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The author of this article analyzes the field of images of irony, starting from some Douglas C. Muecke’s works and some other personal analyses developed in «Poétique de l’ironie». He questions himself about the tension that exists between a possible archetypal image of irony, which would provide a vertical relationship of power, and its most recent images, which would highlight the fundamental ambiguity of the phenomenon.
Between rhetoric and hermeneutics, between violence and conciliation, the outline of an arabesque of irony is defined, which allows us to organize the field of study around the notion of symmetry. Resuming important commentaries made by Sören Kierkegaard and Connop Thirlwell, the analysis focuses upon a certain number of concrete images -engravings, drawings, photographs...- that have been suggested throughout the time so as to explain the nature and the functioning of irony. At the same time, the author uses the opportunity to examine, within the specific context of irony, the notions of purpose and sense.
