Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa

5. Epilogue: The Ends of Irony

One good thing could come from this horror [9/11]: it could spell the end of the age of irony. —Roger Rosenblatt, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End,” Time What strikes me as much more interesting [than ‘a kind of absolute certainty and a total, seamless view of reality that recognizes only disciples or enemies] is how to keep a space in the mind open for doubt and for the part of an alert, skeptical irony (preferably also self-irony). —Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual One of the ends of irony (an alert, skeptical irony, self-irony) is to maintain good conscience in the face of a contradictory and evolving reality. In Toward the African Revolution and in his larger vision of a world not ruled by oppression , Fanon points to Jankélévitch’s understanding of irony as “good conscience ” because it creates that space in the mind that is tough and tender at the same time. Irony as “good conscience” encompasses both paradox and reconciliation ; it is the enemy of illusion without destroying simplicity, and it joins wit to love.1 In Fanon’s view, then, oppression is not just a matter of physical force—“several policemen striking the prisoner at the same time; four policemen standing around the prisoner hitting him backward and forward to each other, while another burns his chest with a cigarette and still another hits 175 CHAPTER FIVE Epilogue The Ends of Irony the souls of his feet with a stick” (The Wretched of the Earth 280). Oppression is also a restriction of the space of thought; it is a crime against “humanity” as such, evidenced by “all the untruths planted in his being by oppression” (309). Fanon argued for a new humanism: It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity . . . [through] racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation, and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousands of men. . . . . For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (315–316) Thirty years after the publication of Fanon’s plea for a new humanism, Edward Said gave his 1993 Reith Lectures for BBC on “Representations of the Intellectual.” He observed that the nemesis of the public intellectual today is not “mass society as a whole” as it had been for an earlier highbrow intelligentsia, but rather the insiders, experts, coteries, professionals who . . . mold public opinion, make it conformist, encourage a reliance on a superior little band of all-knowing men in power. Insiders promote special interests, but intellectuals should be the ones to question patriotic nationalism, corporate thinking, and a sense of class, racial or gender privilege.” (Representations xiii) The public intellectuals who refuse to join the gang and be admitted to the ranks of the social authorities are not “humorless complainers” but rather are dedicated to “a relentless erudition,” are better at “wit and debate” than their opponents who are the sort of “hardheaded pragmatists and realists who concocted preposterous fictions like the New World Order or the ‘clash of civilizations ’”; as Said points out, circumstance fosters in public intellectuals a certain style: “there is something fundamentally unsettling about intellectuals who have neither offices to protect them nor territory to consolidate and guard; self-irony is therefore more frequent than pomposity, directness more than hemming and hawing” (xviii). Immediately following September 11, 2001, while Robert Rosenblatt was eagerly announcing the end of irony and getting down to the pragmatic business of fighting enemies, Said was reassessing the ends of irony. In “The Of Irony and Empire 176 Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” which appeared in the Nation on September 17, 2001, he reflected that while he had tried in the Reith Lectures to pin down the role of intellectuals, “there have been major political and economic transformations since that time” requiring revisions and additions to his earlier views.2 For one thing, “the realm of the political and the public has expanded so...