Contents -- Introduction -- Part One: Rhetorologies -- 1 Successful Reconciliation -- 2 A Desire for Art -- 2.1 Buffo -- 2.2 Parekbasis -- 3 Mad Consciousness -- Part Two: Ethica -- 1 The Irony of Evil -- 1.1 Evil subjectivity (Hegel) -- 1.2 The religious inversion of irony (Kierkegaard) -- 2 Must We Aestheticize? -- 2.1 "Aestheticization" as a self-fulfilling prophecy -- 2.2 Romantic avant-garde -- 2.3 Expanding the zone of aestheticization -- 3 Masking Irony -- 3.1 An art of life -- 3.2 Aesthete, flaneur, dandy (Baudelaire) -- 3.3 The economy of dandyism -- 4 The Melancholic Subject -- 4.1 On (Romantic) melancholia, gloom and despair -- 4.2 Theories of mood -- 4.3 Greek reciprocity -- 4.4 Psychoanalysis: Lacan and Freud -- 4.5 The emergence of the self from the spirit of irony -- 5 The Joy of Dissimulation -- 5.1 Confusion, deception, hypocrisy: Of courtiers and libertines -- 5.2 Seducer or seduction (Les liaisons dangereuses) -- 5.3 From dissimulatio to simulation (Baudrillard) -- Part Three: Novel - Modernity - Irony -- 1 The Philosophy of History and the Poetics of Genre -- 1.1 Georg Lukács -- 1.2 Indirect-mimetic narration -- 2 The Language of the Novel -- 2.1 The traditional narrator -- 2.2 Reality and illusion -- 2.2.1 Misjudging reality -- 2.2.2 Literary irony as digressive refraction -- 2.3 The three structural ironies of the novel -- 2.3.1 Irony between the author-character and the reader -- 2.3.2 Ironic relationships between narrator and hero -- 2.3.3 Contextual irony -- 3 From Micro-irony (Quotation) to Macro-irony (Genre) -- 3.1 The ironic destruction of quotations -- 3.1.1 Proust: Quotation as constitutive of plot -- 3.1.2 Musil: Quotation constitutive of personalities -- 3.1.3 Joyce: Quotation as constitution of meaning -- 3.2 Pastiche -- 3.3 Parody.

4 Novels of (De)formation and Ironic Autobiographies -- 4.1 Educational decadence -- 4.2 From hero to subject -- 4.3 Romantic parodies of education -- 4.4 Ironic autobiographies -- 4.4.1 Thomas Bernhard's aesthetics of language -- 4.4.2 Long live death - Life and the art of the novel -- Part Four: Ironic Politics -- 1 The Struggle with Irony -- 1.1 Post-Marxism -- 1.2 The systems-theoretical irony of the state -- 1.3 Pseudopolitical totalization: Carl Schmitt -- 2 Thesis and Antithesis -- 2.1 Thesis: On irony's structural political subversiveness (Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Butler) -- 2.2 Antithesis: On Irony's structural elitism (Eichendorff, Mann, Rorty) -- 3 The Irony of the Law (Kafka and Deleuze) -- Bibliography -- Index.