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above and beyond any of its single instances. For Plato, we could contemplate the Ideas of justice or beauty, but the Socratic dialogues suggest that we can only intimate or suggest such Ideas because our everyday definitions are inadequate. In contrast to those who claim to know or intuit ideas the sophists who offer easy definitions Socratic irony suggests that such ideas provide infinite ideals beyond everyday life, ideals towards which life can strive, but which can never be fulfilled. The Romantics had seized on this negative dimension of irony and interpreted Socrates as nothing more than the performance of character. Instead of knowing the human soul and offering a theory of man, Socrates presented various personae that produced the soul as a power to act, rather than a thing to be observed. By being other than what he says Socrates is not a thing to be described by language so much as a demonstration of the creative power of language. Following the Romantics, de Man had insisted that the self or power behind language was an effect of the temporality of language. It is in the act of saying that a self who has spoken is produced. Irony strives to reflect on this necessary and fictional gap between a before and after of language. Any description of language as productive of the illusory real or before that it seems to represent must itself rely on the temporality of language and narrative that it is trying to explain: The reflective disjunction not only occurs by means of language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. Language thus conceived divides the subject into an empirical self, immersed in the world, and a self that become a sign in its attempt at differentiation and self-definition. (de Man 1983, 213) HUMOUR AND IRONY 133 Against this ironic account of narrative and subjectivity as unavoidable, Gilles Deleuze argues both for a different non-linear and multiple understanding of time and for a superior irony beyond the subject. De Man follows a long tradition of philosophers (since Kant) in arguing that time is not possible without a subjective point of view: the idea of a before and after requires the perception of a series of sequence of events. Time is subjective, the creation or synthesis of an ordered world from some stable viewpoint: What all the figures of irony have in common is that they confine the singularity within the limits of the individual or the person (Deleuze 1990, 139). Irony, according to Deleuze, is a tendency in thinking, a tendency to not rest with the world in all its flux of differences, a tendency to posit some ultimate point of view beyond difference. The problem with irony, from Deleuze s point of view, is its elimination of all difference its inability to admit what is beyond its point of view. And it is this ironic ascent that has dominated Western thinking: Classical irony acts as the instance which assures the coextensiveness of being and of the individual within the world of representation (Deleuze 1990, 138). HUMOUR Deleuze s own philosophy suggests a contrary direction for analysis in the form of humour. According to Deleuze, humour descends. Both irony and ideas have traditionally been explained through metaphors of height. Ideas exist above existence, giving the world form. Irony is the adoption of a point of view above a context, allowing us to view the context from on high . Deleuze sees humour not just as an opposite movement of descent; he insists that we need to consider just how this distinction between high and low has enabled us to think. Radical humour, or Deleuze s superior irony , dissolves high-low distinctions such as the concept above existence in order to think of the play of surfaces. We tend to imagine life and narratives as relations among persons, their ideas and their intentions; and we understand irony as the elevation of an idea to an infinite principle the words we say can have a meaning that goes beyond what we intend: For if irony is the conextensiveness of being with the individual, or of the I with representation, humor is the art of the surfaces and of the doubles, of nomad singularities and of the always displaced 134 HUMOUR AND IRONY aleatory point; it is the art of the static genesis, the savoir-faire of the pure event, and the fourth person singular with every signification, denotation, and manifestation suspended, all height and depth abolished. (Deleuze 1990, 141) Humour falls or collapses: down from meaning and intentions to the singularities of life that have no order, no high and low, no before and after. Humour can reverse or pervert logic, disrupt moral categories or dissolve the body into parts without any governing intention. Humour is not the reversal of cause and effect but the abandonment of the before and after relations the very line of time that allow us to think in terms of causes and intentions, of grounds and consequents. If Samuel Beckett s (1906 89) theatre is absurd it is not because life is rendered despairingly meaningless. Rather, we laugh when the order of time and explanation no longer holds. Consider a typically contradictory exchange from Endgame (1957): What time is it? The same as usual (Beckett 1986, 94). The humour of Endgame lies in its confusion of logic and the order of sense. Concepts are used, not just in ways that suggest an unconventional meaning, but in ways that destroy the very convention of meaning. One cannot mean or say anything [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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