Irony, Authority and Interpretation

Philosophical hermeneutics and theories of interpretation have often struggled to account consistently for ironic ambiguity in a text or an event. As a trope which is both dependent upon and undermines the notion of ‘authority’, it seems that we are forced into a choice of either presenting a ‘serious’ account of irony, whereby the possibilities of ironic meaning are restricted by the accountable figure of an author, or else resign ourselves to the free play of ambiguity, whereby any statement can be ‘ironic’. The former risks over- determining the limit of ironic possibility, and losing the sense of ambiguity which gives rise to irony in the first place; the latter, conversely, risks losing any sense of ‘seriousness’ to the hermeneutic. In both, the significance of ambiguity can be lost.This paper explores the significance of ironic ambiguity to methods of interpretation, and in particular focuses on the reliance on ‘intentionalism’ as a means to rendering irony accountable to ‘serious’ hermeneutics. It argues that the problem which ironic ambiguity poses to hermeneutics is situated on a constructive tension between the challenge to authority in the identifying irony and the investment in a pre-given authority, or authorities, which enables such identification. The paper argues that the problem with applying the traditional author/critic dispute to the concept of irony is that the notions of authorial intention and critical reception are often presumed to be stable entities upon which the ambiguity of irony is shaped. The paper suggests that, on the contrary, attempts to reconstruct hermeneutically the value of irony involves drawing on two distinct notions of ‘intention’: one as a figurative ‘frame’ of meaning which is exterior to the text or event itself, the other as an interior ‘unity’ of the text or event. By extricating these two forms of intention, the paper aims to show that the traditional recourse to intention in the interpretation of irony is neither as straightforward nor stable as is often presumed.