Nietzsche warns that habituation to irony, like habituation to sarcasm, can spoil the character and turn one into a snapping dog 'which has learned how to laugh, but forgotten how to bite'.
No one wants that to happen. So we must therefore exercise caution and be alert to the dangers of cynicism. But I'm certainly not prepared to abandon irony, as many advocate, in the name of a new sincerity. For irony remains not only an important means of gaining critical distance from the object of analysis, but is also, as Barthes writes, 'the question which language puts to language' and that expands the latter by playing with its forms.
In other words, irony need not make one smug and superior and it need not be the narcissistic product of a thought which has collapsed inwardly and become fatally self-enclosed. At it's best, irony can make happy and set free. And it can help us recover something mistakenly believed to be its very antithesis: passion. For in becoming playful, we find once more the lost intensity of childhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment