Mladen Dolar: The end of the age of irony

The end of the age of irony was the tile of an article in the Time Magazine in 2001, immediately after 9/11. The implication was clear: there was an age where the postmodern irony seemed to reign supreme, encapsulating the spirit of an era, but the harsh realities of history have brought this to an end, to be followed by the crash of 2008, the drastic changes of political landscape in 2016, the Covid crisis, two bloody wars, the impending ecological disaster, the fatal rise of new populisms, with no end in sight. The capacity of irony seems to have given way to the raw affects of depression and rage, not as individual afflictions but as forms of socially produced attitudes and affective stances.

The presentation will briefly explore the notion of irony and its mechanisms through some historically privileged moments, taking the cue from the simplest definition of irony proposed by Quintilian, the great theoretician of rhetoric in antiquity: “Contrary of what is said is to be understood.” Philosophy started with the Socratic irony and centrally dealt with irony in some of its key moments, say with Hegel and Kierkegaard. Furthermore, one should consider the role that irony plays in psychoanalysis, with the strange relation that the unconscious entertains with irony. Finally, the object of scrutiny will be the notorious postmodern irony and briefly the question whether AI can figure out irony.

The aim is not to provide an overview of the vast philosophical ramifications of the concept of irony, but to bring this historical and philosophical trajectory to the point of a diagnosis of the present moment and its pressing concerns.

Mladen Dolar is a senior research fellow in the Department for Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School (EGS). His interests traverse the areas of psychoanalysis, dialectical philosophy, and art theory. He is one of the founding members of The Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik.

The lecture will be held in English.