The following paper discovers Schlegel’s political philosophy derived from his concept of irony as the crucial segment of romantic ontological perception of the world. Romantic irony manifests particularly in the so-called “progressive poetry”, openness, and fragmentarity of romantic essence and language. The leading critique of such concept of irony is Hegel’s. It considers its playful openness and inexhaustibility an evil, arbitrary and isolated subject who undermines any possibility of community, based on universality of law. Nevertheless, Kant and his judgment of beautiful and sublime are of much closer proximity to romantic irony than Hegel’s speculative idealism – the former with Arendt’s further concept of intersubjectivity, essential for ironic playfulness, and the latter with its “revealing” of limits to our knowledge which in turn enables the game of irony. Hence, romantic irony does not disable any formation of political – in its broadest sense – community. An ironic community, that is to say, is founded on pluralism of local narratives and dispersion which bring us to 20th century poststructuralist and postmodernist paradigms. Hegel’s critique is then refuted. Furthermore, it will be argued in this paper that the very same critique represents the ground on which a far-fetched correlation between romanticism and postmodernism plus poststructuralism, respectively, as the horizons of ironic community, is actually based.
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