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knowable object with specific contexts to be satirised, but affirms
118 SATIRE AND THE LIMITS OF IRONY
subjectivity : a power of creativity or becoming that exceeds any
definition, style or context.
The problem with such a distinction is that it is already ironic; we
have already created an overview of human history and seen satire as a
position within that history. As both de Man and Derrida have tirelessly
argued, any attempt to overcome the subject or reason by situating it
within a historical narrative itself adopts a subjective or rational position
above narrative. For de Man this is because of the inescapable problem
of narration. The very act of speaking about the world creates a position
other than the world, and only irony can reflect on this unthinkable gap.
Beyond the locatedness of satire and the overview of irony, writers like
Derrida and de Man have therefore stressed the necessity and
impossibility of irony. We cannot avoid irony s elevation and
questioning; nor can we achieve a pure separation from context. The
task of a post-ironic ethics cannot be a return to satire, a return to the
specific contexts of history within which we are located. For the very
thought of this located we this humanity that realises itself in various
epochs itself creates some trans-historical or trans-contextual
community (Derrida 1973, 6). Rather, we need to acknowledge both the
violence of the ironic viewpoint that judges contexts, and the violence
that would simply resign itself to a context and refuse all question. As
Derrida has argued, not to ask the question of one s context to refuse
or disavow the possibility of thinking is the worst violence (Derrida
1978, 152).
ETHICS AND POSTMODERN IRONY
In order to think of oneself as contextually located and immanent one
must imagine that one is located in, or immanent to, some field. One can
only assert that one s position is discursively constructed if one has
assumed that discourse is some ultimate determining force; one can
only assert that the world is known through competing perspectives if
one has adopted the overarching notion of perspectives, viewpoints or
ways of seeing as constitutive. In order to have a sense of oneself as
located one needs to imagine a general field within which one is
situated. Not only does one have to imagine some general horizon, such
as history, discourse, culture or contexts, one also has to refuse or set
oneself in opposition to any privileged or meta-contextual position
(Mileur 1998, 200). This is the paradox of postmodern and postcolonial
SATIRE AND THE LIMITS OF IRONY 119
political positions; the attempt to abandon the overarching point of view
of Western metaphysics must itself step outside and delimit Western
metaphysics, must see itself as other than the violence of hierarchies
and transcendental elevations. It must reduce all cultures to relative
terms in an undifferentiated field. Only through imagining an
undifferentiated life that is then structured through imposed relations
can one abandon judgement or the thought of intrinsic difference
(Hallward 2001).
How can one offer a critique of judging reason without adopting a
tone of judgment? How can one present the cruelties of morality
without moralising? How can one criticise the rational point of view
that detaches itself from all contexts, without such a criticism creating
its own elevated context? Only irony can, at one and the same time,
judge the tyranny and moralism of a certain context and display its own
complicity in that tyranny. Canto 5 of Byron s Don Juan presents the
imperialism of the over-arching gaze, and shows how our own reading
of the other s tyranny is itself always at risk of being blind to its own
elevation. One cannot avoid the predicament of irony. The attempt to
think a context itself can only take place if one has a sense, definition or
position in relation to that context.
The contemporary celebration of irony often fails to take account of
this violent paradox at the heart of the relation between speech and
context. McGann is quite right to note that the celebration of an irony that
would affirm the human spirit necessarily precludes consideration of
the force of specific speech acts, and just whose humanity is being
generalised (McGann 1983). But it is also the case that one cannot
return to the locality and immediacy of contexts. By virtue of the fact
that texts are read, and are read as past, we have some sense of a
meaning that is translatable across contexts. We cannot avoid the
horizon of history in general, nor the assumption of a continuity of
sense. To read is to assume that the text means something for us; the
singularity or immediacy of the past is lost the moment it is seen as
past. What we can do, via irony, is work with this inherent political
tension: that any judgement that condemns the violence and closure of a
context must in turn elevate itself above context. Without a notion of the
subject who can think beyond the closure of context there would be no
judgement, but the confident belief that such a subject exists or can be
achieved closes off all possibility of self-judgment.
120 SATIRE AND THE LIMITS OF IRONY
THE IRONIC SUBJECT AND HISTORY
Post-structuralism appears as one possible response to the predicament
of postmodern irony. If postmodern irony affirms the equal validity and
ultimately groundless nature of all discourse, post-structuralism
recognises that one cannot speak from a position of groundlessness.
Even the assertion that all values depend upon context constitutes itself
as a position capable of revealing some trans-contextual truth. Richard
Rorty, the contemporary American liberal pragmatist, has insisted that
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