Unfinished Business: The Time and Space of Irony
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2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved. Kierkegaard's provocative treatment of Socrates in The Concept of Irony fails to provide an adequate account of the time and space of irony, i.e., the social, cultural, and political conditions under which Socrates determined that he had no choice but to withdraw from the "given actuality" of Athenian culture. Understandably concerned to isolate the agency that is native to the "ironic subject," and to account thereby for the novel qualification of subjectivity achieved by Socrates, Kierkegaard neglected to explore the possibility (or likelihood) that Socrates' decision to withdraw from his "given actuality" was prompted by the onset of cultural decay.