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Ethics and Irony

Paul Allen Miller

University of South Carolina

Moral action, in fact, is what has entered into the Real. It introduces

something new into the Real, creating a wake that sanctions the point of

our presence. (Lacan 1986: 30)1

It seems to me that the analysis of governmentality—that is to say: the

analysis of power as an ensemble of reversible relations—must refer itself

to an ethic of the subject defined by the relation of the self to itself. This

means very simply that, in the type of analysis that I have tried to propose

to you for a certain time, that relations of power—governmentality,

government of the self and others, relations of the self to itself—all this

constitutes a chain, a weave, and it is there, around these notions that one

ought to be able, I think, to articulate the question of politics and the

question of ethics. (Foucault 2001: 241-42)

If we posit ethics as the systematic reflection of the self on its relation to itself,

and, in the manner of both Foucault and Lacan, see the goal of that reflection as the

creation of new forms of selfhood,2 then irony and ironic texts will play a fundamental

role in any genuinely ethical work. For irony and the ironist seek the folding back of the

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fabric of language and thought against itself and thus enable the creation of radically new

forms of meaning and self-understanding. The ironic text, as such, demands a rethinking

of the subject’s relation to power, pleasure, and the institutions that seek to regulate and

produce them.

The stakes of this encounter and our willingness to leave it open, to encounter the

otherness at the heart of language and thus of ourselves, is of central importance to the

most basic ethical and political concerns (Gros 2001: 524-25; Nehamas 1998: 168-69;

Sawicki 1994: 294). In what follows, I will offer a theoretical definition of irony that

demonstrates its centrality to both the emergence of the critical in thought and to what we

would term the literary. Irony, as thus defined, is a central feature of certain forms of

textual production. Those forms I contend have a fundamental ethical importance, not

because they impart certain lessons, nor because they reveal the truth, but because they

give us the opportunity to think differently, to move beyond the given codifications of

good and evil, right and wrong. Without this possibility ethics can never be truly

creative, can never be more than a post hoc codification of a set of ideological givens.

From this perspective, what the truly ethical must be, then, is not a set of rules or

codes, but in Foucault’s terms a “thought from the outside,” the ability to reflect back

upon the very fabric of our language and our selves, to make them anew. The concept of

“thought from the outside” or “la pensée du dehors” was first formulated by Foucault in

1966 in an article by the same name for a special issue of the journal Critique devoted to

Maurice Blanchot. It was later reissued as a book (1986). La pensée du dehors not only

provides a close reading of Blanchot’s fiction and criticism, it also, on that basis, offers

its own definition of the literary field as that which escapes the limits of the dominant

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mode of representation in a given culture.3 For the early Foucault, literature is not the

depiction of a pre-existing reality, nor the revelation of an already constituted

consciousness, but the construction of a network of surfaces, of exteriorities, that

concretize the void, the negative space that constitutes the possibility of the enunciation

of enunciation. In the literary, language is marshaled in such a way as to reveal, through

the density of its surfaces, the conditions of possibility of the speaking subject and hence

an outside of representation that is prior to the subject. “The speech of speech leads us

through literature . . . to that outside where the subject who speaks disappears” (1986: 13-

14).

In short, the literary, on this construction, possesses the possibility of permitting

fundamentally new forms of self-construction because it produces access to a world

beyond that from which the subject speaks. The “I” of the “I think” or the “I speak,”

which is thus posited through this enunciation, exists only within a constituted world of

signs, a socially operative system of representation. The literary event, however, is not a

plumbing of this system, but the constitution through language of a fundamental

otherness:

This thought that holds itself outside of all subjectivity in order to reveal

its limits, as though from the exterior, in order to announce its end, to

make its dispersion glitter, and to recuperate only its unconquerable

absence; this thought that simultaneously holds itself at the threshold of

any positivity, not so much so as to seize its foundation or justification but

to find the space where it deploys itself, the void which serves as its place,

the distance in which it constitutes itself and in which, as soon as one turns

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one’s gaze there, its immediate certitudes are sketched—this thought, in

relation to the positivity of our knowledge constitutes what one could call

in a word “the thought from the outside.” (1986: 16)

More importantly for our purposes though, this thought from the outside, which the early

Foucault conceived as a function of the literary, is precisely what he later seeks in the

turn to ethics as announced in the opening pages of volume 2 of the History of Sexuality:

“the wager was to know in what measure the work of thought on its own history could

free thought from what it thinks silently and permit it to think differently” (1984a: 15).4

The folding back of thought on itself, its ironic doubling, then is the foundational move

that permits access to both the literary and the ethical in Foucauldian thought.

It is much the same for Lacan, though he expresses it in a different idiom. For the

psychoanalyst, the ethical is the pursuit of a “good beyond all recognized goods,” beyond

the pleasure principle. This is the ethics he sketches in his readings of the Antigone and

the Symposium in his seventh and eighth seminars, an ethics which owes at least as much

to Sade as it does to Kant.

It will be worth our time to pause for a moment and examine more precisely how

this philosopheme of “thought from the outside” manifests itself within the specific

structures of Lacanian thought. Such an examination will make clearer the ethical stakes

of our project. As I have demonstrated at greater length elsewhere (Miller 2007: chapters

three and four), the good beyond all recognized goods, which according to Lacan is the

object of Antigone’s desire as well as of the ethics of psychoanalysis, is located in what

he terms the Real. This is the realm beyond the contingent forms of our socially

constituted Symbolic norms and Imaginary projections. Moreover, it is the concept of

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the Real, I would contend, that gives Lacan’s thought its political and ethical edge by

permitting the radical relativization of any given Imaginary or Symbolic ideological

formation. In the process, it opens the possibility of a fundamental rethinking of one’s

relation with one’s self (ethics) and with others (politics). Lacanian ethics, then, far from

being fundamentally opposed to Foucault’s are surprisingly closely aligned with the

latter. In fact, Foucault himself describes philosophy in one of his later courses as that

which inscribes itself in the Real through a fundamental altering of the relation of the self

to the self (Foucault 1983; Miller 2006), a formula with which Lacan would have

undoubtedly been content.

More significantly though, I would contend that the Real is indispensable to any

concept of philosophy or of theory as critique, inasmuch as the Real is that which is

unassimilable to the ideological norms of a given cultural formation.5 The Real marks the

point at which the Symbolic meets its own systemic negation (Copjec 1994: 9, 121), its

principle of finitude or limit. This moment of negation is necessary to any meaningful

concept of ethical self-formation, since it is precisely this moment that figures the

possibility of otherness within the reigning positive system.6 Without the negation of the

Real, without this conception of the beyond of the Symbolic, the norms and systems of

meaning that constitute the latter would absolutize themselves in a way that would allow

no room to conceive of the radically other (Jameson 1981: 90-91; Jameson 1991: 405-06;

Copjec 1994: 17, 23-24). The Real, thus, in Lacan functions on an analogous level for

Lacanian ethics to that of the “thought from the outside” and “thinking differently” in

Foucauldian ethics. The burden of my argument in this essay will be to examine the way

in which irony functions as a mode of possible access to this outside and hence to a good

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beyond all currently recognizable goods.

I. Introduction: Ethics and Nonmeaning

Ironists can maintain a distance that allows them to say, when pressed,

“But that not what I meant, not what I meant at all,” and to get away with

it. I say “get away with it” not because I presume always to know what an

ironist means but precisely because I believe that it is not often clear what

ironists mean, even though we strongly suspect it is not what they say.

Their words do not bind them. (Nehamas 1998: 60)

I want to start out with some observations and definitions. First, irony—or the

creation of doubled, often conflicting, levels of meaning (Plaza 2006: 13)—is a function

in language of the emergence of moments of nonmeaning. In any given moment of

multiplicities of meaning, there is also a necessary moment of difference that cannot be

recuperated within meaning itself. My research and that of others (e.g., Bakhtin,

Foucault, Derrida, Bataille) reveals that those moments of nonmeaning—or what, as we

have seen, Lacan terms the Real—emerge in relation to moments of Symbolic opacity or

aporia, which historically are most commonly associated with the body, sexuality,

gender, and relations of power and domination. On a literary level, this fact can be seen

most often in the genres of satire, the novel, parody, and other forms of wit.

Second, irony is not just a literary device or an ornament of style. As the example

of Socrates demonstrates, the turn toward irony is also the first necessary step in the

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construction of the concept. Irony, in this context, represents a tropic turning from the

immediate that opens an alternative space of eidetic construction. Thus, the use of this

rhetorical trope on the part of Socrates in his conversations with his fellow Athenians is

not merely an exercise in sarcasm, wit, or false modesty, but also what makes possible

the vision of another register of existence, another self, another form of meaning. It is the

linguistic turn that makes possible the doubling of the empirical by the transcendental and

hence the critical.

The study of irony in the construction of the self is thus, I argue, the study of the

attempt to rhetorically master and deploy these linguistic moments of simultaneous

opacity and doubling in order to create both a renewed self-relation as well as discrete

moments of enjoyment. These linguistic moments, however, can never be understood in

themselves, but always in relation to a changing, historically determined field of power

relations, Symbolic norms, and organizations of the body and its sensations.

Yet all this is terribly abstract and it began as something much more concrete: a

question of interpretation. In the remainder of this essay, then, I will do the following.

First, I will take up two examples of irony, from different genres and historical periods. I

will use these examples both to concretize the generalities I just offered and to flesh out

my definition of irony so as to permit us in the second and third movements of this paper

to enter into a more sustained dialogue with a number of contemporary theorists. Thus

we shall begin by reading a series of passages from Ovid’s exilic poetry, which examine

the possibility of speaking the truth to power under conditions of despotism, and continue

with a close reading of texts from Plato’s Socrates, the ur-ironist of the Western

intellectual tradition. In the second movement of this paper, I shall briefly place the

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concept of irony thus defined in dialogue with the pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the

deconstruction of Paul de Man. In the third and final movement, I will further examine

Lacan’s concept of the Real as well as Judith Butler’s concept of performativity to argue

for the political and ethical specificity of this concept of irony. In the process, I shall

advance three major claims: 1. Ironic doubling is made possible and necessary by a

certain disruptive emergence of the Real into the field of Symbolic continuity through a

discrete performative gesture; 2. Ironic doubling is, in fact, the predicate of the critical in

thought and hence of any ethics of self-formation; and 3. The possibility of saying

something that has a purchase on the Real, of making an ethical statement, is predicated

on the possibility of not saying what you mean, of irony.

II. Ovid and Socrates

My work on irony began with a very specific problem. I was completing a book

on the history of Latin erotic elegy (Miller 2004). The final chapter was on Ovid’s exilic

poetry as the sequel to his earlier erotic works such as the Amores and the Ars Amatoria,

the content of which had, at least in part, led to his exile from Rome to the Black Sea

town of Tomis. While there Ovid wrote nine books of poems all seeking his return to the

metropolis. It has been the consensus of scholars of Latin poetry that, while in the

opening books Ovid is confident of his imminent return and adopts a bold, almost defiant

tone, as time goes on and he becomes aware that his stay will not be short his poetry

becomes increasingly wheedling, flattering, and in the end directly sycophantic.

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More recently, however, this view has been called into question. A number of

scholars have come to see ironic undertones in poems that were once thought to represent

the purest flattery. Indeed, at some points, Ovid’s rhetoric is so extreme that it seems

hard to imagine that he can be serious, especially when these poems are read in light of

what clearly seem to be the flip, tongue-in-cheek poems of praise found in the erotic

portions of the corpus or the Metamorphoses. What was most striking, however, as I read

though the exilic poems and the contending positions outlined above, was not that

different critics came to different conclusions, but that they often pointed to the same

passages as evidence of their claims. Indeed, what became apparent was that the two

readings, while superficially opposed to one another, each pointed to the same rhetorical

features. They were, in fact, from a functional point of view all but identical, except that

what one gave as a positive reading the other claimed was negative.

One of the most salient examples of the possibility and indeed necessity of this

duality is Tristia 2.287, a passage that I have discussed on more than one occasion. Here

the poet argues that the Ars Amatoria, the Roman poet’s humorous manual of seduction,

is no more to blame for vice than other Roman institutions that are equally susceptible of

misuse. This includes temples, and he says, “quis locus est templis augustior?” [“What

place is more august than temples”]. The passage is susceptible to three logically—but

not rhetorically—mutually exclusive readings. The first, which I labeled the constative,

reads the statement as being essentially tautological, “what place is more holy than

temples” (Luck 1977: ad loc.). The second reading, which I termed the ironic, sees a pun

on Augustus’ name and notes the wit of associating the princeps (“first citizen”) with

places of possible seduction, particularly in a poem that seeks to defend its author against

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charges of corrupting young women. According to this interpretation, Ovid is no more to

blame for the misuse of the Ars than Augustus is for what might happen is in his

holy/august temples. This reading gains in poignancy when we realize that the temples

the poet names were all built or reconstructed by the princeps and listed in the Res Gestae

as among his foremost accomplishments (Tristia. 2.277-302; Res Gestae 19.1-21.1;

Williams 1994: 201-02). Thus, what could be more like Augustus, augustior, than these

temples? And it is precisely this very play on words that also allows the line to be read as

a form of flattery that need in no way question the legitimacy of the emperor but rather

acknowledges precisely those attributes he claimed for himself. Ovid, according to this

third reading, merely defends the Ars in its own terms and says even the holiest of places,

those most associated with August, are subject to misuse (Evans 1983: 16-17). Both of

these latter readings are defended by scholars.

The key thing to recognize is not that we must choose between them, as the vast

majority of criticism has done (Evans 1983: 10-11), nor even that the choice is

undecidable and hence founded on a deconstructible binary opposition, but that on the

most basic level they are the same. They both depend on the same verbal forms, and they

both function precisely to the extent that they simultaneously presume and exceed the

constative reading by calling attention to their performative natures. The interpretive

choice in Tristia 2.287, then, is not, as Gareth Williams argues, between a naive and a

sophisticated reading (1994: 49), for both the flattering and the ironic reading present the

same level of self-conscious excess in relation to the naive constative understanding of

augustior. Each necessitates the thematizing of a moment of performative self-

consciousness that exceeds the purely constative content of any possible factual

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statement. The ironic statement only exists to the extent that it calls attention to the way it

exceeds its own denotative content and thereby loses its ability to return to a purely

constative status. Flattery only functions to the extent that it calls attention to its own

hyperbolic nature. It is the sly wink that says, “this is a compliment,” that says “I am

exalting you and recognizing the power differential between us.” The court poet is

always already both flatterer and ironist (Videau-Delibes 1991: 17). He cannot praise

without recognizing the subordination that makes that praise possible and necessary, and

in so doing he calls into question the sincerity of that praise. Yet the very recognition of

the poet’s self-conscious subordination to a system of vertical power relations—a

recognition that seems to the contemporary reader to be an ironic undercutting of those

relations—also acknowledges their hegemony (Bartsch 1994: 177; Labate 1987: 99, 104-

05, 110-13; Evans 1983: 29). As Ovid says approvingly when he instructs his wife on

approaching the empress, Livia, to seek a mitigation of his fate, “sentiet illa/ te

maiestatem pertimuisse suam” [“she will feel that you fear her greatness”] (Ex Ponto

3.1.155-56). Is he being ironic, flattering, or simple stating a fact? Clearly, all three.

We shall finish our examination of Ovid by looking at two other passages that

admit of the same basic structure of reading, beginning with Tristia 4.4.13-16:

ipse pater patriae (quid enim est civilius illo?)

sustinet in nostro carmine saepe legi,

nec prohibere potest, quia res est publica Caesar,

et de communi pars quoque nostra bono est.

[The father of our country himself (for what is more public/civil than

that?) allows himself often to appear in our poetry, nor is he able to

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prohibit it, because Caesar is public property and part of our common

wealth.]

The first thing to note is the pun on civilius in the opening line. The play on words here

possesses the same structure as that on augustior. The constative reading is again

tautological: what could be more characteristic of the Roman civitas (“state”) than the

pater patriae (“father of the country)? The ironic reading acknowledges the tautology

and recognizes that the city is now defined as much in terms of Augustus as vice versa.

The flattering reading attributes the virtues of civility and civilization to the princeps

who, as the pater patriae, is both the reflection of the city and the source of its meaning.

The ironic and the flattering readings thus fold into one another so that each only makes

sense in terms of the other. In the case of augustior, however, the arc described by the

analogous folding of the ironic into the flattering reading passed through an implicit

accusation that Augustus’ temples promoted adultery. There is no reading here, though,

that undermines the position of Caesar: for while the ironic reading flirts with the

accusation of despotism, it also acknowledges Augustus as the source from which the

meaning of the civitas derives. This reading is in turn confirmed by the next couplet,

where we find the clause “res est publica Caesar,” which can be translated in three

different fashions: the constative sense, “Caesar is public property”; the ironic sense,

“Caesar is the republic”; and the flattering sense, “Caesar is the public sphere.”

More daring is Ovid’s treatment of Tiberius’ relation to Augustus in Ex Ponto 2.8.

In the course of an address to Augustus’s image, the poet prays to the princeps “perque

tibi similem virtutis imagine natum,/ moribus adgnosci qui tuus esse potest” [“by the son

similar to you in the image of his virtue/ who can be recognized to be yours by his

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character”]. On the constative level, the poet here asserts a similarity between the

character of Tiberius and his adoptive father, Augustus. On the ironic level, Ovid invites

us to think of the more common way a father is recognized in his son: physical

appearance, hence his use of the words similis, imago, and adgnosco. This impression is

redoubled if we recall that Ovid here is contemplating the faces of Augustus, Tiberius,

and Livia as they appear on coins sent to him by Cotta Maximus. The possibilities for

irony are rich. Not only was Tiberius not Augustus’ biological son but Livia was

pregnant with him when Octavian caused her to divorce T. Claudius Nero. Tiberius was

hardly, therefore, a testimony to his mother’s exclusive devotion. A family resemblance

with Augustus would indeed be surprising. Moreover, it should be remembered that

Augustus’ daughter, Julia, the wife of Tiberius through an arranged marriage, had been

exiled for adultery at the time the Ars Amatoria was published and that her daughter, also

named Julia, had been exiled on the same charge when Ovid received his relegation.

Finally, Octavian himself was adopted by Julius Caesar. His legitimacy in the early years

of his reign was based on the acceptance of his claim to being Caesar’s heir. This was

also the foundation on which his claim to being filius divi, “son of the divinized,” rested.

On the one hand, to a modern sensibility this passage from Ex Ponto 2.8, then,

reads like clear irony. “Tiberius may reflect the image of Augustus’s virtue, but certainly

not the image of Augustus himself.” And, on a certain objective level, it is ironic. But,

on the other hand, none of this was news. All of Rome knew these facts. Had Ovid

thought that this poem would expose the emperor or his family, tear the veil off their

pretensions to an undeserved legitimacy, and cause them to lose face in the eyes of the

Roman public, he would have had to have been terribly naïve indeed. We make a

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fundamental mistake when we assume that sincerity was either valued or possible in such

a situation. Instead, the greatest flattery, the most complete subjection to the powers of

the emperor, would come precisely in accepting imperial claims at face value, in spite of

all the evidence to the contrary. Tiberius is the beloved son and heir to the princeps.

Such is the fundamental political logic of absolutism. As Zizek observes, “An ideology

really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as

arguments in its favor” (1989: 49).7 The more flattery signals its acceptance of the power

differentials between the parties involved, and as a consequence the more the

performative moment becomes visibly separate from the constative in the act of

enunciation, the more ironic subversion and flattering acceptance become

indistinguishable.

In the end, the emperor has becomes the source of civic meaning (“quid enim est

civilius illo?”). He is the central point from which the individual can found his difference

only by falling away from this self-reflecting and suffocating plenitude, only through a

loss of communal Symbolic substance. That loss is found precisely in an excess of

signification that highlights the gap between the subject internal to the speech act, the “I”

of the sentence, and the subject of the speech act, the maker of the sentence. This ironic

excess locates the subject in a position exterior to the content of the actual speech act, in a

realm of pure performativity. To the extent that this separate realm becomes an

autonomous cultivated sphere of reflection, then the subject who is imaginatively

invested in that realm dies to the world of public meaning and recognized “facts.” The

construction of this separate world, one beyond the contingencies of the Other, is, as

Foucault well recognized, one of the primary tasks of imperial philosophy and its

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technologies of the self. This new form of subjectivation seeks to create a self that exists

at a remove from the immediate, and which is constructed around the valorization of the

infinite deferral of meaning, a self first glimpsed in the exilic poetry, and whose ethics of

self-construction is predicated on its ironic practice.

What we see, then, on the theoretical level is that the possibility of an ironic

statement is predicated on its being joined with at least one other possible understanding,

and often more than one, of the same statement. On the pragmatic level, the ironic

statement participates in this polysemy not simply through the co-existence of multiple

possible readings—i.e., through the simultaneous existence of a multiplicity of possible

signifieds for any given signifier—but specifically through a moment of performative

self-awareness that signals the self-conscious act of doubling (de Man 1983: 220-23).

Yet that performative moment, as opposed to the constative, ironic, or hyperbolic

statement to which it is joined, itself falls outside the signification of any one of those

statements per se. It is not a property of the sign, defined as a member of a system of

potential meanings (langue) that pre-exist and make possible the speech act. Rather, it is

a property of the enunciation, of the act as performed in a given speech or textual context

(Foucault 1969: 39-40).

In Lacanian terminology, on one level, ironic performativity partakes of the

Imaginary register in so far as it represents a moment of the projected self’s intrusion into

the existing order of Symbolic meanings, but the Imaginary in fact labels not so much the

performative moment itself as the ethos it connotes and the desire that motivates it in a

given context. Rather, on another level, the performative moment signals precisely the

emergence of the Real, of a moment of non-meaning that makes the joining of these two

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or more levels of signification possible. Irony, then, shares the inauthenticity of flattery

to the exact degree that each is dependent on a moment of radical discontinuity in the

Symbolic fabric of their statements that makes possible the shift in levels necessary for a

given statement to mean more than what it says.

Of course, the duality of flattery and irony found in imperial and court contexts

and other cases of manifest and admitted extreme power differentials does not represent

the only situation in which irony occurs. The motivations for seeking to deploy a

moment of nonmeaning to create an alternative register of symbolic existence are

necessarily multiple. Irony in its most common and limited sense is used either to define

and hence enforce an ideological norm or to resist it. This is the irony of Juvenal and

Boileau, but also of Larry Kramer and Borat. Irony, however, also knows quieter forms.

It answers the desire to create a defensive perimeter around the self, a zone of

nonmeaning that allows the creation of forms of interiority discontinuous with the

enfolding social whole. This is the self-irony of the Horace of the Odes, of Mallarmé and

the early Foucault. Finally, irony in its most radical form produces the shattering

enjoyment (jouissance) that comes when the self is split in the sublime encounter with

that Real that is beyond the compromises and calculations of the Symbolic contract,

under which we all live, and hence beyond the pleasure principle (death, the abject, the

grotesque, the limit and its transgression). This is the irony of Antigone, of Sade,

Bataille, and often Lacan himself.

On the conceptual level, the ironic is also the ground of the transcendental, of the

search for a realm of truth that is also defined as a radical break with the unreflective

immediate. Indeed, the most famous ironist in the western tradition is also he who

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represents the founding moment of philosophy as the privileged language of truth or

parrhesia, Socrates. Socratic irony, of course, is a topic of extraordinary subtlety that has

occasioned endless debate. It is a provocation that has called forth numerous attempts to

contain and naturalize it, some arguably deployed by Plato himself (Nehamas 1998: 70-

98): for, what could it possibly mean that the fons et origo of the occident’s deliberate

and methodical pursuit of truth was one who spoke a language that by definition did not

mean what it said. The paradox is encountered again and again throughout the Platonic

corpus. How is the reader, let alone the typical Athenian, supposed to react? What does

this enigmatic character, who seems to know more than we do and yet claims to know

nothing, mean? How do we know he is not laughing at us? Can we meet his challenge

without radically calling ourselves into question or, failing that, simply executing him?

Socrates is the man who is never quite what he seems to be. His very being is

defined as an insistent tropological turning that at once is invoked in the name of certain

ideological norms, their definition and their resistance via redefinition: i.e., justice,

beauty, desire (erôs), and excellence (aretê). At the same time, his mode of life is

defined by a turn away from the immediate, by the creation of a news sense of interiority,

a turn to the care of the self and attention to the soul (psyche) that defines the beginning

of ethical philosophy. Finally, it is through Socrates that we encounter the limitations of

the self and the possibility of its transcendence in the name of that which exceeds it

absolutely and calls it into question radically. As Plato has the drunken Alcibiades frame

the problem of Socrates as ironist at the end of the Symposium, he is the perfect Silenus

figure: grotesque on the outside, but bearing images of the gods, balms, and medicines

within:

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To begin with, he’s crazy about beautiful boys; he constantly follows them

around in a perpetual daze. Also he likes to say he’s ignorant and knows

nothing. Isn’t this just like Silenus? Of course it is! And all this is just on

the surface, like the outside of the statues of Silenus. I wonder, my fellow

drinkers, if you have any idea what a sober and temperate man he proves

to be once you look inside. Believe me, it couldn’t matter less to him

whether a person is beautiful, or rich, or famous in any other way that

most people admire. He considers all these possessions beneath contempt,

and that’s exactly how he considers all of us as well. In public, I tell you,

his whole life is one big game—a game of irony (eirôneuomenos).

(216d2-e6; Nehamas and Woodruff 1997: 498-99)

Bracketing for the moment, the additional irony of this being spoken by a drunken man

who was once a beautiful boy pursued by Socrates, but whose sexual advances had been

spurned by the very same man, or that this entire speech comes as a comic coda to

Socrates’ own recounting of Diotima’s speech on the ennobling power of love,

nonetheless simply on its own terms, we see Socrates portrayed in the speech as a

deceiver. But the nature of his deception in large part stems from his refusal to judge by

appearances, as “most people” do. In seeking a truth that does not immediately present

itself—what we think is beautiful, good, or noble may be precisely their opposites—he

himself deceives us, or rather he presents to us an appearance that does not mean what it

seems to mean, but turns towards other levels of signification that allow us to reinterpret

the first level as something very different. His deception is then predicated precisely on

his pursuit of an uncommon truth, on his desire for wisdom. But that alternative level of

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signification never completely subsumes the first, never leaves it without remainder.

Indeed, the tropological turning only exists to the extent that the initial level of

signification both continues to function in the discourse—Socrates does love beautiful

boys—and is ultimately incommensurable with its turn toward the transcendental. At the

same time, that initial constative observation—Socrates loves beautiful boys—is only

joined to its transcendental troping through the presence of a moment of radical

nonmeaning, of performativity, that in its very insistence insures that neither the first nor

the second level is ever able to be fully consumed and metabolized by the other, that

there is in fact no final synthesis, no Aufhebung that allows the subject of the enunciation

and its multiple levels of signification ever to coincide fully with themselves.

Indeed even when positive doctrine is presented in the middle dialogues,8 as in the

ontology of the forms, the exact nature of those forms is far from a settled question in

either the dialogues themselves or the scholarship. What is their origin? What is the

relationship between the forms? What is their relation to empirical experience? How

does their status as intelligible essences relate to the individual instances that manifest

them and that, according to the method of collection and division as presented in the

Phaedrus and the Philebus, constitute them (Zuckert 1996: 73; Nehamas and Woodruff

1995: xli-xlv; Boussoulas 1952: 8)?

Even the appeal to the ontology of the forms, then, does not provide a uniform

and stable doctrine from which necessary ethical, political, and aesthetic choices can be

unreflectingly deduced. It does not offer an escape from Socratic irony. The forms, as

presented in the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus, in fact, do not

unproblematically dictate the nature of what is. Rather they force the interlocutors in

20

those dialogues to probe the nature of what they understand as the intelligible bases of

knowledge and experience, and challenge them to find an unambiguous warrant for their

lives beyond the limits of existence acknowledged by the dominant discursive regime,

i.e., the Symbolic (Hadot 1995: 103, 120). What are the good, the beautiful, and the just,

not as instantiated in any particular representation, but in themselves? How can we

understand these concepts to be meaningful without reducing them to mere imitations of

the accepted doxa and hence nullifying their critical edge? The doctrine of the forms, as

presented in the dialogues, invariably by means of myth, analogy, and fiction, does not

represent the end of inquiry, but the spur to examine its conditions of possibility. We

never in any dialogue move from the description of a given form per se directly to the

description of the nature of its existential manifestation, i.e., of being qua being, justice

qua justice, or the beautiful qua beautiful in the realm of experience. The forms function

in the dialogues less as a final answer to the question, t€ §stin (“what is x?”), from

which all else can be deduced, than as a turn to philosophy, the logos, and the systematic

questioning of the realm of existence (Gadamer 1991: 82-83; Szlezák 1999: 49).

Platonic metaphysics, then, represent not an authoritarian system à la Popper, but

a thoroughgoing critique of what is (Hadot 1995: 104-05; Foucault 1983). They point far

more to the deficiencies of the hic et nunc than to what must always and everywhere be

the case. The doctrine of the forms articulates with admirable immediacy precisely the

gap between the unreflective world of sensual immediacy and our continuing desire for

transcendental completion beyond the pleasure principle. As such, the commonly made

distinction between the ironic figure of Socrates in the early dialogues and the

mythopoetic philosopher of the great middle dialogues is more apparent than real, at least

21

in terms of the ethical demands placed upon the subject to care for itself and others

(Gadamer 1991: 4-5; Wallace 1991: xv-xvii).

The forms, in fact, articulate the irony of immediate existence, the necessary self-

alienation of the unreflective life, as one pursues a satisfaction that remains forever

elusive. They represent the same insistent demand for an account (logos) of the self and

its claims to knowledge, on the level of Being, as Socrates does in the Apology on the

level of subjective existence. It is the pure desire for this completion that Alcibiades

misrecognizes as the beautiful agalma concealed within Socrates’s Silenic exterior:

making Socrates the possessor of a hidden substance that could then be passed in whole

or in part to Alcibiades himself (Nightingale 1995: 123-27; Vlastos 1991: 36-37).

Socrates is a “shammer,” according to Alicbiades, an ironist in the Greek sense,

because he appears to love beautiful boys, and this is true not only throughout Plato but

in Xenophon as well. Yet, he does not love them as most people do. In fact, he

simultaneously pursues them and seems to hold them, as well as those that love them, in

contempt. As in the case of Ovid examined above, we clearly have in both Alcibiades’

statement about Socrates and in the behavior of Socrates thus described a set of

enunciations that are doubled, that do not directly mean what they say, but are shadowed

by another set of meanings that seem to mean if not the opposite, then at least something

very different from their literal, constative meaning as a set of propositions about the

world.

This is an oddly troubling origin of philosophy, at least in so far as it is defined as

the pursuit of the truth through the logical attempt to ground a particular set of statements

in a set of criteria that would determined those statements’ veracity in a decisive manner.

22

The great analytic reader of Plato, Gregory Vlastos, has proposed to bring order to this

confusion by making a distinction between two kinds of Platonic irony, simple and

complex:

In “simple” irony what is said just isn’t what is meant: taken in its

ordinary commonly understood sense the statement is false. In “complex”

irony what is said both is and isn’t what is meant: its surface content is

meant to be true in one sense, false in another (1991: 31)

Thus when I say to someone I clearly regard as an idiot, “oh, aren’t you smart,” this is

simple irony. But when Socrates says in the Apology that he has been the teacher of no

man, this would be an example of complex irony: for, while on the one hand he has not

been a teacher in the classical sense of someone whose trade is to provide lessons on

discrete topics in return for some form of remuneration, on the other hand it would

clearly be false to say that no one has learned anything from Socrates and therefore that

he has in fact taught no one. Such a distinction is fine as far as it goes and introduces an

admirable Anglo-American rigor into what can at times seem a chaotic discussion.

Nonetheless, what quickly becomes obvious is that Vlastos’s complex irony is

insufficiently complex. In point of fact, it purchases clarity precisely by eliminating the

very irony, the very doubleness, it purports to explain. It assumes that beneath the

surface appearance of an ironic level of meaning performatively joined to a literal

constative meaning and/or a flattering hyperbolic meaning, there lies a statement about

the world. Irony, then, on this reading is not constitutive of Socratic discourse but a

rhetorical embellishment that is to be penetrated and discarded. This is precisely, the

opposite of what I want to argue in both the case of Ovid and Socrates, but not only for

23

them. When Socrates says that because he knows nothing, he is the wisest of men, or that

if in fact he should cease to be the biting fly on the Athenian body politic, then he should

be put to death for impiety, or that the constitution envisioned in the Republic is not

realizable by men, but merely a pattern laid up in heaven, it is not simply that on one

level what he says is false and on another level it is true. As in the case of Alcibiades’

speech, which brings it own set of ironic overdeterminations—his drunkenness, his sense

of being a spurned lover, his comic inversion of Socrates’s narration of Diotima’s

discourse—each one of these statements is not only double in itself, but then redoubled

on the level of the enunciation as a whole. Moreover, when Socrates says he knows

nothing, on the one hand from a certain understanding of knowledge this may very well

be true, but it is also clearly at the same time false and the simultaneous expression of

another kind of knowledge altogether. Yet the second meaning does not simply

supersede the first, indeed both must continue to exist for the statement to do its work. It

is precisely the performative joining of the two seemingly opposite statements that is the

provocation to further thought. It is the moment at which the Symbolic norms of what

constitutes knowledge and wisdom reveal their limits, and hence thought, as opposed to

repetition, begins.

As Alexander Nehamas and others have recognized, this moment of constitutive

nonmeaning that joins together two or more levels of signification and simultaneously

points to the limitations of each and thus opens the possibility for a new delimitation of

the discursive field goes well beyond a straightforward opposition between simple and

complex irony (Nehamas 1998: 46-98). Rather Socratic irony ultimately creates an

opening that makes possible the radical interrogation of true and false, the merely ironic

24

and the simply literal, and hence also serves as their ground and precondition. In

Derridian terms, Socratic irony consists in the reflexive self-conscious deployment of

doubleness against itself (Derrida 1972: 136). Philosophy, then, I would contend, at least

as Plato understood it and as it is still defined by Foucault, i.e., “the critical work that

thought brings against itself . . . the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be

possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known . . . an askesis

an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought” (Foucault 1985: 9)9, is made possible

precisely by the creation of this ironic space. From this perspective, irony and ethics are

indissociable.

II. Formal Conceptions of Irony in Recent Theory

The preceding sketch has been all too brief and examples could be multiplied.

Nor would their addition lead to a simple arithmetic expansion of the field thus delimited.

Indeed, as we have already seen, irony is not only constitutive of philosophy as the

critical activity of thought deployed against itself but also the space in which Ovidian

poetry speaks truth to power. If we were to examine the discourse of camp and

transvestism, we would find a similar doubling, but organized around a different set of

power relations. At the same time, if were to look at satire and invective, we would again

find yet another set of doublings organized around yet another set of questions. What I

would argue, however, is that in each case what the ironic discourse does is create an

opening or clearing in which the subject is able to establish a set of overdetermined

relations through the interposition of a moment of nonmeaning, a moment of discursive

25

violence, that fractures the continuity of the existing symbolic fabric and allows the

creation of new forms of meaning to be grafted onto pre-existing norms, and hence to

create new modes of relation both to self and other.

Such moments of discursive transgression can be deployed in countless ways.

They can be wielded in the form of ridicule as pure, externally directed violence that uses

the force of nonmeaning to police a perceived conformity to a set of norms. The racist,

sexist, or heterosexist double-entendre creates a zone of transgression into which the

marginalized or abject may be segregated from the normative. It marks or delimits the

territory of the acceptable by establishing the border that has been crossed and turns the

violence of the moment of division against that which has now been cast as other. At the

same time, in as much as the moment of difference that irony marks is in itself

nonsignifying, it creates a point of discursive leverage that may be turned back against

the normative in what Foucault had labeled the “rule of double conditioning” (1976: 131-

32). The space of symbolic transgression that irony creates and attempts to master is

essentially labile and is subject to fundamentally opposed appropriations, as we have

already seen in the case of Ovid’s exilic poetry, but as is perhaps most universally

recognized and represented in the form of dramatic irony: the character whose actions

mean one thing to him- or herself but something very different to both the audience and

the story as a whole.

In many ways the concept of irony I am advocating recalls that of both Rorty and

deMan on a formal level. The ironist for Rorty is the speaker or writer whose

enunciations insistently betray a self-consciousness of the contingency of language. In

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty argues that languages—systems of

26

describing and acting upon the world through signs—are fundamentally arbitrary, bearing

no necessary relation to the material or transcendental world. For those familiar with

Saussurean linguistics or the poststructural universe that followed in its wake, this should

come as no surprise. The corollary of this observation is that there is no metalanguage.

There is no master code—science, theology, history, human freedom, semiotics—that is

able to subsume the others. Rather these different languages enable us to do different

things more or less well. Different languages evolve over time as the questions we ask,

the things we talk about, or the things we want to do change. The ironist thus, according

to Rorty, is someone who recognizes the limits of the various language games in which

she participates. As such, she also recognizes that whatever language she adopts as her

final language, as the system of description to which all her statements are ultimately

referred, that language can and ultimately will be replaced by another.

The ironist thus, as Rorty understands her, is constantly engaged in the critique of

her final language not in the name of truth, i.e., of an ultimate and non-contingent final

language, but in the name of finding a system of description that is the least unconscious

of its own contingency, and of its own relation to other competing languages, and so most

the ironist’s own. The ironist, thus, is engaged in the infinite endeavor to redescribe

herself in a language that least betrays her understanding of her own experience and of

that experience’s overdetermined and contingent nature. At the same time, the ironist

recognizes that the goal of conscious self-redescription can only be pursued in

conversation with others and other languages, if one is not to descend into the madness of

a private language that is completely unintelligible to others, if one is to become not the

ironist but the psychotic. The ironist is then, on this reading always in pursuit of a private

27

perfection, whether on the aesthetic level. In the pursuit of private perfection, Rorty

contends, the ironist has no real public or political utility and so irony must be

supplemented by a foundational liberalism that begins with the commitment to do all in

one’s power to avoid acts of cruelty. Irony for Rorty is always strictly negative and has

no role in the creation of social and political ideals. It is ethical only in the narrowest of

senses.

Rorty’s definition of the ironist, in turn, is reminiscent of that offered by Paul de

Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1983). In the last half of this essay, de Man goes

makes the claim that Romantic irony as understood in the period and as elaborated by

thinkers such as Schlegel and Kierkegaard differed from allegory not in terms of its

relation to the “natural” or to the preoccupations of the period, but in terms of its

temporality. Irony from the de Manian perspective is the instantaneous recognition that

any given image or discourse is temporally bound and hence contingent. Moreover, the

awareness of this contingency has no theoretical limit, but each new level of self-

awareness can always be trumped and unmasked by the next that it necessarily gives rise

to. Irony, then, is the endless replacement of one set of images or discourses by another

more self-aware set. As in the case of Rorty, such a process of redescription is in

principle and on its own terms infinite leading, not to a stable extralinguistic truth or a

transcendental ground, but to a relentless pursuit of private perfection and aesthetic self-

awareness.

III. Lacan and Butler

28

While both of these accounts offer support for our basic conception of irony, they

remain oddly disembodied, both in terms of the speaking subject’s enjoyment as well as

the social constitution of the ironic through competing languages and the practices to

which they are tied. As such, they cannot explain the adjoining of the discourse of

flattery with that of irony as discerned in Ovid, but as could be located in court speech

from Nero to the Sun King or from Elizabeth I to Stalin. Their models, while beautifully

able to describe why and how irony functions as the awareness of a given language’s own

historical, disciplinary, or ontological contingency, they cannot describe the utility of that

awareness, its relation to desire and enjoyment, or the historical specificity of its use. De

Man’s Romantic irony in the final analysis differs not at all from irony tout court: the

formal definition makes no allowance for specific modes of deploying the trope. Rorty

shows a greater awareness of historical specificity but no more convincing account of its

causes or significance, except on the most abstract, ontological level: at different times

people find it more useful or interesting talk about the world in different ways. When

one wants to account for the extraordinarily labile nature of ironic discourses in the

specific social and discursive circumstances of fifth century Athenian philosophy, first

century BCE Rome, seventeenth century France, twentieth-century transvestism, or the

post-colonial novel, they lack the ability to engage these contexts in their requisite

specificity.

This is where the concepts of the Real and the performative earn their keep. The

Lacanian Real, as noted at the beginning of our essay, is that which names the limit of a

given formation of the Symbolic and all the discrete symbolic systems that compete

within it for hegemony. Language is an intervention in the Real not its reflection; nor

29

does the efficacy of its intervention necessarily correlate with its capacity to represent the

nature of things. As I have argued elsewhere (2004), following Lacan, language and

other signifying systems construct a coherent network of representations, a reality, that

allows us to function within the world, but does not present the world in its prelinguistic

purity. What exists outside the world of signs, and the categories of understanding they

represent is the literally unspeakable: a realm of mute horror and obscene enjoyment that

lies beyond and yet inscribed within the world of sense. The Real is not the system of

narratives, conceptual structures, and affective investments we make in the world, but

rather those systems’ necessary limitations, the point at which they come up short before

the world (Zizek 1989: 208-09; Jameson 1988: 107). The Real is the experience of

suffering, the negation of our desire as we run up against a realm of necessity for which

we cannot coherently account, but it is also the sublime encounter with that which is

beyond us and yet our ground.10 In Lacan’s seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is

the death Antigone chooses, her no, the good beyond all recognizeable goods. The Real

then is the beyond of the Symbolic, and it is made manifest by the incoherencies and

double binds created within the Symbolic (Zizek 1989: 21; Julien 1990: 173). It is

simultaneously in and beyond the Symbolic, inscribed within it as the Symbolic’s

external limitation.11

Irony, in so far as it turns the fabric of the Symbolic back against itself, creating

new layers of often contradictory or at least opposed meaning, simultaneously reveals the

limitations of a given Symbolic formation and hence its necessary relation to the Real

while at the same time creating new discursive folds, new possibilities of meaning. It

creates enjoyment both through the encounter with and transgression of the very

30

limitations that define the self in a given discursive world, but also through the violence

inherent in deploying those limitations against the other. These possibilities of new

meaning, of new forms of self-creation and new modes of social discipline—which are

hardly opposed but often go hand in hand—are never created out of whole cloth, but

precisely through the strategic superimposition of different languages, different symbolic

formations and different applications of the same language upon one another, thereby

creating new heteroglot formations that are themselves historically limited and

contingent, that are themselves determined by their relation to a changing Real. It is the

Real as the moment of nonmeaning in relation to a given Symbolic formation that both

makes irony possible and grounds its possibilities of doubling, transgression, discipline,

and resistance in discrete and unrepeatable social and historical circumstances.

The Real, however, is but the internal limitation of a given discursive formation,

its own systemic negation. It is not irony per se. Rather as Judith Butler has

demonstrated, if the ironic and parodic turn, the travestying of a given social code, that

reveals the Real through the turning of that code’s own systemic limitations against itself

is to be conceived, it cannot be done so as a set of inert givens but only through a concept

of the performative. It is this performative turn that Butler evokes in her account of

gender norms and the possibility of their transformation through parody and other

practices of doubling that are epitomized in the logic of camp and transvestism. The

pivot executed by Ru Paul or Lady Chablis on the cultural expectations of compulsive

heterosexuality and the normative behaviors associated with it has its effect precisely

because of the way it folds the gendered norms of society back upon themselves and

31

thereby creates a new space for performing sex, gender, and ultimately family and social

relations:

[T]here is a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of parodic practices

in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted

as effects. The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating

gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the

naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central

protagonists: “man” and “woman.” The parodic repetition of gender

exposes as well the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and

inner substance. As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced

performativity, gender is an “act,” as it were, that is open to splittings,

self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the

natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally

phantasmatic status. (1990: 146-47)

The performative ironist of the Real, then, is not just the private or romantic perfectionist

disembedded from his or her own set of discrete historical, political, cultural, and

disciplinary norms, but one who in doubling the semiotic fabric of our social existence

back against itself simultaneously reveals its constitutive limitations and opens up new

discursive combinations, new modes of layering of signification, new internally

dialogized forms of thought, enunciation, and play.

Of course, it might well be objected that Butler herself is deeply skeptical of the

Lacanian concept of the Real. This skepticism is based on her suspicion that it will be

deployed as a substance, a normalizing baseline, or an ultimate reality that, far from

32

foregrounding the performative, will seek to limit and discipline it. “The ‘real’ and ‘the

sexually factic’ are phantasmatic constructions—illusions of substance—that bodies are

compelled to approximate but never can” (Butler 1990: 146). That fear may not in itself

be misplaced. Yet, at least in his later work, for Lacan the Real is never a substance, but

always the Symbolic’s own self-constituting limit. The Real is precisely that which is

revealed only in the ironic shift between Imaginary and Symbolic levels, only in the

performative moment that makes that shift possible. As Zizek observes, then, “the status

of the Real is purely parallatic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density

in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift

from the one to the other” (2006: 27). Hence, when Butler poses the question, “what,

then, enables the exposure of the rifts between the phantasmatic and the real whereby the

real admits itself as phantasmatic,” her answer is the performative (2006: 146). The

Lacanian answer does not disagree, but it goes one step further. What the performative

reveals in this act of “exposure” is not only the phantasmatic nature of our constructions

of the real, but also the Real itself as the rift between the phantasmatic constuctions that

the performative ironist reveals. Moreover, it is this revelation, this moment of ironic

performativity that makes ethics as a form of radical self-formation, as opposed to the

mere adherence to pre-existing codes, norms, and other phantasmatic constructions,

possible. It is this moment of the performative, tropic turn in which the Socratic gadfly

stings us to wakefulness.

IV. Conclusion.

33

The ironist in sum is very precisely one who folds the work of thought, language,

and culture back against itself and thus performs the critical work that Foucault labels as

the essence of philosophy. But that performative fold is not the province of philosophy

as a discipline. Philosophy as a codified set of practices and rules governing the

admissibility or nonadmissablity of certain forms of enunciation has no special purchase.

Rather irony is the gesture of self-conscious reflection that is the co-constitutive moment

of literature and philosophy—of marked modes of textual and linguistic performance. In

its very doubling, it makes possible a form of critical reflection on the present through an

asymptotic approach to the Real, defined as the inherent limitations of a given Symbolic

system. That critical reflection can take a variety of forms both reactionary and

progressive, conservative and liberal. It can be aimed at the creation and stabilization of

normative forms of identity, as is often the case in satire or invective, where irony is

deployed against perceived contradictions, limitations, transgressions of traditional social

roles in the name of a greater purity or rigor. But that very moment of critical reflection

always necessarily creates something new, always necessarily opens new definitional

spaces in its very negation of the actually existent. As Rorty and de Man recognize, the

space of irony’s relativization of the present is by definition formally infinite, even if it is

always also historically specific and determined by unique and unrepeatable relations of

power. The attempt to stabilize and purify what it means to be French, American, a man,

a woman, a Christian, a Jew, can only be done through the ever more critical attempt to

classify and clarify the other of those very categories, i.e., through the exploration of the

contradictions and limitations of those categories themselves.

34

Irony, then, is the moment when the enunciative act causes the preexisting code to

double itself and thereby to create possibilities for new language games, new modes of

description, new forms of existence. It is not in itself a benign gesture. It can often be a

cruel or violent gesture, wielding the power of nonmeaning, the blunt force of non-

receivership, to cast a given set of actions or behaviors as unacceptable, to redescribe

them in terms they would not recognize, and ultimately to yield them up to our own

enjoyment. Yet at the same time, the very process of redescription creates a dialogic

moment, a moment of possible response that allows the object of irony, to push back, to

fold the force of that redescription back against itself in precisely the fashion Foucault

and Butler have described so well, but also as described by Bakhtin (1984: 127, 193-94;

Platter 2007: 6-23) and other theorists of parody’s power to resist monologism.

Irony, then, is the co-constitutive moment of rhetoric, literature, and philosophy

as self-reflective interventions in the world. In its very refusal of the given, it establishes

a moment of epistemological privilege: for it reveals that the possibility of saying

something that has a purchase on the Real is predicated on not saying what you mean or,

more precisely, of always saying more than what you can mean within the confines of a

given language game. Irony reveals the limitation of a given Symbolic language and thus

makes possible the saying of that which exceeds it. In the poet and the Socratic critical

philosopher, we see that the ironic doubling of the literal by the figural comes to

transcend the immediate through the possibility of its transgression and ultimately of its

negation. In a real sense, the very possibility of ethics itself, at least as I would like to

understand it, i.e., as a creative act of self-formation in the Foucauldian and Lacanian

sense, is predicated not on the regulation and disciplining of meaning, not on its enforced

35

conformity to certain canons of scientificity, coherence, or even morality, but on their

deliberate and reflective transgression.

1 All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own.

2 On Foucault, see also (1994: 711-12); Foucault (1984: 35); Nehamas (1998: 168-69).

On Lacan, see also Mellard (2006: 206); Copjec (2002: 44); Zupancic (2003: 179); Lacan

(1986: 362, 368). On both, as well as their relations with Derrida, see Miller (2007).

3 This is Blanchot’s concept of “l’espace littéraire” (1955).

4 On the relation between Foucault’s opening programmatic statements in L’usage des

plaisirs (1984a: 14-15) and his earlier reading of Blanchot, see Deleuze (1988: 87, 96-97,

113-14) and Vizier (1998: 6).

5 For a fuller discussion, see P. A. Miller (2004: 6-16).

6 See Zizek (1993: 23, 109); Jameson (1991: 5-6, 1981: 91, 95, 97-98, 1972: 193-94)

Adorno (1983: 53, 140-43).

7 I can think of no better example of Zizek’s dictum than the current “birther” controversy

over whether President Obama was born in the United States. Every piece of evidence

cited to prove his birth in Hawaii only serves as another exhibit in the case proving the

existence of a conspiracy to hide “the truth.”

8 For a fuller treatment of these topics, see Miller (2007: chp. 4).

9 Original = Foucault 1984: 14-15.

10 See Lacan (1973: 103); Jameson (1981: 102); Ragland-Sullivan (1986: 189); Parkhurst

(1992: 45).

36

11 Lacan developed a theory of “knots” to explain the mutual interdependence and

inseparability of his three primary categories, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.

See Mitchell and Rose’s explanation (Lacan 1982: 171 n.6).

37

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