Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony
Friedrich Schlegel and the Myth of Irony
The question of the philosophical significance of irony is paradoxical to the extent that it was first posed in a theoretical manner by Friedrich Schlegel, whose own seriousness as a philosopher will always remain in doubt. This chapter examines that paradox by following the way a seminal study by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, addresses the relation between philosophy and literature within the main texts of German romanticism. Can the “non-serious” dimension of literature be addressed adequately by philosophy without being reduced to a philosophical concept of the serious that it will always also resist? The response involves a consideration of the literary “image” and the way that its appearance (Schein) both invites and interrupts philosophical comprehension. The image as it is deployed in Schlegel's texts enacts a mode of ironic fragmentation that by extension unsettles any philosophical claim to understand the limits of its own discursive practices.
Keywords: Friedrich Schlegel, Myth, Irony, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, German romanticism, Image, Schein, Fragment, Chance, Madness
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