Mladen Dolar: The end of the age of irony
Organised
by the Department of Art Theory.
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.
