Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man

1. Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony

15 o n e Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. — f r i e d r i c h s c h l e g e l The peculiar status of irony within the literary and philosophical tradition is perhaps best illustrated by the vexing questions that always hover over its founder and chief exemplar, Socrates. Was Socrates a model pedagogue or a seducer and corrupter of innocent youth? Was his method of rigorous ignorance a path leading to negative knowledge or an abyssal spiraling of rhetorical tricks? Was his stubborn insistence on interpersonal questioning and dialogue a form of urbanity or the egotistical undermining of any genuinely sociopolitical form of community? Was his death sentence an unacknowledged confession of moral and intellectual bankruptcy in Greece or a necessary step in the unfolding of Western thought? These questions assume their most acute form in the epoch of German romanticism—that is, in the constellation of texts signed by Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and several others—precisely because they will have been repeated there in a way that has left an indelible mark on our own thinking about literature, philosophy, and political history. Reading these texts will therefore always entail the difficulty of determining exactly what the question of irony is about, and how, as well as how far, such a question can be taken seriously. 16 Romantic Irony For instance: was Friedrich Schlegel a genuine philosopher or a mere litt érateur, a dilettante, or worse, a farceur, an intellectual practical joker, a pretentiously literate buffoon? In a perceptive essay about some of the more controversial issues surfacing in discussions about literature, literary theory, and philosophy at the turn of the last century, Schlegel was once wittily referred to as a “playboy philosopher.”1 Such a characterization pretty much sums up the way he has been considered, and dismissed, by most serious philosophers ever since he received his first shellacking at the hands of Hegel. To call Schlegel a “playboy” philosopher, moreover, serves above all to highlight the ludic element of “play” that precedes the age and gender specification of “boy”—though of course neither sexual difference nor the accusation of immaturity is without pertinence whenever irony becomes a subject for serious discussion. Primarily at issue in Schlegel is the nonsystematic mode in which his speculative writings relate to what is perhaps philosophy’s principal object and motivation, truth. Is irony the name for a specific kind of philosophical truth, say, its masked appearance in more or less playful form; or is irony rather play as sheer dissimulation, deception, and ultimately the distortion and even destruction of truth? This question, because it states the issue in terms of truth and its manifestation in a subsidiary, and in this case, veiled form, also serves to remind us that irony is a term that always marks the encounter and potential tension between literature and philosophy, or truth and tropes. Irony, that is, always seems to confront us with the very serious question of the precise way in which literature’s constitutive dimension of tropological play, or rhetoric, is related to philosophical determinations of meaning, knowledge, and truth. Schlegel himself, moreover, went out of his way on more than one occasion to draw attention to the appeal and even inevitability of such an encounter between literature and philosophy. One of his more laconic and well-known formulations in this regard reads: “The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united” (Lyceum Fragment 115).2 This is all well and good, of course, but as we know—notwithstanding Keats’s happy version of this commonplace—such encounters between poetry and philosophy, or between truth and tropes, always run the risk of having their constituents rub each other the wrong way. The solicitation of literature by philosophy can always become a simple invitation to trouble, as the saying goes, especially if it is not taken seriously enough, or, as may be the case with Friedrich Schle- Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony 17 gel, if it is taken so seriously that it no longer leaves the limit between the serious and the nonserious in its proper place. Another of...