Reading Irony through Affect: The Non-Sovereign Ironic Subject in C.P. Cavafy’s Diary

This essay probes the intersection of irony and affect. Contrary to approaches to irony as an intentional strategy and to the ironist as a detached sovereign subject, this essay foregrounds a kind of irony that issues from a vulnerable subject and from transmissions of affect that exceed the speaker’s intention. This irony unravels through a close reading of the diary that the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) – a master of irony - kept from his first trip to Athens in 1901. Revising previous approaches to Cavafy’s irony, the essay reads his diary as an ironic text that yields a non-sovereign ironic subject. While the diary consists of dry, factual information and commonplace descriptions, blocking access to the author’s personal experience, its language is haunted by embodied forms of knowledge that draw attention to text’s other: the poet’s body. Irony emerges when the detached mode of writing is disrupted by manifestations of bodily demands and affective forms of knowledge that thwart the writing subject’s desire for control. Proposing the figure of the reluctant ironist, the essay shows how irony springs from repressed physiological forms of knowledge that disrupt a text’s regulatory mechanisms and the speaker’s integrated self.