to have no content but are purely masks.”¹⁰¹ Or again: “Women are considered deep – why? Because you never get to the bottom of them. Women aren’t even shallow.”¹⁰² Yet the metaphors of depth and shallowness with which Nietzsche operates here are not his last word either. Ultimately, the metonymic quality of language leads his paradoxical theory – which he also defines as an ironic “philosophy of quotation marks”¹⁰³ – to abandon any conception of authentic subjectivity whatsoever. One of the notable achievements of the opening lines of Beyond Good and Evil is that they conceive of the connection between “woman” and “truth” quite differently: Suppose that truth is a woman  – and why not? Aren’t there reasons for suspecting that all philosophers, to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not really understood women? That the grotesque seriousness of their approach towards the truth and the clumsy advances they have made so far are unsuitable ways of pressing their suit with a woman? What is certain is that she has spurned them […]¹⁰⁴

Here, too, the dogmatists lack all virility: truth has left “dogmatism of all types standing sad and discouraged. If it is even left standing!”¹⁰⁵ The secret of an unassailable veritas, culturally associated with femininity, is the secret of life itself. After the death of the Christian master signifier, Nietzsche, especially in his écriture, performs the originary life-giving moment of semblance – although it is this very performance that counts and not any (un)conceivable (beautiful) semblance that results from it. Nietzsche’s mimetic approximation of what he dubs “feminine” blurs the lines between a quest for knowledge and a play of masks. When Nietzsche, the trained classicist, speaks of “masks” he does not simply establish a distant relation to the dissembling phenomenon of irony but rather revivifies its philosophical significance under a different name (yet with no less precision). In choosing Verstellung (dissimulation) over “irony,” Nietzsche, who is suspicious of irony’s Romantic connotations, goes back to Cicero, who had translated εἰρώνείαν as dissimulatio (“practice of dissembling”).¹⁰⁶ He thereby returns the term to a terrain that is relevant for epistemology and the philosophy of life without abandoning the level of reflection that had already served Schle101 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 152. 102 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,.153–229, here 159. 103 “Philosophie der ‘Gänsefüßchen,’” Nietzsche, KSA, vol. 11, fragment 37[5]. 104 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 3. 105 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 3. 106 M. Tullius Cicero, Academica, trans. H. Rackham, Cicero in Twenty-Eight Volumes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), vol. XIX, 406–659, here II.15, 486/487.

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gel as a means, occasion, and possibility for reconceptualizing “irony.”¹⁰⁷ And even Quintilian’s definition of irony in terms of a reversal – “something which is the opposite of what is actually said”¹⁰⁸ – is echoed in Nietzsche. Section 40 of Beyond Good and Evil asks the following question (which it answers in the affirmative): “Everything profound loves masks […] Wouldn’t just the opposite be a proper disguise […]?” The entire section reads like a self-description seeking understanding, and also contains a rare respectful reference to Socrates: “There are events that are so delicate that it is best to cover them up with some coarseness and make them unrecognizable.”¹⁰⁹ This topos once again recalls a wellknown figure, namely, Socrates’ mask of Silenus in Alcibiades’ description in Plato’s Symposium: unpleasant on the outside but filled with internal beauty. In Nietzsche, “masks” always have defensive connotations of “healing” and “protection:” Somebody hidden in this way – who instinctively needs speech in order to be silent and concealed, and is tireless in evading communication – wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander around, in his place, through the hearts and heads of his friends.[…] [A] mask is constantly growing around every profound spirit, thanks to the consistently false (which is to say shallow) interpretation of every word, every step of life he displays.¹¹⁰

If we leave Nietzsche’s elitist deployment of metaphors of depth aside, we can see the irony of masks not as a conscious mystification but as a protective and, above all, automatic reflex. Ultimately, this “pathos of difference” also functions as a contextual effect beyond the control of its vehicle. The desire for communication and agreement can only be maintained if it is ironically refracted. In what follows we will encounter an entire series of historical incarnations of ars vivendi along these lines.

107 Nietzsche seems not to have been familiar with Schlegel’s aesthetic irony. On his relationship with Romanticism generally, see Ingrid Hennemann Barale, “Subjektivität als Abgrund: Bemerkungen über Nietzsches Beziehung zu den frühromantischen Kunsttheorien,” Nietzschestudien 18 (1989), 158–181. 108 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), 9.2.44, 401. 109 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 38. 110 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 38–39. On this point, see Bernd Bräutigam, “Verwegene Kunststücke: Nietzsches ironischer Perspektivismus als schriftstellerisches Verfahren,” Nietzschestudien 6 (1977), 45–63.

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3.2 Aesthete, flaneur, dandy (Baudelaire) Dandyism is probably the best-known mode of aesthetic existence. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, it is difficult to assemble a coherent picture of the dandy from what are often contradictory (self-)descriptions and difficult to distinguish it from other historical manifestations of “stylized existence.”¹¹¹ Benjamin lists among nineteenth-century figures not just the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowed, but […] also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of a gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. It is also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades.¹¹²

The flaneur strolls as a private citizen and personality and is still capable of ensuring his separation from the masses. He strolls in the short-lived architectural phenomenon of the arcade, his “natural” terrain, according to Benjamin. The arcade’s “form of […] decay,” the “department store […] is the last hangout of the flâneur” who now “roam[s] through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city.”¹¹³ The dandy is exposed to similar dangers. And yet the two aesthetic modes of existence differ in important nuances. While the flaneur, too, is already “someone abandoned in the crowd,”¹¹⁴ he is not threatened by the masses. “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home,”¹¹⁵ we read in Baudelaire’s description of the ideal observing flaneur who remains incognito everywhere and thus has something left to preserve in the first place. As observer, the flaneur “is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’”¹¹⁶ Yet the flaneur is still an I that reflects the world within itself like a huge mirror, like a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness. Ultimately, therefore, the strolling observer enjoys himself, he “is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”¹¹⁷ In 111 In his reflections on dandyism, Baudelaire already tried to delimit the concept and to prevent misunderstandings: “Dandyism does not even consist, as many thoughtless people seem to believe, in an immoderate taste for the toilet and material elegance.” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 27. 112 Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997), 9–106, here 54. 113 Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire,” 54. 114 Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire,” 55. 115 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9. 116 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 10. 117 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9.

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a series of essays from the early 1860s entitled The Painter of Modern Life, the dandy Baudelaire describes, with some temporal distance, a rather different phenomenon, which he takes to be representative of modernity and thus capable of rendering modernity intelligible. Like Nietzsche in his conception of the mask’s protective function, Baudelaire in his essay “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant” interprets the artist from the perspective of convalescence: “convalescence is like a return towards childhood.”¹¹⁸ Starting from the comparison of the flaneur with a kaleidoscope, Baudelaire reflects on the possibility of recovering the child’s innocence, an innocence that would, nonetheless, require male organs and an analytical mind to express itself. For Baudelaire, there cannot be genius – the capacity for finding what remains, what is beautiful, especially in a modernity that is by definition fleeting – without combining these two elements. When Baudelaire analyzes the peculiar talent of his friend, the caricaturist Constantin Guys, he hesitates to call him an artist. “Dandy” is for Baudelaire a more precise description of Guys: “[T]he word ‘dandy’ implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world; with another part of his nature, however, the dandy aspires to insensitivity.”¹¹⁹ This refusal of empathy is the result of a mode of perception that no longer allows the one who perceives to capture the surroundings as unified and simultaneously differentiated. Instead of capturing a crowd concretized by whatever qualitative criteria, the solipsistic dandy is confronted with an anonymous mass and refuses to individualize the masses into a crowd. The dandy’s resistance to any form of empathy can be called his “counternature.” For Baudelaire, it is the dandy’s artificiality that makes him the bearer of modernity. This aesthetics of existence runs parallel to Baudelaire’s artistic search for the eternal in the most fleeting. The search for modernity must, however, not stop at enjoying constant change, at the flaneur’s stroll. Baudelaire thus famously calls for “extract[ing] from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, […] distil[ling] the eternal from the transitory.”¹²⁰ This delineates Baudelaire’s from a trivial understanding of the dandy. The dandy is not defined by an external beautification (of his clothes, for example) but above all by an ethics probably best designated as speculative. “For the perfect dandy,” externalities like impeccable clothing are “no more than symbols of his aristocratic superiority of mind,” mere means for “distinction.”¹²¹ Baudelaire’s pathos of distance conceives of the dandy as a typical phenomenon of transi118 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 7. 119 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9. 120 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 12. 121 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 27.

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tional periods. In Baudelaire’s thrice-untranslatable formulation: “Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence,”¹²² the dandy is the last fragment to preserve the glory of times past at a moment in which such glory cannot but appear as a skandalon. This is both the core of the dandy’s exaggerated “culte de soi-même” – Baudelaire describes dandyism as a religion, spiritualism, stoicism or mental gymnastics¹²³ – and the root of his heroism. The dandy has to exude coolness. The dandy is not to be swept up by fascination with the masses (as occurs with the flaneur). For this simultaneously ethical and aesthetic imperative of Baudelaire, coolness is the necessary precondition. Dandyism, in analogy with the heroic genius’s capacity for finding the eternal in the most fleeting of moments, is thus legible as an eternal attitude of resistance in “periods of transition.” The battle cry of dandyism is: “destroy […] triviality.”¹²⁴ A similar problem will become apparent in the great novels written from Cervantes to Flaubert and beyond, namely, the lack of heroes that can be described in literary ways. As early as in Balzac, we find a Parisian metropolis in which Lucien de Rubempré is no longer a hero but at most a dandy. As Benjamin writes, “For the modern hero is no hero; he acts heroes. Heroic modernism turns out to be a tragedy in which the hero’s part is available.”¹²⁵ But to Benjamin’s conclusion we must add the following: there is no longer anyone convincing enough to be cast in the role of the hero.

3.3 The economy of dandyism In spite of his fascinating descriptions, Baudelaire does not succeed in providing a historically precise definition of the “dandy” type with all the nuances specific to his age. He finds the dandy everywhere in history, whenever there are remnants of aristocracy confronted with the rise of democratic politics and its uniforming tendencies.¹²⁶ From a historical point of view, one has to object that it is in fact a very specific mechanism of political and economical transformation that contributed to the emergence of dandy fashion in the nineteenth century. It is not a coincidence that the dandy surfaces in England at the beginning of the indus122 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 28–29. 123 “[A] gymnastics designed to fortify the will and discipline the soul. In truth I was not altogether wrong to consider dandyism as a kind of religion” (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 28). 124 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 28. 125 Benjamin, “Paris of the Second Empire,” 97. 126 Cf. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 26; as examples, Baudelaire cites Caesar, Catalina and Alcibiades.

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trial age, when the aristocracy – unlike in France – was under less pressure to distinguish itself from the rising bourgeoisie by means of ostentatious luxury. What no revolution had achieved, the dandy Beau Brummell managed at George IV’s court: he set the style. As member of a generation that had seen the Revolution in France come and go, he did not seek with his style to recall the obvious pomposity of the old aristocracy but instead to present elegance with knowledge. The first dandy was more a proponent of clarity and rigor than one of over-boarding fashion innovations.¹²⁷

The legend of Beau Brummell has it that he kept three hairdressers – one each for the back of his head, for his temples, and for the curls on his forehead – and an additional tailor for the thumbs of his gloves. Moreover, legend has it that he took, on his own calculations, up to ten hours to get dressed – in order to then no longer waste a single thought on his appearance. Brummell thus played with a clear paradox: making the greatest effort to be inconspicuous or, inversely, to be conspicuous to everyone without any ostentatious luxury. In the terms of Balzac’s Treatise on Elegant Living, “The most essential effect in elegance is the concealment of one’s means.”¹²⁸ In Ulf Porschardt’s conception, Beau Brummell occupies a central place in the history of the construction of bourgeois identity. Interestingly enough, the section on dandyism in his book Anpassen [lit., to (make) conform] is entitled “decadence,” i.e. named after precisely the category that Baudelaire sought to confront with the dandy. And indeed, the dandy is hard to categorize.¹²⁹ He serves “alternately as idol and object of hatred for English Society; with him, the history of a conceptual confusion sets in.”¹³⁰ The dandy is seen as either decadent or, by conservatives, as a proponent of a certain Victorian stiff elegance. It’s certainly not wrong to interpret Brummell as a precursor to later dandies and eccentrics, situating him between the will to provoke scandal and the ideal of inconspicuous elegance. Yet it is not enough to reduce the dandy to a fashionable phenomenon, to his relationship with fashion. For the two judgments by English society do not really contradict each other. As the most important weapons in

127 Ulf Poschardt, Anpassen (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard, 1998), 133. 128 Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Elegant Living, trans. Napoleon Jeffries (Cambridge: Wakefield Press, 2010), 46. 129 His status as “rudimentary sign” (Barthes) also explains the view that Beau Brummel had a subversive effect on contemporary class privileges; cf. on this point, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 8. 130 Poschardt, Anpassen, 135.

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the arsenal of the “avant-gardist of taste,” “irony and cynicism”¹³¹ always imply a moment of aristocratic disdain for the fashionably new. That is why dandyism has to be understood against the background of its ambivalent relationship with fashion as the ephemeral commodity par excellence. Only if we stress the heroic attempt to resist this transience does the ironic alignment of the fashionable and the heroic make any sense at all. As early as 1855, twelve years before Marx would try to capture the same phenomenon in the concept of “fetishism,” Baudelaire registers a shift in the concept of the commodity at the Paris World Fair. This shift is a double one: with the onset of industrialization and the wide spread of mass-produced wares, the commodity character of objects increasingly comes into focus and, inversely, the visibility of individual labor diminishes.¹³² The fascination the dandy exerts equally on the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie ultimately stems from these transformations. If we modify Roland Barthes’ famous thesis that the fashion industry sounded the end of the age of dandyism, we could also see the dandy as “the redeemer of things, the one who wipes out, with his elegance, their original sin: the commodity.”¹³³ This is the new religion of the dandy, the raison d’être of the obvious fetishism of his clothes and, in the end, of himself. The dandy’s proprio-fetishism is thus a new form of economic cathexis. On the one hand, there is the dandy’s melancholic withdrawal of all interest in the outside world. In Freudian terms, libido is withdrawn into the ego, which gives rise to the dandy’s extreme narcissism. Yet at the same time, the dandy-ego also voids himself of all content: Beau Brummell is reputed to have delegated a question he was asked to his servant with the words, “Which of the lakes do we prefer?” The delegation of even his personal preference is an expression of his mask-like surface, of being nothing more than a character husk without individuality. Minimalism and the most extravagant wastefulness are the economic extremes that meet in the paradoxical utterances of the dandy. Minimalism is 131 Poschardt, Anpassen, 136. 132 This latter shift is where Marx and Haug pick up. See Haug’s call for ideological restraint: “It would be pointless and premature to describe this process in terms of a systematic theory for corrupting the masses. For the ideal of commodity aesthetics is to deliver the absolute minimum of use-value, disguised and staged by a maximum of seductive illusion, a highly efficient strategy because it is attuned to the yearnings, and desires, of the people” (Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Robert Bock [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 54). 133 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 48.

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here not simply a certain reserve in matters of fashion; it describes the core of the dandy’s demeanor: He has arrived at the minimum of wit, managing to take it, with felicity or pain, to an almost invisible point. All of his bons mots are founded on a single circumstance, the exaggeration of the purest trifles into something important […] their significance is so attenuated that ‘nothing lives’ between them and nonsense: they are suspended on the edge of the void and in their shadowy composition they are very close to nothingness […] His is truly the art of extracting something from nothing.¹³⁴

If conceived of correctly, the unity of understatement and arrogance can only be achieved by an ascetic minimalism. “Beau Brummell’s irony served the purpose of mystification,”¹³⁵ which endowed him, if we believe his first biographer, with a sphinx-like air. His answers were usually (and this is what really makes it possible to speak of Brummell’s irony) the opposite of what was expected from him, for “like all dandies, he loved astonishing even more than pleasing.”¹³⁶ The social success of Brummell’s arrogance is due to the soft masochism of a society willing to be dazzled, seduced, and violated in its moral principles. The dandy’s impassibilité, his coolness, thus appear sadistic. It is through irony that Brummell finds his role in society. These comportments and inclinations easily refer us to the close relationship between the dandy and the (Kierkegaardian) seducer. Both maintain a stance of ironic indifference toward sex, at least over long periods. Both radically prefer the mentally or spiritually sublimated enjoyment of this incognito to any kind of physical sensation of pleasure. To understand this, we can again refer to Nietzsche, according to whom [t]he price of being an artist is that one feels what all non-artists call “form” to be content, to be “the matter itself”. Certainly, this places one in a world turned upside down: for now content becomes something merely formal – including our life.¹³⁷

We find thoughts that point in that direction among the dandyistic theoreticians of the art of life even earlier in the nineteenth century, especially when they talk

134 Quoted in Agamben, Stanzas, 52. It is no coincidence that the terms applied to Brummell are Romantic ones (wit, invisibility, nonsense, etc.). 135 Hiltrud Gnüg, Kult der Kälte: Der klassische Dandy im Spiegel der Weltliteratur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 23. 136 Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, Vom Dandytum und von G. Brummel (Nördlingen: Greno, 1987), 78. 137 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207.

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about irony. D’Aurevilly, for example, defines irony as art, as the art of life: “Irony is a talent that allows you to dispense with all others.”¹³⁸ The mental or spiritual enjoyment of what appears to be merely external, of the formal aspects of stylized life, is thus attributed to both the artist and the dandy. The ideal dandy naturally embodies what here takes shape as the sadistic impulse of ironic play to a greater degree than even the seducer. A dandy of historical significance, someone like Brummell, approximates a state of pure detachment and attempts a maximum of spiritualization.¹³⁹

138 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Vom Dandytum, 77. 139 That even a seducer can choose not to seduce is neither a contradiction in terms nor the result of the dandy’s fundamental smugness.

4 The Melancholic Subject A person cannot rid himself of the relation to himself any more than he can rid himself of his self, which, after all, is one and the same thing, since the self is the relation to oneself. Anti-Climacus¹⁴⁰

This chapter attempts to articulate a theory of the (always already ironic) subject, that is, a theory of the birth of the ego from the melancholic spirit of an ironic imitation doomed to fail. In this context, wit and allegory resurface in ethical form.¹⁴¹ The modern ego emerges or arises from the spirit of irony. But what exactly is this emergence, this arising? How, for example, did Flaubert’s character Madame Bovary emerge? How does Flaubert’s protagonist arise from reading? These questions and their relevance for literary theory have been the subject of much discussion, and they are central here as well.¹⁴² In this chapter, however, the question has to be put in more fundamental ethical terms: What is the original matrix out of which the melancholic subject is generated? And does this constitute an ironic triumph of a defeated subjectivity? In a way, the following reflections provide theoretical support for one of Kierkegaard’s central intuitions. Already in his dissertation, in thesis VIII, he claims that the subject is generated from ironic spirit and ironic practice. Irony, in this context, is “the lightest and weakest indication of subjectivity.” This first, vague, relationship between subjectivity and irony is taken a step further in thesis XV: “Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.”¹⁴³

4.1 On (Romantic) melancholia, gloom and despair A melancholic Hamlet becomes an emblematic figure already in the early Schlegel. Peter Szondi has traced this motif (perhaps going a little too far) and analyzed early Romanticism in terms of its awareness of a lack of world. Irony, he writes, counters this lack with an “attempt to endure a painfully difficult position by means of a renunciation and an inversion of values.” The ironic “reevaluation 140 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 17. 141 That is why the two structural moments of an irony no longer conceived of in purely rhetoric terms, metaphorical wit and, above all, metonymic melancholia, are ethical phenomena as well. 142 See below, part 3, chapter 4. 143 Kierkegaard, Irony, 6.

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renders his existence tolerable and induces him to dwell in the realm of the subjective and the virtual.” Irony, on Szondi’s reading, is thus barely distinguishable from a blind amor fati. Toward the end of his subtle analysis, Szondi takes recourse to a line of argument more familiar from staunch anti-ironists: Acceptance of his own incapacity prevents the ironist from respecting what has nevertheless been accomplished – therein lies its danger for him. The fact that through this acceptance he himself bars the way to perfection, while at the same time this acceptance continuously proves to be unbearable, finally leading nowhere – this is his tragedy.¹⁴⁴

Without skipping a beat, Szondi identifies the ironic artist with the distanced observer. Yet Szondi then makes the ironic artist responsible for his imperfection and thereby precludes any elaboration of the intrinsic connection between irony and melancholy as aesthetic and ethical phenomena. No one has examined the melancholic substratum of irony more thoroughly and in more detail than Kierkegaard, who reformulates the traditional topos of melancholy under the headings despair and gloom. Initially, these terms designate the dark aspects of aesthetic existence. As he proceeds in theorizing them, however, they lead straight to the center of the religious critique of his age. This is another reason why his reflections should not be seen as metaphysical reflections on a sort of eternal conditio humana but should be recognized instead for their incisive social criticism. The apparently oxymoronic formula of an analysis that is both ontological and specific to its time captures this characteristic of Kierkegaard’s speculations. Here as elsewhere, descriptions and analyses of the ironic and aesthetic are also to be read as descriptions and analyses of the flipside of enlightened modernity. Despite or perhaps because of his “Old Lutheran heritage” (Adorno), because of an ultimate affirmation of the given, Kierkegaard is very sensitive to the social changes under way in early capitalism. The critique of modernity contained in his discussion of melancholic irony is particularly striking when we compare Kierkegaard with Karl Marx. At first sight, Marx seems to be the exact opposite of Kierkegaard. And yet they are not only contemporaries but also share a Hegelian heritage. Marx’s conception of the “economic character mask” that is worn in private life derives from observations similar to those that led Kierkegaard to critique the mask-like incognito. Kierkegaard’s description of a widespread “despair

144 Peter Szondi, “Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony, with Some Remarks on Tieck’s Comedies,” in On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 57–73, here 68.

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that not only does not cause one any inconvenience in life”¹⁴⁵ but remains invisible in the bustle of the everyday has something of a critical prophecy about it. The ethical condition of his ironic figures is a kind of creeping loss of the self in which one is completely finitzed […] a number instead of a self […] Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Just by losing himself this way, such a man has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, indeed, for making great success in the world. Here there is no delay, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing; he is as smooth as a rolling stone, as courant as a circulating coin. He is so far from being regarded as a person in despair that he is just what a human being is supposed to be.¹⁴⁶

4.2 Theories of mood In Baudelaire’s definition, Romanticism was a new way to feel. If we consult his older contemporary, Kierkegaard, we can come to a more nuanced definition. The table of contents in Either/Or alone can be read as an analytical variation on the various facets of “mood.” The Diapsalmata that open the book initially describe a passive relationship: “I seem destined to have to suffer through all possible moods, to be required to have experiences of all kinds.”¹⁴⁷ In the “crop rotation” that follows, which is an attempt at a “theory of social prudence,” Kierkegaard notes, “it is primarily a matter of being able to use moods”¹⁴⁸ and of making the most of every moment of life. The activity of the subject is here limited to “hav[ing] control over one’s moods,” for to “produce them at will is an impossibility.”¹⁴⁹ In its most pointed articulation, the seducer’s irresistibility is defined as his dominance in the “kingdom” of moods.¹⁵⁰ Kierkegaard’s monastic seducer pithily rearticulates Schlegel’s Romantic imperative of developing a “capacity for attuning oneself” at will: “I am flexible, supple, impersonal, almost like a mood.”¹⁵¹

145 Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 34. 146 Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 33–34; on this parallel, see also Hinrich Fink-Eitel, “Kierkegaard und Foucault: Fragwürdige Gemeinsamkeiten zweier ungleicher Denker,” Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993), 7–27. 147 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 31. 148 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 298. 149 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 298. 150 Cf. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 400. 151 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 380.

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From the point of view of the ethical general, this must appear as a lack of substance. Yet this moment is also what, according to Karl Heinz Bohrer,¹⁵² distinguishes the Romantic perception of time; and the bored, fragmented subject in Kierkegaard’s dissertation is composed of a multiplicity of discontinuous moments: As the ironist poetically composes himself and his environment with the greatest possible poetic license, as he lives in this totally hypothetical and subjunctive way, his life loses all continuity.¹⁵³

The price of such fragmented consciousness is an insignificant “life [that] is nothing but moods.”¹⁵⁴ On the one hand, these moods constantly change. On the other hand, the ironist’s relative coherence is due entirely to a mood: “Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has. Boredom, this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this superficial profundity, this hungry glut.”¹⁵⁵ In Either/Or, the protagonist, A, presents himself as a man of pleasure who has seen it all and had enough of it. Only the most imaginative possibilities can still intrigue him. The idea that “[p]leasure disappoints; possibility does not”¹⁵⁶ is a variation on a theme that characterizes all later literature on decadence. At issue is not an increase in enjoyment but a different, cerebral pleasure obtained through mental categories. By means of fantasy, the subject tries to obtain a possible freedom from the modal categories of necessity and reality, which are both determined by universality. Fantasy and possibility are the cure for ironically induced boredom, yet they only accelerate the catastrophic dynamic of boredom. Just as hypertrophic fantasy tends toward irrationality or madness, so too does radicalizing the category of possibility lead to a pathological intensification of the ego. The hopeless search for the pleasure of boredom, “the hungry glut,” is a precursor of what Kierkegaard later calls “despair.” In the face of an existential void, both moods stand in close proximity. In Hegelian fashion, Kierkegaard takes the ironic disposition of modern Romantic humanity – according to Schlegel, we simultaneously feel finite and infinite – further, yet Kierkegaard cannot come to rest in Hegel’s philosophy of reason. The “fidelity to the thing” Benjamin discerned in 152 Bohrer, “Denn Gedanken stehn zu fern? Moderne aus dem Geist der Musik,” Die Grenzen des Ästhetischen, 37–57, here 43; cf. also 47–48. 153 Kierkegaard, Irony, 284. 154 Kierkegaard, Irony, 284. 155 Kierkegaard, Irony, 285. 156 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 41.

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the melancholic, the occasionally whiny fidelity to the unattainable “thing in itself” Hegel criticized in the Romantics, resurfaces transformed in Kierkegaard’s heroic faith. After all, the “self” is nothing but “the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself.”¹⁵⁷ From the very beginning, Sickness unto Death pulls out all dialectical stops and kills the Hegelian spirit with its own weapons. Hegel’s syntheses are blown apart by their dialectic: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.” In this anti-Hegelian dialectic, which rejects synthesis, the human being, according to one reading of irony, namely, the Romantic reading of irony as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, falls through the cracks: “Considered this way, a human being is still not a self.”¹⁵⁸ One might say that the communal religions of Antiquity and the secularism of modernity saw in the figure of the melancholic, above all, sadness, whereas the Middle Ages saw despair in the features of the melancholic. Climacus’ Protestant namesake amplifies the monkish features of acedia. He does so by strongly opposing Fichte’s supposition that the I posits itself (even if he does not explicitly mention Fichte’s name). In complete conformity with the Danish editor’s pointed individualism, Anti-Climacus holds that if the I posited itself, then despair could only be conceived of as the desperate tendency “to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form in despair to will to be oneself.”¹⁵⁹ Kierkegaard builds his phenomenology of an ever-restless subjectivity upon this existential fissure. The early Romantics’ radicalization of the post-Kantian philosophy of reflection or, put more simply in ethical terms, the ironic distance from the general holds for both the aesthetic and religious subject described by Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s analyses demonstrate that the early Romantic conception of reflection informs his concepts of mood, anxiety, and suddenness. Without this conception, the decisive categories of possibility and fantasy cannot but appear arbitrary. The human being’s disproportionateness lies in the reflexive mirroring of its self – which is nonetheless necessary for existence. Kierkegaard, of course, seems to be afraid of the critical courage of his own thought when he – the image of his creator – tries to imagine an ideal mirror stage and accuses the most-allegorized of objects, the mirror, of deception: “[F]or, in the highest sense, this mirror does not tell the truth.”¹⁶⁰ But had not the Romantics already dispensed with 157 Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 29. 158 Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13. 159 Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 14. 160 Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 37.

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unbroken reflection? The reflection produced by Romantic mirroring does not illuminate any teleologically secured path to the infinite. Rather, its productivity lies in the fact that it does not cease reflecting. Like this progression to reflected states of madness and irrationality, practically all the topoi Kierkegaard uses to describe irony in his dissertation can be seen as fallen heirs to Romanticism’s lofty (philosophy of) reflection. Kierkegaard’s attempt to think melancholy or gloom as fantastic hyperfunctions of reflection can be read, beyond his attempt to philologically ground himself in early Romanticism, psychologically. In this context, Giorgio Agamben has pointed out the surprising convergence of psychoanalytic theory both with medieval Aristotelian theories of the imagination and with Renaissance theories that build on a neo-Platonic, occasionally magical theory of pneuma. In the latter, “the phantasy (phantasikon pneuma, spiritus phantasticus) is conceived of as a kind of subtle body that, situated at the extreme point of the sensitive soul, receives the images of objects, forms the phantasms of dreams.” This definition then leads Ficino to develop a phantasmatic theory of love which, via troubadour and dolce stil novo poetry, revolutionized the western discourse of love as a whole. For Ficino, “[n]ot an external body, but an internal image, that is, the phantasm impressed on the phantastic spirits by the gaze, is the origin and the object of falling in love.”¹⁶¹ Inscribed on the face of the one infinitely in love are thus the traits of eternally melancholic desire, traits that can still be found in the Romantics’ love of the infinite. Melancholy and other unreasonable derangements of the mind are produced by an overactive imagination: Hippocrates thus speaks at one point of melancholics as the ones who step out of themselves, who are in ecstasy, and the use of the medial reflexive verb (εξισταμενοισι) points to thoroughgoing observations: the subject is not just captive to a will not its own, it is also the object of its own acting.¹⁶²

Thus is the effect of imagining oneself out of oneself. Its counterpart has been most beautifully described by Gaston Bachelard: “Imagination allows us to leave the ordinary course of things […] To imagine is to absent oneself […]”¹⁶³ The phenomenon of melancholia thus surreptitiously turns out to be tied to questions of producing and processing images. That is why the infinite, too, is

161 Agamben, Stanzas, 23. 162 László F. Földényi, Melancholie, trans. Nora Tahy (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1988), 19. 163 Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1988), 3.

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seen as phantasmatic. But where do the images fantasized by the “I” come from? Where does this “I” ultimately come from, and how does it obtain its fantasized properties?

4.3 Greek reciprocity It seems trivial to say that a good part of the human being can only be understood in relationship to his or her environment. That any ego is constituted under the influence of models is already evident from the etymology of the word “subject.” The ego can become itself only in subjecting itself to the forms around it. And even that isn’t a certainty. Every imitation is melancholic because imitation can never completely succeed. It is never really genuine. Every subject who is subject to its models becomes “I” only as another. Already “the first conscious experiences of childhood […] are not quite ‘genuine’. They always contain an element of imitation, play, wanting to be different.”¹⁶⁴ Let us take the following hints from Adorno’s Minima Moralia as our guide: Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. All its content comes from society, or at any relation from its relation to the object. It grows richer the more freely it develops and reflects this relation[…]¹⁶⁵

Adorno suggests a playful genesis of the ego from the spirit of creative mimesis that takes place as early as the infant’s first hazy attempts at imitation. In terms of an evolutionary theory of how the specific traits of the genus homo sapiens emerged, this child’s imitation can be understood as a technique of mimicry for survival.¹⁶⁶ The question raised above of how the face emerges is central here in more than one way. Instead of a notion of mastering facial expression, which suggests ultimate possession, I’d like to adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of reversibly “sliding into a face” which,¹⁶⁷ because there is no such thing as an individual without a face, can also be thought of as “sliding into individuality.”

164 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 153. 165 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 154, my emphasis. 166 On this point, cf., for example, Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 167 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 177.

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At the very beginning of her illuminating study Du masque au visage [From Mask to Face], Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux points us to the Greek prosopon, which names both the Greek actor’s mask and the real human face. The Latin persona perhaps also points to the function of the mask: per-sonare – to sound through.¹⁶⁸ Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two functions of the mask: Either the mask assures the head’s belonging to the body, its becoming animal, as was the case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case now, the mask assures the erection, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the body.¹⁶⁹

It is precisely this double logic that we can read in the Greek theater’s use of masks. On the one hand, there is the “primitive” effort to obtain a coherent image of oneself; on the other, the Greeks’ use of masks points the way for how the “mask” will function in later societies. What I would like to suggest here is that we not see the two logics as strictly separate. The formation of a coherent image of the body already contains the attached head’s super-codification and superelevation in terms of a face. This, then, would be a theatrical confirmation of what Nietzsche called the Greek “superficiality […] out of profundity.”¹⁷⁰ The classical Greek designation of face and mask with one and the same term is expressed in a missing phrase, a lacuna that comes as a surprise for us today and at the same time points to the question of irony: “The expression hypo tou prosopou, which would mean ‘underneath the mask’, is not attested.”¹⁷¹ The Greek aristocrat’s facial mask thus performs only the first two of the three functions of the mask as catalogued by Henry Pernet for the West: of “representation, identification and dissimulation, only the first two are present in the Greek mask.”¹⁷² Even the Greek actors of classical tragedy were identifiable, without dissimulation, as the heroes of the

168 Cf. Sibylle Krämer, “Verschwindet der Körper?” in Raum  – Wissen  – Macht, ed. Rudolf Maresch and Niels Werber (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 49–68, here 62. 169 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 181; on the category of “becoming-animal,” see also 176, where mystery cults’ simultaneous deployment of animals masks and drugs is explicitly cited. 170 Alexander Nehamas has detected this profound effect of masks in Socratic irony as well: “Irony seems to create a mask. It does not know what, if anything, is masked. It suggests depth” (The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 67). 171 Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 41. 172 Frontisi-Ducroux, Du masque au visage, 39; there also a reference to Henry Pernet, Mirages du masque (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1988).

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tragedy – for the duration of the performance (représentation).¹⁷³ And whenever, in later centuries, a certain cult of the actor, i.e. the first individual stylizations of the kind we admire in actors today, began to surface, a sure instinct seems to have prompted the elders to reject it as a sign of decadence. Beyond the theater, too, the Greek masked face seems to have fully represented its bearer. The eternal fascination with classical Greek antiquity lies in the fact that Greek aristocrats were able to reciprocally mirror and thereby produce their individuality. In the Greek universe, inner monologue makes little sense. Greek dialogs are always honest, even if they are part of the most intricate conspiracy, and they take place under bright light and face to face. This is of crucial importance for the inventor of the myth of Narcissus. The use of mirrors was for the longest time reserved for women, and the act of seeing another was of paramount importance insofar as the face could also simultaneously function as a mirror.¹⁷⁴ The speculative (primal) scene of ancient Greeks’ attempts to reciprocally guarantee each other’s individuality gives rise to two hypotheses. On the one hand, a group of men, however small, already manage to project themselves as beautiful individuals; on the other hand, this Greek mirror stage is still an intersubjective one.

4.4 Psychoanalysis: Lacan and Freud This hypothetical construction of a primal scene in which Greek aristocrats see their individuality mirrored in each other helps us to discern a decisive shift in how the meaning of “mask” (as ironic dissimulatio) can be understood. For the mask to function performatively, fashioning a coherent image of the body with an attached head/face is not enough. The triumph of the imaginary archaic pack of aristocrats is the playful repetition of a moment Lacan has described as a nonrecurring transitional stage: [T]he mirror stage is a drama […] [in which] the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what

173 The French représentation, as opposed to a séance in the cinema, marks the shift, in later conceptions of “performance,” away from the Greek understanding. In Greek theater, we may speculate, actors did not so much re-present as they did slide, for the time of a performance, into their masks. 174 In Frontisi-Ducroux’s terms, “visage-miroir.” Du masque au visage, 28.

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I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality – and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.¹⁷⁵

The triumph of the Greek concept of humanity can be understood as a variation of this illusion from early childhood.¹⁷⁶ The original Greek jocks may have thought of mirrors (or their precursors) as effeminate – their (self-)confirmation nonetheless was an imaginary one. The subject of the mirror stage is imaginary insofar as it originates in the imaginary space of the mirror image. The primal scene speculatively postulated here is to be conceived of as a reciprocal situation of mirroring that is not mechanically fixed but intersubjectively reflected and infinite. This reflective situation sets into motion a complicated dialectics of identification.¹⁷⁷ It does this insofar as deriving the self from an other reveals the originary impurity of any of the ego’s content. A supposedly pure (ego-)form can thus be said to be “impure” only insofar as we are no longer dealing with a purely physical image, no longer with a projection of a pure body surface,¹⁷⁸ including the head that goes with it, i.e. insofar as the Greek mask also fulfills the second function evoked by Deleuze and Guattari, namely, that of creating the face. It not only performs the fundamental unification of body and head, it also serves as a catalyst for the emergence of the individual, symbolic face. The becoming impure of the pure form of the body is predicated on an identification that is symbolic, linguistic, and, in Lacan’s sense of the term, dialectical as well. The purely imaginary fixation of the body in statues (by the Greeks, no less, as masters of sculpture!) is succeeded by the symbolic determination of a pure yet obviously never genuinely filled ego-form of the (psychological) face. These two theoretical approaches taken from cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis both point to an essential background of melancholy: desire 175 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” Écrits, 75–81, here 78. 176 On the distinction between illusion as necessary (because constitutive of the subject) and as mere error, see Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 48–49. 177 Lacan describes his in no way mythical mirror stage as prior to any identification: “The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being –still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence – the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation in the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” 76). 178 This description is a speculative interpretation of Freud’s definition: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Ego and the Id, in Standard Edition, vol. XIX, 26).

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never comes to an end. Although I cannot go into the details of Lacan’s theory of desire – as desiring the Other –¹⁷⁹ here, I can invoke a purely formal definition of desire from the Seminar of 1954/1955 that is particularly appropriate to the speculative reconstruction of a Greek initial situation I have in mind: I desire that. That’s impossible. Admitting that there is an I would immediately turn it into you desire that. I desire that means – You, the other, who is my unity, you desire that.¹⁸⁰

Instead of speaking of the despair of being oneself, we could reformulate Kierkegaard’s paradox and speak of the melancholy of desperately wanting to be one, that is, to skip the impossible contradictions of desire. What we find here are the limitations of the constructive content of masks discussed above. In Judith Butler’s terms: The mask thus conceals this loss, but preserves (and negates) this loss through its concealment. The mask has a double function which is the double function of melancholy. The mask is taken on through the process of incorporation which is a way of inscribing and then wearing a melancholic identification in and on the body.¹⁸¹

The figure of melancholy and the melancholic mask thus cross in two ways. On the one hand, subjects, constituted like masks, melancholically fail at complete individualization. On the other hand, as in the case of irony, the extension of a concept results in its dialectical-oscillating lapse into its alleged opposite: in the case of melancholy, this would be jubilatory identification. And indeed, every imitation is not only carried by the resigned melancholy that results from the impossibility of living up to one’s model. Quite the contrary, the paradoxical production of something like “character” can only be explained by an ironic excess of processes of identification (however divergent these may be). Thus Freud writes about his earlier text, “Mourning and Melancholia”: We succeeded in explaining the painful disorder of melancholia by supposing that an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is, that an object-cathexis has

179 “When I tell you that the desire of man is the desire of the Other, I am reminded of something in a poem by Paul Eluard that says ‘the difficult desire to endure’ (le dur désir de durer). That is nothing more than the desire to desire” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII, trans. Dennis Porter [New York: Norton, 1992], 309). 180 Lacan goes on to say “that here we have rediscovered that essential form of the human message whereby one receives one’s own message from the other in an inverted form” (The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 51). 181 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2006), 67.

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been replaced by an identification. At that time, however, we did not appreciate the full significance of this process and did not know how common and how typical it is. Since then we have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character’.¹⁸²

The “pharmacological paradox” of every “becoming-an-ego” is this: the ground of the ego’s possibility is at the same time what endangers it. For if, as Freud states a few lines later, “in the individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other,”¹⁸³ then we cannot assume an initial or original ego that could gather strength and “become more resistant to the influences of such identifications.”¹⁸⁴ The original imperative is thus more likely to be “I is to become” than Freud’s “Where id was, I [ego] shall be” – which makes sense only once these entities have been constituted.¹⁸⁵ The ironic dialectic ascent and descent of the ego from out of and into the same ground always returns. Time and again, we encounter the same descriptive model: The more aesthetic (or, later, literary) individuality has been elaborated, the more its eccentricity is endangered – as is often justifiably argued. The first individual in the history of philosophy is a case in point. What matters here is not the external, moral danger that eventually leads to the execution of the demonic Socrates but the inner dimension relevant to a theory of the (ironic) subject. For this dimension also describes a developmental scheme of irony as we find it in the life-world: first the childishness of the ego as yet becoming; second mature, potentiated individuality; third, the endangerment of individuality by unreason and madness.

4.5 The emergence of the self from the spirit of irony As we saw, the thesis that the subject emerges from the spirit and practice of irony figures already among the theses with which Kierkegaard prefaces his dissertation. Irony is “the lightest and weakest indication of subjectivity.” Kierkegaard does not determine human life to be humane only once irony has been attained

182 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 28. 183 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 29. 184 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 48. 185 Freud, New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis, in Standard Edition, vol. XXII, 79. Cf. The Ego and the Id, 56: “Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id.”

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without fixing the price of uncontrolled, undefeated irony: being stuck for good in a childish existence.¹⁸⁶ In any case, a life only becomes humane, worth living, through ethical irony, in and by means of the distance to itself and to others that the subject needs in order to be able to posit itself as its own subject in the first place. To summarize in Lacan’s words: The subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in by the image, the deceiving and realised image, of the other, or equally by its own specular image. That is where it finds its unity.¹⁸⁷

Every French child knows that the person is nobody (personne), and it did not escape Odysseus either. The cleverest of the Greek heroes, the one most conscious of his intelligence, sometimes saves his life only through self-denial.¹⁸⁸ In all of his adventures, the only thing that keeps him together is the mask of his name. What makes Odysseus, perhaps the first individual hero of western literature, so unique and unmistakable is his self-denial. It is the ethical analogue of Socrates’ epistemological wisdom, which consisted in knowing nothing. Philosophy that does justice to the subject thus begins not with Plato’s idealizations but with Socrates’ existentialist midwifery, which managed to trick those around him into becoming (Socratic) philosophers. In this context, Socrates’ condemnation as a demonic seducer of Athenian youth is merely external. The Socratic capacity of tricking children into a moral [moralisch] conscience and thus into a no longer ethical [sittlich] life is founded on his daimonion, which makes him the archetype of potentiated individuality. For Hegel, Socrates marks the beginning of a longstanding problem of an ethics of conscience that is still felt in the Romantic ironists’ hypertrophied freedom of the will.¹⁸⁹ Schlegel, for example, gives an ethical (as distinct from a rhetorical) definition, according to which “someone who has no daemon cannot have irony. This is, as it were, the potency of individuality.”¹⁹⁰ Kierkegaard’s

186 Cf. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 27 and 31. 187 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 54. 188 This is one of the central motifs in Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation of the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972). 189 I owe this reference to a seminar I co-taught with Juliane Rebentisch in Potsdam in the winter semester 2007/2008. 190 Schlegel, Sta, vol. 5, 64. The quotation is taken from Schlegel’s posthumous papers. Kierkegaard, therefore, was not familiar with it and noted independently: “The first [manifestation], of course, is the one in which subjectivity asserts its rights in world history for the first time” (Irony, 242).

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picture of Socrates is even more unambiguous. Socrates is described as an existentialist whose irony is situated at the edge of Platonic idealism: The daimonian was sufficient for Socrates […]; but this is a qualification of personality, but of course only the egotistical satisfaction of one particular personality. Here again Socrates proves to be one who is ready to leap into something but never in the relevant moment does leap into this next thing but leaps aside and back into himself.¹⁹¹

Through this “infinite albeit negative freedom […] Socrates’ position once again manifests itself as irony.”¹⁹² For “[i]nstead of speculatively setting this negativity to rest, he set it far more to rest in the eternal unrest in which he repeated the same process with each single individual. In all this, however, that which makes him into a personality is precisely irony.”¹⁹³ Irony can be said to be a quasi-existential condition because ironic questioning is the only constant of Socrates’ personality. Many who come after him cannot help but think that Socrates’ only way of obtaining a minimum of stability or coherence of character consisted in a quasi-vampiric irony, a parasitic reversal of the certainty his interlocutor had lost. In that sense, “irony was his position – more he did not have,”¹⁹⁴ as Kierkegaard writes when he describes Socrates as the first specimen of a subject that is hyper-reflective, aesthetically overbred and which risks disintegrating in its moods. The insight that irony aids in the constitution of subjectivity but simultaneously undercuts this subjectivity already applies to the Socratic subject. In the philosophy of history, we find an analogy to the always only ironic position of Socrates in the early Romantics’ unrestrained attempts to exceed the dialectical process, a process that abandons its origins in the Fichtian tension between I and not-I and continues to reflect autonomously and aimlessly. The inverse, positive aspect of Socrates’ exclusively ironic position is relevant as well. Personality only becomes possible thanks to the mental flexibility that comes with irony. An inner void – for Hegel and Kierkegaard, a “lack of substance” – makes it possible to detect in the Greek hypokaimenon what is later to become the subject. Whereas Socrates keeps on talking, his truth-loving method only ever tactically refers to his counterpart. Only the counterpart mirrors (his) contents and reflects them back onto him. In the twentieth century, linguistics turns this into a certainty that has nothing of Hegel’s “sense-certainty” about it: “I can only

191 Kierkegaard, Irony, 166. 192 Kierkegaard, Irony, 166. 193 Kierkegaard, Irony, 176. 194 Kierkegaard, Irony, 214.

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be defined by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone.”¹⁹⁵ In this sense, “Socrates” is the first personal pronoun in the history of philosophy. He is a medium, a means of conversation, and nothing else. Another formulation of Benveniste can serve to define his role: to provide the instrument of a conversion that one could call the conversion of language into discourse. It is by identifying himself as a unique person pronouncing I that each speaker sets himself up in turn as the “subject.”¹⁹⁶

What may have scandalized Socrates’ contemporaries seems today to be a linguistic commonplace. The I “has no value except in the instance in which it is produced […] the form of I has no linguistic existence except in the act of speaking in which it is uttered.”¹⁹⁷ Benveniste thus gives a description of something that Kant already had in mind with his “I think” that “must be able to accompany all of my representations.” According to Kant, “it is only because I can combine a manifold of given representations in one consciousness that it is possible for me to represent the identity of the consciousness in these representations itself, i.e., the analytical unity of apperception is only possible under the presupposition of some synthetic one.”¹⁹⁸ It is precisely this synthetic capacity of consciousness that is targeted by Kant’s Romantic successors. Hegel’s assessment of early Romantic irony contains very precise insights into the way every I functions. Irony, Hegel writes, garnering more effect than he may have hoped for, has to indiscriminately accompany all representations with its punctual I, and it floats freely above even the most disparate representations. The I self-reflexively communicates with itself in the manner it has learned from the mirror stage: ironically. The I thus always circles around its own ironic beginning and never leaves the orbit of irony. Our contemporary identification of Socrates’ daimonion as an inner structure of conscience, and no longer as the voice of an alien god, reveals that both the emergence of the I and the potentiation of the I describe one and the same (ironic) movement. And just as “subjectivization” in Kierkegaard cannot be separated from a demonic element inherent to it, so too is there in Freud a genesis of the ego

195 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 218. 196 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 220. 197 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 218. 198 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 132–133.

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from out of the spirit of melancholy: “Ego” and “super-Ego” emerge together and are thus always tied together in a dialectic never to be concluded. This becomes clear in the tension already pointed out within Freud’s own theoretical edifice. The melancholic of “Mourning and Melancholia” presents us, as Freud suggests in a formulation that recalls Luhmann, with “one part of the ego [that] sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object.”¹⁹⁹ What Freud here calls conscience is articulated in more precise terms in the discussion of melancholy in The Ego and the Id: “[I]n melancholia, the object to which the super-ego’s wrath applies has been taken into the ego through identification.”²⁰⁰ Yet the same flaw applies to the concept of “identification” that also characterizes the (initially synonymous) concept of cathexis. In this case, too, Freud makes a distinction between primary identification, which takes place prior to any lasting separation between ego and alter ego, and secondary identification in an attempt to establish a clear identification. Yet both the transitive and the intransitive meaning of identification stand in need of a supplement: the individual can only be identified once it identifies with the other. It is however impossible to speak of intransitive self-identification as long as there is no identified ego. And even the concept of identity, so much is clear, is ill-suited to the heterogenetic ego. Lacan showed the imaginary emergence of the individual to be an “armor,”²⁰¹ and the individual becoming-face turns out to be a tainting symbolical identification.²⁰² Delusional, phantasmatic (over-)identifications are thus already built in, as it were, as possibilities of the original process of identification. Jacques Derrida has attempted a “redefinition of the I (the system of introjections) and

199 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Standard Edition, vol. XIV, 247. Luhmann makes this point in the following terms: “Individuals are self-observers. They become individuals by observing their own observations” (Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 93). Only by way of their reciprocal constitution, i.e. a “second order observation” do Id, Ego, and Super-ego become distinct psychological instances or objects. Cf. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2, trans. Rhodes Barrett (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 200 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 51. 201 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 76. 202 I adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s hypothesis according to which “language is always embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in relation to the signifiers in progress and subjects concerned. Choices are guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a common grammar is never separable from a facial education. The face is a veritable megaphone” (Thousand Plateaus, 179).

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of the incorporation fantasy.”²⁰³ His reflections circle around another concept conceived according to an ironic logic, namely, that of the crypt²⁰⁴ as a “place comprised in another but not strictly separated from it.”²⁰⁵ Interpreting this enclosed space (for, forum) as conscience, Derrida hints at a connection between phantasm and conscience, at the very phantasmatic conscience invoked above to define what for Socrates’ contemporaries was more likely a crazy or psychotic inner voice. “‘I’ [je] do not save an inner forum except by placing it within ‘me’ [moi], beside me, outside.”²⁰⁶ And indeed, the phenomenon of conscience refers us like no other concept to the ultimate porousness of the I: to the impossibility of delimiting oneself from precisely the external world out of which I was able to emerge in the first place. This becomes particularly clear when we take a look at a phenomenon that nineteenth-century discussions, not by accident, place under the heading of irony: seduction. There is no (sadistic) attempt at dominating the object of seduction – or of turning it into a mere object – that does not, with necessary (masochistic) violence, turn against the seducer himself.

203 Jacques Derrida, “FORS: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” in Le verbier de l’Homme aux loups by Nicolas Abraham and Maria und Torok (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 7–73, here 14. 204 On the connection between crypt and dissimulation cf. ibid. 12 as well as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), esp. “La crypte au sein du moi,” 229–321. 205 Derrida, “FORS,” 12. 206 Derrida, “FORS,” 13.

5 The Joy of Dissimulation Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex. Jean Baudrillard²⁰⁷

Time and again, it has been helpful to distinguish between the ironist and someone who temporarily speaks ironically, the ironic one, as it were. Only the ironist has completely incorporated irony. If we look for a figure that specially demonstrates the paradoxes of irony in the period that stretches from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, we come across the seducer. For this reason, and also to bring out the figure of the modern ironist by way of a contrast with his predecessors, this chapter outlines the discourse of seduction. In this context, we will also detail the social, cultural, and historical differences between the courtly protagonists of the Liaisons dangereuses and their petty-bourgeois successors in the nineteenth century.

5.1 Confusion, deception, hypocrisy: Of courtiers and libertines Hegel once solemnly declared to his students: “Here, we may say, we are at home and, like the mariner after a long voyage in a tempestuous sea, we may now hail the sight of land.”²⁰⁸ The secure ground of modern subjectivism celebrated in Hegel’s discussion of Descartes in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy has, however, always been treacherous ground. Beginning with Descartes’ Discourse on Method, the subject is at least temporarily reduced to the punctual moment of doubting and haunted by phantasms of deception and a possibly devilish conspiracy. In the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin offers the most comprehensive and succinct account of the political and aesthetic significance of the figure of the intriguer in his book on The Origin of German Tragic Drama: The term “confusion” is to be understood in a pragmatic as well as in a moral sense. In contrast to the spasmodic chronological progression of tragedy, the Trauerspiel takes place in a spatial continuum, which one might describe as choreographic. The organizer of its plot, the precursor of the choreographer, is the intriguer. […] The sovereign intriguer is all

207 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 13 208 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3:217.

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intellect and will-power. And as such he corresponds to an ideal which was first outlined by Machiavelli.²⁰⁹

Writing from the perspective of the interwar years, Benjamin sees the revolutionary moment of Machiavelli’s theory in its purely immanent founding of politics. In analogous fashion, “the richly significant irony which resounds from the mouth of the intriguer” and thus makes him “the master of meanings”²¹⁰ functions in such continuous space without any transcendent guarantee. Correlating codes of conduct were conceptualized, at about the same time as Benjamin wrote, by Helmuth Plessner. Drawing on paleontological, medical and zoological studies, Plessner, too, brings Baroque knowledge up to date. Helmut Lethen could thus laconically summarize the “principles” of Plessner’s anthropology against the background of Gracián’s courtly wisdom as follows: “the human being is artificial by nature. The human is born in a position ‘eccentric’ in relation to its environment and stands in need of the artificiality of a second nature”²¹¹ to survive at all. According to Plessner, “The human generalizes and objectifies himself through a mask behind which he becomes invisible up to a point without disappearing as a person.”²¹² Yet it is this artificial basis of humanity – the external flipside, as it were, of what we examined above as the genesis of the I from the spirit of irony – that opens up the possibility of manipulations of all sorts. That is why the fear of everyone else’s deception was particularly prevalent in the microcosm of the court. The courtier’s attempt to manipulate the world as mechanism of personal passions to his benefit involves making the first step toward atheism. “Knowledge, not action, is the most characteristic mode of existence of evil,”²¹³ we read in Benjamin, who is looking for the connection between exaltation and grief. Ironic maieutics thus ultimately appears as a maieutics motivated by the spirit of evil.

209 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 95. 210 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 209–210. For evidence, Benjamin (Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 228) quotes from Richard III: “Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity / I moralize two meanings in one word” (III.i). 211 Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehre der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 80. 212 Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1999), 133 [modified]. 213 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 230.

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Before causing terror in mourning, Satan tempts. He initiates men in knowledge, which forms the basis of culpable behaviour. If the lesson of Socrates, that knowledge of good makes for good actions, may be wrong, this is far more true of knowledge about evil.²¹⁴

If we accept the thesis that morality has been increasingly internalized since the Middle Ages, two historical perspectives emerge. First, we see how “the old version of ethics, which had operated with the distinction between good and bad behavior and between virtues or vices […] was supplemented by the comparison between intention and action.”²¹⁵ Second, this supplementation serves as a catalyst for a dialectic always already implied in processes of enlightenment insofar as the extension of (self-)knowledge comes with a complication of assessments of self and other. It now becomes clear why the figure of the seducer has been a constant companion of the ethical discussion of irony since Kierkegaard. As someone who simulates or deceives in matters of love, the seducer touches on and sums up a large number of the ethical motifs of irony already discussed. He presents more than simply an arbitrary theme to be found in a number of novels. Rather, “love” and “adventure” were the dominant themes of literature for a very long time.²¹⁶ That is why the motif of “seduction” provides more than one occasion for reflecting on the medium of the novel and for establishing a systematic connection with the poetological chapters on “Novel – Modernity – Irony” that follow. Faced with a prefabricated, clichéd mass of linguistic material, novelists, too, find themselves compelled to seduce. Only by means of finding (or inventing) a unique language, or at least extraordinary content, novelists believe, can they capture their audience. The educated aesthete and the literary artist share the claim to conquer. On this level, there is no difference between Swann’s cattleya metaphor and Proust’s metonymic novel. The discourse of love abounds with tired phrases like “I love you.” The fact that we cannot escape such clichés, however, only seems to be an obstacle. “The derision heaped on the cliché in no way impedes its efficacy. This is the fundamental ambiguity of the way writing relates to the stereotypes of the discourse of love,” writes Anne-Marie Paillet-Guth, according to whom “this ambiguity rhymes in particular with the pragmatic definition of irony as enunciative polyphony.”²¹⁷

214 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 229. 215 Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2, 277. 216 See generally Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 217 Paillet-Guth, Ironie et paradoxe, 105.

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It is thus not a coincidence that one of the emblematic seducers of the modern novel, Madame Bovary’s Léon, can be read as the first medium in Flaubert’s attempt (partially successful in Bouvard et Pécuchet) to write a purely cliché novel. As early as 1852, Flaubert remarks on the literarily productive character of “the disdain proper to irony:”²¹⁸ I am writing a scene with a dialogue between a young man and a young lady on literature, the sea, the mountains, music, in short all the poetic subjects. It could be taken seriously, but its intention is decidedly grotesque. It will be, I think, the first time we see a book that mocks both its heroine and its hero. Irony doesn’t interfere with the pathos, on the contrary, it pushes pathos even further.²¹⁹

Flaubert could have adopted the technique of ironically deploying characters from Sade’s Justine, whose protagonists serve Sade as a means for assaulting Enlightenment optimism of the Rousseauean variety. Yet one shouldn’t forget that lingering in the background of all subsequent French novels of seduction, there is Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses. In Laclos’ novel, the already mentioned analogy of author/seducer or reader/victim is readily apparent. Almost every letter in the novel owes its existence to a preceding exact calculation of the recipient’s position. Valmont and the Marquise Merteuil consciously deploy clichés and even incrementally increase their doses of clichés after carefully rereading their own letters. What becomes visible in the Liaisons dangereuses is, so to speak, the transition from the figure of the intriguer to the modern-ironic seducer. The intriguer described by Benjamin is devilish or satanic for the simple reason that he is and remains “himself” without being affected by his manipulations of others. He can remain himself because he does not derive his “I” from the genealogy described above. As an I not yet completely determined by irony, he sovereignly commands irony – one of the many aspects that accounts for the intriguer’s superiority as Benjamin sees it. In Norbert Elias’ terminology, we can conceive of the libertine as a special case of the “courtified warrior” who, after losing his political assertiveness, has also lost his “physical assertiveness” and therefore, in a sort of rearguard action, has to look for new fields and strategies for deploying his “sexually aggressive

218 Paillet-Guth, Ironie et paradoxe, 112. 219 Gustave Flaubert, Letter of 9 October 1852, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 172; quoted and translated in Soledad Fox, Flaubert and Don Quijote: The Influence of Cervantes on Madame Bovary (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 123.

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virility.”²²⁰ Prior to or at the beginning of any movement of emancipation, the Marquise Merteuil confronts these increasingly castrated courtiers as the revengeful mistress of her sex – she is not merely a seductive object, an occasion for the seducer to prove the virtuosic deployment of his manipulative capacities; she is herself a seductress.

5.2 Seducer or seduction (Les liaisons dangereuses) Two historical constellations, which seem to be wholly divergent only at first sight, clash in the French libertins of Laclos’ novel. On the one hand, there is political absolutism, which in France entailed the aristocracy losing the larger share of its power. At the same time, however, the over-codified navel-gazing of the privatized nobility at court on the other hand served as a sort of playground for Enlightenment ideas – though the pre-revolutionary libertine was of course often more concerned with private, erotic intrigues than with public, political ones. In training their victims to become the objects of their private desires, seducers penetrate the brutal (symbolical) core of what is already set up in Gracián’s Art of Worldly Wisdom and what will become a real fantasy in Sade. Those with worldly judgment, as it were, dissect people and proceed to determine their properties and their essence. Since we “live for the most part by what is told us […] [i]t requires the whole attention at such times to discover the intent of the newsbearer, in order to know beforehand what foot he is going to put forward.”²²¹ Laclos’ central protagonist, the Marquise Merteuil, is a magisterial practitioner of these ideas of Gracián. As a woman at the patriarchal court, her ethicalaesthetic self-labor and what she calls “my pleasures”²²² have a political thrust. “This labour upon myself fixed my attention on the expression and character of faces.” She operates with a knowledge whose political roots in court life she evokes in the next paragraph: “I was not yet fifteen and already I possessed the talents to which the greater part of our politicians owe their reputation; and I

220 Michael Schröter, Wo zwei zusammenkommen in rechter Ehe… Sozio- und psychogenetische Studien über Eheschließungsvorgänge vom 12. bis 15. Jahrhundert, PhD dissertation, Hannover, 1982, 184. 221 Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans. Martin Fisher (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), § 80, 27. 222 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, trans. Richard Aldington (London: Routledge, 2011), 315 (letter CXXVII).

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considered myself still in the first elements of the science I wished to acquire.”²²³ Merteuil seeks to avenge her entire sex by means she has developed herself. What separates the two main characters, who will later become opponents, is not a Cartesian will to a “purity of method,”²²⁴ which characterizes both Merteuil and Valmont, who follow their principles not merely out of “habit.” Rather, the methodological purism of these characters is, Merteuil writes, “the result of my profound meditations.”²²⁵ Initially, both share the same “love of combat. The tactics, the rules, the methods. The glory of victory […] The love of glory. Valmont and the Merteuil talk about it constantly, the Merteuil less so.”²²⁶ This last subtle difference, identified here by Baudelaire, can be explained only by the (historically) different gender perspective of the two participants. For Merteuil, gaining pleasure also has a liberating effect. Thanks to her initiation, her lover Dannecy, for example, may be considered (sexually) enlightened. Valmont’s machismo, amplified by boredom, is, on the contrary, necessarily paid for by his victims. In Baudelaire’s terms, one could describe Valmont’s escapades as expressions of an erotic will to power. Female logic – and in this respect, it resembles Sade’s heroine Juliette – turns out to be the sharper tool. Without mediation, especially without any dialectic mediation, this is accompanied by an increase in the pleasure obtained. The difference, therefore, between Valmont and the sublime hypocrite, what makes him “inferior to the Merteuil” is, paradoxically, “a residual sensibility,”²²⁷ a soft, precisely not pleasurable, sensibility. What distinguishes him from Merteuil, the enlightened master of (her) desires is, in Kantian terms, a “pathological interest.” Already in Kierkegaard’s seducer we observe the inversely proportional relationship between sensuality and sensibility. A spiritualization opposed to pleasure can easily be linked to misogyny (of the Old Testament or the culturally secularized variety). In Kierkegaard in particular, this testifies to the religious heritage of his discourse about seduction. Walter Benjamin has pointed out that speculating thinkers out of touch with reality figured as demons and as contrast to true contemplation as early as in St. Augustine’s City of God. “In the form of knowledge instinct leads down into the empty abyss of evil in order to make sure

223 Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, 181 (letter LXXXI). 224 Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, 309 (letter CXXV). 225 Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, 180 (letter LXXXI). 226 Baudelaire, “Notes sur Les liaisons dangereuses,” Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–1976) vol. 2, 66–75, here 69. 227 Baudelaire, “Notes sur Les liaisons dangereuses,” 73.

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of infinity.”²²⁸ Against the backdrop of Benjamin’s description of the baroque Satan  – “the devilish jocularity of the intriguer, his intellectuality, his knowledge of significance” – Hegel’s definition of the evil Romantics discussed above acquires a whole new dimension. “In laughter, above all, mind is enthusiastically embraced by matter, in highly eccentric disguise.”²²⁹ For the sadistic seducer, unlike the devilish intriguer, the liberating effect of laughter is an effect of ironic sublimation – ironic because the elevation above matter into the immateriality of spiritual evil only appears to succeed. And whereas the sublimity of the intriguer is due to the pathos of the sublime, the sublimation attained by the seducer presupposes, to cite the psychoanalytic definition, a “transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido.”²³⁰ Going beyond the platitude that every form of sadism has elements of a (masochistic) passivity directed against itself, we have to take seriously Freud’s derivation on the level of the second duality of drives (Eros and Thanatos), a derivation that connects the metapsychological thesis of a death drive with the concept of a “primary masochism.” Every identification is in the nature of a desexualization or even of a sublimation. It now seems as though when a transformation of this kind takes place, an instinctual defusion occurs at the same time. After sublimation, the erotic component no longer has the power to bind the whole of the destructiveness that was combined with it, and this is released in the form of an inclination to aggression and destruction.²³¹

Every love is not merely founded on aggression; it also contributes to the production of aggression. That is why Marquise Merteuil’s triumphant judgment is right on target. But it still must be made more precise: “Yes, Vicomte, you loved Madame de Tourvel very much and you still love her; you love her like a madman.”²³² Valmont, however, does not only love like a madman; his love is a mad identification to the core. The resulting sadistic revenge taken by the Freudian super-ego on the ego’s masochistic tendencies is what forces Valmont to die after the death of the president with whom Valmont was enamored [einverliebt]. The Marquise’s super-ego, in contrast, is closer to the super-ego as conceptualized by Lacan. It commands her to enjoy. It does not interfere with her method; it rather conditions the rigor of the method. Her feminine revenge consists in the (secret) pleasure, in the positive (and indeed unironic) side of Enlightenment,

228 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 231. 229 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 227. 230 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 30. 231 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 54. 232 Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, 351 (letter CXLV).

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whose destructive antithesis is embodied precisely in Valmont’s idealism. All Cartesian fear of a deceptive God and the human machine seems to be bracketed for a moment in this feminine utopia. The combative goal of this utopia is to avoid the status of a sexually defenseless or exposed pleasure machine (machine à plaisir). The strategy of this reciprocal seduction is thus one of play, the bodies involved are instruments of pleasure. Sublimating her desire, la Merteuil moves from being a victim without a will to being the subject of pleasurable activity. According to the reflection that, once rhetorologically differentiated, dissolves the polarity of reflector and reflected, medial seduction breaks through the abstract separation of active seducer and passive victim. Against the backdrop of the three rhetorological modes analyzed earlier, we can distinguish three ironic performativities of seduction: first, aggressive dominance; second, fearful compensation; and third, acceptance of the loss of control. The oscillating motion, which we saw hinted at in Nietzsche’s conception of the mask and which encompassed both simulation and dissimulation, can be read as a variant of the third rhetorological type of irony. It implies the dissolution of a further rhetorical distinction, namely, the definitional split of ironic procedurality into a “simulational irony” that consists “in the transparent pretense of an opposite point of view” and a “dissimulational” one, a “recognizable concealment of one’s own convictions.”²³³ Instead of hiding something substantial, masks, in this understanding, block the view onto – nothing.²³⁴ For the ironic play with Nothingness commented on by both Hegel and Kierkegaard, this means that there might no longer be anything to dissimulate. “Simulation of Nothingness” then implies two things: on the one hand, manipulating with a lack of meaning; on the other, producing this Nothingness, i.e. the acknowledgement that Nothingness suffices as an occasion for fetishistic games of desire. That nothing is pretended thus means, not least of all, that seduction does not have to be based on backhanded ruses and deception.

233 Peter L. Oesterreich, Fundamentalrhetorik: Untersuchung zu Person und Rede in der Öffentlichkeit (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990), 139. 234 This enlightened-fetishistic performative turns out, as we shall see, to be the performative of a simulated presence of an absent object of truth.

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5.3 From dissimulatio to simulation (Baudrillard) Since Kierkegaard, no one has put more emphasis on the connection between seduction and irony than Jean Baudrillard. His theory of seduction, which he derives not least from a critical reading of the Seducer’s Diary, is also useful in discerning where Kierkegaard’s subjective limitations lie. What makes Johannes, the sadistic seducer, interesting is once again his biblical Satanism.²³⁵ Unlike Faust, he has no need for an ironic Satan such as Mephistoteles. For in opposition to this Hegelian devil, who “would do evil constantly and constantly does good,”²³⁶ Johannes foregrounds a more radical tendency, whose most complete articulation is provided by Sade: the fantasy of a conscious sacrifice and complete annihilation of the object of desire. So even if Sade’s écriture may be called ironic  – his phantasm of absolute destruction is not ironic at all. An “ironic sadism” would sublate itself insofar as the acting subject would be indistinguishable from the tortured object. Such an ironic, medialized form of seduction is still discernible in Kierkegaard’s good ol’ boys’ chauvinism – which, to be sure, is controlled by its fearful attempt to succumb to the fascinating dialectic of seduction. On this point, it is worth bringing up a conceptual clarification of Baudelaire’s, which concerns the age described by Laclos: “It wasn’t ecstasy, as it is today, it was delirium.”²³⁷ What interests me here, beyond the precise attributions of the terms to specific time periods, is the sublimatory paradox they imply, a paradox according to which there is a spiritual correlate to the physical element of delirium. It is seduction’s emphasis on play that marks its difference from, to use Baudrillard’s terms, “paranoid” and “pornographic” attempts to dominate the real. Seduction can only become a variant of irony if it is “aestheticized” and thereby integrates the opponents involved.²³⁸ If we follow Baudrillard’s attentive reading of the Seducer’s Diary, the seducer’s aesthetics appears as “ironic and diabolic,” but not as perverse. Thus understood, the “aesthetics of irony […] seeks to transform a vulgar, physical eroticism into a passion, and stroke of wit.”²³⁹

235 Schlegel had already spoken of “the tendency of modern poetry toward Satanism” (Sta, vol. 5, 11). 236 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42. 237 Baudelaire, “Notes sur Les liaisons dangereuses,” 69. 238 On this distinction, cf. Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati (Milan: Bompiani, 1965). 239 Baudrillard, Seduction, 115.

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These observations on the practical potential of seduction reveal the failure of Kierkegaard’s overly theoretical seducer, whose own limitations make him look ridiculous. Johannes the seducer, to be sure, does manage to put into place some of the elements of his project of translating ethics into aesthetics. His aim was, after all, to awaken the desire of his victim, to push the chaste maiden from out of her naiveté into the unhappy state of reflexivity. Yet in almost every one of his diary entries we find the same enduring fear of being seduced himself; we hear the compulsive delusion of being the sole and all-powerful seducer. Johannes, as a seducer who is sometimes Hegelian, sometimes monkish, but always chauvinistic, stops at revengeful antithesis without getting involved in the game. While medial seduction stands obliquely with regards to traditional (and still Freudian) distinctions between female seduction on the one hand and male sexual libido on the other, the allegedly asexual seducer, with his paranoid fantasies of omnipotence, remains stuck in a pre-pleasure that, for this reason, becomes not just sadistic: “Consider the seducer’s obsession with the girl in Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer. An obsession with an inviolate, still asexual state […] because naturally endowed with all seduction, she becomes the object of a savage challenge and must be destroyed.”²⁴⁰ That is why the always fetishistic object, “the feiticho […] the lure,”²⁴¹ becomes an evil object for him. And in order not to succumb to its fascination, he performs his seduction-exorcism. Johannes, narcissistic as he is, has nothing to gain; but he nonetheless starts his useless battle. He indeed masters the art of letting the sign float, but he seduces no one except little Cordelia. He stops at the attempt – at fantasies of omnipotence, one of irony’s most seductive aspects! – to keep Cordelia in suspense and to remain in control himself. That is why Johannes spends weeks chatting disinterestedly with Cordelia’s aunt, even introduces another boring suitor, and – living up entirely to the cliché of the body-less intellectual – responds to none of Cordelia’s slowly-awaking erotic impulses. Medial-ironic seduction is quite different; it is a seduction of paradoxical success, of a unification of disjointed elements. For why would one seduce what one does not desire, succumb to what one has not already succumbed to? That would not merely be a waste of time (all too easy, most of the time) but a decisive reduction of seduction. Johannes’ attempt at controlling semblance means that

240 Baudrillard, Seduction, 98–99. Baudrillard’s unrealistic distinction between a quasi-natural seductive power that works with semblance on the part of the female seducer and the seductive power that works through strategy on the part of the male seducer is undercut in each and every letter written by the Marquise. 241 “But the object is always the fetish, the false, the feiticho, the factitious, the lure […]” (Fatal Strategies, trans. Jim Fleming [New York: Semiotext(e), 1990], 184).

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he misses the point of seduction – a failure we saw earlier in the authoritarian attempt to control irony discussed in Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Seduction involves playing with semblance without the phantasm of controlling semblance. It is a seductive activity that by no means relinquishes intentionality but instead allows for a pleasurable experience of the complication and frustration of its own goals. Only the “duel relation abolishes the law of exchange.”²⁴² The goal is passion, passion as seduction, against the hysterical discourse of love. Love is always also a sign of “weakness because it demands something from the other.”²⁴³ Passion, in turn, “is a state, something that overcomes you, that seizes you, that holds on to you, that does not pause, that has no origin.”²⁴⁴ The discourse of hysteria is a discourse of blackmail with symptoms, of tears and love, of barter and (self-)deception. “If you won’t do that, I won’t love you any more.” Against the extortive quid pro quo logic of love it is necessary to imagine a deceptive seduction that goes beyond the chauvinistic reduction of seduction. “Only those who lie completely outside seduction are ill, even if they remain fully capable of loving and making love.”²⁴⁵

242 Baudrillard, Seduction, 126. 243 Michel Foucault, “Conversation avec Werner Schroeter,” Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol. 4, 251–261, here 252. 244 Foucault, “Conversation avec Werner Schroeter,” 251. 245 Baudrillard, Seduction, 121.

Part Three: Novel – Modernity – Irony

Characteristic for the novel as a genre is not the image of a man in his own right, but a man who is precisely the image of a language. Mikhail M. Bakhtin¹

This part examines the aesthetic and especially poetological deployment of irony in the most important of modernity’s genres: the novel. I begin by looking at explicit theorizations of the novel in literary studies, a discipline that since its beginnings (in Schlegel, of course, but also in Bakhtin and Lukács), has been investigating the connections between the novel, irony, and modernity. The second, narratological chapter focuses on differentiating the three rhetorological ironies in the field of literary narration. In the third chapter, I analyze ironic procedures and genres (quotation, pastiche, and parody) and their different poetological functions. The fourth and final chapter examines autobiography as a special case of ironic writing. It pays particular attention to prosopopeia, the trope that, according to Paul de Man, is constitutive of all autobiographical texts. In the context of my systematization of the various functions of irony, this means that autobiographies are – voluntarily or involuntarily – always already ironic. Masking and simulation are constitutive preconditions of all writing about oneself.

1 Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259– 422, here 336.

1 The Philosophy of History and the Poetics of Genre The novel is the form of the epoch of absolute sinfulness, as Fichte said, and it must remain the dominant form so long as the world is ruled by the same stars. Georg Lukács²

“Three dominant poetic genres: (1) tragedy among the Greeks (2) satire among the Romans (3) novel [among] the moderns.”³ This note by Schlegel articulates the issue I would like to address at the beginning of this third part. Schlegel’s distinction does not attempt to pick up on a hierarchy of genres such as the one a poetics of the representative regime of art would impose. He does note, however, that it is the (reflective) medium of the novel that, in his time, is most successful at incorporating an awareness of the mutability of literary genres, an awareness that is itself an eighteenth-century phenomenon. In the novel, essential distinctions between genres dissolve because it becomes obvious that previous hierarchical norms cannot be kept separate outside of the representative regime of art. In addition, the novel is increasingly conceived of on the basis of its own mutability, which allows it to absorb ever-new elements and to aesthetically reinvent itself time and again. Before its career as the model genre of modernity, the novel was understood as a prose epic subject to the stylistic laws that govern the epic.⁴ Taking a look at the origins of the genre helps in sketching the outlines of the novel and the specific perceptual, descriptive, and narrative modes it obtains once it has detached itself from its background in the epic. A question that precedes all others, then, is the question of the achievement of the author named “Homer.” The act of recording in writing that is attributed to him – or to her, or to a eunuch of the name⁵ – is an incisive change at the end of a long tradition of epic singing. A large number of individual mythical events are, for the first time, composed together in a way that goes beyond the chronologicalcyclical organization of time. 2 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 152. 3 Schlegel, KA, 5:187. 4 On this point, see Hans Robert Jauß, “Nachahmungsprinzip und Wirklichkeitsbegriff in der Theorie des Romans von Diderot bis Stendhal,” in Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Fink, 1991), 157–178; see also 157, where Jauß analyzes Huet’s Traitté de l’origine des romans (1670) in this same context. 5 The most recent iteration of this controversial thesis can be found in Raoul Schrott, Homers Heimat: Der Kampf um Troia und seine realen Hintergründe (Munich: Hanser, 2008).

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The author of the Iliad masters his material and is capable of artfully arranging and composing it. Everything remains at the surface level of successful description because, as Hegel writes, “the poet completely immerses himself in the world which he unfolds before our eyes.” In the Iliad, there hardly seems to be any gap between the world of the author and the world of his heroes. Hegel could thus claim, “the great epic style consists in the work’s seeming to be its own minstrel and appearing independently without having any author to conduct it or be at its head.”⁶ The Odyssey, written after the Iliad, displays a different mode of recording epic narration. Its distance from the earlier work may indicate that it was written by a different author, who took the Iliad as a model. In a sense, the Odyssey is already on its way toward the novel. Particularly striking are its descriptions of everyday – that is, unheroic – activities. Yet despite his “Enlightenment” perspective (Horkheimer and Adorno), Odysseus remains mythically heroic. What distinguishes him is that, paradoxically, he does not possess a natural heroism but rather a heroism he owes to his tricks. It requires a good deal of fantasy to narrate his world as a heroic world. The most articulate allegory of this (literary) historical constellation is the loss of his men, whom Circe turns into pigs. The men forget their heroic past and prefer the enjoyment of the lotus plants which nature has provided for them. This transformation illustrates how Odysseus’ environment becomes exotic. It takes a resourceful trickster indeed to create the semblance of heroism  – not just in foreign lands of legend and in battles with monsters but in general.⁷ Both this dubious heroism and the question of how the epic text organizes time are linked with the hero’s problematic path to himself  – not just in the Odyssey. The novels of later ages, too, will confront the formal problem of how to make it home, between the Scylla of classicistic petrifactions of form and the Charybdis of novelistic excess. Homer’s epic success ultimately lies in Odysseus’ unscathed return home.⁸ When, in the modern novel, we once again come across a return home, this return is no longer a solution. Leopold Bloom, in Joyce’s Ulysses, somehow makes it home. Yet the difference between the banality of his return and that described in the Odyssey is what gives rise to the former’s ironic

6 Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:1049. 7 We can only agree with Blanchot that this “ode” about “a Greek of the decadent era” who only plays the game of the Gods (and therefore no longer plays along) has become an “episode” (Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 4–5). 8 Blanchot asks the interesting question, “What would happen if […] Ulysses and Homer were one and the same person?” (Blanchot, The Book to Come, 7).

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effects.⁹ Bloom’s return is no longer the triumphant assumption of a teleological potentiality but, as Hans Blumenberg writes, “the least important and consequential station of all.”¹⁰

1.1 Georg Lukács The question of the hero thus simultaneously and immediately touches on the question of form. As the most fluid of literary media, the novel is always in becoming. It is therefore best conceived of as a process and well captured in the image of Odysseus’ journey. Georg Lukács succinctly describes this in his Theory of the Novel, where he connects a classical ethics of fulfillment with a Romantic aesthetics of longing in a rather original fashion: “Ethics or – since we’re speaking of art – form.”¹¹ Ethics and form are, for Lukács, interchangeable terms. What he calls ethics in art is a kind of form that writing has carved from life. Yet, as we see in what Bakhtin calls the “dialogic” or in the Russian formalists’ concept of skaz (a style of narration that imitates oral communication), the novel is also related to another kind of ethics best called “aesthetic.” It is also possible that the novel’s aisthesis is multiple or synaesthetic insofar as it also speaks to other senses (voice, hearing) that remain present to the word in the novel, even if we often forget that the word in itself has nothing in common with the printed word – that it is a living, dynamic act which is formed by voice, articulation, and intonation and is also accompanied by gestures and mimicry.¹²

Boris Eikhenbaum’s observation that literary writing is irrepressibly oral is immensely important for understanding the significance that irony, originally 9 Not the most important but perhaps the “most obvious mode of irony in Ulysses is the exposure of the protagonists’ inadequacies and contractions, the sharp, diagnostic irony that underlies Joyce’s comparison of the noble and spacious world of Homer with the flaccid corruption of the present” (Samuel L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper [London: Chatto and Windhus, 1961], 118). 10 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 81; cf. ibid. on the “irony of the mythical over the factical” in Ulysses. 11 Georg Lukács, “Richness, Chaos, and Form: A Dialog Concerning Laurence Sterne,” in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 145–174, here 171. In a different essay in the same volume, Lukács writes, “Kierkegaard’s heroism was that he wanted to create forms from life” (“The Foundering of Form Against Life: Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen,” in Soul and Form, 44–58, here 56). 12 Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, “The Illusion of Skaz,” trans. Martin P. Rice, Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (Spring 1975): 233–36, here 233.

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a rhetorical technique of speech, has for literature. We “think that ‘the writer writes,’ but that is not always the case, and in artistic literature it is often not the case.” Rather, oral improvisation can still be discerned in written literature. A writer often imagines himself to be an oral narrator and by various devices tries to give his written language the illusion of skaz.¹³

What makes the novel break formal molds again and again is its perception of language as well as the power of language to perceive. And if it is the case that the “natural” form of realism demands that we obediently follow the hero, then it is up to the hero to misbehave. Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, who is a true relative of Dostoevsky’s hereos, is exemplary in this regard. Dostoevsky’s heroes, for their part, often tragically counteract all intentions, including their own, as Bakhtin tells us: Dostoevsky’s hero always seeks to destroy that framework of other people’s worlds about him that might finalize and deaden him. […] A man never coincides with himself. Once cannot apply to him the formula of identity A ิ A.¹⁴

Against this background, it is useful to consider how the ultimate failure of the Theory of the Novel is ironic. It is “ironic” because Lukács fails to live up to the standards set by his own philosophy of history and, as a consequence, fails to live up to his own assessment of irony as well. This is obvious in his description of the novel’s double endangerment: the tradition of “abstract idealist” novels since Cervantes faces both “triviality” and the “inability to give form.” The “other novel form,” the novel of disillusionment, is in turn inherently threatened by “disintegration and formlessness.”¹⁵ Between these two extremes, Lukács, Hegelian that he is, seeks the reconciliation of the individual guided by an ideal with concrete social reality in Wilhelm Meister and in Tolstoy. Because he cannot find such an ideal, Lukács overlooks the success of the novel. In the 1962 preface he writes, “the ‘prose’ of life is […] only a symptom, among many others, of the fact that reality no longer constitutes a favourable soil for art.”¹⁶ Irony is thus made, according to the well-known pattern, into a function, albeit this time into a poetological function: Irony is to perform a longed-for solution and redemption, that

13 Eikhenbaum, “The Illusion of Skaz,” 233. 14 Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59. 15 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 130–131. 16 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 17.

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is, irony is to sublate both the situation of conflict and irony itself. The irony of “the aesthetic philosophers of early Romanticism,” writes Lukács, is the “selfrecognition and, with it, self-abolition of subjectivity” and the “self-correction of the world’s fragility.”¹⁷ By taking the perspective of satire, that “cold and abstract superiority which narrows down the objective form to a subjective one” and is entirely caught up in the world,¹⁸ Lukács paints a pleasing albeit narrow picture of irony. Yet this picture amounts to more than a reduction of irony to something that fits the author’s plan; the reduction of irony in the Theory of the Novel to just one of the three rhetorological functions I’ve sketched here, namely, the irony of reconciliation, serves as a catalyst for a very specific coalition between literary theory and morality, one that leads to a normative misinterpretation of the ironic nature of the novel genre as a whole. The Theory of the Novel can be read as the work of an unhappy Hegelian who, in “a world that has been abandoned by God,”¹⁹ suffers from “transcendental homelessness.”²⁰ Against the world’s “‘bad’ infinity,”²¹ Lukács then, in entirely un-Hegelian fashion, places his hopes in “the ethic of the creative subjectivity” and in the “author’s consciousness and wisdom […] as irony.”²² Yet what Lukács’s analysis is lacking at this point is a distinction between the novel’s historical specificity and the correlation of content without form and form without content that Hegel calls “abstract infinity.” For the novel does not look back, it looks ahead; inclusive progressiveness is its watchword. Lukács surely read this in Schlegel, who writes in the Athenaeum fragment 116, cited above, that Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry. […] It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; […] and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction and animate them with the pulsations of humor.²³

Peter Szondi, in his analysis of the complex relationship between the poetics of genre and the philosophy of history in Schlegel’s theory of the novel (a theory

17 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 74 and 75. 18 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 75. 19 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 88. 20 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 41. 21 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 81. 22 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 84. 23 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” no. 116, 175. And perhaps even more explicitly: “The novel to be considered as progressive poetry. ” (Schlegel, KA, 5:218).

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that sets the tone for Lukács as well), points out that Schlegel’s criticism of a strict poetics of genre was prompted, above all, by his attempt to theorize the novel genre. Schlegel’s so-called Studiumsaufsatz already prepared this positive valuation of modernity, the novel, and irony.²⁴ Like another theoretician, namely, the Russian Formalist Yuri Tynyanov, who thinks of the novel as a “variable” genre in which “[e]ven the features of the genre evolve,”²⁵ Schlegel conceives of the novel in terms of its inner flexibility. Thus in the fragment just quoted Schlegel goes on to speak of progressive universal poetry qua Romantic poetry as follows: [It] can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age.[…] Other kinds of poetry are finished and are now capable of being fully analyzed. The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected.²⁶

The fragment’s two ideas – the absorption, to the greatest possible extent, of the entire reality of the age and the abandonment of fixed limits between genres, which define the novel’s “becoming” – have to be brought together. To this end, we may turn to and develop Hans Blumenberg’s suggestion to conceive of the “possibility of the novel as ontological.”²⁷ Every novel seeks to create a world. This might be its central difference from the epic. The epic “singer” does not need to create a world. He can think of himself as a transparent medium through which the world is presented. In the novel, however, the medium is language. Language lays out the conditions for the author to present him- or herself as narrator. Every author, therefore, has to think about the possibilities of language. The novel’s encyclopedic character is due to its thirst for knowledge, which comes into its own in vast projects like Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, Zola’s Les Rou-

24 Despite his tendency to interpret Schlegel as a kind of imperfect idealist, we can only agree with Peter Szondi when he writes: “By abandoning the classicist position (which he had set out to defend when he began writing the essay on Greek poetry) in favor of self-understanding and of a self-justification of the modern age, Schlegel explodes the system based on the history of Greek poetry. […] The sequence dramatic – epic reflects the opposition between classical tragedy and the modern novel, two forms in which, for Schlegel (although not only for him), the respective periods found their most characteristic expression” (“Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of Poetical Genres: A Reconstruction from the Posthumous Fragments,” in On Textual Understanding, 75–94, here 87). 25 Yuri Tynyanov, “On Literary Evolution,” trans. C. A. Luplow, in Twentieth Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 152–162, here 156. 26 Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” no. 116, 175. 27 Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Nachahmung und Illusion, 9–27, here 19.

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gon-Macquart, or Joyce’s Ulysses. The broad social panorama cannot but result in an increase of knowledge. Essays, scientific treatises, letters, diary entries, lyrical interpolations – nothing is too strange or indigestible for the novel, everything expands its horizon. In this Bergsonian cone of virtual worlds, all perspectives are free; the historical novel is just as plausible as science fiction. The novel no longer lives on borrowing from ancient models. It no longer seeks, as the modern epic still did, to make sense of ancient history. Therefore even later attempts at renewing the epic had to accept that the “organic world” of the ancients and Dante’s “architecture”²⁸ were past. Don Quixote, however, doesn’t even begin to try to force together Virgilian epic, medieval order, and modern spirit the way that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Spenser, Tasso, and Milton, each in his own way, were tempted to do. The later novels always also open up a perspective onto the future of prose writing. The openness they owe to their genre is not just cause for anxiety; it is also liberating. The irony proper to the novel is never mere melancholy.

1.2 Indirect-mimetic narration To analyze the irony of the novel in detail, it helps to look at how the eighteenth century (belatedly) ennobles the novel in an aesthetic manner. Hans Robert Jauß has shown how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their neo-Aristotelian poetics and the primacy of a theory that explicitly referred to “higher” literature, such an appreciation was not yet possible. Like French heroic novels of gallantry, Spanish picaresque and pastoral novels were long denied entry into the official literary canon. The eighteenth century is the first to find itself reflected in the novel and the first to reassess it. Diderot’s Eloge de Richardson (1762) and Blankenburg’s Versuch über den Roman (1774) finally come to an understanding of what constitutes the novel’s essential difference from the epic. With the same inner necessity that has novels’ characters act not as epic heroes but as fellow citizens, the novel becomes bourgeois society’s supreme literary form. As in the ethical domain, this rise comes with an increasing differentiation of ironic elements. This is the frame within which, for Schlegel, the novel can become the “dominant poetic genre” of modernity. As indirect mimesis, irony is first of all a fitting catalyst of the slow turn away from a simpler conception of imitation modeled on a logic of representation. Strictly speaking, the history of the novel is richer in attempts to “merely”

28 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 80. On the two-world structure in Dante, see 68–69.

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overcome particular conceptions of reality than it is in attempts to overcome “realism.” Mrs. Ramsey’s reality might be more complex and varied than that of Rameau’s nephew – the claim to being an imitatio naturae is made for both. This is also expressed in what may well be the decisive innovation of both the novel and of aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century: “In Diderot, the object of imitation in the novel is an everyday reality and environment, not an ideally-beautiful nature in its transcendent harmony.”²⁹ In the English novel, irony’s indirect-mimetic impulse is already apparent in Fielding.³⁰ Yet when it comes to destroying the narrative biographical illusions that had earlier made the smooth mimesis of a hero’s life possible, the inventive power of Lawrence Sterne is unsurpassed. In a dialectical reversal, it is precisely Sterne’s digressive style of narration that heightens the novel’s mimetic power, that makes it possible to nestle up to Tristram Shandy’s fragmented life. The subject’s mimesis of the fabulous characters is indirect-mimetic, moreover, because the diegetic form of characters shows how the presented subjects are refracted. There is no better way to deal with Uncle Toby’s dodginess than through analogous refractions and interruptions, and it is entirely impossible to describe him without irony. Sterne’s characters appear with a peculiar double polarity: on the one hand, they embody the Enlightenment’s moral qualities, good-nature, generosity, tenderness, frankness, and so on, yet on the other, they are defined by a ruling passion.³¹

These “humors” characterize Sterne’s heroes and set the tone for the novel’s ironic style. Irony also functions as a sublation of contemporary linguistic usage and of the philosophical psychology built on it. Kant’s Critique of Judgment offers a differentiated assessment of “humor,” translated in the eighteenth century into German as Laune (“caprice in its favorable sense”):³² Caprice in the good sense signifies the talent of being able to transpose oneself at will into a certain mental disposition […] Someone who is involuntarily given to such alterations

29 Jauß, “Nachahmungsprinzip und Wirklichkeitsbegriff,” 160. 30 On Fielding’s narrative irony, cf. Thomas Pavel, “The Novel in Search for Itself: A Historical Morphology,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2:3–31, esp. 19. 31 Rainer Warning, “Fiktion und Wirklichkeit in Sternes Tristram Shandy und Diderots Jacques Le Fataliste,” in Nachahmung und Illusion, 96–112, here 96. 32 Winfried Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard, trans. Henry Pickford (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 28.

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is subject to caprice [launisch], but someone who can assume them voluntarily […] such a person and his performance are called capricious [launicht].³³

This knowledge about the uncontrollable nature of what are supposed to be certain styles of emotions is inscribed in irony – which Kierkegaard would later describe as aesthetic mastery over moods. This is already embodied in Sterne’s characters. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Sterne figures among the paradigmatic authors cited in Schlegel’s analysis of irony in the novel. A clear judgment on whether Uncle Toby’s projects are serious is impossible. The answer to the question of whether he is capricious or subject to caprice is lost in an impenetrable thicket made up of authorial intentions, the literary narrator, and the actions of the literary character. The eccentric “hobby-horses” of Sterne’s heroes also provide a link to another function of irony qua indirect-mimetic narration. Sterne’s very British protagonists are comfortable bourgeois inheritors of the great Spanish madman Don Quixote. In “Shandean humour,” Rainer Warning explains in his exposition of the idea of “assimilation,” the “ruling passion” has become “a category of subjectivity.” The events narrated “are assimilated with the illusionary worlds of the hobby-horses,”³⁴ and the way the narrator proceeds reflects the relation between events and illusory worlds. This also explains why the emergent modern novel had to be written in a realistic-humorous style. The only means of habituating the novel to the banal everydayness that subsequently became the focus of realist novelists was to present quirky everyday occurrences. In contrast to Don Quixote, Sterne’s characters find their way, at least to a certain extent, in the everyday world. Bakhtin has outlined the genealogy of this type of the novel and its comical types (later instances are Myshkin and Hans Castorp). In Rabelais and His World, he elaborates the birth of the novel from the (declining) spirit of carnival. His argument that carnival reverses and twists naturalized relationships allows us to see in irony the inheritor of the oxymoronic logic of carnival laughter. Bakhtin demonstrates this logic in great detail in readings of Rabelais and, in later works, in readings of the great Russian novels. He discerns, for example, various effects of ironic alienation in Pantagruel’s well-known butt-wiping episode, which includes a several-pages-long list of objects that can be used for this purpose.

33 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:335. 34 Warning, “Fiktion und Wirklichkeit,” 97.

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The object or the person is assigned an unusual, even paradoxical role (due to absentmindedness, misunderstanding or intrigue); this situation provokes laughter and renewal in the sphere of extraordinary reactions.³⁵

In Gogol, to cite another example, the “zone of laugher” later also becomes a “zone of contact”³⁶ between what is heterogeneous. Its Socratic heritage allows the non-rational novel to be in very close contact with the most varied domains of reality, ironically pretending to be stupid, simple-minded, or borderline mad. A pessimistic or even melancholic pathos pervades Bakhtin’s analyses of the decay of carnival in modernity. “On the one hand the state encroached upon festive life and turned it into a parade; on the other these festivities were brought in to the home and became part of the family’s private life.”³⁷ Nonetheless, this decay merely expresses general cultural and social changes (not least of a democratic nature) and as such is inevitable. Carnivalesque forms cannot be recuperated without refraction; this can occur only if they are sublimated. Hence there is in literature – in Molière’s comedies, in Diderot’s novels – a corresponding Enlightenment sublation. Romanticism detects such sublimated grotesque elements already in Shakespeare and Cervantes and comprehends them in categories more accessible to the nineteenth century, namely, humor, irony, and sarcasm, against the background of a newly rhetorological understanding of irony. From this perspective, the novels of Cervantes and Sterne, pervaded as they are by ironic procedures, appear to “romantically” redeem the idea of universal poetry. And because this sublimation can be described poetologically as irony, we can discuss laughter and “irony, a form of reduced irony,”³⁸ here as integral parts of the (modern) novel. In other words, the definition of irony from the Lyceum fragment discussed above applies here as well: 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 an averagely gifted Italian buffo.³⁹

35 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 374. 36 Bakhtin, “Rabelais and Gogol: The Art of Discourse and the Popular Culture of Laughter,” trans. Patricia Sollner, Mississippi Review 11.3 (Winter/Spring, 1983), 34–50. 37 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 33. 38 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 135. 39 Schlegel, “Lyceum Fragments,” no. 42, 148.

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In declaring the buffo to be the transcendental condition of possibility of novelistic literature, Schlegel even goes beyond the assessment that Goethe’s irony always hovers above the work. He describes this “ethereal merriment” as being almost “too fine and delicate for the mere letter of commentary to be able to reflect and reproduce.”⁴⁰ Strictly speaking, the buffo is structural. The buffo does not hover above the work but is anchored in the novelistic discourse itself. “Language in the novel,” Bakhtin tells us, “not only represents, but itself serves as the objet of representation. Novelistic discourse is always criticizing itself;”⁴¹ it is mimetic only indirectly. The buffo’s structural anchoring in the sublimated bourgeois novel starkly marks its difference from, say, the popular comedy of the Middle Ages. The novel is a genre eminently conscious of its own linguicity; its dialogic prehistory inheres in it as a structural moment. What is inscribed in the novel as aesthetic knowledge must no longer be worn on the outside as a lingual mask. Just as irony or the ironist appeared in the field of ethics in various masks (as aesthete, dandy, or seducer), so too does the poetological terrain present us with a pre-history of linguistic and dialect masks that make the historical background of the novel’s ironic polyphony comprehensible.

40 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 279. 41 Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in Dialogic Imagination, 41–83, here 49.

2 The Language of the Novel Three aspects of the language of the novel, of what Bakhtin calls “novelistic discourse,” are especially relevant for an understanding of the novel’s specific ironic character. First is a “process of interanimation of languages, the measuring of them against their current reality and their epoch.”⁴² To describe this process, Bakhtin looks at how the language of the novel emerges by separating itself from the standard language, Latin. The popular aspect is manifest less in incorrect grammar than, for example, in the combination of vulgar Italian with Latin endings. Only in absorbing such grotesque and satirical elements can it become a medium that subsequently accommodates the novel’s realist tendencies. Such a language, as Julia Kristeva has shown for Menippean and satirical prose as a whole, has to be conceived of as “an experience that produces its own space,” in which “man describes himself by making of himself an exhibition, finally creating ‘characters’ and ‘personalities.’”⁴³ Second, there is the proximity of the novel’s ironic language to nonsensical phenomena. In rhetorological terms, this tendency of irony is manifest as a tendency toward incomprehensibility. De Man, as we saw, defined irony as “trope of the tropes” because it revealed the rhetorical conventions of all language. And this definition is poetologically productive as well, as is apparent from Rainer Warning’s analysis of the recurring formulation “to drop my metaphor” in Tristram Shandy.⁴⁴ Sterne’s central device indicates a common mode of ironic questioning. Metaphors are taken seriously and literally in an ironic manner such that their rhetorical linguistic function both becomes visible and simultaneously is undermined. Beside their function as the first inventories of the French language, Rabelais’ endless lists also manifest an affinity to and enjoyment of nonsense. A third aspect of the ironic language of the novel is connected to this, and it concerns the novel’s individual words. In prose the individual word fluently enters characters already shaped by language and continually redefines or disfigures them. It can do so because in the novel, speaking is speaking “not in language but through language, through the linguistic medium of another.”⁴⁵ This is the difference between novelistic prose and tragic verse, which “is sharp

42 On this point, cf. Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” 82. 43 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 34–61, here 54; on popular culture, in which all languages were “masks,” cf. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 273. 44 Cf. Warning, “Fiktion und Wirklichkeit,” 102. 45 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 313.

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and hard, it isolates, it creates distance.”⁴⁶ The novel’s sensitivity concerning language always already implies a historical consciousness and tends to tell of the history of its words as well. The “flowering of the novel is always connected with a disintegration of stable verbal-ideological systems and with an intensification and intentionalization of speech diversity that are counterpoised to the previously reigning stable systems,”⁴⁷ which potentially infinitizes the historical perspective of novels. In novels, every hero has his Sancho, a profaning commentator – even if that function is merely performed by the narrator, in whom a poetological memory of an originally oral presentation remains inscribed.

2.1 The traditional narrator Walter Benjamin was one of the first to make use, for understanding the novel, of the insight that the great age of non-refracted oral narration is over. Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.⁴⁸

The first narrator of the western tradition is Homer. And he already is no longer a narrator, a storyteller in the proper sense, but an author. His textual interface organizes and summarizes the oral tradition. The full spectrum of the handeddown narrative is reflected, for example, in the Iliad’s decentered inventory of characters. To call upon the muses to sing of Achilles’ wrath does not mean concentrating the plot on Achilles. Achilles is not the central support of the plot; and the epic, for that reason, is not named after him. This changes with the more novelistic figure of Odysseus. In the novel, written narrations are increasingly organized around a given hero, whose multiple personal experiences serve as a narrative principle of concatenation. The complete revision of traditional forms of remembering and of organizing memory is undertaken by the bourgeois way of life and the invention of print. The vague milestones ancient epic, early modern book printing, and modern novel constitute different stages in the process of integrating oral forms of memory into writing. These transformations are sublations, not dismissals, of orality.

46 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 56. 47 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 370–371. 48 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings, 3:143–166, here 144.

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And yet, as the formalist Viktor Shklovsky has noted, the distinction between “naive”⁴⁹ oral narration on the one hand and refracted written narration on the other remains constitutive of the novel. “From the day of its birth and even before, the novel gravitated towards a literary rather than an oral form.”⁵⁰ The recording system of the book irrevocably reminds us that things have to be remembered less and less and can be looked up more and more. The emergence of the book modifies the structure of remembering itself. This is linked to the tendency toward ironic refraction inscribed in all (modern) narration. Novelists are forced to create; they must make use of a medium and cannot simply pretend to be transparent mediums of a tradition. If the novel is, as Schlegel thinks, the medium of reflection of modernity, it is so because it is always already forced to reflect on the conditions of possibility of narration (which is no longer unrefracted and oral). Even if one disagrees with Adorno’s use of the past tense, it remains true that “[t]he novel was the literary form specific to the bourgeois age. At its origins stands the experience of the disenchanted world in Don Quixote.”⁵¹ In a dialectical reversal, the novelist’s attempt at creating any illusion at all replaces the illusionary world of enchantment that is home to singer, hero, and listener equally. What Don Alonso fails to recognize constitutes Cervantes’ ironic success. The same literary impulse with which Cervantes breaks through Don Quixote’s illusion allows him to keep his readers under his illusionistic spell (and with new aesthetic justification). Even and especially in its destruction, the novel can be, has been, and is, ironically constructed.

2.2 Reality and illusion Schlegel updates the poetological concept of parekbasis specifically for his theory of the novel. According to him, parekbasis, a “breaking of illusion,” is the speech that the chorus [gives] to the people in the middle of the piece in the name of the poet. Indeed, it was a complete interruption and suspension of the piece, [an interruption] in which, as in [the piece], the greatest dissoluteness [reigned] and the chorus, which steps

49 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamen Sher (Normal: Illinois State University Press, 1990), 83. 50 Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 66. 51 Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–1992), 1:30; cf. also Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 151: “It is probably more plausible to interpret the phantasmagoric aspect, which reinforces the illusion of the being-in-itself of art works by technological means, as a rival of romantic art, which from the outset undermined phantasmagoria through the use of irony.”

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out to the outermost limit of the proscenium, would hurl the grossest incivilities at the people. This stepping out (εκβασις) is also the source of [the interruption’s] name.⁵²

Yet according to Schlegel, the violation of the dramatic illusion is by no means an awkwardness but a deliberate wantonness, ebullient fullness of life […] Life’s highest agility must act, but destroy; if it does not find anything outside of itself, it turns back onto a beloved object, onto itself, its work; in that case, it injures in order to stimulate without destroying.⁵³

As we saw, parekbasis and irony are structurally related in Schlegel; irony is “permanent parekbasis.”⁵⁴ As an exception designed to last naturally, parekbasis needs less restrictive (genre) forms. The shortness of a fragment can only partially provide the space necessary for this function of irony to develop. The art form appropriate to parekbasis is the novel, designed as it is to allow for fullness in extension. In the novel, parekbasis is indirect and “veiled, not obvious as in old,” and presumably also new, comedy (such as Tieck’s romantic “comedy”). As a modern art form, Schlegel’s novel thus dismisses direct carnival parekbasis in favor of a state of permanent criticism of language and medium. The definition according to which “parekbasis and chorus [are] necessary to every novel (as potency)”⁵⁵ thus accords with the definition of reflection as a heightening of aesthetic vividness discussed above.⁵⁶ The more profoundly a work is shaped, the more refracted, the more intensively vivid it is – this, in short, is Schlegel’s optimistic thesis. The parekbatic oscillation between reality and illusion produced by irony is, of course, not to be understood as the juxtaposition of a precedent reality and an illusion dependent on it. It is an ironic play of different and, in this difference, equivalent realities. These realities are constituted by language in the sense outlined by Julia Kristeva: masks of style and language open up and populate spaces of reality with protagonists. This brings us to the question of how a novel’s characters relate to the reality that surrounds them, constituted as it is by language, and to the question of how such linguality determines their actions. For many novels, this question is unmistakably constitutive because their characters are identified by the way they integrate other novels. 52 Schlegel, KA, 11:88. 53 Schlegel, KA, 1:130. 54 Schlegel, KA, 18:85. 55 Schlegel, KA, 16:265. 56 See Armen Avanessian, Winfried Menninghaus and Jan Völker, eds., Vita aesthetica: Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2009).

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2.2.1 Misjudging reality For good reason, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are time and again cited as examples of misjudgments of reality through excessive reading. The many studies on this topic usually focus on the “role model” function or pernicious influence of a literary education.⁵⁷ Of course literary works can have effects that distract, so to speak, from reality. Yet beyond that, they can have an even more fundamental, constitutive function. Especially in Don Quixote, the boundaries usually remain clearly visible. Don Quixote is of course dreaming, but as long as the attentive reader follows the narrator’s judgment, the reader is immune from getting lost in these dream worlds. To the reader, the knight’s derangement appears as a mistake in reading, as a reality-distorting side effect of the knightly romances the hero has devoured. Yet Don Quixote’s errors and aberrations result from a double mistake in reading: against his prosaic reality, he attempts once more to act the hero he imagines himself to be based on the model of the knightly romances he has read – he reads the novels “incorrectly” by taking them to be descriptions of reality, and this misreading leads him to read reality “incorrectly.” Don Quixote does not at all believe that the windmills are giants but that they are giants magically turned into windmills, i.e. that as things, they are and remain things, and that they turn, semantically so to speak, into giants. They have become signs that mean something other than what they appear as. Windmills mean giants.⁵⁸

From this perspective, Don Quixote’s madness reveals what is commonly called reality as symbolic or structured by language all the way through. His madness reveals not so much that things are superficially turned into metaphors but that every figuratively perceived thing is constituted symbolically. What we perceive is truly imaginary. “To have fantasy does not mean to think up something, it means to make something of the things around us.”⁵⁹ In Don Quixote’s case, the syntheses (of the imagination) that institute reality become fantastic themselves and this brings the fictive, phantasmatic origin of the symbolic to the literary surface. Time and again, however, this radicalism is marginalized by citing the apparent disease, the alleged failure in the confrontation with reality. Yet Don Quixote does not simply suffer from the methodical form of derangement that Kant, in 57 See Hans-Georg Pott, Literarische Bildung: Zur Geschichte der Individualität (Munich: Fink, 1995), 75. 58 Pott, Literarische Bildung, 23. 59 Thomas Mann, quoted in Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 90.

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Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, calls “dementia” and defines as “that disturbance of the mind in which everything that the insane person relates is to be sure in conformity with the formal laws of thought that make experience possible; but, owing to the falsely inventive power of imagination, self-made representations are regarded as perceptions.”⁶⁰ Insofar as Don Quixote’s confusion does not affect his perception and cannot simply be juxtaposed to a correctly inventive power of imagination, such a diagnosis is simply inapplicable. What at first sight might seem to be the effect of the knightly romances’ model function, the effect of their seductive power, is in fact a function of language itself. It is language that structures perception such that Don Quixote’s “madness” becomes conceivable as a difference between different language-worlds, as a deviation of his world from a reality that is no less constituted by language than that of Don Quixote, but which is accepted by those around him. To a greater extent than Cervantes’ novel, various other parodies and imitations of the genre exploit the comical effects of the contact between generally accepted reality and subjective delusion. One example is Charles Sorel’s Le Berger extravagant of 1627.⁶¹ The main character Lysis, whose head is filled with pastoral idylls, constantly misunderstands the world around him. Yet, as the novel shows, his head can be emptied, and the misunderstanding can be set right. It is characteristic that Lysis does not seem to be unreservedly at the mercy of his madness, just as Don Quixote waits for some sort of actual accolade before he lives out his fantasies. Although Lysis throws himself into a river, determined to go all the way, he does so equipped with pig bladders to help keep him afloat. He owes this preparation to a sense of reality that separates him from a madman or someone attempting suicide. His latent sense of reason, which waits to be discovered, is the precondition for his illumination at the end, an enlightenment that constitutes the hypocritical triumph of those around him and of those that read about him with amusement. Partially cured, he marries and is then talked out of his desire to wear shepherd’s clothes with the argument that in pastoral idylls, shepherds do not marry. Instead of refusing to marry, the former Lysis relies, in a completely reasonable manner, on those elements of the delusion that are compatible with reality. His comic insanity is such that the critical component inherent to the procedure of parody can enlighten and overcome madness.

60 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, in Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), §52, 7:215. 61 On both the Berger extravagant and on Don Quichote, cf. “The antiromance,” in Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 148–156.

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Where a protagonist’s delusion is made transparent in the novel as the effect of his or her readings, the boundary between reality and dreamy ideality remains discernable. This is also true of the novels in which heroes rather than the novels themselves come to a tragic end. Madame Bovary’s insight at the end of the novel, for example, ensures a sound ontological order. Society always already believes itself entitled to defining reality such that common sense can then depart victoriously. In this sense, the Berger extravagant has a diametrically opposed counterpart in Nabokov’s Transparent Things, for example, in which the words “reality” and “dream” only ever appear in quotation marks. The protagonist Hugh Person accidentally strangles his wife when, sleepwalking, he attempts to save her from a fire that he dreams; conversely, he dies because he does not recognize an actual fire as real.⁶²

2.2.2 Literary irony as digressive refraction Literary scholars have found at least three different forms of irony in the works of Ludwig Tieck.⁶³ The first is the motif of life as a dream (in which the I functions as sole legislator), as in William Lovell; the second is that of broken illusions, especially in Puss in Boots; the third is that of a world turned upside down. These motifs constitute three forms of the carnival heritage of parekbatic irony. The carnivalesque element in Puss in Boots lies in the constant undermining of the separation between active actors and passive spectators as well as in the correlative dream-like inversion of the world. “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it.”⁶⁴ That is why Tieck’s actors are in dialog with the spectators and that is why the boundaries between reality and illusion are blurred in a way not found again until Pirandello. “As far as the theater is concerned, the illusion presented on the stage ought to have a ‘flickering’ quality to it (i.e., it should alternate with the other, more realistic element in the play),”⁶⁵ Viktor Shklovsky writes in “The Making of Don Quixote.” Yet it is significant for epic distancing as well that “the spectator […] 62 The only text to go further than this is Nabokov’s last novel, Look at the Harlequins! which blends the hero’s fear of being only a copy of Nabokov with a parodistic confusion of time and space structures. Cf. Herbert Grabes, “Die parodistische Aufhebung der Grenze zwischen Fiktion und Realität in den Romanen Vladimir Nabokovs,” in Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von der Moderne zur Postmoderne, ed. Gerhard Hoffmann (Munich: Fink, 1988), 3:231–245. 63 Raymond Immerwahr, “The Practice of Irony in Early German Romanticism,” in Romantic Irony, ed. Frederick Garber (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), 82–96, here 88–90. 64 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 65 Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 94.

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must experience within himself a shift in his perception of the action onstage.”⁶⁶ To speak of parekbasis in the novel as permanent is thus not a statement of fact but a demand, and Schlegel formulates it precisely as such. A true development of parekbasis can be attributed to the novel in cases in which, in Käte Hamburger’s terms, the simultaneous disruption and strengthening of “the illusion of fiction” proper to “romantic irony” is made aesthetically productive.⁶⁷ In the novel, (constant) interruption becomes a productive moment capable of representing the creativity of the imagination, which in turn is constitutive of an awareness of reality, even as its illusionary nature is revealed. As permanent parekbasis, irony aims not to unambiguously reveal what is illusionary about reality (in the sense of an Enlightenment-type critique of ideology). Nor does it seek to brush aside a profane reality through a more poetic illusion (in the sense of an aestheticizing escapism). This is the manifestation, in the poetological domain, of the same figure discussed earlier in our critique of aestheticization: since there can be no clear delineation between art and life, the two domains morph into one another time and again; times, places, people change sides, as it were.⁶⁸ In Milan Kundera, for example, the author goes swimming and observes a woman, about sixty years old, walking along the edge of the pool, waving to the instructor. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twentyyear-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly coloured ball to her lover. […] The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name.⁶⁹

From the early stories via the Czech novels, beyond even The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s œuvre seems to have attained the apogee of enchanted 66 Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 94. “It’s worth noting that in part 2 of Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote shows that he is fully cognizant of the existence of part 1 by polemicizing against the spurious anonymous version of part 2 (circulating in Spain even before Cervantes’ version). A curious situation emerges. The leading character of the novel feels himself to be real as such but does not come across as a living human being” (Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 93). 67 Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Fiction, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Marilynn J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 154–155. The passage reads in full: “That this style is a play of ‘romantic irony’ is no new conclusion. The intrusion of the author into his narrative, or the entrance of the poet, the director, or a feigned public into the (romantic) drama was always designated as a disruption of the illusion. But it was not clearly enough perceived that thereby the illusion of fiction is far less disrupted than stressed, underscored.” 68 On this fictional shifting of the deictic triad I – here – now, see Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, Present Tense: A Poetics, trans. Nils F. Schott (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 107–139. 69 Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 3–4.

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lightness and balance in the foam-born Immortality. All seven parts of the novel communicate with one another, anticipate, announce themselves, Hemingway meets Goethe, Kundera talks about his novel while he is writing it – and all this without avant-gardist effort. Kundera’s tasteful poetic integration of the inartistic breaking of illusion is definitely rare, but it has been achieved by other writers such as Italo Calvino: “The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph”⁷⁰ is the first sentence of the chapter “If on a winter’s night a traveler” in Calvino’s eponymous novel. The book tells of another love story but at the same time reflects the search for readers, authors, and texts. The deployment of these poetological elements for the purposes of narrative composition does not take place by means of irony but is a function of medial irony, of parekbasis designed to be permanent.

2.3 The three structural ironies of the novel Schlegel’s aesthetic reflections allow us to separate three ways in which parekbatic irony functions in the novel. They also allow us to name three ways in which irony decisively influences the specific characteristics of the novel: three different ironies; three positions and roles on the part of the narrator. These three ideal types are never to be found in pure form, but since one of them is always dominant, they can be separated and analyzed one after the other. The types are: (a) irony between the author-character and the reader, (b) ironic treatment of the protagonist by the narrator, and (c) narrative irony.

2.3.1 Irony between the author-character and the reader The first of the three forms of ironic narrative situations is irony between a character who appears as author and the reader of the text. It constitutes the most direct form of a procedure that strengthens novelistic illusion by disturbing the illusion of “naive” oral narration. Employed in a number of English eighteenthcentury novels, it is particularly striking in Henry Fielding’s humoristic staging of reality. The authorial narrator is perhaps nowhere more powerful than in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, his “comic epic poem in prose:” The one who doubts, 70 Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 10.

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who asks who is speaking, is assured in excessive digressions that the author, Fielding, narrates. Parek-batic interpolations are as constitutive of the form of the novel as the constant parodying of classical-epic stylistic elements is. As allpowerful author, Fielding reserves the right to intervene in the plot to preserve the novel’s suspense, comprehensibility, or illusion. The text’s ongoing reflection on the role of its author produces an (ironic) agreement with the reader. This agreement aims indirectly to produce the narrative effects also produced by naive oral narration. By reflecting on the fact that his action is mediated (i.e. the fact that the language of the novel is a medium), the author signals to the reader that they are both aware of the difference between written and oral narration – and thereby allows the reader to disregard this knowledge. The subversive force of this form of structural irony comes into its own in Sterne’s simultaneously digressive and progressive narrative style. Tristram Shandy’s auto-narration generates comic effects not least from the fact that Tristram appears to be the author of his biography, that his digressions constantly lead him off the track of the story, and that it is this very failure that makes him such a vivid character. Empty pages, supplying the preface belatedly in the third volume, the interpolated essays, etc.  – all of this makes Tristram Shandy the second exemplary model of the first novelistic irony. What makes these two otherwise rather different novels exemplary is that each constitutes an opposite pole of this irony. While Fielding never loses sight of the main plot, the way that Tristram loses sight of the plot follows a method of madness. The loquacious narrator’s constant asides to the reader are also turn-arounds and turn-abouts of his no longer progressing, though allegedly intended, autobiographical report. What is ultimately narrated in this authorial irony is always something else. The irony between, on the one hand, the authorial or chaotic narrator (in both, the author’s claim to pulling all the strings becomes excessive) and the self-controlled, obedient reader, on the other hand, thus functions analogously to the first rhetorological irony in at least one way. Nowhere does saying something differently threaten to lead to a tragic failure of communication in general. Or, to put it differently: the failure of communication that consists in the way that communication only ever takes place indirectly is not experienced as a tragic failure – as long as this failure can be conceived of as a grotesque logic or as an exception, i.e. as long as it is not linked to the logic of rhetorological irony with its other rhetorological implications.

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2.3.2 Ironic relationships between narrator and hero The second form of narrative irony is characterized by an ironic relationship between the narrator and his hero. This form has attracted the bulk of critical attention in literary studies.⁷¹ What has often been overlooked, though, is that irony – especially here – is not an end in itself but rather constitutes the condition of possibility of (modern) novelistic narration. In nineteenth-century realist novels, for example, in which this narratorial irony functions best, irony’s deployment can be accounted for by its references to the other elements operative in these novels: a hero who seeks unique experiences and a profane reality. The resulting disaccord allows and calls for ironic commentary from the narrator. Irony, here, is the perfect, tactful medium for distancing oneself from the heroic ambitions of the novel’s characters without having to interrupt the narrative illusion. Here, too, there is an analogy with the three rhetorological ironies. The tension between the protagonists’ heroic aspirations and the narrator’s self-distancing from these aspirations corresponds to the second form of rhetorological irony, the epistemological moment of indirect communication. Just as Flaubert, despite his identificatory assertion “C’est moi,” is not identical with his heroes, so too is Henri Beyle’s view of the world not identical with that of Stendhal’s heroes. The novels themselves tell a different story. The novelists Stendhal and Flaubert communicate their distance from the protagonists by means of indirect literary communications.⁷² The epistemological advantage of the narrator over the protagonist was already indirect, or negative, marked by a lack of illusion, in Cervantes. And what makes Stendhal and Flaubert the most impressive representatives of this narratorial irony is that they are still marked by their heroes’ illusions, though they share them less and less. In contrast to the deeds to which Balzac’s heroes aspire, the aspirations of Flaubert’s heroes do not so much fail as they do have trouble even getting off the ground. On the level of plot, destroying illusion means first of all that, confronted with bourgeois reality, heroic ambitions dissolve into nothing. On the formal level, the narrator is confronted with the problem that the prosaic world of the bourgeoisie offers little that is striking enough to be narrated. The

71 See Beda Allemann for an example of a scholar who, without further differentiations, moves from irony via the ironic narrator to the ironic (Ironie und Dichtung [Pfullingen: Neske, 1956]). 72 On this point, cf. Jacques Rancière: “The politics of literature is not the same thing as the politics of writers. It does not concern the personal engagements of writers in the social or political struggles of their times. […] The expression ‘politics of literature’ implies that literature does politics simply by being literature” (“The Politics of Literature,” in The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose [Cambridge: Polity, 2011], 1–30, here 1).

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nineteenth-century novel’s need for description can also be understood as a reaction to a lack of things worth telling about in a traditional sense. The psychological description of a character’s inner life furnishes, at least, an ironic contrast with a reality that can then be staged. This second, narratorial irony displays the narrator of the nineteenth-century realist novel in full possession of all his mental powers and still  – for the first time – at the center of reality. This, perhaps, is a lonely heroic high point of this bourgeois genre. The subtle control that characterizes the bourgeois world marks the world of the narrator as well, both the power he exercises and the constraints this power imposes on him. His irony is controlled and precise; rarely are the lines blurred that separate him from his anti-heroes.⁷³ Where we encounter this narratorial irony outside of the nineteenth-century context, in Don Quixote for example, it veers toward authorial irony. What separates Flaubert and Cervantes is not their narratorial irony in the face of their heroes’ failures. Even as early as in Don Quixote, for example, the protagonist spends an entire day riding around “and nothing happened worth mentioning.” Nor is it the protagonists’ will to imagine their exploits recorded in novels.⁷⁴ What separates Cervantes from Flaubert is that Don Quixote could be cured by reality whereas Frédéric Moreau is foiled by a banalized reality. Another characteristic of irony important for this context is how it turns against the hero and deprives the hero of his pathos. The outstanding example of this procedure is the ironic or, in Bakhtin’s terms, dialogic contrast established by the constant presence of Sancho Pansa. This contrast of opposite poles survives until the twentieth century, albeit in a strongly sublimated form. The narrators of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose or of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, for example, live up, we might say, to Schlegel’s demand for a pervasive, structural refraction of novelistic narration. They could thus be situated on the limit between this second, narratorial, and a third, narrative irony (to which we’ll turn in a moment). Both narrators no longer treat only one individual hero ironically. Deformation or alienation can be found throughout in the sense that the narrator 73 In professorial novels, this kind of controlling and dominating irony lives on in the twentieth century. With the evocation of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Eco’s “Postscript” to The Name of the Rose could not be more explicit: “This enunciative duplicity fascinated and excited me very much. Also because – to return to what I was saying abut the mask, in doubling Adso I was once more doubling the series of interstices, of screens, set between me as a biographical personality, me as narrating author, the first-person narrator, and the characters narrated, including the narrative voice. I felt more and more shielded” (Eco, Name of the Rose, 517–518). 74 See Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. John Rutherford (London: Penguin, 2003), 31; on protagonists willing to become literary heroes, see Pott, Literarische Bildung.

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obviously remains below the level of complexity proper to the narrated events in general. Eco’s Name of the Rose symbolizes the transformation of the carnival hero and his upside-down world, of the accompanying dupe. Decades after the events, Adson, who had understood very little even at the time, becomes the simpleminded narrator of a story that is erudite in so many ways. The narrator’s simplicity produces a dialogic refraction that is structurally implanted in the novel’s narration. In John Barth’s LETTERS, irony performs a similar function with regard to narrative stance and narrative expectations. There, characters from Barth’s previous novels meet, as in a Kierkegaardian paradox of the last supper. The naive act of narrating is once more possible only because of an irony that the scholarship usually dubs “postmodern.”⁷⁵ Irony here functions in two ways simultaneously. On the one hand, it is conservative in that it allows for assuming narrative stances whose deforming artificiality it, on the other hand, unreservedly displays. Adorno sought to capture the sublimely-ironic counterpart to conservative irony by reading Flaubert’s work as the turning point of reflection on irony in the novel. According to Adorno, Flaubert’s irony was always moral: taking a stand for or against characters in the novel. The new reflection takes a stand against the lie of representation, actually against the narrator himself who tries, as an extraalert commentator on events, to correct his unavoidable way of proceeding. This destruction of form is inherent in the very meaning of form. Only now can the form-constructing function of Thomas Mann’s medium, the enigmatic irony that cannot reduced to any mockery in the content, be fully understood: with an ironic gesture that undoes his own delivery, the author casts aside the claim that he is creating something real, a claim which, however, no word, not even his words, can escape.⁷⁶

And as we have seen, even in formally conservative twentieth-century authors irony performs a residual redemptive function that both conserves and constructs.

75 Once more, the most succinct expression is Eco’s: “Is it possible to say ‘It was a beautiful morning at the end of November’ without feeling like Snoopy? But what if I had Snoopy say it? If, that is, ‘It was a beautiful morning…’ were said by someone capable of saying it, because in his day it was still possible, still not shopworn? A mask: that was what I needed” “Postscript” in (Eco, Name of the Rose, 511). 76 Adorno, “Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” in Notes on Literature, 1:30– 36, here 34.

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2.3.3 Contextual irony The interface between an irony that works through contrast and an irony that is pervasive and contextual can, as suggested, also serve to distinguish a third form of irony on the part of the narrator. This narrative irony comes closest to meeting Schlegel’s demand for the constant refraction and destruction of illusion. Polyphonic or polylogical irony in the novel uncontrollably extends, encompasses, and intrudes in all events. When, in Proust, commentary is so thoroughly interwoven with action that the distinction between the two disappears, the narrator is attacking a fundamental component of his relationship to the reader: aesthetic distance. In the traditional novel, this distance was fixed.⁷⁷

This narrative form is no longer the clearly outlined irony of an author or a narrator posited by the author. None of the characters of A la recherche du temps perdu remain unaffected by this structural irony. Everyone who falls in love with a being from a different salon takes leave of his reputation upon entering another salon. In all possibility, the character will no longer be understood there, just as he or she fails to understand many things in these new surroundings. Every character in the novel who is invested with action or emotion is structured, outlined, and criticized by the novel’s language. The ease with which one is ridiculed in the exclusive salons derives from the fact that mastering a specific social jargon does not necessarily suffice for acceptance into a different salon. Instead, these different contexts exclude one another, on the level of language, of style, and sometimes on the level of semantics as well. The rise of Odette and the small Verdurin circle as well as the decline of Swann and Charlus are only partly motivated by society’s lack of memory. The characters’ high and low points are conditioned, more fundamentally, by the way they are fashioned through language. Protagonists are nominal “actants,”⁷⁸ the effects of whose actions are only ever verbal. As speakers, they emerge  – and are engulfed – in situations. It is not that society treats them unfairly. They live entirely in their speech acts in the salon. Beyond that, they are nothing. What

77 Adorno, “Position of the Narrator,” 34. Traditional, for Adorno here, seems to be the great nineteenth-century novels. But these form only one strand of the tradition deriving from Rabelais and Cervantes. Only in the vicinity of realist narration does irony remain limited to its individualized variant, narratorial irony. 78 For a discussion of the salient structuralist theories (Greimas, Todorov, Kristeva), see Gerhard Hoffmann, “Das narrative System der Postmoderne und die Auflösung des Charakters im Erzähltext: Die Reduktionsformen von Handeln und Bewußtsein,” in Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von der Moderne zur Postmoderne, 1:145–224, here 153.

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holds Proust’s characters together across thousands of pages is simply their proper names and certainly not any sort of coherent behavior. While in Flaubert the narrator stylistically contradicts his heroes’ illusions, in Proust it is increasingly language itself that does this. Even the narrator, Marcel, is disillusioned by the salons’ language games, which never cease. In the polyphonic novel, language is polylogical and allows every word to have a different meaning in a different context. The “dynamism” of the word, Bakhtin tells us, “consists in movement from speaker to speaker, from one context to another, from one social community to another, from one generation to another.”⁷⁹ In the terms of this literary “sociology of language” (Marcel Mauss), each of Proust’s salons is a contextual milieu in which words get lost and sometimes never manage to regain any unambiguousness at all. The reinvention of authentic memory does not take place. We take a word “into new contexts, attach it to new material, put it in a new situation in order to wrest new answers from it, new insights into its meaning, and even wrest from it new words of its own.”⁸⁰ In the novel, there are always several polyphonic voices that speak and act at the same time. Narrative irony is predominantly characterized by the fact that it is no longer tied to the narrator-function’s authority. This does not at all exclude, in an author like Proust, the possibility of narratorial irony. But the two forms are triggered differently and, accordingly, also take different literary paths. In strongly polyphonic novels, only the autarky of contexts is still capable of guaranteeing any distinction, however dubious, between different characters and their motivations. Ironic effects can arise when different contexts encounter each other through erring actants. In such cases, understanding and communication fail because words display their contextually-limited meaning and language reveals an ironic difference from itself or from its communicational duties. This third irony is the adequate narrative, indirectly-mimetic expression of the fact that in its original rhetoricity, language always already speaks itself differently. Here, language itself, as a medium, is placed in the foreground. In being used, language expresses the (hi)story of the speakers and it tells this (hi)story more explicitly than any description of the speaker’s outer appearance could.

79 Bakhtin, “Discourse Typology in Prose,” trans. Richard Balthazar and I. R. Titunik, in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 285–303, here 302. 80 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 346. This, too, is the polyphonic novel’s inheritance from carnivalesque techniques, in which, according to Bakhtin, things or people are deployed in a manner entirely foreign to them. This results not only in a comical effect but also sheds new light on the particular context in which they are deployed.

3 From Micro-irony (Quotation) to Macro-irony (Genre) From the perspective of narration, irony largely appears in its more controlled forms. This chapter moves to the third relationship between narration and irony, namely, to a contextual irony that is no longer necessarily tied to the authority of narrator or writer. Here, I analyze this relationship by looking at different ironic procedures and genres – quotation, pastiche, and parody – as well as different forms of intertextuality. My aim is less to describe the way in which irony, more radically conceived, loses control than it is to differentiate as precisely as possible irony’s various heterogeneous effects. The aesthetic sense or nonsense of specific effects can be determined only in relation to a particular poetic context.

3.1 The ironic destruction of quotations This becomes clear in a first form of literary intertextuality:⁸¹ the quotation. For our purposes, quotation differs from other kinds of transtextuality such as plagiarism and allusion insofar as it is specifically marked. Once propositions (or entire figures of speech, even actions) seem to become detached from their original context, they can begin to take on new meanings. Only in so far as they are becoming can they be ironic or have comical effects. In this context, scholarship has time and again insisted on “repetition as the main possibility of irony.”⁸² In fact, every proposition, sufficiently perpetuated, can petrify into an ironizable cliché. Proust’s mastery rests not least on his ability to unmask his characters by means of the clichés and hollow pathos (re)produced by them.⁸³ It would be wrong to see this as a purely rhetorical and somewhat aggressive oppositional irony. It is, rather, a subsumption of contextual irony 81 Gérard Genette lists intertextuality as the first of five types of transtextuality: 1. intertextuality (literary influences), 2. paratexts (subtitles etc.), 3. metatextuality (commentary), 4. hypertextuality (grafting of one text onto another), 5. architextuality (taxonomic attribution to, for example, the genre “poem” or “novel”); compare Palimpsests, 1–7. 82 Allemann, “Ironie als literarisches Prinzip,” 18. 83 In this, the Salons resemble one another. On clichés in Proust, see Sarah Benzaquen Lumpkin, Irony and Clichés in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). What remains unclear in Lumpkin’s book, however, is how an irony that is, on the one hand, understood to be only a style of language can, on the other hand, lead to configurations such as an “irony of fate.” An account in terms of content alone (e.g. based on the fact that Mme Verdurin becomes Princess Guermantes [Lumpkin, Irony and Clichés, 27]) is insufficient.

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under narratorial irony. In those instances in the Recherche in which what is not explicitly quoted sheds new light on the quotation and on the one who quotes, the technique of quotation is masterfully deployed to unmask the semi-educated – a group that in Marcel’s view includes practically everyone. My focus here, however, is not on satirical deployments of irony such as these but on the function quotations play in the constitution of the novel. In excerpts from icons of classical modernity, we can discern three techniques of quotation: one constitutive of plot (Proust), one constitutive of personalities (Musil), and, through uniting a number of forms of quotations, one constitutive of meaning (Joyce).

3.1.1 Proust: Quotation as constitutive of plot The ability of quotations to constitute plot stands out particularly in the use Proust makes of them. In the Recherche, every character who quotes can be seen as a linguistic mask, and because everything can be imitated and copied, everything is also capable of becoming literature. The ideal of determining those quotations oneself, which are in turn determining for a character, is nothing but an ethical criterion. One might even call it a Stoic ideal: to aim for becoming a quotation worth imitating (or, analogously for the writer: to become the object of a pastiche). One of the best-known examples of Marcel’s living and playing in and with quotations is his use of Racine’s Phèdre. From the beginning of the novel, the young Marcel lives in the world of Phaedra; he memorizes, thinks in, and identifies with the Phaedra universe. This seems to suggest that the novel’s reality is shot through with literary simulacra. The novel’s entire project, however, undermines such strict demarcations: later in Marcel’s life, the drama is given reality – to a large extent, Marcel’s own liaisons are given meaning through quotations from Phèdre and Esther. These quotations come alive, manifest themselves in Marcel’s experiences, and help the author-to-be to describe Swann at the beginning of the novel. It may in fact very well be the case that without preformed literary schemata, nothing at all, or something very different, would be experienced. The model texts’ aesthetic quality and psychological refinement thus acquire a significance for life: the more complex these texts are, the more varied and comprehensive are the protagonists’ experiences, thanks to their language masks. The knowledge that one’s personal apperception of the world is pre-formed offers an invitation to deal with this world productively. Each new relationship between the quotation’s old and new contexts expands the novel’s polyphonic web and its ironically configured imperviousness. No quotation leaves its ances-

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tral home, as it were, without paying a price. Repetitions of life and of literature produce an inevitable aesthetic difference. Once they have come into being, the new overtones are difficult to ignore. The Recherche is aware of the ironic deviation that results from every quotation and turns these deviations into ever-new options for its plot.

3.1.2 Musil: Quotation constitutive of personalities Musil demonstrates the second constitutive function quotations perform in novels: that of constituting personalities. The expectations of even minor characters such as Klementine Fischel, who desires to see her banker husband sitting at Goethe’s “whirring loom of time,”⁸⁴ are driven by literary models. In a note found among his papers, Musil writes: “Human beings show how they are entirely put together from reminiscences” because “human beings want others to act according to their literarily typified conception.”⁸⁵ In The Man Without Qualities, almost every character or group of personalities has a main author or at least a certain pool of citations.⁸⁶ One could even say that the limits of the protagonists’ world are marked by how far their quotations reach. In this sense, “most of the novels’ characters” are “prisoners of specific idioms.”⁸⁷ Yet the double logic of irony implies not only this delimiting function but also an un-limiting one: Musil’s characters develop within a space opened up by criticism or ironic demarcations. Musil creates in and by means of his quotations. His characters grow out of quotations into life. Thus everyone is defined by language in a double sense. As the novel progresses, it moves away from its satirical approach. Irony in The Man Without Qualities can be called medial because in the novel communication generally takes place by means of quotations. These quotations do not have to be literary, they can also be lingual stereotypes, unquestioned figures of speech, and so on. This is what we find, for example, in the scene in which we encounter Diotima by herself after Ulrich has left her. Section chief Tuzzi’s wife is shown caught up in her covetous daydreams that metonymically circle around Arnheim’s “little 84 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 1:240. On Musil’s entirely non-Goethean use of this expression, see Gerhard R. Kaiser, Proust, Musil, Joyce: Zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Gesellschaft am Paradigma des Zitats (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972), 95. 85 Quoted in Kaiser, Proust, Musil, Joyce, 95. 86 For a more complete attribution of stocks of quotations to various groups of people, see Kaiser, Proust, Musil, Joyce, esp. 143. 87 Kaiser, Proust, Musil, Joyce, 105.

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blackamoor.” Her first thought is: “Society life has become soulless nowadays,” a thought that anticipates all the subsequent needs for clichés. There was something in her heart that took the part of the dashing outsider who was bold enough to keep a blackamoor, this urbane intruder who overstepped the limits of bourgeois decorum and put to shame the mighty lords with their inherited tradition, as once the learned Greek slave had put his Roman masters to shame.⁸⁸

Everything about these comparisons is off, each element is wrong – and exactly for this reason the passage is an all the more truthful and precise expression of Hermine-Diotima’s late bourgeois phantasms. As a bourgeois Viennese, she does not even have access to the phantasms of a colonial power. Doubly inappropriate is her attribution of the lax exoticism of the rather unlikable black slave (who, in any case, has not lived up to the educational program imposed on him) to his educated master. According to the logic of Bovary, Arnheim, everybody’s darling, becomes the poor hero in need of protection. For Diotima, Arnheim is, in turn, a “bold outsider” or “an outsider of genius,” whereby the latter attribute is particularly significant in the context of contemporary theories of genius. The (journalistic) discourse of “race horses of genius” is after all one of the main triggers of Ulrich’s decision to take a vacation from life. Diotima, in any case, is irrevocably resolved to be ravished. In this way, she is in agreement with the other subject of desire, for “Arnheim too was delighted when in Diotima he met a woman who had not only read his books but, as a Grecian figure swathed in almost imperceptible plumpness, corresponded to his ideal of beauty.”⁸⁹ The types of comparison and the way they are organized shows above all how much this desire is steeped in bourgeois classicist readings. It does not belie a lack of authenticity, but it does unmask the relationship’s artificiality through the protagonist’s threadbare artistic ideals, e.g. Diotima’s fantasies dressed up in a sort of aestheticism. The uneven syntax of the subsequent description confronts the reader with the laboriously obscured vulgarity of Arnheim’s ideal of beauty, “which was Hellenic, only with a little a bit more flesh on it so as to make the classical line a little less rigid.”⁹⁰ Musil’s stylizing procedure deserves closer investigation. Irony here is not merely negative-satirical. It is situated in the productive core of the narrative style. This narrative productivity can be explained with the help of a poetological concept central to Russian formalism, namely, the concept of skaz, the written

88 Musil, Man Without Qualities, 123. 89 Musil, Man Without Qualities, 124–125. 90 Musil, Man Without Qualities, 125.

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simulation of oral communication. The passage quoted above is particular, for instance, in that it shows “the infusion of a verbal stream into the channel of a single linguistic consciousness.” This is necessary wherever there is a need to relate the semantic ligature of the narration to an individual figure who has a particular everyday psychological and social make-up. Problems concerning the functions of the narrator are semantic problems for the field of stylistics. It is a question of […] relating the meanings of symbols to the person and milieu to which the skaz is adjusted.⁹¹

Instead of one-sidedly satirizing and criticizing, irony in the above passage also has a reverse, productive aspect. By means of ironic skaz, it brings about a successful mimesis of the protagonists’ way of speaking and thus vivifies the protagonists and their social and intellectual milieu. The novel’s short chapter, which is taken up by a conversation Diotima remembers, highlights other aspects of ironic skaz. Musil’s procedure is, once again, best described in Vinogradov’s terms. For Vinogradov, a significant part of the intonational variations and forms of word order in a narrative monologue (especially among literary, educated people) is of bookish or generally speaking, of secondary origin; that is, it is created by adapting either syntactical constructions of the written language or any other constructions that are bound to mnemonic signs of complex speech formations to a system of oral recitation.⁹²

In Diotima’s recollection of a dialogue with Arnheim, both of these techniques mutually reinforce each other. Despite the long distances between Musil and the narrator, the narrator and Diotima, between Diotima’s recollection of Arnheim and Arnheim himself, the introductory sentence of Arnheim’s direct speech (a type repeated in similar ways throughout) characterizes the speaker with extraordinary precision: “Yes,” he had said, “there are no longer any inner voices in us. We know too much these days. Reason tyrannises over our lives.” Thereupon she had replied: “I like to be with women, because they know nothing, they are integral.”⁹³

91 Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov, “The Problem of Skaz in Stylistics,” trans. Martin P. Rice, Russian Literature Triquarterly 12 (Spring 1975): 237–250, here 239. 92 Vinogradov, “The Problem of Skaz in Stylistics,” 243. 93 Musil, Man Without Qualities, 125.

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This passage is important for the two kinds of oscillation it displays. First, there is a narratological oscillation: what we find between narration and dramatic showing is not a simple transposition of speech. Rather, what is narrated is an inner monologue, one recalled and transposed by the protagonist herself. Second, there is a grammatical-semantic oscillation, evident from the beginning in the word “had,” between simple tense (the simple past of to have) and a purely grammatical construction in the perfect tense: “And Arnheim had said…” This word guides the flow of the stereotypical conversation that had delighted Diotima as she unwinds it once more in her recollection. Some ten “had”s can be found in this short episode, short despite Arnheim’s proclivity for long monologues. They are usually accompanied by an awkward “and” or “then” that only serves to reinforce the evocation of the stuffy atmosphere of a German lesson in the provincial young ladies’ academy. The young Hermine’s dreams date from long-gone, neverending mornings spent in the classroom. And this fact compels readers not to forget Hermine’s small-mindedness but to empathize with it. Surely she normally expresses herself in a more elegant way. And Musil most certainly can write in a very different way. Yet the more vivid the narrator’s agitation and the more vivid his highly emotional relationship to his subject matter is, the further removed his monologue is from the logical constraint of written syntax and lexical elements of “bookish” language.⁹⁴

Diotima and Arnheim usually serve as a counterpart, in content and in style, to Musil’s complicated satirical syntax, which is an adequate form for expressing the ironically refracted utopia of The Man Without Qualities. But when we observe Diotima as she used to be, dreaming of happiness, and when we see, together with her, the sunshine through the window, we sometimes forgive her naiveté. In these instances, even the rather self-assured narrator needs a moment to return to his usual controlled style. Diotima’s atmosphere overwhelms him as well; the episode’s framing narrative stylistically imitates Diotima’s tone and her often archaizing choice of words and in this way offers an example of “the usage of archaisms in an ironic function”⁹⁵ analyzed by Tynyanov.

94 Vinogradov, “Problem of Skaz,” 243. On the novel’s macro-level, this porous style corresponds to an indulgence in countless ideological discourses and social idioms. Hartmut Böhme has pointed to the danger that the novel thus runs of becoming ideological itself. Böhme, Anomie und Entfremdung: Literatursoziologische Untersuchungen zu den Essays Robert Musils und seinem Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1974), esp. 253. 95 Tynjanov, “On Literary Evolution,” 154.

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3.1.3 Joyce: Quotation as constitution of meaning James Joyce’s Ulysses offers the collective culmination of the aspects of quotation listed above. Among the works of classical modernity, Ulysses is a comprehensive treasure trove and provides endless material for a poetological investigation of the role of quotation and ironic intertextuality. In this novel, quotations no longer simply outline the horizon of actants. In Joyce, quotations perform a third constitutive function: they simulate the horizon of meaning in its entirety. The ironic paradox we saw among Musil’s characters is repeated here on a fundamental textual level. Whereas Joyce’s Finnegans Wake demonstrates how a myriad of quotations undermine a novel’s meaning, Ulysses shows how a mythological, antecedent (hi)story serves to simulate a traditional novel structure. Instead of instrumentalizing quotations for the constitution of plots and characters, Ulysses (before Döblin, Dos Passos, and Aragon) deploys quotations with unparalleled specificity: Joyce’s new brand of realism shifts the traditional understanding of quotation.⁹⁶ Quotations appear suddenly and disappear just as suddenly. They do not stand out from the flow of associations  – which we see for instance in the fragmentary song lyrics and advertisements that float around Molly’s mind. Irony dismantles pathos and distance and tends to profane or even blasphemize what is quoted. According to its partly carnivalesque logic, irony also performs a degrading function, as in the permanent association of liturgical quotes with sexual themes. Roughly put, Joyce deploys two procedures to banalize given linguistic elements: He either alienates this material through wordplay – rearrangements that change meaning, for example, or onomatopoeia – or he inserts a quotation that, taken in isolation, is quite serious, and exposes it, if not to ridicule, then to leveling. ⁹⁷

The quotation is thereby lost in the adjoining technique of estrangement (pastiche, satire, parody), which undermines not only individual quotations but also the function of quotations as such. The negative and simultaneously self-destructive effects of satirically employing quotations unfold in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter. The many Shakespeare quotations are not marked as such; they are, strictly speaking, plagiarized. Even if one senses the proximity to Shakespeare’s 96 More traditional is the use in Ulysses of various forms of satirizing both people and what is quoted. There is narratorial irony, for example, in the treatment of Stephen’s double madness when he explains everything in Shakespeare biographically and everything about his own biography in terms of Shakespeare. 97 Kaiser, Proust, Musil, Joyce, 188.

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language, the reader is hardly able to tell with certainty what is intentional pastiche, what is incidental allusion, and what is a hidden quote. The novel’s encyclopedic character once again asserts its resistance to habitual forms of definition and terminological distinctions.

3.2 Pastiche A second stylistic technique of irony emphasizes this point: though it often remains undecidable whether a given element is pastiche, quotation, or plagiarism, it is often of little or no consequence within the universe of the novel, which never attempts to strictly delimit separate spheres. Joyce and those after him display what Genette diagnosed already in Stendhal as an “almost hysterical taste for travesty,”⁹⁸ that is, a tendency toward blurring the lines of plagiarism, apocrypha, and pastiche. So how is it possible to nonetheless provide a heuristic definition of pastiche? What is its function in the novel? What, exactly, does it mean in the novel? According to Genette, pastiche “ideally […] consist[s] of taking a text written in familiar style in order to translate it into a ‘foreign’ style: i.e., a more distant one.”⁹⁹ The great polyphonic novels, however, call for a correction in this definition, geared as it is toward conscious, controlled pastiche. This definition does not sufficiently take into account the effects that lie beyond the control of even the most powerful of wordsmiths: if an author had complete control over a (foreign) style, then its foreignness would be lost and the attempt at pastiche would fail. This might also be the point of Proust’s imperative, popularized by Deleuze, that one must write in one’s own language as if it were a foreign language. If Marcel becomes an author, he will have done so only by way of a detour through the confusingly large number of salons, only by way of the sensitivity for language he develops in the process. Insofar as the pastiche brings the stylistic conditions and restrictions of (one’s own foreign) language to the fore, and insofar as it brings out the mediality of (the novel’s) language, it is characteristic of the style of novels as such. Although Bakhtin does not devote much time to pastiche, his analyses can nonetheless assist us in understanding the decisive function pastiche performs in the novel. In a specific way, pastiche combines two elements that appear in

98 Genette, “‘Stendhal,’” in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 147–182, here 173. 99 Genette, Palimpsests, 81. This does not mean, of course, that we have to agree with his definition that “[i]mitation […] is to figures (to rhetoric) what pastiche is to genres (to poetics)” (Genette, Palimpsests, 80).

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Bakhtin: first, the “micro-dialogic“ nature of individual words and, second, the dialogic-distancing presentation of opinions and utterances. For dialogic relations also exist between different styles of language and sociolects insofar as they are conceived of as a kind of linguistic worldview.¹⁰⁰ In his pastiches, for example, Proust explores the limits of Flaubert’s language or that of his opponent Sainte-Beuve. The almost unnoticeable production of a satirical effect, however, is not a necessary part of the stylistic imitation called “pastiche.” Pastiche that constitutes meaning is thus to be distinguished from what Roland Barthes, in The Preparation of the Novel, calls “pastiches done out of irony, out of mockery.”¹⁰¹ The decisive function of pastiche is not to be confused with the satirizing or parodying effects it produces. Take for example Balzac, who surely is not always pathetic and only rarely involuntarily funny. But it is difficult to tell the extent to which we read these effects into Balzac’s original after we have read Proust’s pastiches of Balzac. It thus becomes necessary to relativize Frederic Jameson’s objections against pastiche (albeit in a different context). According to Jameson, pastiche is like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.¹⁰²

In his politically understandable Marxist indignation, Jameson hypostatizes an original political impulse that, in his reading, remains transparent in parody but is amputated, scandalously, in pastiche. In my reading, by contrast, pastiche is the imitation of a style, a “stylization” in Tynyanov’s sense,¹⁰³ and parody is the imitation of a content, if not of an entire genre. What is more: their respective logics seem to stand in an inversely proportionate relationship. The more pastiche (because of exaggerations or other markers) becomes recognizable as such, the less it conforms to its own technical ideal of unrecognizability. This seems 100 Cf. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 101 Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–80), trans. Kate Briggs, ed. Nathalie Léger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 134. 102 Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 17. 103 For reasons of method, Tynyanov prefers the concept of “stylization” over “imitation” or “influence”; see “Yury Tynyanov on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol” in The Complection of Russian Literature: A Cento, trans. and ed. Andrew Field (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 66–83, here 68.

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to be the provocative aspect of pastiche: it does not teleologically aim at comprehensibility or recognizability. Itinerant pastiche can become a form of uncontrolled literary irony not least because there is nothing necessarily at stake. That it overlooks and seeks to theoretically instrumentalize the pastiche is one reason, among others, why ideology often cannot (and does not want to) see irony. Irony ought to be under control, for otherwise pastiche could not serve as satire and parody, that is, ultimately, as a means of unmasking something in the service of a healthy sense of morality. The question to be asked of ironic literary procedures as well as of irony in general is: to what end? We can only answer this question if we do not remain fixated on the “purgative and exorcising merits of pastiche”¹⁰⁴ for individual subjects, and if we instead focus on pastiche’s poetological function in the novel. What drives the novel to pastiche is its encyclopedic drive to capture the past. Bakhtin was well aware of this diachronic ambition. “A dialogue of languages is a dialogue of social forces perceived not only in their static co-existence, but also as a dialogue of different times, epochs, and days, a dialogue that is forever dying, living, being born.”¹⁰⁵ A novel like the Recherche, whose lost hero is time itself, only finds time, if at all, by means of a pastiche of old manners of speaking.¹⁰⁶ Through pastiche alone, the past cannot be brought to life, but it can be figured: this is what Swann was like, this is how Charlus spoke, and perhaps now they are no longer dead. And if they are, then Proust has at least allowed something of the age in which they lived to survive. In keeping with its encyclopedic tendency, the novel, from Don Quixote¹⁰⁷ to Pynchon’s picaresque novels,¹⁰⁸ leads its heroes through innumerable milieus. It 104 Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1988), 268. 105 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 365. 106 Not only styles of writing, styles of speaking, too, can serve for pastiche. Thus, for example, young Marcel imitates Swann and Gilberte later produces pastiches of Marcel. 107 On Cervantes’ novel-encyclopedia, see Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 73. 108 In Pynchon’s V, for example, the stencil chapters, which take place in different times and are written in different styles, feature pastiches of Melville, Conrad, and others. On Pynchon’s continuation of the picaresque tradition, see Ralph Pordzik, “Twins Abroad: Towards a Dyadic Theory of the Picaro,” in Das Paradigma des Pikaresken, ed. Christoph Ehland and Robert Fajen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 301–314. On the picaro’s encyclopedic nature generally, see the still important essay by Claudio Guillén, “Zur Frage der Begriffsbestimmung des Pikaresken,” in Pikarische Welt: Schriften zum europäischen Schelmenroman, ed. Helmut Heidenreich (Darmstadt: Winter, 1969), 375–396. More recently, Christoph Schubert has picked up on Guillén’s thesis that the picaresque novel fundamentally uses language ironically; see his “Irony as a Pragmalinguistic Strategy of Picaresque Masking,” in Das Paradigma des Pikaresken, 159–175.

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does so by means of different languages, picking up on and mimetically approximating the various lingual worlds through pastiche. This follows from the imperative – an imperative of Bakhtin’s that literary practice can, of course, never quite live up to – that a world be reflected not only in the text but from out of the text as well: “[T]he novel must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all the era’s language that have any claim to being significant; the novel must be a microcosm of heteroglossia.”¹⁰⁹

3.3 Parody Novel and parody are already closely linked on the level of content. In terms of a history of genre, they share an origin. Starting from a practice of parodistic repetition, the novel developed as a genre to become realistic enough that its grotesque origins were occasionally lost from sight. Yet it was precisely the defeatist virus of parodistic criticism that dismantled the dogmatic ideal of a flat realism – an ideal that is in any case more deeply rooted in the theory of the novel than in realist and naturalist novels themselves.¹¹⁰ We can now pick up on our earlier description of how the logic of the novel split off from the generic laws of the epic. Stereotypical formulations, often reminiscent of refrains, were typical of Greek epics. Especially meanings whose repetition had turned these formulations into clichés became occasions for par-odia, for the song on the side, the individualizing companion of the critical logic of the novel. With perfect logical consistency, the epic unity that had just been established exploded. That is why the origin of the novel can be described as a leap – a deconstructive scheme that ceaselessly repeats itself in ironic phenomena. The more interesting question than the futile one of when the first novel was written (futile because it is ultimately unanswerable) is the question of the novel’s (pre-)ironic roots. In the history of literature, wherever we encounter forerunners of the novel – no matter what genre, in Euripides’ tragedy, Aristophanes’ comedy, Menippean satire – the Enlightenment tendencies of their parody distort the dominant song.¹¹¹ The closed genres of high art “become dialogized, perme-

109 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 411. 110 On the tension between a historical and a typological conception of “realism,” see Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 38–46. 111 On the innumerable ancient (and medieval) travesties of Greek epics sometimes attributed to Homer, see Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” 55, and Genette, Palimpsests, 133.

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ated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody.”¹¹² The novel is ironic insofar as it reveals what is conventional about other genres. Its criticism of other genres is the criticism I discussed above with respect to Schlegel’s “progressive universal poetry.” The novel inhales everything, it is essayistic, epistolary, scientific – and at the same time it isn’t any of these. It is always already novel and anti-novel at the same time. That is why, like the question of the first novel, the question of the “novel to end all novels” can only be answered within a particular perspective. Within the framework of this book’s fundamental inquiry into the relation between irony and modernity, one could of course make reference to Sterne, Diderot and others. But around 1800 something else changes along with irony: one of its poetic forms. As par-odia, irony moves from being a song sung alongside, to being a song sung against, to being a parasite on all Ptolemaic linguistic worlds that dissolves the closed unity of word and world, form and content, in order to highlight the form of form – the mask of genre. Its preferred means is the estranging juxtaposition of high style and low content or high content and low style. If indirect speech leads to the stylization of style, then parody leads to the formalization of form, whose theory we then find in early Romanticism.¹¹³

In societies that are less and less stratified, we might conclude, art sublimates parody into a form of implicit contradiction. Some so-called “postmodern” novels have taken this up with enthusiasm. Nabokov’s Lolita, for example, is a pastiche of various styles of thinking and writing (for example in the way it indulgently offers psychoanalytic platitudes) and a parody of various genres (romance novel, crime story, etc.) that, in Herbert Grabes’ terms, “ironize each other.”¹¹⁴ “Ironize” here is likely meant in the sense of “to relativize.” Taken literally, it indicates the auto-destructive drive of an uncontrolled irony no longer readily serviceable or easily applicable. Twentieth-century novels display this tension. In Ulysses, we see not only the corrosive effects of irony but also the author’s attempt to organize the plot by means of inserted quotations and ironized mythological elements. By way of conclusion, I will mention one last literary form of parody: Parodying entire plot patterns “leads to an ‘excess’ of plot and triggers, despite the variety of plot elements, even through their multiplication,” a corrosive effect,

112 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 7. 113 David Roberts, “Genealogie der Literatur: Zur Selbstbeobachtung in stratifizierten Gesellschaften,” in Systemtheorie der Literatur, 292–309, here 307–308. 114 Grabes, “Die parodistische Aufhebung,” 237.

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“such that the individual situation in turn moves to the forefront.”¹¹⁵ What might have begun as a parodistic strategy against cliché plot patterns (Nabokov), or what may have set out to constitute plot in the first place (Eco), through a process of ironic self-conception, far exceeds these beginnings. Thus, for example, the apocalyptic guiding thread of the murders in The Name of the Rose turns out, in the end, to be a necessary fictive simulation that constitutes the text. The paranoid motivation that characterizes every search for a plot is marked nowhere more clearly than in Thomas Pynchon. In his novels, every interpretation is potentially just one more interpretation on the part of the protagonists who try more or less desperately to bring some kind of coherence into divergent events – which ultimately subjects them to the generalized suspicion that they’re paranoid.

115 Gerhard Hoffmann, “Situationalismus als epistemologisches bzw. ethisches Grundmuster des zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Romans und die Umwandlung der erzählten Situation ins Fantastische,” in Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman, 1:108–144, here 130.

4 Novels of (De)formation and Ironic Autobiographies To conclude this third part’s discussion of ironic procedures and genres, let us turn to two particular cases: the Bildungsroman or novel of education and the autobiography. In both cases, we can return to the issue of the melancholic subject discussed above. Regardless of whether the Bildungsroman and the autobiography involuntarily present epigones or voluntarily engage in parody, both genres display the tensions of inevitable irony. As is obvious in the case of autobiography, questions concerning the author and questions concerning the protagonist overlap. But it is just as true for the novel of education that the problems of characters tend to duplicate the problems of their authors.

4.1 Educational decadence The concept of “education”  – and especially of German Bildung  – is overburdened with connotations. In discussions of the Bildungsroman, education is usually linked to the overloaded term “mastery” (Meisterschaft). The paradigm of mastery has been and is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and the “Apprenticeship” in particular. Our investigation of irony in the novel of education, of the way in which it constitutes and undermines subjects, must take a two-fold approach. Beside their literary particularity, novels of education have always also been regarded as concrete programs of education. From this perspective, a subject (a self-reflective consciousness) is to be educated or shaped into a differentiated individual (an autonomous decision-maker). The doubling of literature and pedagogy within and outside of the novel remains effective even in the decadent variants of the genre. In Thomas Mann’s chronicle Buddenbrooks – the most salient example of the genre in German literature  – the decay of a natural, organic education sets in with Thomas Buddenbrook. Thomas Buddenbrook already, and not just later his brother, experiences the attack on his healthy entrepreneurship by artistic decadence. It is precisely the exaggerated cultural education, in particular in the form of drama, which Goethe’s Wilhelm survives with his health more or less intact, that in Thomas Mann’s polar view of the world is now clearly placed on the negative side. Attacked by the virus of dandyish decadence, Thomas Buddenbrook’s existence was no different from that of an actor, but one whose whole life has become a single production, down to the smallest, most workaday detail – a

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production that, apart from a few brief hours each day, constantly engaged and devoured all his energies. ¹¹⁶

This can also be applied to the novelist Mann himself, who has a later protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, comment on the vulgarity of old stylistic devices: “Why must it seem to me that almost all, no, all the means and contrivances of art nowadays are good only for parody?”¹¹⁷ A long time even before Thomas Mann, Gottfried Keller and Adalbert Stifter, for example, reflect on a “late period” (Spätzeit) and the figure of the “late-comer” (Spätling). The heroes of Karl Immermann’s Epigonen (1836) already suffer from familiar symptoms: they have come to “maturity” early and are endowed with an excess of “understanding and experience;” they are pervaded by the same ailment as the protagonist Hermann, namely, the sense that “his past preceded him.”¹¹⁸ The problem of writing in the shadow of Goethe, which is only possible through ironic refraction, is thus reflected in the difficulties that the non-autonomous heroes of German novels face. Nonetheless, advanced texts such as Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years already betray an awareness of the unmet conditions – idealistic (authenticity, originality) as well as philosophical – of concepts such as “epigonality” around 1800. Generally, we may speak of a construct of the Bildungsroman, since conceptualized by Dilthey, that incites a particular fascination but that can never be completely verified in literary works. In a way, early Romantic criticism, by pointing out the poetic excess of Wilhelm Meister, had refuted the Bildungsroman concept before it was even articulated. Immermann’s Epigones then bear their refraction as their title, and Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry is more aptly described as a novel of “disillusion” or as an “anti-development novel”¹¹⁹ than as a novel of education. This is due to the dialectical refraction of the conceptual couple novel/ education that mirrors the refraction of Enlightenment processes in general: they are ambivalent both in their consequences and in their triggers. On the one hand, epigones will never quite live up to their models. On the other hand, the subject, guided by an invisible hand, still seeks to liberate itself from its self-imposed immaturity. 116 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1994), 597. 117 Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1999), 143. 118 Quoted in Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Die Ästhetik der Epigonalität: Theorie und Praxis wiederholenden Schreibens im 19. Jahrhundert, Immermann – Keller – Stifter – Nietzsche (Tübingen: Francke, 2001), 126. It is not a coincidence that Meyer-Sickendiek’s many insights on the novel of education appear under the auspices of epigonality. 119 Meyer-Sickendiek, Die Ästhetik der Epigonalität, 99.

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4.2 From hero to subject The structural problem of the role and function of the hero in the novel is particularly acute in the novel of education: the protagonists, measured against common realistic expectations and assessments, either are not real people or they are not heroes. In almost all national literatures, the nineteenth century broke with the concept of “hero.” Byron’s heroes were already confronted with a “sublime irony,”¹²⁰ and when Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time attempts Byron, he runs the danger of ridicule as much as his pastiche-writing colleagues in Pushkin. The novel’s heroes are seekers. Where German novels emphasize their protagonists’ search for education, French novels have usually placed this search in the context of contemporary political change. In Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert, the protagonist’s social success or failure clearly develops against a political and social background described in great detail. Frédéric’s éducation, the schooling of his feelings, fails politically, precisely because of the dichotomy of homme and citoyen. With few exceptions – Raabe, for example¹²¹ – contemporary German-language novels rather seem to avoid a more complex view of social reality. Not the least important of influences on the way in which heroes (un)realistically inhabit their times is a brand of idealist philosophy that advocates a narrative reconciliation with reality. It seeks to make the humanist ideal of personal self-perfection congruent with the idealist content of classical aesthetics. In Schiller’s terms: Apprenticeship is a relational concept, it demands a correlate, mastery; the idea of the latter has to explain and justify the former. Yet the idea of mastery, which is only the work of matured and perfected experience, cannot guide the hero; it cannot and must not present itself to him as his goal and purpose, for as soon as he would think this goal, he would eo ipso have reached it. [The idea of mastery] thus has to stand behind him as his guide. This way, the whole receives a beautiful purposiveness without the hero having a purpose; the understanding thus sees its business completed while the imagination completely asserts its freedom.¹²²

120 We find a “sublime irony” as early as in Byron’s Don Juan, whose “satirical impulse […] ridicules the Romantics” themselves. See Claire Colebrook, Irony (London: Routledge, 2004), 117. 121 On Raabe’s attempt to establish a critical counter-project in a contemporary novel of manners, see Dirk Göttsche, Zeit im Roman: Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitromans im späten 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2001), 25. 122 Schiller to Goethe, July 8, 1796, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe und Friedrich Schiller, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Hans Gerhard Gräf and Albert Leitzmann (Frankfurt: Insel, 1964), 175.

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The concept of education Schlegel develops in his radical years differs from that of classicist aesthetics and its literary manifestations insofar as it avoids prejudging the aesthetic value proper to the imagination.¹²³ The concept of education is profoundly changed by Schlegel’s attribution of an autonomous function to reflection. According to a fragment from 1797, education is an “antithetical synthesis and perfection to the point of irony.”¹²⁴ The following year saw the publication of the review of Wilhelm Meister in which Schlegel, on the one hand, lives up to the demands he articulated for criticism, namely, that it potentialize, but in which he also, on the other hand, articulates his understanding of education as a subjective or universal-moral category. Within Schlegel’s conception of progressive universal poetry’s autopoietic reflection, “education” acquires constitutive significance, a significance immanent to the literary work. Goethe’s work, Schlegel suggests, shows that Wilhelm is the last person these years of apprenticeship would and could turn into a fit and able artist and man. The intention is not to educate this or that human being, but to represent Nature, Education itself in all the variety of these examples, and concentrated into single principles.¹²⁵

This move away from reality allows Schlegel to develop an interpretation of the novel that is probably best described as musical. The novel is to show the artful composition of connections and mirrorings in purely aesthetic terms. But we should not be deceived into thinking that the poet is not utterly serious about his masterpiece, even though he himself seems to take the characters and incidents so lightly and playfully, never mentioning his hero except with some irony and seeming to smile down from the heights of his intellect upon his work. We should think of this work in connection with the very highest ideas, and not read it as it is usually taken on the social level: as a novel in which the persons and incidents are the ultimate end and aim.¹²⁶

As is usually the case, Schlegel’s terminology requires some clarification. This is particularly true for the peculiarly ironic oscillation, triggered by a structural parekbasis, and for the attribution of a “genius” to the novel.¹²⁷ Balance is no longer guaranteed by the tasteful genius. Instead, as a reflective construct, the novel must, from the inside out, develop its own principles of composition. Even if the novel that succeeds in this task is a “masterpiece,” the “mastery” thus 123 [The German for imagination, Einbildungskraft, contains the word for education, Bildung.] 124 Schlegel, KA, 18:82. 125 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 283–284. 126 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 275. 127 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 276.

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implied is just as little that of the author as it is that of the protagonists. That is what Schlegel’s aesthetically refined intuition means. Winfried Menninghaus has described this paradox in post-Kantian aesthetics as an oscillation between “selfpotentiation and collapse. The Romantics called such a figure ‘hovering’ [‘Schweben’]; a suspense and suspension that annihilates what it potentiates and potentiates what it annihilates.”¹²⁸ It is precisely in the fairy-tale nonsense of a good number of Romantic works that we find, if we follow Menninghaus, a redemptive power, the liberation from constraints in motivation and signification that have their origin in myths.

4.3 Romantic parodies of education The best example, perhaps, of an unreasonable successor of Kantian aesthetics is the runaway imagination of the novel of (un)education in The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Chapter headings such as “Sensations of Existence  – My Months of Youth,” “My Youthful Experiences  – I Too was in Arcadia,” “My Apprentice Months – The Whimsical Play of Chance,” “Beneficial Consequences of a Superior Education – My Months of Greater Maturity,”¹²⁹ are parodistic allusions to the schemata that had become conventional in novels of education in the wake of Goethe. Like Keller’s Heinrich Lee, Murr, too, feels a Rousseauean duty to abide by the truth. And like everyone else educated (in the arts), the tomcat is a profound reflection of the project of the novel. What ultimately drives the mirroring of the novel to the limits of madness, however, is its awareness of language. At the very beginning, we find an absurd variation of a familiar Romantic editor’s game. The editor here regretfully remarks that the tomcat has torn sheets from a biographical manuscript. The torn-up biography is that of the musician Kreisler, on the reverse side of which Murr composes his (demolished) novel of education. This doubling should be read less as an expression of the artist’s split personality¹³⁰ than it should, as I would suggest, be read as a sign of an ironic blending of spheres. At first, Murr is just another novelistic hero who has read too much. Even in fear of death, he is still quoting – which is something he, as autobiographical auto-narrator of his Life and Opinions, considers to be “glorious:”

128 Menninghaus, In Praise of Nonsense, 158. 129 E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2006). 130 A thesis defended, for example, by Rüdiger Safranski in his biography of Hoffmann; see E. T. A. Hoffmann: Eine Biographie (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992), 437.

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“Alas!’ thought I, […] “What if this innocent white drink  – what if it be a poison which my master subtly hath ministered to have me dead? – O glorious Murr, even in mortal fear you think in iambic pentameters, paying heed to what you once read in Shakespeare and Schlegel!”¹³¹

The novel’s radicalism lies in its significant reversal of the forms of language and the contents of thought, placing language above thought. The editor of the Life and Opinions gives an external definition of literature’s productive power: “Finally, it is a fact that authors often owe their boldest notions and most remarkable turns of phrase to their kind typesetters, who assist the inspiration of their ideas by perpetrating what are called printer’s errors.”¹³² But Hoffmann carries the principle of blending different spheres, particularly the spheres of realist reality and literary phantasm, even further than this obvious materialization of intertextuality. For what Kreisler, who is himself reproached with “fantastical eccentricity” and “cutting irony,”¹³³ suspects is pointed out by Murr explicitly: Yes, reader! I had an ancestor, an ancestor but for whom I would not, so to speak, be anything at all […] who was none other than the world-famous Prime Minister Hinz von Hinzenfeldt, so dear to the world, so greatly valued, by the name of Puss in Boots.¹³⁴

Not the least among these blendings of spheres is the absurd combination of autobiography and the novel of education. It is no coincidence that this tomcat, whose savage irony (of which he is unaware) constantly produces new connections that increase the general confusion, appears as the author of his (own) life. To the extent that any constitution of a subject is thinkable only as ironic, the attempt to non-ironically come to terms with the constitution of a subject in an autobiography must appear as deeply naive. Hoffmann does not miss this opportunity to heighten the irony of Tomcat Murr. Already in the “Author’s Preface,” we find beneath topoi of modesty (“Bashfully – with trembling breast – I lay before the world some leaves from my life: its sorrows, its hopes, its yearnings – effusions which flowed from my inmost heart in sweet hours of leisure and poetic rapture”) what is really meant, something that is irrepressible and that can be translated through the model of the plainest oppositional irony:

131 Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr, 110. 132 Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr, 4. 133 Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr, 49–50. 134 Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr, 49.

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With the confidence and peace of mind native to true genius, I lay my life story before the world, so that the reader may learn how to educate himself to be a great tomcat, may recognize the full extent of my excellence, may love, value, honour and admire me – and worship me a little.¹³⁵

4.4 Ironic autobiographies There are two reasons for concluding our investigation of the rich relationship between irony and the novel with an analysis of ironic autobiography; both can be framed in the terms Paul de Man proposes in a short essay. The first concerns the constitution of meaning by acts of writing that is fundamental for the biographical production of meaning as well. What does the genesis of the I from the spirit of irony described above look like in (autobiographical) literature? How are texts able to individualize subjects (beyond the problem of intertextual overlap)? They employ the figure of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity […] Voice assumes mouth, eye and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography […] ¹³⁶

This leads us to the second reason, since prosopopeia applies not only to novels that are obviously autobiographical. De Man’s conception allows us to read autobiography not simply as a genre or a particular sort of text but rather as “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts.”¹³⁷ This claim is a variant of the thesis that, strictly speaking, no text ever lives up to the demands of its genre. The possibility and the impossibility of establishing strong boundaries between genres go hand in hand. This paradox, time and again assessed as ironic, is the “specular moment that is part of all understanding [and] reveals the tropological structure that underlies all cognitions, including knowledge of self.”¹³⁸ In this context, Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters lends itself as an object of investigation for a number of reasons. First, this particular work delivers a virtuoso performance of the self situated between the autobiography and the

135 Hoffmann, Tomcat Murr, 6–7. 136 De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94.5 (December 1979): 919–930, here 926. 137 De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 921. 138 De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 922.

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fiction. In contrast to Bernhard’s “officially” autobiographical texts, which also contain fictional elements, Woodcutters is not explicitly designated as autobiographical. Its publication nonetheless caused a scandal because the identities of certain individuals seemed obvious. Second, all of Bernhard’s heroes struggle with the problems of an educated bourgeoisie’s self-understanding. Even in the case of complete failure, the topic of his novels is always “education.” And third, this text undermines an “autobiographical pact.” Typical of modernity, this agreement assumes that the autobiography’s protagonist is identical with its author.¹³⁹ In particular, two more recent premises, namely, the “entitlement to autobiography” and the “expectation of authenticity,” retreat to the background against the emergence of an intertextual montage of artistic and stylistic models (exempla).¹⁴⁰ Bernhard’s work is of interest for another reason as well. Unlike most of the Romantic and post-war novels discussed so far, it is (still) dedicated to a strict modernism. It can thus serve to bring out additional facets of ironic writing. In Bernhard’s barren subjects, there is no place for fantasies, whether Romantic or post-modern. Yet it is precisely from its reduced descriptions, from the endless monologues and mad dialogues, that Bernhard’s novelistic discourse derives a specifically grotesque quality.

4.4.1 Thomas Bernhard’s aesthetics of language The language of Bernhard’s novels is often, quite vaguely, called “musical.” Readers sensitive to the music of language are easily made dizzy by the various linguistic cascades. Usually, such a literary fugue begins with two or three main motifs, short claims that, enriched with secondary theses, are varied in the course of a scene. Again and again, at an ever-increasing tempo, ever-new variations, which seem to obey a serial combinatory logic, appear to turn on an imaginary axis, to circle around a non-existent center. The reference made in Woodcutters to the Bolero is one example of this. But the first-person narrator in that text plays on a Baroque-Catholic grand piano with keys made of exaggerations. The stupendous technique of this grouchy Glenn Gould rip-off from Austria helps produce ever more coloraturas of exaggeration. A reflection commences, and even when it is the most banal reflection about losing evening gloves, it is expanded and 139 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 140 On this point, see Karl A. E. Enenkel, Die Erfindung des Menschen: Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 2–3.

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varied and finally, just before it is taken apart, mutates, with nothing holding it back, into one of the countless crazed Archimedean points of articulation in the Bernhardian universe. But nobody takes an idea like this seriously, even though of course such ideas, which are not taken seriously, are actually the only serious ideas and always will be. It is only in order to survive, it seems to me, that we have such serious ideas which are not taken seriously.¹⁴¹

The eruption of the drunk actor, which remains incomprehensible to all present and gives the book its name, is varied on the same pattern: “the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter”  – in every case, a radical blow puts an end to these spasms and then allows for a new turn, another shot at other reminiscences and always-the-same thoughts. Bernhard’s artificial spasms often end with a downright existential moment. “What am I doing in this company”¹⁴² – this sentence, immediately following the above quote, is one of those moments. And at the same time, it names another question central to the text. On the micro-structural level, every single line of Bernhard’s is inscribed with a knowledge the first-person narrator is able to insert only as counterpoint. To get ourselves out of a tight spot, it seems to me, we are ourselves just as mendacious as those we are always accusing of mendacity […] we are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable […] perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me. I told her I was glad to have renewed my ties with her and her husband.¹⁴³

These unexpected transitions and abrupt switches result from (residually carnivalesque) digressions, typical of Bernhard’s novels and disjunctive unifications of opposites. In his language tricks, the melodious character of individual theses, worldviews, or accusations takes precedence over the people who defend them or are affected by them. The characters, too, stand in a fundamentally musical relationship to one another. They provide cues or counterpoints. Either – or, them or us: Either we escape from them and start running them down, slandering them and spreading lies about them, I thought, in order to save ourselves, slandering them wherever we can in order to save ourselves, running away from them for dear life an accusing them everywhere of

141 Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters, trans. David McLintock (New York: Knopf, 1987), 79. 142 Bernhard, Woodcutters, 79. 143 Bernhard, Woodcutters, 178.

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having us on their consciences. Or they escape from us and slander and accuse us, spreading every possible lie about us in order to save themselves.¹⁴⁴

Another example is the reproach, repeated over and over, of not having left Vienna. This reproach is a function, open to manifold variations, a medial weapon in the hands of whoever picks it up; on the textual level, however, it serves as the occasion for universal self-destruction. What ends up being tossed around by everyone¹⁴⁵ loses meaning. When everyone wants to be the center of attention at the grave of Joana, who has been betrayed by everyone, it is only the text that possesses any kind of overview. This view corresponds to the insight that no one is morally better than anyone else. Nor is there any center to the novel. The sickening envy and ridiculous hatred among the protagonists are evidence of their inferiority even before any particular accusation is made. The text Woodcutters makes a judgment about people and individual opinions in its own way. Coming from the mouth of the drunken Auersperger, the clichés about Spain that the acolytes of the misogynist and generally conservative Thomas Bernhard treat as nuggets of anthropological wisdom reveal themselves as the banalities that they in fact are. The author’s answer to why he made the pianist Friedrich Gulda, whom he otherwise appreciates, the target of a devastating remark is legendary: “Ta-tam, ta-ta-tam […] must have been the rhythm worked out better that way.” The narrator thus finds little that is original in Auersperger’s dictum, “The human race ought to be abolished” (a typical Bernhard sentence). But Auersperger at least emphasizes the phrase “with a rhythmic precision that came from his musical training.”¹⁴⁶ And even what the actor, who dominates the second part of the novel, says about the Prado does not make him his author’s alter ego. He, too, is just one among the novel’s many language masks. The novel presents, even opposes, people and opinions. Scenes, nothing but scenes, and the specificity of Bernhard’s novels is that they are almost exclusively language scenes. Woodcutters especially is populated with a large number of little Thomas Bernhards that all speak the same language and present analogous accusations in an analogous style or tone of voice. The lone hero in Bernhard’s novels is thus language itself. Everyone, even the worst enemies of the various first-person narrators, speaks the same Bernhardian language. The style of writing and style of thinking imposes itself on all of them.

144 Bernhard, Woodcutters, 92. 145 “Possibly it was because you bought a property in Grinzing that you lost your enjoyment of the theater and theatrical affairs generally, Jeannie insisted” after the first-person narrator had made similar accusations against her for pages on end (Bernhard, Woodcutters, 160). 146 Bernhard, Woodcutters, 141.

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The criterion of this literary ethics is this: Is one able to give oneself, prosopopeically, a face? Can one reflect (on) oneself in reflecting on others instead of drowning in the projections of others? Has one successfully used a language mask to construct oneself autonomously and in a way worth copying?

4.4.2 Long live death – Life and the art of the novel Formulations typical of Woodcutters are “I thought,” “I think,” “sitting in the wing chair.” The art of the novel is also the art of indirect speech. In a world in which there is no direct meaning, everyone is the ironic actor of his or her existence, “neither wholly a being nor an actor.” In the second part of the novel, it is an actual actor who speaks up and picks up the language but only manages to produce phrases churned out by Bernhard’s novelistic discourse machine. The dialogically constituted monologues of Thomas Bernhard’s first-person narrator are parekbatic tight-wire acts. They produce an aesthetic distance that runs counter to any identification with content and with protagonists, or that at least reveals the protagonists’ artificiality. “I’m not really here in their apartment in the Gentzgasse, I’m only pretending […] I’ve always pretended to them about everything.” What up to this point might still somehow have been read as the confession of an inconsequential liar is turned by Bernhard’s rigorous processing of language into the lucid auto-reflection of a novel. I’ve always pretended to them about everything – I’ve pretended to everyone about everything. My whole life has been a pretense, I told myself in the wing chair  – the life I live isn’t real, it’s a simulated life, a simulated existence. My whole life, my whole existence has always been simulated – my life has always been pretense, never reality, I told myself. And I pursued this idea to the point at which I finally believed it. I drew a deep breath and said to myself, in such a way that the people in the room were bound to hear it: You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life – a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

The first-person narrator then breaks off this unlivable reflection, “lest I go mad.”¹⁴⁷ Yet it lives on in the novel, no, it is the novel. In Woodcutters, an artistic world, marked off from apparent facts, celebrates itself, reflects itself, potentializes itself. The irony of this potentialization is just as ironic as the breaking off of the reflection. If there is such a thing as the “consciousness of madness” discussed above, then it takes the form here of an insight into the paradoxical im-possibility proper to irony. This consciousness of madness is the non-reason 147 Bernhard, Woodcutters, 60.

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touched upon several times, Kant’s derangement which does not contradict the methodological and formal laws of thought. We can pick up here on a different aspect of the ethical dimension of ironic literature which we saw earlier in Lukács. Articulating anew what is past  – an attempt also made in Woodcutters  – is what we might call an “ethical imperative of literary irony.” Every claim to novelty is an aesthetic claim, even if it is aware that it is illusory. That is why we do not necessarily have to speak of the success of Thomas Bernhard himself. It is the temporary triumph of the novel that corresponds to the identification of those overpowered by the autofictitious protagonists. We can see this in the way in which Bernhard, like a dandy, assumes various elements of an aristocratic heritage. These can only be justified aesthetically. Not unlike the Faubourg Saint-Germain, insofar as its function in the novel is concerned, there is an inventory of characters to populate the Auerspergers’ salon. Woodcutters is itself a search for lost time. After a long time, everyone meets again in the salon. Unlike Proust, however, Bernhard does not stop at a few out-of-place wigs but sketches a midnight feast in grotesque colors. The Auerspergers, like the Verdurins before them, “exhausted themselves in this aristocratic mania of theirs […] They made a show of being artistic, yet remained essentially petit bourgeois […] I thought.”¹⁴⁸ Woodcutters thus tells the truth even about Bernhard’s own ridiculous aristocratic mania. This mania aims less for a utopian ideal of non-authoritarian communication and of social manners freed from socio-economic constraints (as it sometimes does in Adorno) than it does for a violent ironic pathos of distance: to make oneself unpopular as a measure of self-discipline. It remains open whether this exorcistic rudeness manages to distance itself from its own petit bourgeois craving for attention. In society novels, in any case, submissive displays of respect for aristocracy are only unembarrassing when they destroy themselves on the level of the text. The best actant of this all-suspending novelistic condition is the “Burgtheater actor” who has just come from a performance of Ibsen’s Wild Duck. The intertextual reference is an empty allegory. The actor cares very little about a self-destructive desire for clearing things up. It all means nothing. Something similar is to be said about the intertextual allusion to Stifter’s story Hochwald.¹⁴⁹ The tranquilities of that forest, too, are cut down. All that remains is a crowd of educated idiots that enters and destroys the novel of education. Woodcutters cuts short Stifter’s conception of the novel of education. No master is accepted who would guide the young person’s apprenticeship. A good 148 Bernhard, Woodcutters, 96. 149 On the innumerable intertextual montages generally, and above all in the plays, see Christian Klug, Thomas Bernhards Theaterstücke (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991).

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deal of the victor’s arrogance might shine through in Bernhard here, where someone refuses to be destroyed and departs instead. Someone who made something of himself in England and in Germany while others back home settled down to lead the life of the local avant-garde. The gentle desperation in trying to save himself from the latter cannot but go unnoticed by the hometown heroes. The fact that it is, in the end, a terminally ill narrator who victoriously shines forth endows the text with a gentleness that separates it from a revengeful settling of accounts. Why does Swann’s never completed study on Vermeer fail when the Recherche manages to incorporate Vermeer’s painterly aesthetic? Why do all the ridiculous university professors fail? And why, later in Bernhard, do the journalists fail with their maybe not even unfinished studies on Mendelssohn-Bartholdy or some other subject? Why can we tell from their very approach that they will fail? Because they’re small. Small not necessarily in scope but in their claims. Small in comparison with the novel’s superhuman will to create a world of its own. That is the ethical imperative proper to literary writing. Bernhard’s helpless provincial invectives against the experimental avantgarde also call for a prosaic reading. The banal misreadings of Anton Webern’s lyrical microcosms (in the form of his post-war epigone Auersperger) show us the way. Because these microcosms are diametrically opposed to the prosaification of the world, they fall prey to the criticism of the novel. That is why any ethical reading of novels can only be possible if it is founded on an ethical aesthetics of prose, a literary aesthetics. The novel is thus a test case in a double sense. Quite a few people have been drawn into the world of the aesthetic linguistic work of art that is Woodcutters and thus have accepted the impositions of its criteria. Thomas Bernhard’s triumph, however, is not for that reason a personal triumph. It is the triumph of his novels to have built a world of their own, a virtual parallel universe. This is the reason why all other worlds fail in Bernhard’s novels. None of the authors present will describe this world, Auersperger will not put it to music, and his wife will not sing its praises. The triumph is a literary triumph – a triumph of the novel itself. On the other hand: To have created no memory of one’s own means not to have remembered. In Bernhard’s novel, the ethical trespassing consists in not assuming one’s past. Those who do not creatively fashion themselves from virtuality will never free themselves. Here, as in Swann’s aestheticist misrecognition of Odette (as the living echo of Giotto’s Madonna), aesthetic ignorance and ethical weakness go hand in hand. Those who don’t do anything with what they have might one day find themselves as copies, as death masks in someone else’s novel. Those who do not retell their story can only have their story told for them and die.

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This, and not simply his getting stuck in the musical succession to Webern, is the reason why Auersperger is an undead epigone. And from this perspective too, the theme of Woodcutters is death. The objects of memory always already tend toward death. Mournful memoria sets in like a shock. And only through this shock are lost ones found again. The narrator’s search begins with Joana’s death, at her grave. What he is searching for on the Graben, Vienna’s once noble shopping avenue, is not really the Auerspergers. In the salon, and even in the cemetery, he finds his past  – and at the same time he doesn’t find it. Everyone has gathered together: mentor-father, the beloved patron-mother, brothers and sisters in spirit. But his memory of the half-naked Joanas and Jennies in various beds is a memory of the dead, even if the characters are still alive. The memory put on paper in Woodcutters preserves its object and thus keeps a past alive. But it does so at the price of mummifying its protagonists. Those who do not remember are remembered without shaping this memory. The masks describe the double movement whose ironic logic we have traced several times already. In the context of autobiography, we are “deal[ing] with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration.”¹⁵⁰ Woodcutters, too, is thus an extinction, an ef-facement of a different kind.

150 De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” 926.

Part Four: Ironic Politics

Indeed, if one sees in Kant the terrorist Convention and in Fichte the Napoleonic Empire, so we see in Mr. Schelling the reaction of the restoration which followed it. Heinrich Heine¹

In this last part, I turn to the question of irony and politics. Irony in the twentieth century can be understood as a political phenomenon just as it could be seen as a moral phenomenon in the nineteenth. Moreover, we are confronted with philosophical insights that do not simply concern political theses about irony but rather the linguistic constitution of the political sphere as such, that is, the possibility of political speech and discourse in general. The historical starting point is once again, almost self-evidently, the French Revolution. As a political event of world-historical significance, the French Revolution determined the horizon of thought well beyond the turn of the nineteenth century. Among contemporaries, Schlegel considered the French Revolution, beside Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Fichte’s conception of the I, to mark the third trend of his new age. Drawing on Kant’s essay “To Perpetual Peace,” Schlegel thinks the Revolution in terms of the problem of infinite freedom. In his 1796 “Essay on the Concept of Republicanism,” he sketches a Romantic conception of freedom. “Civil freedom is only an idea, which can be made actual only through an infinite progressive approximation.”² Schlegel is thus a post-revolutionary not only because he knows that the Revolution did not succeed. He also detaches the principle of hope from any singular historical event (an event formerly projected into the future) and turns it into a procedural concept. Freedom becomes a utopian idea, it becomes bourgeois, as it were. In 1796, freedom appears on the horizon of an infinite, longing approximation – a few years later, it will be thought of in terms of its self-dissolution. The French Revolution was the decisive event in opening the space of the political. In democratizing the political, it practically achieved a development begun by Machiavelli and debates on sovereignty in the seventeenth century. At the same time, this newly opened space turns out to be an infinite space and, because it lacks clear social definition, provokes a sense of non-freedom. Schlegel confronts the possibility that freedom could be unreal with a categorical imperative of practical-political philosophy: “‘[T]he ego should be’ means in this specific

1 Heinrich Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and Other Writings, ed. Terry Pinkard, trans. Howard Pollack-Milgate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 112. 2 Schlegel, “Essay on the Concept of Republicanism occasioned by the Kantian tract ‘Perpetual Peace,’” in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93–112, here 97.

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case ‘the community of humanity should be’ or ‘the ego should be communicated’. This derived practical thesis is the foundation and subject matter of politics.”³ It is thus the ego, questionable on its own, that is charged with taking the step into intersubjective unification by the most precarious means. This is nothing but the “communicability of the decision-making process” that Hans Kelsen later defines as a decisive element of democracy. It is “the fact that the decisions of the state are not made immediately by the people but by a parliament, which, however, is created by the people.”⁴ This conception of the ego is the political corollary of what above, I conceptualized as an ironic dialectical ascent and descent of the subject from out of and into the same ground. Analogous to the psychotic-immovable full subject, the closed society is a totalitarian one. Conversely, in both instances, the question arises of how social subjects and (political) communities, respectively, are constituted and how they can be controlled or provided with a structured conception of the self. For this purpose, Schlegel suggests the means of representation. Not unlike Kelsen, Schlegel considers a “majority of the people” to be “the single valid surrogate of the general will.”⁵ He thereby conceives of republican society as a differentiated unity only by virtue of representation, which is necessary for the democratic separation of powers. Where belief in revolutionary democracy is gone, reality requires fictitious support from political theory as well. Just as “aestheticization” is a precondition of reality, so too is fictionalization at the heart of politics: “Politics is a fiction.”⁶ With neo-Kantian precision, Hans Kelsen describes the function of the “democratic ideology of freedom” to be “to maintain the illusion of a freedom that cannot be salvaged in social reality.”⁷ To find a democrat as upright as Kelsen in a post-Kantian realm of paradoxical simulations indicates how relevant irony is to political science as well. For this reason, the first chapter analyzes different descriptions and articulations of political irony. I will discuss three variants of a political post-revolutionary

3 Schlegel, “Essay on the Concept of Republicanism,” 100; in the same vein, some pages later: “The state should exist and it should be republican” (107). This, of course, names only one of Schlegel’s positions on the political field, in which he is as difficult to pin down as he is in all other areas. See Jan Niklas Howe, “Ornament und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Beiwerksästhetik und Staatstheorie der deutschen Frühromantik,” MA thesis, Free University Berlin, 2007, 27. 4 Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Aalen: Scientia, 1981), 29. 5 Schlegel, “Essay in the Concept of Republicanism,” 107. 6 Eva Horn, The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 41: “Politics is a fiction in the sense that its pronouncements and legitimizations, its attempts at presenting and locating itself are just one presentable variant among other less opportune versions of an event.” 7 Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 78.

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post-foundationalism. In examining post-Marxist irony, systems-theoretical state irony, and Carl Schmitt, we will once more encounter the tripartite rhetorological matrix of irony  – even where irony is not explicitly discussed or where the irony immanent to the political is conjured by a reductionist interpretation of irony. The second chapter juxtaposes evidence from political science, history, and theory to discern two tendencies inherent in irony: conservative or reactionary tendencies on the one hand and progressive or subversive ones on the other. The third chapter replaces an ultimate judgment about political irony as such with a reading of Kafka’s humoristic and grotesque writings, which questions the conditions of possibility for making such political judgments in the first place.

1 The Struggle with Irony The irony of politics is as old as politics. It exists wherever politics exists. No politics escapes irony; all politics is exposed to it. What distinguishes the various forms and shapes of politics one from the other is how they deal with irony, how they relate to the irony of politics. Christoph Menke⁸

Despite all their differences, the authors discussed in the following pages share the assessment that political modernity is irrevocably tied to the experience of democratic revolution. Two formulations taken from Claude Lefort, an important historian of the French Revolution, may serve as our starting point. He writes: “From a political point of view, the questioning of modernity means the questioning of democracy,” and: “The locus of power becomes an empty place.”⁹ At the same time, the field of the political expands as power loses its center and place. Monarchical “power” had formerly been present in the material body of the king and therefore capable of immediately incorporating itself in the body of the prince upon the monarch’s death. The modern experience of power – described in exemplary fashion by Foucault – is in turn characterized by the fact that its site becomes “unfigurable,” as Lefort writes, because the Revolution’s decapitations came with a “disincorporation.” After the Revolution, there is no longer any hope for a simple reversal. Post-revolutionaries no longer believe that cutting off the king’s head will suffice. Power becomes diffuse, permeates all social relationships and immanently constitutes these same relationships.

8 Christoph Menke, “Von der Ironie der Politik zur Politik der Ironie: Eine Notiz zum Prozess liberaler Demokratie,” in Die Ironie der Politik: Über die Konstruktion politischer Wirklichkeiten, ed. Thorsten Bonacker et al. (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2003), 19–33, here 19. 9 Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 55 and 17. On this point, Rancière objects to Lefort: “I don’t think the place of power is empty. Unlike Claude Lefort, I don’t tie democracy to the theme of an empty place of power. Democracy is first and foremost neither a form of power nor a form of the emptiness of power, that is, a form of symbolising political power” (“Politics and Aesthetics: Interview with Peter Hallward,” Angelaki 8 [2003]: 191–212, here 199). But Rancière’s principle of democracy, too, aims for a void: As “the communicability of language can never appear as such, the unconditional equality of all speaking beings based on it is the vanishing point of all democratic politics. Accordingly, in Rancière, it is neither a positive concept nor a state to be actualized as such – it is necessarily empty” (Juliane Rebentisch, “Zur Unterscheidung von Politik und Politischem,” in Techniken der Übereinkunft: Zur Medialität des Politischen, ed. Hendrik Blumentrath et al. [Berlin: Kadmos, 2008], 99–112, here 111).

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[N]either the state, the people nor the nation represent substantial entities. Their representation is itself, in its dependence upon a political discourse and upon a sociological and historical elaboration, always bound up with ideological debate.¹⁰

Nor does class, we might add from the post-Marxist perspective of Laclau and Mouffe. In their view, a polar antagonism of class is overcome by insight into the multiplicity of antagonistic forces.

1.1 Post-Marxism For Laclau and Mouffe, the proletariat no longer has ontological-political primacy; nor can it claim an epistemological privilege that would allow it insight into the social domain. In an orthodox Marxist approach, the void of power is merely the effect of an antagonism, the intersection of unmediated economic positions. In a post-Marxist approach, there is no simple antagonism that could, at some point, occupy the site of power  – regardless of whether political decisions are to be actively provoked by any means available or whether they teleologically emerge by themselves. The site of absolutist power had been filled by incorporation. Modern politics, by contrast, attempts to win hegemony within the field of the political. It also tries to incorporate power – which used to be had, as if naturally, in the body of the monarch – by constructing appropriate power structures. Insofar as these structures lay claim to the field of the political in its totality – which they must – they have an innate tendency toward totalitarianism. Yet since this field has no fixed boundaries, the competing politics can never reach this goal. To this extent, then, the liberation and discovery of the political as the site on which political conflicts are fought has an innate anti-totalitarian or emancipatory tendency.¹¹ Laclau and Mouffe’s rearticulation of Marxist strategies thus positions itself amidst an antior post-foundationalism. Critical of metaphysics, whose totalizing consequences Derrida brought to light with the help of Saussurian linguistics,¹² Laclau coun10 Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 18. 11 Here I follow Jacques Rancière, according to whom the political goes beyond the administrative activity of politics as much as it is opposed to police regulation and attempts at establishing order. In this sense, the political is where politics and police meet; the political is the confrontation with administration and politics is the process of emancipation. See Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 12 Cf. Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 86.

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ters the totalitarian effects of politics with a broad spectrum of interventions that highlight the openness of the space of the political. The “emptying of a particular signifier of its particular, differential signified is […] what makes possible the emergence of ‘empty’ signifiers as the signifiers of a lack, of an absent totality.”¹³ The term “democracy” is one such signifier. In Paul de Man’s terms, one might call the term an allegory that makes possible its own real impossibility. Everyone refers to it, endows it with a particular meaning – there is little that the “democracy” practiced in North Korea today shares with the “democracy” practiced in the United States. And the more the term becomes central, the more hollow it rings, which is why the hegemony game is not likely ever to come to an end. As a poststructuralist, Laclau conceives of political interventions in terms of symbolic articulations. On the one hand, he thereby dismisses any claim to “direct” politics just as he excludes the idea of an ultimate revolution, an idea that would retain the (non-ironic) fantasy that the space of the political could once again be closed. On the other hand, Laclau claims that “liberal democratic theory and institutions have […] to be deconstructed”¹⁴ because they attempt to ignore the antagonistic nature of the political. For although liberalism defines the field of the political as the site of social and political antagonisms mediated according to the rules of democratic conflict resolution, it nevertheless believes it is able to occupy this site. Given the heterogeneous character of contemporary society, however, this would once again have a unificatory, i.e. totalizing effect. What we have here, then, is a model of democratic interminability. And this interminability’s irony of desire ultimately lends it a liberal character: A “liberal form of politics,” according to Christoph Menke, is characteristically “no longer just the object of irony, it rather is ironic itself; a liberal politics answers the irony of politics with self-irony.”¹⁵ This openness toward the present, this refusal to violently impose its will on the present, seems also to play a part in weakening the utopian content of leftist utopias. Ultimately, Laclau and Mouffe thus remain, against their will, within the purview of the liberal-democratic idea. Insofar as political theory (and practice) has to content itself with “articulation” as a practice that establishes “different nodal points from which a process of different and positive reconstruction of the social fabric could be instituted,” their theory remains longingly tied to a (Romantic) ideal of an, at least temporary, bracketing of dissent. Laclau and Mouffe apply Lacan’s concept of the “quilting point” to demonstrate that it is no longer Lacan’s famous master signifier that organizes the chain 13 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 42. 14 Laclau, Emancipation(s), 33. 15 Menke, “Von der Ironie der Politik,” 19.

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of signifiers. Instead, this chain supports itself autopoietically by means of different nodal points that simulate an adaptable, ironic “conflict coherence.” Yet irony here is almost like an invisible hand that restores the unity of the political on the discursive level after all. “Laclau speaks of democracy in the case of a society that is ironic because it exhibits the continual political mediation and negotiation between that which is and that which ought to be; in short, the ‘infinite process of investments.’”¹⁶ The extent to which the political commitments of post-structuralist discourse theory are marked by a longingly-infinite irony can be seen in the way in which Laclau and Mouffe describe the hegemonic practice of articulation. In contrast to Foucault and in opposition to materialism, they propose the following theory of how political meaning is produced: The important point is that every form of power is constructed in a pragmatic way and internally to the social, through the opposed logics of equivalence and difference; power is never foundational. The problem of power cannot, therefore, be posed in terms of the search for the class or the dominant sector which constitutes the centre of a hegemonic formation, given that, by definition, such a centre will always elude us.¹⁷

Yet according to other statements in the same text, this center – which withdraws according to a strictly Romantic thought pattern – does not exist. Nonetheless, these statements remain within the framework of Romantic modernity as outlined here. Yet it remains unclear to what extent the political struggle for hegemonic articulations is distinct from merely symbolic power games and whether this conception does not prematurely delimit the field of political action. Even if Laclau and Mouffe are not affected by a longing for conclusive realizations of political goals, constant reinvestments come with a, to put it in Hegelian terms, bad or abstract infinity that reactivates the structures of Romantic longing. Their conception “of an ‘order’ which exists only as a partial limiting of disorder; of a ‘meaning’ which is constructed only as excess and paradox in the face of meaninglessness,”¹⁸ strictly follows a logic first developed by the early Romantics. This restricted view allows us to see its weak spot: as Alessandra Tanesini has pointed out, this view is stuck in the logic of the paradox. “This paradox deserves the label ‘deconstructive’ because of its structural similarities with

16 Alexander García Düttmann, Philosophy of Exaggeration, trans. James Phillips (London: Continuum, 2007), 46. 17 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 142. 18 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 193.

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Jacques Derrida’s views about meaning.”¹⁹ Yet it also deserves the label “Romantic longing” because it conceptualizes the complete political society as one that withdraws. The meaning of a political system is thus no longer decided by one fundamental and transcendent center. In post-foundationalism, the criteria of decision and meaning are constituted by several quilting or nodal points. And these points of orientation are subject to a constant ironic engagement between refracted convictions. In his examination of Laclau’s terminology and theory, Jacob Torfing describes what I have analyzed – epistemologically and poetologically – as an “ironic evocation of the infinite” as follows: “The universal emerges out of the particular as an irreducible dimension of the chain of equivalence expanded as a result of the negation of particular identities.”²⁰ Faced with this movement of differentialization, a process of ironic “equivalentialization” is of particular importance, for it allows groups to cohere that are otherwise only linked by their common opposition to the enemy. On the one hand, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-feminist groups always maintain differential relationships. On the other hand, they can enter into a relationship of equivalence for this very reason: It is at this point that the overdetermination of effects linked to the democratic revolution begins to displace the line of demarcation between the public and the private and to politicize social relations; that is, to multiply the spaces in which the new logics of equivalence dissolve the differential positivity of the social.²¹

That is why these different minorities fight the same fight, albeit indirectly. This is what wishful thinking calls the “ironic ruse of reason” when, for example, a homophobic black hip hop artist unwittingly, and allegedly indirectly, supports the anti-hegemonic resistance of other minorities whom he ideologically despises. Laclau and Mouffe’s faith in generalizable abstract entities like “minority” is a result of the changed position the economic occupies in their post-Marxist theory. For them, the economic is no longer the site of primary contradictions from which merely secondary side-contradictions (racism, patriarchalism, etc.) derive. All antagonisms metonymically refer to one another. In relations of difference we have neither metaphor nor metonymy. However, the equivalential disruption of relations of difference tends to produce metonymical relations of contiguity,

19 Tanesini, An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies: A Philosophical Introduction (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 13. 20 Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 174–175. 21 Laclau und Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 181.

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and when the paradigmatic sameness of contiguous elements is fully realized we see the construction of metaphors.²²

Metaphors here appear as something like wittily arrested metonymies that, by way of ironic equivalence, allow for temporary tactical coalitions – as, for example, coalitions between the various “anti” movements: anti-nuclear energy, anti-gender discrimination, and anti-racist movements. Ultimately, though, Laclau and Mouffe cannot ignore the “representative role in the constitution of […] a will” for “there is a gap in the identity of the represented that requires the process to […] fill it.”²³ Trapped between liberal freedom and democratic equality, they ironically maneuver between and amidst difference and equivalence,²⁴ and thereby pay homage to a model of ironic liberality that they would probably seek to transcend in politics or political theory.

1.2 The systems-theoretical irony of the state Systems theory is relevant to our reflections because it allows us to confront the question of how individual areas, fields, or spheres of society relate to one another. The title of this section is borrowed from Helmut Willke’s Ironie des Staates [Irony of the State], whose subtitle, Outlines of a Political Theory of the Polycentric Society, indicates the study’s systems-theoretical approach. “No modern society,” Willke writes, “can be organized against unleashed functional differentializations, against the centrifugal dynamics of wayward rationalities of partial systems, against the explosive innovative power of decentralized specialization.” In practice, the centrifugal forces of wholly differentiated societies in modernity cannot be controlled. For that reason, an authoritarian-hierarchical conception of society that aims at a “dedifferentiation of modern society” can only fail.²⁵ Nonetheless, social systems need “mechanisms for controlling contingency and procedures for dissimulating the consequences of the loss of unity,”²⁶ i.e. for simulating a unity that might never have existed.

22 Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 98. 23 Laclau, Emancipation(s), 99. 24 Cf. Torfing, New Theories of Discourse, 252. Torfing includes references to Mouffe’s ideas on liberal democracy. 25 Helmut Willke, Ironie des Staates: Grundlinien einer Staatstheorie polyzentrischer Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 313. 26 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 91.

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Both articulated (non-)communication between social subsystems and the problem of their societal legitimacy refer, within the system, to ironic dissimulatio. Systems theory prefers (formal) contextual control and (informal) self-organization to comprehensive social control, which only reinforces undesirable developments that derive from structurally necessary disproportions. Analogously, planning is formally defined as “deciding about the premises of decision.”²⁷ Yet despite its reformulation in procedural terms, as a “conditionalizing of authority,”²⁸ legitimacy remains problematic. Even the formula of the “state of law” merely introduces an extra step to hide the claim to providing an ultimate foundation. As a systems theorist, Willke conceives of his work as post-foundationalist. Yet once again, a (restrictive) interpretation of irony indicates how much he is still caught up in questions of foundation – which were supposed to have been left behind. Willke offers a peculiar variation of the triangle “politics – society – state.” Armed with Hegel’s definition of bourgeois society as the sphere of universal egotism, Willke turns against the welfare-state optimism of various conceptions of “bourgeois” or “civil” society. These include, despite their differences, Laclau and Mouffe as well as Hannah Arendt or Jürgen Habermas. At the same time, Willke sees in the neoliberal call for “less government” the ideological reintroduction of a strong concept of politics. “There is no authority and no system in sight that could represent society as a whole. Not even politics.”²⁹ What Willke is aiming for is a variant of post-foundationalism beyond arbitrary-sovereign decisions on the one hand and metaphysical representation on the other. Ultimately, however, he cannot make good on his claim. Instead of being able to rely on politics and society, Willke has to take recourse to a particular kind of “state,” namely, an active state (as opposed to a “minimal state”). What is needed above all is to condense the idea of the active state to a form of government [Staatsform] that draws its legitimacy from its connection with a correlative form of society […] It is a stroke of luck that such a description is already available in a version that continues to strike us for its elaborateness: Etzioni’s theory of the active society.³⁰

The convergence of systems theory and socially conservative communitarianism, however, is no coincidence. A closer look reveals that this is due to an immanent weak point in Willke’s systematic project. He, too, deploys a conciliatory irony

27 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 113. 28 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 52. 29 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 136. 30 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 119.

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in aestheticist fashion, no longer on subjective-ethical terrain but this time on social-political terrain: The best way still of dealing with the decentering of the subject is irony, we’re told by ironists to be taken seriously, from Nietzsche via Kierkegaard to Rorty. My supposition, now, is that modern society is to be dealt with in analogous fashion.³¹

A correspondingly reactive irony thus serves to soften the blow of the “structural break” that is modernity. In a historical situation in which no area within the social system has any “‘natural’ claim to leadership,” control over the system has to “develop from out of the artfully arranged interaction and consultation among autonomous agents.”³² This sounds like a Habermasian theory of communicative action. Yet according to Willke, “the core of the problem” is the “improbability of successful communication” such that the first task is to make the different “language games” compatible.³³ And this task, in turn, is performed by irony, which Willke, like so many others, interprets as both a symptom of crisis and a cure: The capacity of complex societies for self-observation and for reflection can be conceived of as the result and the complement of their self-endangerment. Only one resource could become a counterweight to these societies’ destructive potential: a better knowledge of themselves.³⁴

Politics and the state are sworn here to a Socratic ideal of irony – a knowledge about one’s own complexity, which can never completely be known – that once again paradoxically guarantees the maintenance and viability of modernity’s discrepancies. The insights of systems theory into the paradoxes of modernity forces politics into an ironic way of dealing with itself and with social systems. It suggests an irony of the state that takes the political game of the organizations and corporations within the state seriously as a game in which everyone knows better than they are willing to admit.³⁵

One cannot help but suspect that these lines gloss over an Enlightenment optimism that dare not speak its name. To put the question in the terms of our theory of irony: Does this knowledge of the irony (of politics) not betray the desire to make this irony transparent and to dissolve it? What do the various subsystems actually know? Are they aware of each other at all? And if so, does this not contradict 31 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 317. 32 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 154. 33 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 345. 34 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 105. 35 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 142.

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the systems-theoretical assumption that individual partial systems are unable to communicate with one another? Of course, the strategy of “producing agreement through estrangement”³⁶ is eminently ironic. Yet Willke also believes that “second-order observation allows for proceduralizing [prozessieren] the problem of the (necessary) blind spots of every observation.”³⁷ This “proceduralizing” is obviously thought on the basis of naive enlightening, and it is barely distinguishable from the fantasy of apolitical social conflict resolution. Once agreement has been reached, little is left of the irony that was indispensible for reaching agreement. To cite another example of the paradoxes or, in polemical terms, self-contradictions of Willke’s ironic understanding of politics: On the one hand, “diversified descriptions of society” repeat “the drama of the exclusion  – inclusion dialectic.”³⁸ On the other hand, the “unchangeable distance between systems” gives the ironist “leeway for the possibility of making contingencies accord.”³⁹ A (structurally) paradoxical irony, it seems, is meant to cover over the “core problems.” In Willke’s theory – as in all conceptions of post facto aestheticization – irony is to aid in overcoming general systemic paradoxes. But how exactly irony could succeed in resolving tensions both within theory and within society remains unclear. And this imprecision indicates a theoretical inadequacy in Willke’s (ironic) understanding of politics as a whole. This inadequacy is the following: via a detour of the ironic game of inside and outside (an inconsistent game, as it were), representation returns. And it does so despite Willke’s dismissal of representation on the grounds of self-referential systems’ specific blindness. Whereas elsewhere he suggests switching to a decentralized control of contexts, Willke speaks here of a “developmental step toward the internal representation of one’s own freedom,”⁴⁰ which is to lead organizations to adopt specifically targeted identities. Representation, that is, is charged with “dissimulating the consequences of the loss of unity,” while ironically “making contingencies accord” and thus turns out to be a mechanism suitable for controlling contingencies. In contrast to potentialized ironic reflection, which also embraces the polarity of inside and outside, or of form and matter, Willke opts for a more conciliatory variant of reflection. Of course “politics, too,” works with “a money-based infrastructure,” that is to say,

36 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 167. 37 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 209. 38 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 209. 39 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 321. 40 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 73.

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(fiscally tinted) money has become an essential factor of the political exercise of power […] It now no longer accords with the rationality of social agents to fight the power claims of politics and to limit politics (from the outside). Instead, they actively seek to support and expand welfare state policies.⁴¹

Once Willke’s irony shows itself to be allegedly politically neutral, to be without values, it is easily subjected to economic values. When it comes to (the value of) money, Willke calls for entirely unironic “buffer zones” to avoid irrational conditions of operation that persist in the long term. It is telling that the first of these conditions are “central banks for securing the autonomy of the economy.” One need not be a convinced Marxist to see here, in the primacy of the financial system, a blind spot of the systems-theoretical approach. The context of the money-based exercise of power, especially, would suggest an observation  – of whatever order – of the “capitalism” complex, for it is precisely this complex that relativizes the inner and outer limits of power in its favor. At this point, the systems-theoretical supervision, the observation of observation that duplicates “the difference between internal and external perspective,”⁴² turns out to be postfoundationalist in a negative sense. Reflection here is reflexivity as Niklas Luhmann conceived of it: neither a thinking of thinking nor a potentializing elaboration of force, but rather “the structural principle of the differentiation of processes that are applied to one another.”⁴³ This mutual referencing of processes by means of processes has adverse consequences for (systems) theory. In the end, there is a “primacy of the economic” (Luhmann) over other partial systems of society and over concrete determinations of the content of the constitution.⁴⁴ It is thus possible without further ado to offset irrational conditions of operation with the social policies of western welfare states. In this sense, Ingeborg Maus writes: The postulate that economics obeys laws of its own contains […] a selective principle. Among conceivable political, e.g. legislative, interventions it only excludes those interventions that, as concrete manifestations of social postulates of the constitution, impose ‘extraeconomic’ goals on the economic process.⁴⁵

41 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 333–334. 42 Willke, Ironie des Staates, 342. 43 Ingeborg Maus, Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 252; cf. also 257. 44 See Maus’ criticism of Luhmann on this point in Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus (Munich: Fink, 1986), 318. 45 Maus, Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie, 218.

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1.3 Pseudopolitical totalization: Carl Schmitt The role Carl Schmitt’s study Political Romanticism has played in preparing his later fundamentalist writings is well documented. Karl Heinz Bohrer, for example, has examined Schmitt’s text as to its poetological sensitivity toward Romanticism in particular. He shows that “Schmitt negatively uses political concepts that all possess a poetological correspondence from which the claim to modernity can be derived.”⁴⁶ Many of the key terms of Schmitt’s political theory are thus transvalued categories of aesthetic modernism. As to the understanding of the political dimension of ironic Romanticism, Schmitt’s conceptual contribution culminates in reintroducing the concept of occasio, which he considers to be the contrary of the classical causa. For Schmitt, “Romanticism subjectified occasionalism. In other words, in the romantic, the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion and an opportunity for his romantic productivity.”⁴⁷ Schmitt thus accuses the modern Romantic subject of aestheticization. If this aestheticization, however, is understood not as retroactive but as constitutive, we see just how much Schmitt’s reductive understanding of irony and aesthetics is inscribed in a long tradition of anti-democratic criticisms of aesthetics. Already in Plato, the democrat, for example, is “a homo aestheticus, and as such […] he has no business in his [Plato’s] state.”⁴⁸ In a way that is only too familiar, Hegel appears in Schmitt’s discussion as the democrat’s classical antagonist. Hegel’s “philosophical truth,” according to Schmitt, is “that all spirit is present spirit […] The historical spirit does not reside in baroque representations or even in romantic alibis.”⁴⁹ Here as elsewhere, Schmitt’s Manichean thought operates with exaggerated dichotomies, which, under the influence of a pessimistic anthropology – the precondition of his hypostatized friend–enemy schema  – transform into political tautologies. According to a common pattern of thought, an unconditional justification of political order and an argumentation against the anti-state discourses of anarchistic as well as libertarian dreamers follows from the fact that the human being is evil and unfree. 46 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik: Der Verdacht der Philosophie gegen die literarische Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 285. 47 Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 17. 48 I owe these comments on the similarities between Plato’s democrat and the ironist in critiques of Romanticism to Juliane Rebentisch. On the homo aestheticus, see Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 49 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 62.

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Still, Schmitt’s concept of the political is a modern one, and thus has to reject the Baroque idea of incorporation; and if this idea disappears, so too does all confidence in natural, organic, or symbolic bonds. Both the path of monarchic incorporation – in which the prince metonymically metaphorizes a whole people in himself  – and the path of the Enlightenment’s pedagogical rationalism are barred. The objection to Romantic politicking-as-if also refutes the second condition of possibility of democracy, the genuinely romantic “eternal conversation” that is opposed to bloody conflict resolution. In the stark terms of the Political Theology: “Dictatorship is the opposite of discussion.”⁵⁰ What we see here is the exact reverse of the argument in Kelsen’s neo-Kantian defense, On the Essence and Value of Democracy, according to which “all democratic procedures, whose dialectical-contradictory technology is made for speech and counter-speech, argument and counterargument,” are oriented towards “achieving a compromise.”⁵¹ Compromise follows a logic of conflict resolution to which corresponds, on the epistemological level, a pragmatic attitude in situations of disagreement.⁵² “The semantics of conversation launched by the Romantics”⁵³ that Schmitt opposes with all his theoretical and stylistic might refers to the historical transformation of modern thought. As subjective thought, modern thought is not juxtaposed to objectively organized entities but retains an ironic distance from everything that is given. There is yet another reason why Schmitt addresses democracy, which in its settling of conflicts is oriented toward the infinite, as romantic. Whereas, on the one hand, the political vanishes into the economic or technical-organizational, on the other hand, the political dissolves into the everlasting discussion of cultural and philosophical-historical commonplaces, which, by aesthetic characterization, identify and accept an epoch as classical, romantic, or baroque. The core of the political idea, the exacting moral decision, is evaded in both. The true significance of those counterrevolutionary philosophers of the state [such as Donoso Cortés or Joseph de Maistre] lies precisely in the consistency with which they decide. They heightened the moment of the decision to such an extent that the notion of legitimacy, their stating point, was finally dissolved.⁵⁴

This fetishism of the decision comes with an exclusion of all purpose from the sphere of the law. The anti-empirical purification corresponds here to an arbi50 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 63. 51 Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 57. 52 See Friedrich Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende: Die Versuchung Carl Schmitts (Munich: Fink, 1996), 106. 53 Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende, 106. 54 Schmitt, Political Theology, 65, my emphasis.

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trariness of content that is most vocal in Schmitt’s odd dictum that what is important is not when the trains are running but that they are running on time. Despite his quasi-Luhmannian separation of spheres, which assigns an individual distinction to each sphere,⁵⁵ Schmitt does have his preferences. His apparent privileging of the political is in fact permeated by epistemological, moral, economic, and aesthetic presuppositions that defy all decision. This applies also, and in particular, to the central category of the “decision.” As Friedrich Balke writes, there is “no decision without a prior distinction that reduces the complexity of events to a binary alternative or an ethical choice, to an ‘Either – Or.’”⁵⁶ Ingeborg Maus has pointed out another theoretical impurity, namely, a hidden bourgeois (property) interest, in Schmitt’s demand for a “substantial order, purged of social moments.”⁵⁷ Thanks to a merely content-based understanding of the “material state of law,” the separation of legitimacy and legality – or the distinction between higher and lower legality – thus ends up in a dubious and unstable dominance of a particular constitution. Excluding underprivileged social strata, content-based “values” that accommodate the ruling class and simultaneously claim timeless validity are preferred to formal procedures. In light of the danger of a revolution from the left, the Fascist decision thus reveals itself to be economically motivated. Schmitt’s Political Theology, to be sure, dismisses the social or materialistic explanations of the political informed by the nineteenth century’s economic conception of history for the reason that they see “projection, reflex, reflection”⁵⁸ everywhere. Yet although Schmitt serves today’s theoreticians (including many on the left) as an argumentative spearhead against a purely technical-economic, administrative concept of politics, his concept of the decision, as Helmut Lethen has pointed out, always rests “on the pillars of a ‘healthy economy inside the strong state.’”⁵⁹ Despite his criticism of both “American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks,”⁶⁰ Schmitt, like Max Weber or Helmuth Plessner, ultimately remains attached to the economic dogmas of the

55 These include the beautiful and ugly in aesthetics, good and evil in morality, and profitable and unprofitable in economics. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26. In The Nomos of the Earth, this approach will form the basis of Schmitt’s implicit defense of Nazi Germany. 56 Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende, 26. 57 The relevant quotations from Schmitt can be found in Ingeborg Maus, Rechtstheorie und politische Theorie im Industriekapitalismus, 42. 58 Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. Gary L. Ulmen (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996): 21. 59 Lethen, Verhaltenslehre der Kälte, 91. 60 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 13; cf. 15–16.

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liberal age.⁶¹ Maus’ detailed analysis of Schmitt’s elaborations of constitutional theory demonstrates their radicalism, limited though they are by a careful, economic dosage. Although always valid, originary law is posited against the world of appearances, i.e., against the positivity of the Law occupied with reform. What is always valid, however, […] are the bourgeois essentials of any constitution imaginable, even if it [the constitution] were reduced to guaranteeing the freedom to own property and regulating the authority of the executive in the state of exception. The apparently dynamic principle of permanent revolution only serves to stabilize bourgeois constitutional contents that are not expected to survive within liberal forms of political interaction.⁶²

In addition to moral and economic factors, Schmitt’s political rigorism also seems to be determined, against his own methodological precepts, by aesthetic factors. Again, very much against Schmitt’s own political principles, processes of aestheticization reveal themselves to be methodologically constitutive. Only by means of a judgment that is ultimately an aesthetic judgment can the distinction between friend and enemy be made, a distinction claimed to be constitutive of the political sphere. To found his categories, Schmitt offers little more than his classicist predilection in favor of clarity and against ambivalence. To illustrate: In Schmitt’s phantasms of sovereignty – no less than in Kierkegaard’s melancholic theory of repetition – the elements of the romantic are “irony, an aesthetic conception of the world, oppositions of the possible and the real, the infinite and the finite, the feeling of the concrete second.”⁶³ Yet the Romantic could not make up his mind without relinquishing his superior irony; in other words, without giving up his romantic situation. The romantic wants to do nothing expect experience and paraphrase his experience in an emotionally impressive fashion.⁶⁴

With Bohrer, we can read Schmitt’s weakness for the sovereign decision, like the preference for the state of exception over normalcy, as an indication of his sensitivity to aesthetic modernity. Yet beyond this, it is necessary to stress that Schmitt simply does not justify his concepts. If, however, he were to attempt such a justification in spite of the decisionism immanent to his theory, he could do so only aesthetically. What is more: the point of non-justification, the moment of sovereign decision is itself taken over by the aesthetic. With only slight exaggeration, 61 In this context, cf. Gary L. Ulmen, Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie über Max Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim: VCH-Wiley, 1991) esp. 210. 62 Ulmen, Politischer Mehrwert, 157. 63 [This quote is taken from a footnote to Schmitt’s Political Romanticism (page 97 of the German) that was not included in the English translation cited earlier – Trans.] 64 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 100.

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we could say that the place of sovereignty in Schmitt is nothing but the place of the aesthetic. The fact that only the occasio of war makes the sovereign decision possible brings out the aesthetic traits of Schmitt’s model, which builds on this hypostatization. Schmitt’s classicist aestheticism expresses his dismissal of the alwaysalready-impureness of the political and his unwillingness to allow the subversion of the political by ethical, economic and aesthetic moments. It leads him to overlook both important aesthetic dimensions and the decisive political dimension of irony. A (Schmittian) understanding of post facto aestheticization therefore has to be countered by pointing to the originary rhetoricity and linguisticality of the political. The decisive question then, in Schmitt as in Kierkegaard, is the question of the fundamental or legal status of irony. As Werner Hamacher writes: This law of irony […] is not the law of an ironic language as opposed to another language, but the law of the irony of language itself that allows for no decision as to whether it is language or sign, imparting or “chatter,” talk (Unterredung) or law.⁶⁵

The medium of this ironic politics of de-position [Ent-setzung] in Benjamin’s sense is language in its indomitable rhetoricity. An objection premised on the theory of irony is relevant in another context as well. For, as Alexander García Düttmann has shown, irony can be understood as a technique of affirmation that undermines “the basis for decision, the seriousness without which no practical engagement and no practical intervention are possible.”⁶⁶ Irony’s anti-decisionism results from the logic of reflection: “Irony […] moves between opening up and closing down. In itself it turns out to be political, as it were, a strategic negotiation, the adoption of a point of view from which friend and foe,” as well as other oppositional couples, “are not expressly kept apart and recognized as such.”⁶⁷ Irony undermines the “basis of decision” and, in its logic of reflection, irony both takes sides and refuses to distinguish between friend and enemy.⁶⁸ Schmitt’s demand for an absolutely pure decision, on the contrary, is fueled by an obsessive “concern with oppositional purity.”⁶⁹ Only these sorts of hygienically clean divisions without remainder or ambiguity are capable of

65 Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” Cardozo Law Review 13.4 (December 1991): 1133– 1158, here 1157 n. 46. 66 Düttmann, Philosophy of Exaggeration, 44. 67 Düttmann, Philosophy of Exaggeration, 39. 68 Düttmann, Philosophy of Exaggeration, 73 and 82. 69 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 247; cf. ibid., 155–158.

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keeping Schmitt’s neurotic-compulsive delimitations and political constructions intact. Martin Greiffenhagen has used the term “dilemma of conservatism”⁷⁰ to describe the fact that in modernity, every conservative conception of politics rests on an ironically refracted foundation, or, more precisely, the fact that every such conception criticizes what is the very precondition of its own conservative position. This is likewise apparent in his attitude toward the paradigmatic political construction of modernity, namely, the state. For the end of the era of statehood is also the end of the entire superstructure of concepts that refer to the state. […] But its concepts are retained, even retained as classical concepts. But of course the word classical today sounds equivocal and ambivalent, not to say ironical.⁷¹

Schmitt, the ironic theoretician of the state, is always indirectly oriented toward the sphere (of guarantees) of the law: in this sphere, the one who subjectively decides the law is the one who is objectively sovereign.⁷² Against its will – and in this sense similar to Kierkegaard’s fundamentalist approach with its proximity to contemporaries on the political left like Marx – Schmitt’s dictatorship is still part of and cannot transcend the universe of Romantic-modern post-foundationalism. As a “victim” of secularization, dictatorship cannot provide the ultimate justification either. Instead, it relies on “form,” an eminently aesthetic category. And it does so in the register of enthusiastic melancholy. After the end of the state, of the “model of political unity” and “masterpiece of European form,”⁷³ Schmitt like “every theorist of the state involuntarily becomes an ironist of the state.”⁷⁴

70 Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich: Piper, 1971). 71 [This quotation is taken from a later preface not included in the English translation; see Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1996), 10 – Trans.] 72 Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 124. The question of whether “legitimacy” is really, as Schmitt never tires to claim, “an absolutely unromantic category” is superfluous. 73 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, 10. 74 Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende, 189.

2 Thesis and Antithesis Each time the Israeli dwarf has once again beaten the modern Goliath, a three thousandyear-old irony flares up in the eyes of the victor. Peter Sloterdijk⁷⁵

In this chapter, I would like to show how irony functions in the field of the political. To do so, I will discuss two sets of entirely contradictory claims for irony: is irony politically progressive or conservative/reactionary? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt, for example, criticizes irony as the henchman of democratic modernity. Thomas Mann comes close to identifying it with an apolitical bourgeois stance. And today, decades later, in a very different theoretical environment, the question whether irony is essentially subversive or reactionary still remains a mystery. Is postmodern irony an expression of uncritical conformity? Or are ironic procedures and deployments of irony in queer and gender discourses an indication of its subversive power?

2.1 Thesis: On irony’s structural political subversiveness (Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Butler) One thing can be affirmed about Socrates no matter how unreliable the sources are: he appeared to be a threat to a good number of Athenians. The very divergence of the descriptions of this historical figure, the first consistently ironic individual, would suffice to support the following thesis: irony is subversive because it cannot but stir up confusion. It would be as nonsensical as it would be meaningless to attempt an empirical answer to the question of whether, in the last two thousand years, ironic utterances have been predominantly progressive or predominantly non-progressive in one way or another. Making a list of conservative ironists would be misleading as well. Irony cannot be assessed empirically. To demonstrate the subversiveness of irony, we must look at its proper logic and understand what irony allows us to comprehend: that there is often nothing to comprehend. What is decisive is not the content of ironic utterances but their rhetorological “substratum.” To ignore this distinction is to fall prey to the usual prejudices. Of course there are conservative, regressive, or simply stupid ironic utterances – but that has no bearing on irony as an indirect speech act. The intrinsic distinction of this speech act is that it is difficult, often even impossible, to pin down. 75 Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 425.

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As a classicist by training, Nietzsche was well aware that rhetoric is a specifically republican art. Rather conservative in his everyday political views, and despite all his opposition to the (unaristocratic) corrosive power of Socratic discourse, Nietzsche employs a similar stylistic strategy. He turns two thousand years of Platonic-Christian philosophical anti-art discourses, and thus anti-deception discourses, against themselves. He seeks ironically to undermine metaphysics by defeating it with its own weapons. Against Plato’s will to truth, Christianity, and the Enlightenment, Nietzsche outlines the paradoxical consequences of the demise of truth and of the belief in truth. In the differentiation between truth and lying, he recognizes a paradoxical act of deception. He opposes this act not so much with a less conscious deception as with an ironic acquiescence to the fundamental inevitability of deception. What may otherwise appear to be an argumentative paradox turns out, in this theoretical context, to be a central element of Nietzsche’s style, of the structure of his aphorisms, of his very own irony. Beside Nietzsche, it may be Bakhtin’s theory of language and discourse that is the clearest on the structural subversiveness of irony. A central thesis of his Rabelais books is: “All [carnival] forms are systematically placed outside the Church and religiosity. They belong to an entirely different sphere.”⁷⁶ In the age of “real subsumption” (Marx), the absence of any outside to power and thus of an “entirely different sphere” is an epistemic condition of the necessary cultural shift from carnivalesque to ironic practices. Irony attains its modern significance because everything is integrated in the capitalist cycle of production and consumption. Irony is, to invoke a contemporary art form, a “site specific art” of speaking, writing, and thinking. There is, Laclau comments on Bakhtin, “no possibility of victory in terms of an already acquired cultural authenticity. The increasing awareness of this fact explains the centrality of the concept of ‘hybridisation’ in contemporary debates.”⁷⁷ According to Bakhtin, a hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two “languages,” two semantic and axiological belief systems.⁷⁸

Irony’s scandal lies in how it goes back to the fundamental mixture of linguistic constructs and pushes it ever farther. Every ironic utterance communicates the polyphony on which it is based and, moreover, conveys a sense of enduring rest-

76 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7. 77 Laclau, Emancipation(s), 50. 78 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 304.

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lessness. Ironic utterances cannot be conclusively interpreted or assessed. That is why every attempt at using irony to stabilize a position of power turns against itself, emphasizing irony’s implicit subversive force. Was that a compliment or not? Does she mean that seriously? Irony cannot be grasped on the level of conscious deception. It can only be understood in terms of the paradoxical (non-)knowledge outlined above. Irony rests on the insecure foundation that all meaningful constructions are uncertain. Like Socrates targeting his victims on the agora, irony targets these constructions of meaning where they are most at home. The ironist knows very well which dialogizing backdrop he should bring to bear on the accurately quoted words of his opponent, in order to distort their sense. By manipulating the effects of context, it is very easy to emphasize the brute materiality of another’s words […] it is, for instance, very easy to make even the most serious utterance comical.⁷⁹

The deconstructive emphasis on words, which Bakhtin has shown to be an indirect linguistic moment of novelist prose, functions “humorously, ironically, parodically”⁸⁰ in political speech as well. Here, irony is a subversive power because it is inscribed in even the most authoritarian of utterances as a powerlessness. It thereby undermines all claims to power. From popular carnivalesque to anti-ideological novelistic discourse, Bakhtin’s theoretical engagement stands out all the more clearly against the backdrop of Stalinist cultural politics and the theoretical resistance against it. That is why, besides Deleuze and Guattari,⁸¹ the theoretical vocabulary of Bakhtin’s linguistic politics has been especially important to representatives of various minorities. The combination, for example, of the early idea of black double consciousness and Bakhtin’s notion of double-voiced discourse, African American theorists have indirectly theorized irony in their discussions of ‘signifying’ […] This idea of an irony […] functions to repeat and yet to revise the white discourses.⁸²

The same is true of feminist theorizations of ironic strategies, as an analysis of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble shows.⁸³ The concept of a “literalization of the 79 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 340. 80 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 299. 81 For a discussion that draws a parallel between Black English and the linguistic situation in Old Austria, see Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, esp. 104. 82 For individual references, see Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 31. 83 Butler relies not least on Monique Wittig’s analyses of Bakhtin; see Butler, Gender Trouble, esp. 151–174. On gender identification and melancholia, cf. Joan Riviere “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 10 (1929): 303–313.

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body” or of “anatomy”⁸⁴ opposes the distinction between abstract concept and material reality. Gender, then, is a discursively constructed category, in which the corresponding “political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation.”⁸⁵ Butler opposes this ideological naturalness with a radicalization of the category of “artificiality” and with the newer concept “hybridity.”⁸⁶ At the same time, she criticizes a certain variant of identity politics. On her reading, we have been familiar with this pattern of thought since Romanticism, with this intellectual strategy according to which “it is from this very difference, gap, incommensurability between the realizable and the ideal that a certain striving emerges, one that tries always to realize the ideal but never can.”⁸⁷ And to this extent, even the most “regulative” of identity politics is deeply ironic, which is why the transformative and subversive power of an “irony of protest”⁸⁸ can develop all the more effectively in this domain. Butler aims at distorting the universalizing male discourse by way of common cultural conceptions of “femininity.” Her goal is to provoke a shift, a shift that no longer obeys a logic of metonymic longing but rather remains faithful to its deformative potential. Thus, “reflexivity” does not operate in the service of an unattainable full sex but as a hybridizing potentialization that undermines any attempt at an ontological definition of “gender” or, more precisely, reveals such definitions to be fictitious. Not only do women wear their masks for men; we have come to see how we all mask ourselves in a two-fold sense. Masks (dis)simulate; they at once reveal and conceal. Processes of concealing and revealing are not temporally successive but are – in keeping with the specific temporality of ironic figures – one and the same process, a process that has always already taken place. In the best of cases, we ironically rediscover ourselves time and again in order to then simulate identity by means of this very irony. But we do more than simply deceive others; we justify ourselves to ourselves by way of deception. We become ourselves only by becoming deceptively real. The more we are aware of it, the more productive and free this process becomes.

84 Butler, Gender Trouble, 95 and 97. 85 Butler, Gender Trouble, 3. 86 See Bernd Wagner’s general overview of “hybridization” and its relation to terms such as “creolization,” “metissage,” etc. in his “Kulturelle Globalisierung: Weltkultur, Glokalität und Hybridisierung,” in Kulturelle Globalisierung: Zwischen Weltkultur und kultureller Fragmentierung, ed. Bernd Wagner (Essen: Klartext, 2001), 9–38, here 17. 87 Judith Butler, “Poststructuralism and Postmarxism,” Diacritics 23.4 (Winter 1993): 2–11, here 7. 88 See the eponymous essay by Thorsten Bonacker, “Die Ironie des Protests: Zur Rationalität von Protestbewegungen,” in Die Ironie der Politik, 195–212.

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[H]eterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law but also as an inevitable […] intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself.⁸⁹

Taking up an argument of Monique Wittig’s, Butler writes that “[t]o be lesbian or gay” or queer is “no longer to know one’s sex, to be engaged in a confusion and proliferation of categories that make sex an impossible category of identity.”⁹⁰ Queer discourse thus understood functions as an ironic performative that only seems to adopt “straight” identity markers. In fact, however, it recodes them, it topples them the way one topples distinctions that claim authenticity, namely, by means of simulation and exaggeration. “Thus gay is to straight not as copy is to original but as copy is to copy.”⁹¹ Within an ironic universe, the distinction between the world of semblance and the real world is obsolete, and with it the distinction between original and copy as well. “The parodic repetition of ‘the original’ […] reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original.”⁹² This (post-)feminist conception can be generalized. The ironic imperative is to stir up confusion politically as well, that is, to sublimely and fluidly turn a defensive into an offensive position. Irony is the guerilla tactic of discursive minorities. It turns the necessity to appropriate a majority discourse into the virtue of producing local instabilities and thus free spaces within a field of preconceived notions. Even more than a subversive strategy, therefore, irony is the lifeblood of strangers, the space in which they float, the air they breathe. Strangers, as Julia Kristeva well knows, are often “the best of ironists”⁹³ because they are plagued like no other by this perverse pleasure of estrangement. They are controlled and driven by an inborn strangeness over against the other, a strangeness that even the effects of globalization on collective mobility have not diminished. “Without a home, he [the stranger] disseminates on the contrary the actor’s paradox: multiplying masks and ‘false selves’ he is never completely true nor completely false.”⁹⁴ He cultivates his two-fold identity or even an entire “kaleidoscope

89 Butler, Gender Trouble, 166. 90 Butler, Gender Trouble, 166 91 Butler, Gender Trouble, 43. 92 Butler, Gender Trouble, 43. 93 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 10. 94 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 8.

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of identities.”⁹⁵ His “simulation drive” doesn’t urge him, according to Roland Barthes, “to be an other but to be other, it doesn’t matter who.”⁹⁶ In this way, the stranger can also have an alienating effect on others: “the beloved stranger urges me, actively compels me to affirm the stranger who is within me, the stranger I am to myself.”⁹⁷ This ironic stranger is by far not a better person. Strangers might be whiny, judge unfairly, and possibly (albeit understandably) even be paranoid. They are more than simply pessimists and yet their misanthropy is never really out of place. “Optimism is just a lack of information,” says Heiner Müller. Always the catalyst and object of projected aggression, strangers hold on to utopia. In their pesky way, strangers uphold an ideal: the savage utopia of living an entirely different life. As Adorno writes in “Nach Steuermann’s Tod [After Eduard Steuermann’s Death]”: “This unrelentingly gentle ironist embodied the good whose positivity is blocked. In the wrong life, he achieved a right one.”⁹⁸ This obviously implies claiming the right to act out. Permanent paranoia blends with parasitic arrogance. The enduring, almost genetic truth of the everresistant ironic stranger is to “always contradict.” Strangers contradict even when they say nothing at all. Their heightened sensitivity contains a pathos of distance that keeps them at a distance from even their awkward admirers. The profound meaning, the fecundity of the strangers’ whininess, is that they remain strange in every situation, no matter how hard they try. It is less that they are nowhere at home, but rather that they are (not) at home in as many different places as possible.

2.2 Antithesis: On Irony’s structural elitism (Eichendorff, Mann, Rorty) We must not let ourselves be fooled by the various rediscoveries and reconceptualizations of irony. Friedrich Schlegel’s choice of irony as a central theoretical concept is the choice of a concept with a social-political history. In the eighteenth century, irony was primarily a social tone, a manner of cultivated speaking in upper, even courtly circles. These circles are not only economic parasites, their

95 “[T]hat exquisite distance […] the impetus of my culture. Split identity, kaleidoscope of identities” (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 13–14). 96 Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 137. 97 Barthes, Preparation of the Novel, 237. 98 Adorno, “Nach Steuermanns Tod,” in Musikalische Schriften IV, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 17:311–317, here 317.

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“irony signals” also “operate parasitically on the factors that participate in a given speech act.” The higher […] the signal threshold […] the more the object of irony is degraded to a mere occasion for an artificiality of its transmission that flatters the connoisseur and, for the sake of the happy few that enjoy this understanding, runs the risk that the ironic sacrificium intellectus will not be recognized by the masses (should it ever reach them).⁹⁹

Irony will never manage to break free of this elitist background. To this day, irony is the most suitable trope of the smug “upper classes” that seek to ward off intrusions from below with their own kind of pathos of distance. Irony lends itself to this purpose. Any ironic utterance, no matter how short, operates by means of exclusion. Those who grasp the irony remain on the “inside,” those who do not are on the “outside.” “In a negative sense, irony is said to play to in-groups that can be elitist and exclusionary.”¹⁰⁰ Elitism is functionally inscribed in the trope of irony even if the one speaking ironically remains alone (which is certainly quite often the case). As a sort of cultural decal – of contemporary culture as well – irony is, to name but a few critiques of the concept, a “convention for establishing complicity,” a “screen of bad faith” (Thomas Lawson), even “a commodity in its own right” (David Austin-Smith), whose “monadic relativism” (Frederic Jameson) remains pseudo-critical.¹⁰¹ Ironically, we always know better but that does not prevent us from ideological participation. This aligns with Slavoj Žižek’s repetitive thesis that it is precisely what is ideologically false that is phantasmatically enjoyed. We act “as if” we didn’t know better. The ironic logic of fetishism discussed above in the context of ethics is at work in political fantasies as well. Irony thus makes it easy to concede knowledge of the necessity of deception for life in general. It is precisely from deception and false consciousness that irony derives its perverse pleasure. Its political fate or, more precisely, its political application is thus predetermined. In its very essence, irony is regressive and resists true enlightenment. That is why there has rightly been a stream of critiques of irony for more than two hundred years. Schlegel’s own conversion to conservatism in Vienna, which has been frequently commented upon, is not to be seen as a reactionary “turn” on the part of German Romanticism. Rather, this move is already anticipated in his early, aestheti99 Warning, “Ironiesignale und ironische Solidarisierung,” in Das Komische, ed. Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1976), 416–427, here 420 und 422. 100 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 54. 101 Quoted by Hutcheon (Irony’s Edge, 21) who lists a large number of assessments of irony, including those by Northrop Frye and Wayne Booth.

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cally advanced works. For the early Romantics, even the Enlightenment ideal of a “non-authoritarian culture of conversation” stands under the auspices of the “dictatorship of taste,”¹⁰² which Schlegel periodically envisioned. It is characteristic that we find descriptions of “public opinion” as an “ugly monster,” “swollen with poison” as early as in Lucinde.¹⁰³ The Romantic “aristocracy of the witty” is subjected to criticism even by its contemporaries.¹⁰⁴ The primary target was, initially, Friedrich von Gentz, a German dandy, advisor to Metternich, and the “spirit incarnate of Lucinde, the palpable personification of ironic geniality.”¹⁰⁵ In his letters, Gentz reports “on his ‘disdain for the world,’ his ‘egotism’ and his smug disinterest in everything” that exceeds “the ‘furnishing of my rooms,’ the ‘raffinement of so-called luxury’ and ‘breakfast.’”¹⁰⁶ In the twentieth century, the target of devastating criticism was less Gentz’s privatist dandyism than Adam Müller, a convert and co-founder of the antiSemitic Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft. Whereas with Gentz, who had translated Burke’s anti-Revolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France, irony led to a reactionary political attitude, Müller appears ironic in his political attitude and activity. Not unlike Novalis, according to whom the “ruler creates an infinitely varied theatre, where the stage and the parterre, the actors and spectators, are one, and where he is at once poet, director, and hero of the piece,”¹⁰⁷ one of Müller’s “Ideas of Beauty” is the following: “I list for you the art of politics among the fine arts and would list it first if there had to be a hierarchy.”¹⁰⁸ In keeping with the ideas laid out in the journal Phoebus, which he edited together with Heinrich von Kleist, Müller conceives of a public relations department avant la lettre. The ambivalence of his projects is on full display in the infamous suggestion that Müller submits to the Prussian government on August 20, 1809. He proposes a journal project supported entirely by an ironic ideological flexibility:

102 See David E. Wellbery, “Rhetorik und Literatur: Anmerkungen zur poetologischen Begriffsbildung bei Friedrich Schlegel,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1987), 161–173. 103 Schlegel, Lucinde, 53. 104 “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst 53 (1840): col. 420; cf. Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik, esp. 210–220. 105 “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” col. 498. 106 “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” col. 499. 107 Novalis, “Faith and Love,” in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33–49, here 48. 108 Quoted in Benedikt Koehler, Ästhetik der Politik: Adam Müller und die politische Romantik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), 79.

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I venture to publish a government newspaper openly and with the authority of the Privy Council, and to publish a popular newspaper anonymously and with the mere connivance of the Privy Council: in other words, to write both a ministerial and an opposition newspaper.¹⁰⁹

No matter from which perspective political Romanticism is examined, all critics agree in their assessment that it is fundamentally conservative. This conservatism is not due to any biographical idiosyncrasy or failure on Schlegel’s part. We find it long before his support of Metternich in the Fragments on History and Politics. The same is true of Novalis’ reflections on Christianity or Europe or Eichendorff ’s infamous History of Poetic Literature in Germany, which defines “the content of poetry” as “essentially Catholic, the memorable sign of Protestantism’s nostalgia for the Church breaking through almost unconsciously.”¹¹⁰ The rise of Schlegel, Gentz, and Müller is thus rightly described as ironic. “For irony,” Martin Walser tells us, is a very special freedom. Not just the freedom to do this or that or to do everything. Irony, in the sense Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller give the term, is the freedom NOT to do something; namely, [the freedom not] to stand up for one’s civil, for one’s human rights.¹¹¹

In the twentieth century, the most prominent advocate of such a freedom is, in Walser’s view, the artisanal “concept shunter”¹¹² Thomas Mann, whom he sees as having created “no ironic work […] but the figure of the ironist.”¹¹³ In Thomas Mann, irony is in the end always conciliatory; it mediates and is a means to an end. All conceptual, personal, artistic incoherence is eased by irony. Possible conflicts between spirit and life, artistry and the bourgeoisie, are not coherently thought through, never mind lived out, but  – ironized. “Irony as modesty, as backward-looking skepticism is a form of morality, is a personal ethics.” It is what Mann tellingly calls an “inner politics.” In the wake of the Romantics’ (practical) political statements, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man are renewed evidence that when irony is applied to political territory its effects are conservative and apolitical, if not reactionary.

109 Quoted in Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 44; cf. Martin Walser, Selbstbewusstsein und Ironie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 70–71. 110 Joseph von Eichendorff, Literarhistorische Schriften III: Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands, ed. Wolfram Mauser, vol. 9, Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Kosch et al. (Regensburg: Habbel, 1970), 470. 111 Walser, Selbstbewusstsein und Ironie, 71. 112 Walser, Selbstbewusstsein und Ironie, 97. 113 Walser, Selbstbewusstsein und Ironie, 105.

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In postmodernity, these effects are particularly visible in Richard Rorty. Rorty’s project of irony amounts to a kind of privatist aestheticization. The struggle between “the insistence on individual spontaneity and private perfection and the insistence on universality”¹¹⁴ which began, according to Rorty’s reading, in Romanticism, can be resolved by “the possibility of a liberal utopia: one in which ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal.”¹¹⁵ A victory of irony in this way would at the same time be the “final victory of poetry in its ancient quarrel with philosophy.”¹¹⁶ What this means becomes clear in the following passage: Ironists read literary critics, and take them as moral advisers, simply because such critics have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance. They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They have read more books and are thus in a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book. In particular, ironists hope that critics will help them perform the sort of dialectical feat which Hegel was so good at. That is, they hope critics will help them continue to admire books which are prima facie antithetical by performing some sort of synthesis.

That is because ironists, Rorty continues, are plagued by the problem that they would like to be able to admire both Blake and Arnold, both Nietzsche and Mill, both Marx and Baudelaire, both Trotsky and Eliot, both Nabokov and Orwell. So we hope some critic will show how these men’s books can be put together to form a beautiful mosaic. [They] hope that critics can redescribe these people in ways which will enlarge the canon, and will give us a set of classical texts as rich and diverse as possible.¹¹⁷

Needless to say, “[i]n the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however, be commonsensically nominalist and historicist.”¹¹⁸ Within this conservative conception of history, which systematically excludes progressive political ideas, neither progress nor conceptual development are possible. A strict separation of castes, it seems, allows highly sophisticated ironists to coexist harmoniously with less intellectually inclined but commonsensical nominalists. A closer look, however, shows this exclusive separation of the political and the private to be nothing other than an (a)political statement, the retreat of mutilated thinking to its own sweet home.

114 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 30. 115 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 15. 116 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 40. 117 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 80–81. 118 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 87.

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In Rorty’s case as in Thomas Mann’s, irony serves as a makeshift cover for the weakness of his own arguments. If we apply his rather free dealings with the various thinkers he discusses to Rorty himself, we cannot help but feel that such a theory must end in laconic lethargy. Rorty’s ironic linguistic mode comes into play as a defense mechanism meant to protect its own discourse and thus ends up authoritarian. The goal of ironist theory is to understand the metaphysical urge, the urge to theorize, so well that one becomes entirely free of it. Ironist theory is thus a ladder which is to be thrown away as soon as one has figured out what it was that drove one’s predecessors to theorize. The last thing the ironist theorist wants or needs is a theory of ironism.¹¹⁹

From this point of view, any public discourse can be reduced to private idiosyncrasies. Ironic theorists hover freely and unfettered above the fields of theory that threaten the theorist as little as he or she threatens them. Controlled, selfconfident deployment of irony and conformist relativism join in their discursive strategies without any trouble.

119 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 96–97.

3 The Irony of the Law (Kafka and Deleuze) Tyrants are never born in anarchy, they only flourish in the shadow of the laws and draw their authority from them. Marquis de Sade¹²⁰

The completely contradictory attributions of political meaning to irony we have just discussed – summarized in Claire Colebrook’s formula, “Irony is provocative, disruptive, but also hierarchical”¹²¹ – lend credence to Linda Hutcheon’s thesis about the “transideological nature of irony.”¹²² Nonetheless, we can reformulate, one last time, the question of whether irony might be deconstructive of ideology in general. We can do so by rethinking the concept of the “ironization of the law.” How would one think it? Gilles Deleuze, in particular, has time and again come back to this question and to the problem, which in his view is related, of the encounter of law and humor. One of the central theses of his early essay on Sacher-Masoch, for example, is that the law cannot be conceived of other than in terms of irony and humor.¹²³ In the wake of Bergson, Deleuze, too, conceives of the law as secondary, as dependent, in the final analysis, on a concept of the (Platonic) Good. He simultaneously picks up on Bergson’s distinction between humor and irony: Sometimes we state what ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what is actually being done; then we have irony. Sometimes, on the contrary, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the method of humour. […] Irony is emphasised the higher we allow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought to be.¹²⁴

According to Deleuze, the humorist, in opposition to the ironist as logician of principles, is no longer concerned with “the upward movement of irony toward a transcendent higher principle” but with “a downward movement from the law to its consequences. We all know ways of twisting the law by excess of zeal.”¹²⁵

120 More precisely: Chigi in Sade’s Histoire de Juliette, quoted in Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 86–87. 121 Colebrook, Irony, 122. 122 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 15. 123 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 81–90. 124 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 127; Bergson concludes that “[h]umour, thus defined, is the counterpart of irony. Both are forms of satire” (127). 125 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 88.

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These comments from Deleuze are likely inspired by Kant’s distinction between determining and reflective judgment. In Deleuze’s early essay, both irony and humor aim at the “subversion of the law.”¹²⁶ But it is precisely the ascent to the good and the ensuing alliance between irony and some kind of legality that Deleuze will later criticize in ironic procedures. His reproach is only justified, however, if humor is indeed the opposite pole that once and for all dismantles the mechanism of a transcendental and unintelligible law. Nonetheless, as we will see, there is no such final dismantling but, at most, a distortion of functional contexts. Deleuze’s later critical assessment of irony is decisively shaped by irony’s ties to sadism and the correlative ties of humor to masochistic practices. The refusal of an original separation of subject and object entails more than the rejection of the strict separation between primary and secondary narcissism. It reveals secondary masochism as a hidden sadism. The mask of irony also eliminates the differences between constitutive and constituted identification at a later narcissist mirror stage.¹²⁷ The same goes for the separation between an egological identity and a super-ego. And this in turn does away with Deleuze’s criteria for deciding between the triumph of the ego in humor and the triumph of the sadistic superego in irony. The humoristic overfulfillment of the law is thus a figure inscribed in the third rhetorological logic of irony. Conversely, Deleuze’s Logic of Sense provides aesthetic criteria for the effects of sense, criteria which rest on non-sense, that allow for clarifying the logical components of irony. The categories “nonsense” and “incomprehensibility” are central aspects of (Romantic) irony and are as inseparable from its rhetorological logic as they are from their apparent opposite: successful reconciliation. The way these categories blend together and the never-resting process of ironization in general are perhaps nowhere more clearly on display than in Kafka. First, – and this is one of the reasons why Kafka comes at the end of this book – his work brings out, at virtually every turn, the inseparability of ethical, poetic, and political questions. Kafka’s texts provide different perspectives on the ironization processes that are constitutive and inevitable for modernity. In Kafka, ironization can never be understood on the level of language (or narrative

126 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 86. The problems raised by this distinction are even more clearly brought out in Candace D. Lang, for whom irony is “virtually synonymous with the now(in)famous écriture, or writing, in the Derridean sense” (Irony – Humor: Critical Paradigms [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988], 4). This is how Lang justifies her distinction between two ironies, one of which she calls (allegedly for reasons of clarity) “humor.” 127 Bernd Liepold-Mosser, Gesetz  – Übergang  – Stil: Von Immanuel Kant zur Philosophie des französischen Poststrukturalismus (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1996), esp. 53.

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or time) alone; it is always presented in its ethical, juridical, and political consequences as well. Second, the three logics of irony are always co-present in Kafka’s texts. Their irony never ceases to transition from one logic to the other. There is hardly a Kafka text that does not explicitly raise the question of the law, and there is no text in which its performative effects could not be shown. According to Joseph Vogl, part of “the auto-irony of Kafka’s texts” is “that they organize themselves around an empty center in which there is absolutely nothing, no event, no object, no knowledge, no sense” and that their narrative process can be understood “as movement at a standstill, as narration of stories that sometimes barely make it beyond their own beginning. This irony works on the core of literary self-understanding.”¹²⁸ This ironic void, this cheerful Nothing that appears at the core of so many of Kafka’s texts is of course extremely rich: the structure of legality implies, on the one hand, that the void of its content remains concealed behind its material, concrete manifestations but also, on the other hand, that it can be described poetologically, ethically and in terms of a philosophy of time or, more precisely, of tense.¹²⁹ What can be shown on the poetological level as a shift of literary categories such as “narrativity” and “chronology” also explains the legal-philosophical project of Kafka’s prose, namely, the project to reveal the extent to which it is “essential to the law that it is shifted temporally and spatially.”¹³⁰ Kafka’s écriture operates on the same infinitely high level as his thinking; his writing, in fact, is this timeless event. It is impossible to resist in a more fundamental way than Kafka, that is, on the level of the form of all our intuitions. I will make this point largely on the basis of a series of unorganized but coherent aphorisms Kafka wrote in his diary between January 6 and February 29, 1920. First published by Max Brod under the title ‘Er’ (“‘He’”),¹³¹ they provide, almost in passing, one of the most beautiful descriptions of irony: But he couldn’t wish in that way at all, for his wish wasn’t a wish at all, it was only a defence, a decent domestication of nothing, a breath of cheerfulness he wanted to give to nothing […] He was bidding a kind of farewell then to the illusory world of youth, which, by the way, had

128 Joseph Vogl, Ort der Gewalt: Kafkas literarische Ethik (Munich: Fink, 1990), 150. 129 On the concept of a philosophy not of time but of tense, based on a linguistic-grammatical analysis, see Avanessian and Hennig, Present Tense, 187–218. 130 Vogl, Ort der Gewalt, 158. 131 [These notes have been published in a variety of arrangements. The quotes given here are taken from the translations collected under the heading “Aphorisms” in A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) – Trans.]

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never deceived him directly, but only allowed him to be deceived by what all the authorities around him had told him. That is how the “wish” inevitably came about.¹³²

In Kafka, it is this question of the wish in particular, of longing and desire, that leads into the borderlands of law and politics. A prison he could have come to terms with. To end as a prisoner, that would be a goal for a life. But it was a cage with bars. […] The prisoner was actually free; he could take part in everything; nothing outside escaped him; he could even have left the cage, after all, the bars were yards apart, he wasn’t even imprisoned.¹³³

The topic of the descriptions in this aphorism are supplemented by an aphorism written four days later, which gives voice to the inner problem of the pseudoprisoner even more clearly: “But if you ask him what he really wants he is unable to answer, for he has […] no idea what freedom looks like.”¹³⁴ These formulations express an insight into the intricate relationship between freedom and codification or restraint. Unlike The Trial, this text does not offer the hallucination of an imaginary court procedure, nor does it project an ultimate authority of decision onto the law. In this way, it dispenses with the usual dialectical game of real and apparent acquittal. Even the categories of “guilt” and “delay,” which still seem to imply something like responsible authorities, lose their meaning. In The Trial, the central allegory is the situation “Before the Law.” Its interpretation turns on the question of deception. In Kafka’s late notes, these interpretative options are no longer available. The prison is open, and yet we do not encounter freedom. Kafka’s texts announce a new understanding of “freedom” and “power.” And the text “He” is particularly unaware of any trespass or guilt when it describes a protagonist sitting between widely-spaced bars. What makes escape impossible for him might possibly be expressed in the fifth notation: “The bone in his forehead obstructs his way (he rams his forehead bloody against his own forehead).”¹³⁵ In Kafka, the subjective entanglements in the effects of “power” are always thought from concrete situations and thematized on several levels. The first thing that strikes us in this context is that all of the novels’ characters are quarrelsome. Josef K. and K. seem to take any chance they get to verbally attack an innocent villager or court servant. This embarrassing sadism has a correlate in a

132 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 205. 133 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 202. 134 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 203. 135 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 203.

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masochistic desire not only on the part of its victims but also in the protagonists’ relations to their superiors. Josef K.’s mobbing paranoia concerning his director-deputy offers important glimpses into bureaucratic power structures. Still on the level of the individual, the protagonists of Kafka’s novels are motivated by a Spinozist conatus; they are dominated by a drive to life qua expansion of power. In the twelfth entry we read, “The basis of human unions is that the strong self of one appears to have refuted other individuals, in themselves essentially irrefutable.”¹³⁶ And the twenty-fourth aphorism speaks even more directly of a power to say no, this most natural expression of the continuously changing, renewing, dying, reviving, human fighting – organism, is something we always have, but not the courage; all the same while to live is to say no, it follows that to say no is to say yes.¹³⁷

This marks a breakthrough to a new understanding of “power” that could not have been obtained within the perspective of the small office or of the castle, projected onto exaggerated heights. For the personal fixation on the count’s castle and its representative, Klamm, deprives K.’s insight into Klamm’s merely “formal power” of its value. On the one hand, we read: “Nowhere before had K. ever seen official duties and life so closely interwoven, so much so that sometimes it almost seemed as if life and official duties had changed places.” On the other hand, we read in the very next sentence: “What was the meaning, for instance, of the power, so far only formal, that Klamm had over K.’s services compared with the power that Klamm really did exert in K.’s bedroom?”¹³⁸ The oedipal compulsion to make off with his superior’s girlfriend, Frieda, results from a simplistic understanding of the power balance. K.’s dream that “from the [first moment], he had come face to face with those authorities, so far as that was possible, openly and without equivocation,”¹³⁹ is still linked to his hope for a final decision that will never take place. The villagers, for their part, see Klamm’s influence at work everywhere. And instead of seeking a way out, K., too, clings to this one contingent person in the chain of influence and imagines Klamm to have (some kind of real) power. In contrast to this intractable unreasonableness and the protagonists’ entanglements, the novel’s structure offers exemplary reflections on symbolic bureaucracy. More than any other text, Kafka’s writings anticipate fascist, Stalinist, and capitalist bureaucratism at the limits of sovereignty. K. arrives in the village as a Schmittian, 136 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 205. 137 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 208. 138 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 55. 139 Kafka, The Castle, 147; I see the interpolation of “so far as that was possible” as an interpolation of the narrator; K. himself is ambushing the authorities.

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so to speak, ready to incite a great showdown. But his narrator already knows better. On each ride to the castle the narrator ironically allows K. to sink deeper into the snow and mud of the village from which he seeks to liberate himself. What, from the point of view of literary theory, has been described as a narrative ironization¹⁴⁰ can, from a historical point of view, be conceived of as a collision of discontinuous political dispositions in the sense of the (Foucault-inspired) distinction Deleuze makes between disciplinary and control societies. Kafka, in Deleuze’s reading, stood at the junction of these two types of society and described in The Trial their most ominous judicial expressions: apparent acquittal (between two confinements) in disciplinary societies, and endless postponement in (constantly changing) control societies are two very different ways of doing things.¹⁴¹

This is apparent in their respective methods of punishment and imprisonment. In the society of sovereignty, the law consisted in the enunciations of the sovereign. And what the sovereign said was clearly audible; so clearly audible that it could be inscribed on the delinquent body. In the Penal Colony, Kafka’s sadistic imagination assembles post facto the ultimate machinic realization of this model of sovereignty, which, under the conditions of modernity, is doomed to fail. The society of discipline, in turn, operates by means of confinement and imprisonment. The prison and its bars are the dead machine of this society. In an early, fragmentary version of the “Report to an Academy,” the ape Rotpeter finds himself in an architectural version of the already mentioned barred crate. Angry as I was, I did not want to see anyone and therefore remained facing the crate; I was crouching this way for days and nights with trembling knees and in the back, the bars were cutting into me. Such storage of wild animals during the first days is held to be advantageous and from my experience I cannot deny that in the human sense this is indeed the case. But at the time I did not yet care about the human sense. I had the crate before me. Open the wall of planks, bite a hole through it, squeeze yourself through a gap that in reality

140 Some have seen this widening of perspective as “anchoring” the novel’s irony: this irony occurs thanks to a split in the narratorial perspectives between the “view reflected by the protagonist” and the one “not reflected by him […] Narrative irony is the contradiction between the reflected and the unreflected parts of K.’s perceptions” (Walter H. Sokel, “Kafkas ‘Der Prozess:’ Ironie, Deutungszwang, Scham und Spiel,” in Was bleibt von Franz Kafka? Positionsbestimmung: Kafka-Symposion, Wien 1983, ed. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler [Vienna: Braumüller, 1985], 43–62, here 44). 141 Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–182, here 179.

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hardly allows for a glimpse and that you welcome with the blissful howling of foolishness when you first discover it. Where do you want to go? The forest begins behind the plank.¹⁴²

The fragment thus ends such that animal traits (howling, biting, irrationality) still dominate. In the later version, the anthropos in the anthropoid takes over. And beyond the crate, there is no longer a forest, in which Rotpeter, a “sentimental ironist,”¹⁴³ once ran the danger of losing himself. Instead, he is shipped across the sea and introduced to civilization; he no longer even desires to escape to freedom anymore. “No, it was not freedom I wanted. Only a way out; to the right, to the left, in any direction […] Move on further, further! Anything but have to stand still with arms raised, pressed against the wall of a crate.” Such is the task – a task beyond perennial solutions, which might best be called momentaneist.¹⁴⁴ I can’t remember whether flight was possible, but I believe it was; for an ape, flight should always be possible. […] I did not. And what would have been gained by it? […] I would have been tossed on the ocean for a while and would have drowned. Acts of desperation. I did not calculate in these human terms, but under the influence of my environment I behaved as if I had been calculating.¹⁴⁵

Instead of the abstract leap into the void of chaotic immanence, the anthropoid chooses the bourgeois domestication of nothing, that is, he chooses irony as the domestication of the void. Already in The Trial we find a similar doubled reading. There, the focus is either on the question of interiorized guilt, of (theological) conscience, if we take the title to refer to a Prozeß in the legal sense of a trial. Or the focus lies on the question of acquittal, the removal of guilt, if we take Prozeß to refer to the process by which decisions become procedures. The latter point of view is supported by the supposition that “[g]uilt did not come into it. The trial was nothing more than

142 These fragments related to the “Report to an Academy” are part of the octavo notebooks D and E; cf. Wolf Kittler, and Gerhard Neumann, “Kafkas ‘Drucke zu Lebzeiten:’ Editorische Technik und hermeneutische Entscheidung,” in Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr, ed. Wolf Kittler and Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg: Braumüller, 1990), 30–74. 143 On this characterization, see Gerhard Neumann, “‘Ein Bericht für eine Akademie:’ Erwägungen zum ‘Mimesis’-Charakter Kafkascher Texte,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 49 (1975): 166–183, here 179. 144 Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in A Hunger Artist and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37–45, here 41. According to Erhard Schüttpelz, these ironic polite formulas conceal a task not set by the Academy but by Rotpeter himself; cf. Schüttpelz “Eine Berichtigung für eine Akademie,” in Kafkas Institutionen, ed. Arne Höcker und Oliver Simons (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), 91–118, here 96. 145 Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” 42.

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a piece of business. The trial was nothing more than a piece of business, such as he had often transacted with profit for the bank.”¹⁴⁶ Yet Josef K. himself (“it’s the organization that’s guilty, the senior officials”¹⁴⁷) mistrusts his lawyer’s explanations of how infinitely opaque court procedures are even for the officials involved. In the context of the bureaucratism debate of the interwar years, Kafka’s insights are much more complex than, for example, Carl Schmitt’s decisionist criticism of modern bureaucracy or his praise for the Catholic Church’s “celibate bureaucracy.”¹⁴⁸ For, to cite Deleuze and Guattari, “[u]ltimately, it is less a question of K. as a general function taken up by an individual than of K. as a functioning of a polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary individual is only a part.”¹⁴⁹ It’s not enough to say that someone opposes freedom. To understand “power” in Foucault’s terms as both productive and transcendental is to deprive the concept “freedom” of a large share of its former heuristic and emancipatory meaning. In the society of control, writing on bodies or pressing against bars no longer occurs. And the same goes for the concept “escape”: In Kafka’s universe, modernity’s permanent state of exception precludes any ultimate or decisive escape. In his suggestion that politics is also always an (aesthetic) competition for resources and visibility, Jacques Rancière speaks of the fight over and against the policing¹⁵⁰ of space and time. Constant de- and reterritorializations thus prevent both anarchist dissolution and identificatory arrest of the political dynamic by an imaginary sovereign. That is why it is only ever individual lines of flight that become possible within a given arbitrary diagram of power and society. Flight, escape into an extra-societal freedom is no longer a dispositif we can dispose of. We may still sympathize with those who go off the grid, but it is not a coincidence that, as a political option, this move is ironized time and again. There is no longer any site “Before the Law,” no place in which a decision about each individual is at stake or where a superior would decide our fate.

146 Kafka, The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 90. 147 Kafka, The Trial, 60. 148 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, 4. 149 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana B. Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85. 150 This demarcation of the political from purely economic-technical administration we already find, as noted, in Schmitt. In Hamlet or Hecuba, we also find a differentiation of the terms “politics, police, and politesse”; see Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos Press, 2009), 63.

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If we read the “before” of Kafka’s “Before the Law” temporally, we could say that we live “after” the belief in the law. But spatially, too, the “he” in the aphorisms seems to have moved beyond the doorkeeper – and nothing happens after the law, behind it, or even according to it. All that happens is that we realize we must have lost the belief in final authorities of decision somewhere along the way. The law is thus no longer just a product of desire, something desire projects into the space behind the doorkeeper. Kafka’s gaze penetrates the law even in its productive and performative function of exception. Before all political, poetological or artistic rules, the object of literature is the law of language itself. If we take Saussure’s point seriously, we receive and accept language like we would an inevitable law. Literature, in turn, is always already somewhat unfair by playing with these laws of language. This is not about an originary semiotic quality of literary language, which would be situated before the law. At issue is not a sort of subversion, flight or escape once and for all but singular ways out, paths of escape, or the construction of lines of flight. The events of literary language live on. They do so in their singularity, which emerges from the law of language and which rests on the possibility of repetition. The disconcerting ability of Kafka’s prose to draw us in lies in its capacity to ironically repeat the fundamental laws of language. Transformed into the outside chain of events, such an ironization comes to the fore in Kafka’s “political grotesques,”¹⁵¹ for example in K.’s helpers, who are as duplicitous as they ironically double K.’s orders. It is only “outwardly” that they are “ridiculously ready to oblige”¹⁵² someone whom they obviously do not take seriously. Their stupid (dis)obedience is surpassed only by those successors of Sancho Pansa and Jacques the Fatalist, the bouncing balls of Kafka’s “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” The slapstick-like mixture of sense and nonsense of this short story is typical of almost all of Kafka’s comical-grotesque minor characters. The question of how political irony relates to the “law,” however, also has an eminently ethical dimension. In his book on Kant, Deleuze describes the problem as follows: “When we choose against the law we do not cease to have an intelligible existence […] We cease to be subjects, but primarily because we cease to be legislators.”¹⁵³ But that, precisely, is what irony or, more precisely, ironists have

151 Cf. Vogl, “Kafkas Komik,” in Kontinent Kafka, ed. Klaus R. Scherpe and Elisabeth Wagner (Berlin: Vorwerk, 2006), 72–87, 86. 152 Kafka, The Castle, 21. 153 Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 32–33.

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always been accused of. Nonetheless, Deleuze makes the exactly opposite accusation in the Logic of Sense: What all figures of irony have in common is that they confine the singularity within the limits of the individual or the person. Thus, irony only in appearance assumes the role of a vagabond. […] Classical discourse was held by the individual, Romantic discourse by the person.¹⁵⁴

This assessment, however, presupposes a law that is always already morally precarious, a law that implies the paradoxical ethical demand that it be trespassed. To the extent that Kafka’s ironizing the law no longer aims at trespassing the law, the law itself can be thought of as no longer infinitely deferring itself. The fourteenth aphorism illustrates why the law cannot simply be dealt with by means of transgressions: “He does not live for the sake of his personal life, he does not think for the sake of his personal thinking.”¹⁵⁵ Once more, Kafka seems to appeal to the authenticity of autonomous ‘personhood’ to oppose the laws of the oedipal family: “For the sake of this unknown family and these unknown laws, he cannot be discharged.”¹⁵⁶ Yet this last formulation suggests a new reading. “Discharge” is more evocative of a process in a hospital than it is of a delinquent’s confrontation with the law in court. In addition, it is an impersonal thought, a process of reflection that is, so to speak, not subject to individual-lawful control. In the entry that follows, this depersonalization finds a corollary in the de-demonization of the law as well: “Original sin, the ancient wrong committed by man, consists of the accusation man makes and never ceases to make, that a wrong was done to him, that the original sin was committed against him.”¹⁵⁷ The Trial’s clergyman in the cathedral, who reveals himself to Josef K. as (his?) prison chaplain, was therefore correct: it is precisely the ones who are guilty who insist, “But I’m not guilty.”¹⁵⁸ The original sin of the eternally guilty lies not just in this denial but consists in their implicit identification with the authority that judges as well. This is what the modern reversal opposes; in political theory, this opposition is articulated by Hobbes and Schmitt, in moral philosophy by Kant, Rawls,

154 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 139–140. 155 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 206. 156 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 206. 157 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 206. 158 Kafka, The Trial, 52; analogously K.’s assertion: “I always prefer to be a free agent” (The Castle, 9.)

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and Habermas.¹⁵⁹ In modernity, only a formal law prescribes the Good without content: this is Kant’s mere form of the law, the “validity without meaning” which Gershom Scholem saw in Kafka.¹⁶⁰ In Kafka, therefore, the irony of the law is not what Deleuze tends to narrow it down to. It is not a manic “art of depths and heights,”¹⁶¹ exposed to the threat of depressive crashes. In the “He” aphorisms, the idea and the origin of original sin are designated as subjective projections. This ironic insight is different from Gregor Samsa’s tragic “Oedipus irony,”¹⁶² which anticipates and accepts guilt before it has knowledge. The destabilizing irony of Kafka’s aphorisms dismisses this type of irony by imploding the foundations of its own content down to the very core of the objects it questions. Kafka’s deployment of literary strategies of irony opens up yet another theoretical perspective. For if we understand productive power structures to be constitutive of various processes of subjectification, then this also undermines the theory of lack that is tied to the unattainabilty of the law. The structures of the super-ego display their own diagrammatic¹⁶³ character. This takes us beyond a Lacanian reading of the process of law, according to which “law” is experienced in as formalized a way as possible and according to which “[n]o man is actually ignorant of it, because the law of man [is] the law of language.”¹⁶⁴ And it is only through language that subjects are constituted and through which they simultaneously become heterogeneous to themselves. The point of Lacan’s approach is a radical transvaluation of the super-ego’s function. The super-ego commands us to enjoy. That is the experience that Josef K. has before the law. What he learns in court is that the law commands us to enjoy. His glimpse into the pornographic books of the law is only an official endorsement of his constant desiring. In almost every chapter, he prowls after a different woman, be it Miss Bürstner or, in the filth of the courtroom, the bailiff’s wife. Just as Nietzsche’s dogmatists fail when confronted with feminine truth, so too does Josef K. fail in his rough encounters with the other sex. In the end, he doesn’t listen to the women carefully enough. And the protagonist of The Castle 159 For a parallel reading of Rawls’ and Kant’s premises, see Liepold-Mosser, Gesetz  – Übergang – Stil, 43. 160 On Scholem’s remark about Kafka in a letter to Benjamin, see Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 50–51. 161 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 9. 162 Walser, Selbstbewusstsein und Ironie, 184. 163 For a theory of the diagram in Foucault, see Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 164 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, 197– 268, here 225.

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also ignores a hint to this effect or at least does not draw the correct, anti-decisionist conclusion: “We have a saying here – maybe you know it – ‘Official decisions are as elusive as young girls.’” “That’s a good observation,” said K., and he took it even more seriously than Olga. “A good observation, and such decisions may share certain other characteristics with young girls.”¹⁶⁵

In general, what we hear coming from the castle is obscene. Yet in Kafka, the possibility of a pure decision is not only threatened by obscenities of whatever kind. The law’s ironic contiguity renders impossible the purification that decisionists seem to adore so much: But an official decision is not something like, for example, this bottle of medicine standing on the little table here. You reach for it and, there, you have it. A real decision is preceded by innumerable small inquiries and reflections, it takes years of work on the part of the best officials […] even when these officials knew the decision at the very beginning […]. And is there such a thing as a final decision? To keep it from emerging, that’s what the controlling offices are there for.¹⁶⁶

The hysterical dimension of (Schmittian) decisionism is emblematically captured in the compulsive cleanliness of the officer in the Penal Colony: “Then he examined his hands; they didn’t seem to him clean enough to be handling the designs [of the ideal machine]; so he went over to the bucket and washed them once again.”¹⁶⁷ In terms of political theory, this urge for cleanliness indicates an anti-democratic aversion toward ambiguities. The corresponding moral formula, “Guilt is always beyond question,”¹⁶⁸ explains why the accused is not allowed to defend himself at all. The grimy, oily gears of the bureaucracy, in turn, are naturally a thorn in the officer’s side. “The machine is very complex; something is bound to snap or break now and again; but one shouldn’t let that mislead one when making an overall judgement.”¹⁶⁹ Because the officer is the only who still believes in the machine. And the machine has done its duty once it dismantles itself on his body.

165 Kafka, The Castle, 153. 166 Kafka, Das Schloß: Apparatband, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 273. 167 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75–99, here 79. 168 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 80. 169 Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 85.

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In accordance with the scope of the genre, Kafka’s novels, unlike the short stories, focus more on the procedural character of judgments. “[W]here one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone. Justice is desire and not law. Everyone in fact is a functionary of justice […] but also the equivocal young women and the perverse little girls.”¹⁷⁰ In the Trial, this “process is itself a continuum, but a continuum made up of contiguities.”¹⁷¹ From one hallway to the next, from one office to the next, Josef K.’s metonymic desire drifts restlessly, the way K., too, moves from one bar to the next and is served each time by a different woman. Move on and on, just don’t stand still. “He guards from being fixed by his fellow humans”:¹⁷² the opening sentence of Kafka’s eighteenth aphorism indicates an important shift, the shift from the question of (freedom from) guilt to the question of political mobility. The conatus described above less as a lust for power than as a drive to life, to ever-new potentialities, thus turns out to be a sufficient, material, bodily justification for political resistance.¹⁷³ The last sentence of the eighteenth aphorism designates it as “longing,” as “an important element of vital energy, or perhaps vitality itself.”¹⁷⁴ It is Foucault’s famous “will not to be governed like that and at that cost.”¹⁷⁵ And perhaps it has always been the wish for another leap, a leap into another, post-ironic state, a state beyond the paradoxical alternatives that I have described in this book as inevitably inscribed into modernity. He has two opponents; the first puts him under pressure from behind, from his origins; the second blocks his way forward. He does battle with both. Actually, the first is supporting him against the second because he wants to press forward; likewise, the second is supporting him against the first, because he is driving him back. But this is only in theory, for it is not only the two opponents who are present, but he himself as well, and who really knows what his intentions are? It is, after all, a dream of his that once, in an unguarded moment – which, however, implies a night dark as no night before it – he leaps from the line and is elevated, thanks to his experience in battle, to be judge over his fighting opponents.¹⁷⁶

170 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 49. 171 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 51. 172 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 207. 173 On Spinoza’s conatus, see Antonio Negri’s early study, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 174 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 206. 175 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 45. 176 Kafka, “Aphorisms,” 203 [translation modified].

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Index Adorno, Theodor W. 83, 88, 115, 127, 137–138, 164, 193 Agamben, Giorgio 87 Alighieri, Dante 120 Anaximenes 2 Arendt, Hannah 178 Aristophanes 1–2, 150 Aristotle 2–3, 51, 67 Arnold, Matthew 197 Augustine 1, 104 Austin-Smith, David 194 Bachelard, Gaston 87 Bakhtin, Mikhail 116–117 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 7, 113, 122–124, 136, 139, 147–150, 188–190 Bakthin, Mikhail M. 125 Balke, Friedrich 184 Balzac, Honoré de 77–78, 119, 135, 148, 155 Barthes, Roland 79, 148, 193 Barth, John 137 Baudelaire, Charles 5, 75–79, 84, 104, 107, 197 Baudrillard, Jean 99, 107–108 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 31 Benjamin, Walter 5–6, 29–30, 75, 77, 85, 99–100, 102, 104–105, 126 Benveniste, Émile 96 Bergson, Henri 199 Bernhard, Thomas 159–165 Berrendonner, Alain 13–14 Blake, William 197 Blanchot, Maurice 115 Blankenburg, Christian Friedrich 120 Blumenberg, Hans 116, 119 Böhme, Hartmut 145 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 60, 62–63, 85, 182, 185 Booth, Wayne C. 12 Bräutigam, Bernd 51 Brentano, Clemens 41 Brod, Max 201 Brown, Robert L. 12 Brummell, George Bryan 78–81 Bürger, Peter 65

Burke, Edmund 195 Butler, Judith 7, 92, 188, 190–192 Byron, George Gordon 155 Callicles 1 Calvino, Italo 133 Cartland, Barbara 21 Cervantes, Miguel de 36, 77, 117, 123, 127, 130, 135–136 Cicero 2 Climacus, John 86 Colebrook, Claire 199 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 40 Cortés, Donoso 183 D’Aurevilly, Barbey 81 Deleuze, Gilles 88–89, 91, 97, 147, 190, 199–200, 204, 206–209 De Man, Paul 37, 44–45, 64, 113, 125, 159, 174 Derrida, Jacques 17, 25, 27, 31, 36, 44, 72, 97–98, 173, 176 Descartes, René 64, 99 Diderot, Denis 120–121, 123, 151 Dilthey, Wilhelm 154 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 117 Düttmann, Alexander García 186 Eco, Umberto 13, 21, 136–137, 152 Eggington, William 36 Eichendorff, Joseph von 193, 196 Eikhenbaum, Boris 116 Elias, Norbert 102 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 197 Eluard, Paul 92 Epicurus 71 Euripides 150 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 15, 17–19, 25, 27, 32, 35, 40, 51–52, 64, 86, 114, 169 Ficino, Marsilio 87 Fielding, Henry 121, 133–134 Flaubert, Gustave 77, 82, 102, 135–137, 139, 148, 155

228   

   Index

Foucault, Michel 36, 172, 175, 204, 206, 211 Frank, Manfred 20, 36 Freud, Sigmund 90–93, 96–97, 105 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise 89–90 Furst, Lilian R. 35, 37 Genette, Gérard 147 Gentz, Friedrich von 195–196 George IV 78 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 16–17, 31–32, 40, 50, 55, 71, 124, 133, 142, 153–154, 156–157, 169 Gogol, Nikolai V. 123 Gombrowicz, Witold 117 Gould, Glenn 160 Grabes, Herbert 151 Gracián 100, 103 Greiffenhagen, Martin 187 Grice, Herbert Paul 12 Guattari, Félix 88–89, 91, 97, 190, 206 Guys, Constantin 76 Habermas, Jürgen 178, 209 Hamacher, Werner 24 Hamburger, Käte 132 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 16, 19, 24, 27, 38, 49–57, 60–61, 70–71, 85–86, 94–96, 99, 105–106, 115, 118, 178, 182, 197 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig 56 Heine, Heinrich 169 Hemingway, Ernest M. 133 Herder, Johann Gottfried 35 Hobbes, Thomas 208 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 41, 157–158 Hölderlin, Friedrich 36 Homer 114–116, 126, 150 Horkheimer, Max 115 Hutcheson, Linda 199 Ibsen, Henrik 164 Immermann, Karl 154 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 25 Jameson, Frederic 148, 194 Jauß, Hans Robert 120 Joyce, James 115–116, 120, 141, 146

Kafka, Franz 171, 199–204, 206–211 Kant, Immanuel 15, 17–18, 38–39, 51, 59, 63–64, 96, 121, 129, 164, 169, 200, 207–209 Keller, Gottfried 154, 157 Kelsen, Hans 170, 183 Kierkegaard, Søren 1, 5, 49–50, 53–57, 60, 69–71, 82–87, 92–96, 101, 104, 106–109, 116, 122, 179, 185–187 Kleist, Heinrich von 195 Knox, Dilwyn 2 Kohns, Oliver 36, 64 Kristeva, Julia 125, 128, 192 Kundera, Milan 132–133 Lacan, Jacques 26, 90–92, 94, 97, 105, 174, 209 Laclau, Ernesto 173–178, 189 Laclos, Choderlos de 102–103, 107 Lawson, Thomas 194 Lefort, Claude 172 Lermontov, Mikhail Y. 155 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 27 Lethen, Helmut 100, 184 Locke, John 35 Luhmann, Niklas 65, 97, 181 Lukács, Georg 50, 113–114, 116–119, 164 Lyotard, Jean-François 64 Machiavelli, Niccolò 100, 169 Maistre, Joseph de 183 Mann, Thomas 7, 136–137, 153–154, 188, 193, 196, 198 Marquard, Odo 59–60, 62–63 Martensen, Hans Lassen 56 Marx, Karl 79, 83, 187, 189, 197 Maus, Ingeborg 181, 184–185 Mauss, Marcel 139 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 165 Menke, Christoph 64, 172, 174 Menninghaus, Winfried 32, 40, 157 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Lothar von 195–196 Mill, John Stuart 197 Milton, John 120 Molière 123 Mouffe, Chantal 173–178

Index   

Müller, Adam 195–196 Müller, Heiner 193 Musil, Robert 141–146 Nabokov, Vladimir V. 131, 151–152, 197 Nehamas, Alexander 71, 89 Nietzsche, Friedrich 34, 36, 60, 66–74, 76, 80, 106, 179, 188–189, 197, 209 Novalis 17–18, 24–28, 35, 38, 64, 69, 195–196 Orwell, George 197 Paillet-Guth, Anne-Marie 101 Pernet, Henry 89 Plato 1–2, 50, 62, 67, 74, 94, 182, 189 Plessner, Helmuth 100, 184 Porschardt, Ulf 78 Proust, Marcel 101, 138–141, 147–149, 164 Pushkin, Alexander S. 155 Pynchon, Thomas 149, 152 Quintilian 2, 74 Raabe, Wilhelm 155 Rabelais, François 125, 189 Racine, Jean 141 Rancière, Jacques 58, 62, 65, 206 Rawls, John 208 Rebentisch, Juliane 94, 182 Rorty, Richard McKay 179, 193, 197–198 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 199 Sade, Marquis de 36, 102–104, 107, 199 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 148 Saussure, Ferdinand de 24, 207 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 51, 61–62, 169 Schiller, Friedrich 17, 24, 61–63, 155 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 42 Schlegel, Friedrich 3, 11, 15–21, 23–24, 26–32, 38–44, 49–53, 58, 61, 63, 65, 69–70, 74, 82, 85, 94, 107, 113–114, 118–120, 122, 124, 127–128, 132–133, 136, 138, 151, 156, 158, 169–170, 193–196

   229

Schleiermacher, Friedrich 42, 50 Schmitt, Carl 4, 7, 171, 182–188, 206 Schoentjes, Pierre 3 Scholem, Gershom 209 Schopenhauer, Arthur 60 Searle, John R. 12 Shakespeare, William 11, 123, 146, 158 Shklovsky, Viktor 127, 131 Sloterdijk, Peter 188 Socrates 1–2, 50, 55–56, 74, 93–96, 98, 101, 190 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand 16–17, 19, 23 Sorel, Charles 130 Spencer, Herbert 120 Sperber, Dan 13 Staecker, Karl Heinz 15 Stendhal 135, 147, 155 Sterne, Lawrence 121–123, 125, 134, 151 Steuermann, Eduard 193 Stifter, Adalbert 154, 164 Szondi, Peter 82–83, 118–119 Tanesini, Alessandra 175 Tasso, Torquato 120 Tieck, Ludwig 16, 41, 128, 131 Tolstoy, Leo N. 117 Torfing, Jacob 176 Trotsky, Leo 197 Tynyanov, Yuri N. 119, 145, 148 Vermeer, Johannes 165 Vinogradov, Viktor V. 144 Vogl, Joseph 201 Walser, Martin 196 Warning, Rainer 122, 125 Weber, Max 184 Willke, Helmut 177–181 Wilson, Deirdre 13 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 38 Wittig, Monique 192 Xenophon 1–2 Zola, Émile 119