Abstract
This chapter introduces the two central literary works to be discussed in the book: The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bad Love (2007) by French filmmaker Catherine Breillat. It lays out the reasoning for comparing these two works directly as two tragic love stories of mutual destruction–the later work having been directly influenced by the earlier one. Two additional core concepts in the book are then introduced and theorized: irony, which is conceived as a mental mechanism that brings conceptual tension to the fore, and idiocy, which is understood not in cognitive terms but in terms of interpersonal relations, as a lack of relational consciousness. This leads into a discussion of dialectical thinking as a moral imperative and also suggests that, from such a dialectical point of view, a book ostensibly about idiocy appears to also be about wisdom.
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Notes
- 1.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1989). All references to The Idiot refer to this edition and appear in my own translation.
- 2.
Nina Pelikan-Straus (1998) claims that “Evgeny’s voice articulates a skeptical modern perspective…[a] mirror [that] shows Myshkin a naive but benignly ambitious young man who has read too many books” (122–123). She thus concludes that he “voices a dangerously modern clearance in the novel: a moment when the text’s official myth of Myshkin’s identity collapses and no laughter emerges” (124). Bruce A. French (2011), acknowledging that “Radomskij’s explanation has been called by Tunimanov the profoundest ‘worldly’ interpretation of Myskin and his interactions with other people,” still argues that “Radomskij’s way of looking at the prince’s actions and at this part of the novel is deficient” (51). Robin Feuer Miller has tended largely to agree with Evgeny Pavlovich’s position (1981).
- 3.
Catherine Breillat (2007) 9. All references to the original French edition. English translation by Marie-Claire Merrigan and David Stromberg.
- 4.
Breillat has been considered as an auteur of sex and the body, yet, as Sophie Bélot (2017) suggests in the very final words of her dedicated study: “Breillat’s cinema should be understood as intimate” (144). This last idea of her conclusion can be seen as an opening for the kind of analysis that will be undertaken in this study.
- 5.
Jonathan Lear (2011) 9.
- 6.
Wayne Booth (1974) 273.
- 7.
These distinctions are split into two general approaches–attempts to qualify ‘Socratic irony’ as a complex speech-act in its own right, and attempts to read Socrates’s ironic speech-acts in a broader framework that includes the situational, dramatic, or structural elements of Plato’s dialogues. Gregory Vlastos (1987), who brought the first approach to focus, put forth a relatively straightforward claim: Socratic irony is a “complex irony [in which] what is said both is and isn’t what is meant” (86). A main criticism against the first position is that it fails to account for the dramatic elements of Plato’s works, locating the “source” of irony in Socrates as a character. Paula Gottlieb (1992), in her criticism of Vlastos, notes: “For the purposes of dramatic irony, Plato fully exploits the fact that Socratic irony amuses and pleases those in the know, while deceiving and angering those on the outside” (278). Jill Gordon (1996) strikes a similar note: “Vlastos’ notion of complex irony is not complex enough…because it fails to recognize the dramatic context in which Socratic irony is situated” (131).
- 8.
- 9.
Hyland (1988) 327.
- 10.
One strand of this debate can be traced to Charles L. Griswold (1986), who sets out an approach to differentiating between what Socrates says on the page and what Plato does, including the concept of Platonic irony. This led to a defense in Christopher Rowe (1987) for the possibility of taking Socrates’s words seriously. Dorit Cohn (2001) raised the debate again, suggesting that some of the voices in which Plato’s views may be found could be those that counter the voice of Socrates in the dialogues. And soon afterward, Griswold (2002) reiterated in greater detail his approach to Platonic irony and its relation to Socratic irony.
- 11.
Plato (2008) 216e. Until this point in the Symposium , Socrates has, according to the accepted structure of the drinking party devoted to love, given a speech on love, a topic on which he says he is an expert–but, unlike the other characters, who present their own discourses on love, Socrates ‘reproduces’ a dialogue he held as a younger man with the priestess and wise woman, Diotima. Plato here portrays Socrates narrating a dialogue that took place between a younger self and an older teacher, just as Plato elsewhere portrays him speaking to others.
- 12.
Plato (2000) 337a.
- 13.
Plato (2000) 54n206.
- 14.
Aristotle (2009) 4.7.14.
- 15.
P. W. Gooch (1987) 95.
- 16.
Richard Harvey Brown (1983). In Brown’s words, irony in Plato fuses “the author’s methods with…his critical reflection on his own interests and techniques” in a “dialectical revolving-back-upon-oneself” (546–547). He describes the emergence in the late Renaissance and early Romantic periods of three new understandings of irony–rhetorical irony, irony of action, and irony of events–wherein irony shifts from being understood as dissimulation to serving as a form of indirect communication. See also Paul R. Harrison (1994) 83.
- 17.
Brown (1983) 544.
- 18.
For Hegel (1892–1896), Socratic irony was a “mode of carrying on intercourse between one person and another”–a verbal speech-act that meant to help him derive the opposite of what was said.
- 19.
Friedrich Schlegel (1971) 265.
- 20.
Søren Kierkegaard (1989) 170.
- 21.
Aristotle (2009) 4.7.9.
- 22.
Talisse (2002) 50.
- 23.
Talisse (2002) 52.
- 24.
- 25.
Plato (2000) 294.
- 26.
Plato (2000) 295.
- 27.
Plato (2000) 296.
- 28.
As Matthew Landauer (2014) notes, Plato refers to this kind of idiotes in the Republic when “Socrates voices suspicion that those who desire to rule will invariably do it poorly” (146).
- 29.
Talisse (2002) 52.
- 30.
See especially Miller (1981) 63–65.
- 31.
Frye (1957) 48–49.
- 32.
As Val Vinokur (2008) puts it in his study of The Idiot: “For Dostoevsky…moral teaching comes less from another, from conversation, than somehow because of another…. Myshkin’s love of the beautiful prevents him from the justice…that ethics demands” (20–21).
- 33.
Trudelle Thomas (2005) explains the psychosocial term as “refer[ring] to an awareness of our interdependence with other beings….It suggests a nuanced sensitivity to the complexity and connection of all creatures…[and] was popularized by David Hay in the 1990s through his research into the spirituality of English school children” (375).
- 34.
See László F. Földényi (2004).
- 35.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922): “a proposition is true, if what we assert by means of it is the case; and if by ‘p’ we mean ∼p, and what we mean is the case, then ‘p’ in the new conception is true and not false” (43). In other words, if what we mean is the negation of a proposition, then that negation is the true case.
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Stromberg, D. (2020). Idiocy and Irony. In: IDIOT LOVE and the Elements of Intimacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42695-8_4
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