This paper examines the ironic structures of Kostas Karyotakis’s poetry, using Kierkegaard’s concept of irony as a theoretical reference point, with particular attention to Karyotakis's distinctly modern Greek, bourgeois-inflected “detachment of subjectivity.” The central claim is that, unlike some other pessimistic poets (e.g. Leopardi), Karyotakis’s pessimism does not open onto a realm of transcendental freedom. Instead, it exposes the progressive contraction of the subject’s possibilities. Up…
Read moreThis paper examines the ironic structures of Kostas Karyotakis’s poetry, using Kierkegaard’s concept of irony as a theoretical reference point, with particular attention to Karyotakis's distinctly modern Greek, bourgeois-inflected “detachment of subjectivity.” The central claim is that, unlike some other pessimistic poets (e.g. Leopardi), Karyotakis’s pessimism does not open onto a realm of transcendental freedom. Instead, it exposes the progressive contraction of the subject’s possibilities. Upon analysis, bureaucratic employment, poetic practice, and the middle-class world of interwar Greece all fail to provide a stable ground for existence. The paper therefore explores how irony, initially understood as a form of negative freedom, fails in Karyotakis to become a passage toward transcendental resolution, and instead becomes a poetics of limited possibility. I also consider and analyze, with due caution, the place of death within this theoretical structure, without presupposing that suicide constitutes his final response to nihilism.
