What Is Irony?
de Man, Schlegel, and Kierkegaard on Transcendental Buffoonery
Irony is an ancient term. Quintilian defines it as saying one thing and meaning another.
Paul de Man wrote an essay named after Kierkegaard’s essay, “The Concept of Irony.” In it he says, the title is ironic because irony is not a concept, meaning it can’t be defined. Irony is something we arrive at indirectly. In the essay he claims that the great Romantic writer, Schlegel, offers us an experience of irony in his use of the phrase “transcendental buffoonery.”
The phrase “transcendental buffoonery” is funny and maybe ironic because it yokes the high and the low. We don’t typically imagine the transcendent to be jocular. But behind the joke is a deeper insight, an idea that the cosmos is intrinsically funny, that the structure of language and perception are intrinsically formed like a trip-wire over which we can’t but fall. The logos is the word made flesh but it’s also pie in the face.
Georg Lukács writes, “Irony is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God.” That is, irony plays the role in modern life that religion and spirituality used to play. It’s a trace of the ineffable. This diagnosis is both sad and interesting, suggesting that the adaptation of an ironic posture—typically considered defensive—is in fact a posture of devotion in a disenchanted age. It also suggests that the religious seeker may have to travel an ironic path to arrive at faith.
Because irony is ambiguous, we can never settle on whether it leads us to making a mockery of the divine or divinizing the joke. And that’s the joke. Amen.
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