Irony and the Logic of Modernity

233 Pages·2015·2.397 MB·English

by  Armen Avanessian

Armen Avanessian
Irony and the Logic of Modernity
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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
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Armen Avanessian
Irony and the Logic
of Modernity
Translated by Nils F. Schott
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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
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Contents
Introduction | 1
Part One: Rhetorologies
1 Successful Reconciliation | 15
2 A Desire for Art | 23
2.1 Buffo | 29
2.2 Parekbasis | 30
3 Mad Consciousness | 35
Part Two: Ethica
1 The Irony of Evil | 50
1.1 Evil subjectivity (Hegel) | 51
1.2 The religious inversion of irony (Kierkegaard) | 54
2 Must We Aestheticize? | 58
2.1 “Aestheticization” as a self-fulfilling prophecy | 59
2.2 Romantic avant-garde | 63
2.3 Expanding the zone of aestheticization | 66
3 Masking Irony | 70
3.1 An art of life | 71
3.2 Aesthete, flaneur, dandy (Baudelaire) | 75
3.3 The economy of dandyism | 77
4 The Melancholic Subject | 82
4.1 On (Romantic) melancholia, gloom and despair | 82
4.2 Theories of mood | 84
4.3 Greek reciprocity | 88
4.4 Psychoanalysis: Lacan and Freud | 90
4.5 The emergence of the self from the spirit of irony | 93
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VI       Contents
5 The Joy of Dissimulation | 99
5.1 Confusion, deception, hypocrisy: Of courtiers and libertines | 99
5.2 Seducer or seduction (Les liaisons dangereuses) | 103
5.3 From dissimulatio to simulation (Baudrillard) | 107
Part Three: Novel – Modernity – Irony
1 The Philosophy of History and the Poetics of Genre | 114
1.1 Georg Lukács | 116
1.2 Indirect-mimetic narration | 120
2 The Language of the Novel | 125
2.1 The traditional narrator | 126
2.2 Reality and illusion | 127
2.2.1 Misjudging reality | 129
2.2.2 Literary irony as digressive refraction | 131
2.3 The three structural ironies of the novel | 133
2.3.1 Irony between the author-character and the reader | 133
2.3.2 Ironic relationships between narrator and hero | 135
2.3.3 Contextual irony | 138
3 From Micro-irony (Quotation) to Macro-irony (Genre) | 140
3.1 The ironic destruction of quotations | 140
3.1.1 Proust: Quotation as constitutive of plot | 141
3.1.2 Musil: Quotation constitutive of personalities | 142
3.1.3 Joyce: Quotation as constitution of meaning | 146
3.2 Pastiche | 147
3.3 Parody | 150
4 Novels of (De)formation and Ironic Autobiographies | 153
4.1 Educational decadence | 153
4.2 From hero to subject | 155
4.3 Romantic parodies of education | 157
4.4 Ironic autobiographies | 159
4.4.1 Thomas Bernhard’s aesthetics of language | 160
4.4.2 Long live death – Life and the art of the novel | 163
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Contents       VII
Part Four: Ironic Politics
1 The Struggle with Irony | 172
1.1 Post-Marxism | 173
1.2 The systems-theoretical irony of the state | 177
1.3 Pseudopolitical totalization: Carl Schmitt | 182
2 Thesis and Antithesis | 188
2.1 Thesis: On irony’s structural political subversiveness (Nietzsche,
Bakhtin, Butler) | 188
2.2 Antithesis: On Irony’s structural elitism (Eichendorff, Mann,
Rorty) | 193
3 The Irony of the Law (Kafka and Deleuze) | 199
Bibliography | 213
Index | 227
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