Sam Curkpatrick, University of Divinity, 2021 Eagleton after Lacan: ironic subjectivity and symbolic slippage Why is irony significant for ethics? This is a sample of writing from my thesis, Saying by unsaying: The redemptive outworking of Terry Eagleton’s irony If, for Eagleton, the human body is cusped between matter and meaning, constraint and possibility, so too is subjective experience. Indeed, he draws on Lacan to show how subjective awareness is generated by a sense of misrecognition in the gap that such differentials entail, in the slippage between self and symbol. To become aware of this is to perceive a certain self- estrangement at the heart of subjectivity that is redolent with irony. Significantly, this approach need not negate human activity and identity irreparably but might form an opening for present renewal and change. Resonating with a Christian awareness of self-compromise, this view suggests that irony can be an impetus for ethical decision, rather than foreclosing on ethical endeavour as inherently compromised. ‘Consciousness,’ Eagleton explains, ‘itself is a structure of misrecognition,’ in the slippage between anticipation and actuality: we are neither who we are nor who we might be. 1 Citing Lacan’s rewriting of Descartes’ famous maxim, ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think,’ Eagleton’s subject is poised before a more authentic awareness of self through an ironic structure that recognises the inherent gaps that define and animate experience. 2 This understanding reveals a close relationship between subjectivity and ethical possibilities. While characteristically modern in his emphasis on self-consciousness, Eagleton’s view seems a contemporary expression of Paul’s sense of self gained by ethical culpability: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Rom. 7:19). Paul’s yearning for the good is continually frustrated by his awareness of the law—in giving definition to righteousness—and the slippage between real circumstances and symbolic ideals. Likewise, for Eagleton, the representations and projects that shape experience are readily shown as insufficient or contradictory, susceptible to ‘ironic self-scuppering.’ 3 Modern psychoanalysis and linguistics have observed that subjectivity is negotiated and animated within a vast network of signs, a view which readily incorporates ironic recognition. In what seems a definition of ironic negation, Eagleton surmises from Lacan, ‘the body 1 Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 10. 2 Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 6. 3 Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 63.