| Title | Irony, Philosophy, and Revolution |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | In the Beginning Was the Concept (Socrates and Derrida) |
| Contributor | Paul Allen Miller (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.53288/0446.1.03 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-before-and-the-after-critical-asynchrony-now/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Paul Allen Miller |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2025-01-29 |
| Long abstract | If we “do justice” to Socrates—not as the Athenian people did, which Hegel considered just and necessary—but if we let him roam free, if we set no limit to the testing he does of us and our fellow citizens, then the Socratic impulse is both profoundly ironic and ultimately revolutionary: for this moment of irony is that in which new thought and new concepts can emerge, and this moment is a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of fundamental social change. To make this case for the revolutionary potential of irony and the movement of the concept, I enlist the help of Jacques Derrida. In particular, I will make use of his notion of “hauntology” as elaborated in Spectres of Marx and related works from the eighties and nineties. |
| Page range | pp. 31–49 |
| Print length | 19 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina. He is the former editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (1994), Latin Erotic Elegy (2002), Subjecting Verses (2004), Latin Verse Satire (2005), Postmodern Spiritual Practices (2007), Plato’s Apology of Socrates (2010, with Charles Platter), A Tibullus Reader (2013), Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (2015), Horace (2019), and Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth (2021). He has edited fifteen volumes of essays on literary theory, gender studies, and topics in classics as well as published more than 90 articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature, theory, and philosophy. He is currently at work on Truth and Enjoyment: Cicero Beyond the Pleasure Principle.