Practical irony: Reflections on a theme in the work of Jonathan Lear

Abstract

In his pioneering work, A Case for Irony (2011) Johnathan Lear has advanced a powerful and novel case in support of Søren Kierkegaard's striking thesis that "no genuinely human life is possible without irony." Lear can be credited for attempting to show not only that irony can play a positive role in living a genuinely human life, but that the role played by irony is genuinely distinctive. However, in this paper, I argue that Lear's use of psychoanalytic theory in making his case for irony is problematic; and I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's own writings contain resources to provide a stronger defense of the stated thesis. In this way, I aim to provide a critical defense of Lear's case for irony by arguing for a return to Kierkegaard in place of psychoanalysis. On my Kierkegaardinspired account, the experience of irony erupts as a disciplinary force in cases where an individual's concrete, practical deliberation has been substituted or "swallowed up" by disinterested theoretical contemplation, which has come to function as an uncanny simulacrum of practical deliberation. Here, the experience of irony potentiates a change in thinking. | INTRODUCTIONI am inclined to agree with Alasdair MacIntyre's assessment that: Jonathan Lear has put us all in his debt once again. Irony had for some time been a subject left to literary critics and to scholars of linguistics. But what they have had to say, although often instructive, has thrown insufficient light on the part that irony might or should play in our lives. Lear, by taking up where Kierkegaard left off, has reopened some old questions and opened up some new ones, in both cases with insight and elegance. (Lear & MacIntyre, 2012)