This summer, two major cultural events - the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris and the premiere of Deadpool & Wolverine - gave us a dazzling spectacle saturated with irony. But that's about all they have in common. In their differences, we will discover the significance of the extremely ambiguous nature of contemporary irony.
Ironic distance from the prevailing social order often appears as thinly veiled conformity. According to a critic of Deadpool & Wolverine, the latest installment in the seemingly never-ending cycle of Marvel's superhero blockbusters, the film "can be both disgusting and hilarious... but it's also sloppy, with lots of repetition and cheap scenes, and relies too much on memes and comic book inside jokes .“
A perfect description of how ideology works today. Since no one takes its essential message seriously anymore, the ideology offers self-referential, multiverse jumps and servile comments that break the fourth wall. Thanks to this same approach - irony in the service of the status quo - the public is able to put up with an increasingly crazy and violent world.
However, the director of the opening ceremony of the Olympics, Toma Joly, reminds us that we have a different manner of irony at our disposal. Although he faithfully followed the rules of the Olympic Charter in representing the host city and French culture, he was widely criticized. Excluding Catholics, who misunderstood the portrayal of the Bacchanalian festivities as a mockery of the Last Supper, negative reactions were summed up by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:
"Westerners believe that nation-states no longer exist. They deny the common culture and the public morality based on it. There is no morality, and you could see that if you watched the opening of the Olympic Games yesterday."
That tells us how significant the stakes are. For Orbán, the ceremony marked the spiritual suicide of Europe, while for Joly (and, I hope, many of us) it was a rare manifestation of true European cultural heritage. The world got a chance to taste the land of Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, whose radical doubt was based on a universal - and therefore "multicultural" - perspective. He understood that his own traditions were no better than the supposedly "eccentric" traditions of others:
"... still in high school [I] learned that it is impossible to imagine anything that would be more strange and anything that would be less probable that one of the philosophers had not already said; and since that time, traveling, I have seen that those whose feelings are sharply opposed to ours are not therefore barbarians or savages, but that many use their minds just as much, and even more than us."1
Only by relativizing particularity can we reach an authentic universalist position. In Kantian terms, clinging to our ethnic origin leads us into a private use of the mind, where we are limited by contingent dogmatic assumptions. In his essay "What is Enlightenment," Kant contrasts this immature, private use of the mind with the public, more objective one. The private one reflects and serves only one's own state, religion and institutions, while the public use of the mind requires man to assume a transnational position.
Universal Mind is what we saw at the opening ceremony: a rare glimpse into the emancipatory core of modern Europe. Yes, the scenes were French and Parisian; but the self-referential jumps made it clear that it was not a private use of the mind. Joly masterfully achieved an ironic distance from every "private" institutional framework, including that of the French state.
Conservatives are simply wrong to condemn the ceremony as a display of LGBTQ+ ideology and politically correct uniformity. Of course, there was an implicit critique of conservative nationalism; but in its content and style, the ceremony was even more directed against hard politically correct moralizing - or "awakening". Instead of worrying about diversity and inclusion according to the standard regime of political correctness (which excludes anyone who disagrees with a certain notion of inclusion), the show embraced everyone. The guillotined head of Marie Antoinette singing, opposite the Mona Lisa floating on the Seine and the cheering bacchanalia of half-naked bodies. The workers restoring Notre Dame danced on the job, and instead of the stadium, the show took place all over the city, open to the world.
Such an ironic and obscene spectacle has nothing to do with sterile political correctness devoid of humor. The ceremony not only presented Europe at its best; she reminded the world that only in Europe such a ceremony is even possible. It was global, multicultural and everything that goes with that, but the message was sent from the French capital, the best city in the world. It was a message of hope for a world of great diversity, in which there is no place for war and hatred.
Contrast that with the vision offered by Russian right-wing political philosopher Alexander Dugin in a recent conversation with Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar. For Dugin, Europe is now irrelevant, a rotting garden surrounded by a high wall. The only remaining choice is between America's globalist deep state and a peaceful new world order of sovereign states. It would be peaceful, Dugin suggests, because Russia would distribute nuclear weapons to all developing countries, so the principle of assured mutual destruction applies everywhere.
Thus, according to Dugin, in this year's presidential elections in the USA - where the American deep state and Donald Trump are competing - the fate of humanity will be decided. If Trump wins, de-escalation is possible; if the democrats win, Dugin believes, we are headed for a global war and the end of humanity.
Set against what people like Orban and Dugin think, Joli's message is deeply ethical and tells conservative nationalists: Look carefully at the ceremony one more time and be ashamed of who you are.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net, translation: M. Jovanović)
1) "Word about the method of good guidance of one's mind and research of truth in sciences", translation from French by Radmila Šajković; Belgrade, 1952; prim. prev.
Bonus video:
