To Corpse a Corpse? Reflections of the Unbearable Blackness of Irony
Jaeden Johnson
The Yearbook of Comparative Literature9/1/2026·DOI·Read paper
Abstract
This essay argues that if, for Paul de Man, irony might be read as a gesture that not only shatters the illusion of representation and resemblance but also paradoxically kills the original by discovering it to have already been dead, then this gesture might be read in turn as having been ironized by what David Marriott comes to call “corpsing.” It would follow that corpsing paradoxically exposes the irony of irony in its blackness and the theory of irony–as inherited by de Man–in its racial blindness. While the latter is shown, in the first part of this essay, to turn upon the philosophical inheritance of the idea of freedom and its attendant notions of loss, alienation, and liberation, the former is shown, in the second part, to follow upon the phobic repudiation of what is imagined to be racially enslaving.
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