Om Begrebet Ironi...

(med stadigt Hensyn til Augustine)

The lack of posts here can be explained by the upcoming deadline for evaluation of my first year of doctoral studies. Evaluation in two senses - primarily the department checking in to see whether I've been doing anything of value this year, and derivatively my own self-evaluation: why keep studying Augustine?

Herewith, a preliminary reflection.

I was watching Extras again last night. Many of you are familiar; for those not, it's Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's follow-up to The Office, which studies the lives of 'supporting artists' in film and TV. Much of the humor of the program comes from the guest stars, who play outlandish caricatures of themselves (the best episode, I think, is Sir Ian McKellen, who grandiosely describes the art of acting to Gervais' character in the most obvious and mundane way possible: 'How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play').

This is irony stripped down to its most basic level: to play one's self.

But what the show does more subtly is point out the basic cultural insight of psychoanalysis: we are all doing this, all the time. (Ricky Gervais, no less than McKellen or Bowie or Winslet, is playing a version of himself; further, this version of himself is constantly 'playing' at being himself in social situations). So even if the mockumentarian introduction of ironic distance were erased, and someone just filmed me in straight documentary, without editing (Watch in awe as he puts down a third cappuccino! Observe the rate of his reading comprehension! Tremble at the amount of time between someone else's joke and his witty retort!) it would be no less self-parodic.

So what does this have to do with Augustine? On one register, Augustine seems to have an implicit account of self-parody, of the subject always at one remove from himself. This remove is, in the Confessions, existential - 'I have become a great question to myself' - and, in de trinitate, Trinitarian - the imago dei which is myself is obscured by the persona (both person and mask) that I project.

We see God, he argues in de trinitate, as in a mirror, but dimly - in enigmata. And here, incidentally, enters the other register that makes Augustine attractive to me: he is himself so brilliantly and unknowingly self-parodic. See here, here, here for times that this has struck me this year. And on the note of the enigma, I'll add one more across which I stumbled today - perhaps less funny, but it still struck me as so.

So he's trying to understand Paul's phrase 'through a mirror, in an enigma' - since 'mirror' denotes clarity, and 'enigma' is a Greek word that was apparently a bit esoteric to the Latin ear, but which in any event denotes lack of clarity. He tries to resolve the issue rhetorically - 'enigma' is a subset of the trope known as 'allegory,' but it's the kind of allegory that's not very straightforward. And it's the example of the un-straightforward allegory that he comes up with that I found a little funny: Proverbs 30.15, 'The blood-sucker had three daughters.'

This is what's great about Augustine - he very earnestly believes that there is an allegorical, ontological, moral truth behind the blood-sucker's tripartite offspring. I provisionally think that Augustine's relevance for our time is largely in this implicit doctrine: sincerity is the new irony.