>>11710150
I feel you, but the fact is we're stuck with it. Viewed from a Hegelian perspective, the dialectical progression of Spirit moves forward by means of negation and sublation. Creationism meets evolutionism, and is sublated into evolutionism-as-opposed-to-creationism. The problem with irony is that the ironic contains its own negation. For example, the negation of "this but unironically" is "this but ironically," but the mere fact of specifying "unironically" demonstrates that the ironic significance was present from the beginning. Remember Zizek's favorite story of Niels Bohr, a rational atheist who hung a horseshoe over his door for good luck, and when pressed on the matter replied, "Of course I don't believe in it, but I hear it works even if you don't believe in it." He believes in it but ironically, meaning that the negation of belief (disbelief) is already present in the term initially, and sublates itself into the original term harmlessly. To simplify in terms of thesis—antithesis—synthesis, we have ironic statement—subset of ironic statement—ironic statement. Since the original term already contains its own negation, the dialectical process always terminates in the selfsame term. We conclude that irony is a dialectical annihilator, analogous to multiplication of a real number by zero in a mathematical context. The ironic can neither be overcome, nor countermanded, nor escaped via dialectical means. To borrow a term from retarded futurists, it's dialectical "gray goo." It swallows everything while being invincible itself. The Hegelian thesis is that History proceeds dialectically. If true, we'll never escape this, and the ghost of DFW will never rest. If History proceeds by means other than rational, we may yet have a chance. I consider Kierkegaard to be the most important thinker along these lines, as the anti-Hegelian anti-rational thinker par excellence.