SubStance

Moral action, in fact, is what has entered into the Real. It introduces something new into the Real, creating a wake that sanctions the point of our presence.

(Lacan 1986: 30)¹

It seems to me that the analysis of governmentality—that is to say: the analysis of power as an ensemble of reversible relations—must refer itself to an ethic of the subject defined by the relation of the self to itself. This means very simply that, in the type of analysis that I have tried to propose to you for a certain time, that relations of power—governmentality, government of the self and others, relations of the self to itself—all this constitutes a chain, a weave, and it is there, around these notions that one ought to be able, I think, to articulate the question of politics and the question of ethics.

(Foucault 2001: 241–42)

If we posit ethics as the systematic reflection of the self on its relation to itself, and, in the manner of both Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, see the goal of that reflection as the creation of new forms of selfhood,² then irony and ironic texts will play a fundamental role in any genuinely ethical work. For irony and the ironist seek the folding back of the fabric of language and thought against itself, enabling the creation of radically new forms of meaning and self-understanding. The ironic text, as such, demands a rethinking of the subject’s relation to power, pleasure, and the institutions that seek to regulate and produce them.

The stakes of this encounter and our willingness to encounter the otherness at the heart of language and thus of ourselves, is of central importance to the most basic ethical and political concerns (Gros 524–25; Nehamas 168–69; Sawicki 294). In what follows, I will offer a definition of irony that demonstrates its centrality to the emergence of the critical in thought, and to what we would term the literary. Irony, as thus defined, is a central feature of certain forms of textual production. Those forms, I contend, have a fundamental ethical importance, not because they impart certain lessons, nor because they reveal the truth, but because they give us the opportunity to think differently, to move beyond the given codifications of good and evil, right and wrong. Without this possibility, ethics can never be truly creative, can never be more than a post hoc codification of a set of ideological givens.

From this perspective, what the truly ethical must be, then, is not a set of rules or codes, but in Foucault’s terms a “thought from the outside,” the ability to reflect back upon the very fabric of our language and our [End Page 51] selves, to make them anew. The concept of “thought from the outside” or “la pensée du dehors” was first formulated by Foucault in 1966 in an article by the same name for a special issue of the journal Critique devoted to Maurice Blanchot. It was later reissued as a book (1986). La pensée du dehors not only provides a close reading of Blanchot’s fiction and criticism; it also offers its own definition of the literary field as that which escapes the limits of the dominant mode of representation in a given culture.³ For the early Foucault, literature is not the depiction of a pre-existing reality, nor the revelation of an already constituted consciousness, but the construction of a network of surfaces, of exteriorities, that concretize the void--the negative space that constitutes the possibility of the enunciation of enunciation. In the literary, language is marshaled in such a way as to reveal, through the density of its surfaces, the conditions of possibility of the speaking subject and hence an outside of representation that is prior to the subject. “The speech of speech leads us through literature . . . to that outside where the subject who speaks disappears” (1986: 13–14).

For Foucault, the literary permits fundamentally new forms of self-construction because it produces access to a world beyond that from which the subject speaks. The “I” of the “I...