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of language as language creates us as subjects who supposedly, but not
actually, exist before that language. Both de Man and Butler can be
located within the tradition of irony: there can be no appeal to the world
or body as such, in all its immediacy. The minute we speak or act with
others we are already committed to a system or language whose origin
we neither constitute nor control. And language must then have the
function of a law: of a system that enables us to speak and act, but also
precludes us from speaking or acting from some point beyond the
system. We cannot elevate ourselves above this power of language; all
SATIRE AND THE LIMITS OF IRONY 127
we can do is destabilise the system from within by presenting it as
system: as language.
Irony, even early Socratic irony, recognised that language has a force
or power that limits what we can and cannot say. Socrates challenges
the sophists who believe that rhetoric and concepts can simply be used
and manipulated according to our individual wills. Concepts have a
meaning, which lies above and beyond any particular speech act. The
Romantics insisted that this Idea or sense, which Socrates constantly
used to challenge the sophist s easy definitions, could never be
presented. The Good, the Law, the Beautiful and the Soul are not
objects that could be correctly labelled within language. It is because
language is limited and always particular that we must imagine, but not
articulate, that which precedes all limitation. For de Man, it is only after
structuralism or the emphasis on the system of language, that we can see
that what supposedly lies above and beyond language the absolute is
actually an illusion created through language. For Butler, this is not just
an illusion in literature; it has political consequences. The idea of a self
before social performance has enslaved us both to notions of the
essentially feminine, and allowed us to dismiss certain sexual identities
as unnatural. By performing or drawing attention to the structure of
gender as performance we will be liberated from a dogmatic politics or
a politics that claims to know the real authoritatively. We cannot escape
the systems of identity, or the illusion that there is a subject who speaks.
But we can perform, repeat or parody all those gestures that create this
subject.
Irony, for writers like Butler and de Man, is not a figure of speech that
 we can choose to use or not use. There is no such thing as faithful and
literal speech, which is at one with its world, and then ironic or
distanced speech, which would speak with a sense of distance, quotation
or otherness. In order to speak at all,  we must adopt a system that is
not uniquely ours. Not only are  we therefore necessarily displaced
from any unique or authentic self, we also only have this  we or  self
through the very speech that appears to be Other. This also means that
there can be no final achievement of irony. We cannot, as Richard Rorty
suggests, adopt our language with a recognition that it is merely a
language. Such a hope would rely on a notion of language as other than
ourselves, as something we might have to use, but which  we would
always recognise as provisional and arbitrary. Any thought of the  we
128 SATIRE AND THE LIMITS OF IRONY
or  self that may or may not be ironic, that would believe or doubt
language, is itself an effect of language.
How, though, did this idea of the signifier or this impersonal notion
of  the system of language emerge? Does it have a history? De Man
insists that it does not. When the structuralists point out that language is
an impersonal system that creates relations, and not just a collection of
labels that  we attach to already differentiated things, they recognise a
necessary and transcendental feature of language. It may be that we can
only understand this structure from some particular point in history or
language, but this does not detract from the necessity of structure as
such. The pre-structuralist idea that language is something  we use is
an illusion, and any attempt to think of a  we or world before structure,
would itself have to use and be located within structure. We could only
think the  before of a structure ironically, as itself an effect or illusion
of structure. The attempt to give a history and origin to the notion of
structure and to the concepts of the signifier and the subject was made
by Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental history of capitalism, Anti-
Oedipus, published in 1972. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Deleuze s
criticism of the subject, the signifier and negativity was also issued in a
critique of irony (Deleuze and Guttari 1983).
7
HUMOUR AND IRONY
Deleuze and Guattari
Against the elevation of the signifier and irony to a universal and
inescapable principle, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have argued
that the logic of the signifier and the idea of a necessarily imposed
structure are strictly modern. Not only can we think of the emergence of
signification, subjectivity and structure, we can also think beyond the
logic of irony. Irony relies on the logic of the signifier: in order for a
sign to mean it must have a lawfulness that transcends any specific
speech act. It is not surprising that Gilles Deleuze s book on sense and
nonsense, The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1990), was preoccupied with
irony. Both in The Logic of Sense and in his writings with Guattari,
Deleuze tried to free sense from the system of language, by arguing that
human signification and the production of a speaking  I are effects of a
 milieu of sense which goes well beyond the system of speech. Before
I utter a proposition, for example, I must have a perception of this world
and a desire to act in this world; there are problems, perceptions, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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