1841
On the Concept of Irony
“An arrow of pain has been lodged in my heart since my earliest childhood.
As long as it remains there I am ironic. If it is drawn out, I will die.” In this
retrospective reflection from 1847, Kierkegaard made irony into a condi-
tion that had been inescapablyhis ownfor as long as he could remember.
But doesn’t irony presuppose a consciousness that a child does not possess,
a mentality that is foreign to the child? Perhaps. A child may be satisfied
with employing a bit of irony, with pretending, with crawling into the
shelter of a lie, with using language in a manner different from what people
think. In this case one says something other than what one means, or one
means something other than what one has said. This is irony. And it is good
to have it at the ready when other people abandon us, which of course they
do. Sooner or later.
From his childhood home, Kierkegaard had learned the forms of pre-
tense. His school had taught him the necessity of distance. The study of the
German romantics, Schlegel in particular, had provided him with insights
into the rather restless intellectual history of irony. He inhaled irony’s ur-
bane ether from Heiberg’s articles. And during the calamitous course of his
engagement he developed all this into a sort of desperate perfection. Thus,
at one point in 1848 he was able to summarize some of his insights in a
journal entry that has a clearly autobiographical character: “A wishing, hop-
ing, searching individual can never be ironical. Irony (as constitutive of an
entire existence) consists of the exact opposite, of situating one’s pain at the
precise point where others situate their desire. The inability to possess one’s
beloved is never irony. But the ability to possess her all too easily, so that
she begs and pleads to become one’s own—andthento be unable to possess
her: That is irony.”
Irony is thus something more and something different than a spirited turn
of phrase for the delight of one’s dinner partner. Irony is (also) an intellectual
distance from others, from the world, and from oneself, a prerequisite for
being able todie away. And as such, irony is an extremely sophisticated but
also a very risky maneuver that can place the ironist in a life-threatening192