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1 Introduction: Irony on Occasion Eijde; oJ ojfqalmov~ sou oJ dexio;~ skandalôzei se, e[xele aujto;n kai; ba;le ajpo; . . . Wenn aber dein rechtes Auge dir Anlaß zur Sünde gibt, so reiß es aus und wirf es weg . . . Si ton œil droit est pour toi une occasion de chute, arrache-le et jette-le loin . . . And if your right eye proves an occasion of falling to you, tear it out and cast it away . . . — m a t t h e w 5:291 If it is true that a book can always be traced back to an occasion from which it must have started out, then the initial occasion for writing this book was not exactly irony. The chapter that was written earliest and which therefore stands more or less at its source is entitled “Fear and Trembling”—an essay that in the first instance ought to be about faith. It may well be, of course, that the book in its entirety is about the unexpected ways in which irony and faith are indissociable. At any rate, the faith that first occasioned the chapter on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling can be traced back to an aside that Paul de Man made during a seminar he was conducting at Yale in the spring of 1980, and which was devoted to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Interrupting his commentary on a passage in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, de Man paused for a moment and began to speak about Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, he said, took issue with Hegel’s conception of language, took issue with the idea that language must function solely and exclusively as a means for expressing the generality of thought. And then de Man mentioned Fear and Trembling as a sustained attempt on the part of Kierkegaard to contest Hegel’s conception of the dialectical relationship between thought, language, and subjectivity.2 But he went 2 Introduction: Irony on Occasion on to add a rather curious comment, or at least at the time it seemed curious to me, as well as detached from the principal topic at hand. He began to talk about the ram that Abraham saw as he looked up just after the angel commanded him to stop his raised arm and the knife it held from coming down on Isaac’s throat. If I remember correctly, it was at that point that de Man said that he had always been intrigued by the role played by the ram in this story, and he concluded his digression by suggesting that one day it would be worth someone’s trouble to read the story of Abraham and Isaac from the point of view of the ram! The comment seemed motivated at the time by the desire to generate a laugh, and it did—so that would be one sense in which the initial occasion for this book actually did have something to do with irony. But on that occasion I must have also believed somehow that what de Man said about the ram was not merely ironic, or that the irony in his remark lay somewhere else, and was not just prompted by the desire to produce the laugh that, as a teacher, one is always anxious to secure in the course of a demanding seminar. The following year, in spring 1981, I attended the seminar Jacques Derrida was giving in Paris, and for my contribution I delivered an exposé on Fear and Trembling that largely concerned itself with the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard. But it didn’t mention the ram. I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity in 1983 to publish a version of that exposé; that version didn’t mention the ram either. So I took the occasion of rewriting that essay for this book so that I could finally say something about the ram in Kierkegaard’s text—which also means that the chapter on Fear and Trembling represents not only the initial occasion but also the most recent occasion for this book. All of which suggests that it would be of far more interest and relevance here, in the introduction, to discuss the concept of the “occasion” than to rehash one after the other the many and various occasions on which I just happened to begin writing the essays that comprise the book as it now stands. That said, there is no reason to conceal the fact—which no doubt also goes without saying—that this book is of a...

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