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The first page of the preface of Jonathan Lear's A Case for Irony shakes things up. It offers, in addition to some considerations on the definition of irony—which may seem to threaten a dry, pedantic tone—some far-reaching questions: “What if the OED gives us the history of our routines with the word, but there is also a phenomenon that underlies and disrupts those routines? What if this little disrupter is crucial to the human condition?” (p. ix).
The argument in what follows is for an affirmative answer to that question. This volume is not the beginning of Lear's case for irony. He addressed the issue in similar terms in an earlier book,1 which includes an extended meditation on the work of Loewald. I suspect that the present work also will not be the end of his treatment of irony. Making the case he has in mind is a tall order. He brings to it substantial tools, including readings of Plato, Kierkegaard, and, to a lesser degree, Wittgenstein, as well as a finely honed psychoanalytic sensibility. His case for irony, while clearly not restricted to considerations about clinical psychoanalysis, does have direct relevance to how he understands psychoanalysis, both theoretically and clinically. The present volume, unlike his earlier book on irony, seems not to have been intended primarily for an audience of psychoanalysts, but it does bear directly on many matters that greatly concern and occupy analysts, and on others that perhaps should.
The book is divided into two parts. The first is a pair of lectures delivered at Harvard University, presumably to a predominately academic audience. The second is a series of commentaries on the lectures by three philosophers and one anthropologist-psychoanalyst, each followed