It seems as though, with each
passing era, a new layer of identity is stripped from the vestments of our personhood and burned in the fire of socialscientific scrutiny. Be it religion, cultural group, or gender, each is reduced to the ashes of phenomenological incommensurability and the individual is robbed of what once robed her in meaning. What results is not the empowerment of the individual over prescriptive categories of identity but rather her inability to relate concordantly to her fellow individuals and the world around her. When ontological categories dissolve into arbitrariness, particular experience alone becomes determinative. Just as experience becomes more particular, it becomes less communicable (language itself is the abstraction and universalization of a particular, so as to make the thought of one person comprehensible to another). When phenomenology, the raw experience of a person, is alone operative in shaping that individual, then person A cannot relate to person B any more than A and B share the same experience. The individual can only achieve meaning in such circumstances by self-assertion in opposition to others, resulting in the incessant and irresolvable positing of difference. This is the violence at the foundation
of post-modernity. Contemporary irony becomes essential to our self-determination, rather than methodological. Whereas ironic distance could once resolve in a new understanding of one’s relationship to the world, it now serves only to renew itself in an “infinite jest.”1
When ontological categories dissolve into arbitrariness, particular experience alone becomes determinative.
The ontological violence that pervades the contemporary West is the alienation of the individual from her world and fellow man. This alienation maintains itself through the rejection of meaning. David Foster Wallace effectively characterizes the popular manifestation of such an attitude in his essay on television and U.S. fiction. The ironically negative relationship towards the world rejects any attempt to pin objective meaning onto self-expression as banal or outmoded.2 Within the framework of ontological violence, the world must exist
6 | Jest up to a Point: Seeking a Constructive Irony
essentially in discord rather than peace, and so the individual’s relationship to any other subjective entity must be negative. As a result, the positing of truth that transcends a single subjectivity is fiercely rebutted, even derided. Appearance and being are one and the same, because to be otherwise would imply a truth deeper than experience. This is the absolute coincidence of phenomenon and being that underlies our world. Irony in its ancient formulation serves well to contrast its present usage. Socrates developed this irony, employing it to reverse the orientation of truth from the exterior world to the interior person. His irony, I argue, found its consummation in the person of Christ, who rejects the ontology of violence and creates an absolutely positive relation of the individual to the world. Socrates did not only introduce irony on a world historical scale, but devoted his entire existence thereto. The kernel of his character can be summarized in his realization “that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know.”3 This fact, reasons Socrates, is what makes him the wisest of all men. The fact that his wisdom consists in a negative orientation towards all other wisdom describes his irony. A more detailed description of Socratic irony as it manifested itself throughout the Platonic dialogues
