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alive, are also just ways of seeing. It is not simply a question of giving up believing that Propertius was 'really' in love with Cynthia: we have also to recognise that viewing her as an ideologically-loaded trope for the poetic book is just another story. |
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And it is here that Romantic Irony may again come to the rescue. The commonest criticism of that postmodernist anti-foundationalism whose most famous representative is Richard Rorty is that it makes political action impossible: just as the sceptic cannot live her scepticism, so the postmodernist cannot live her postmodernism. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity49 Rorty attempted to answer that criticism by showing how a person who is a thoroughgoing nominalist and historicist can yet act in the world: |
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The fundamental premise of this book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance. |
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The political aspect of irony is taken further by J. E. Seery in his suggestively titled book Political Returns, Irony in Politics and Theory from Plato to the Antinuclear Movement,50 in which he attempts to show how an anti-foundationalist can take part in the anti-nuclear movement through an ironic stance: |
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Just as in reading a poem, one does not have to deny that it is a poem to be moved by it, so in writing about that poem one does not have to believe that one is finding the truth to be able to carry on as a critic. A typical trope of criticism is the unmasking of one's opponents assumptions, the revelation of how their views have been historically determined: but traditional humanist criticism has then liked to try to supplant these temporally |
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49 Rorty (1989), esp. 189. |
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50 Seery (1990). |
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51 Seery (1990) 343. |
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