Resisting the Norm: Ironic Images of Marx and Confucius

Abstract

Chinese political culture while Confucius is on the other.1 Or, more to the point, the Strait of Taiwan has certainly been one massive dividing line between Marx and Confucius, especially during the Cultural Revolution period. Yet in an international age when the power of such political ideologies is increasingly called into question (and the regional economies are increasingly intertwined), what about the analytic ideology of binaries? Now that Berliners have brought down their wall between East and West, it is important to consider the discursive walls which frame Sinology. Yet if we are not to heed the Aristotelian urge to rely on the familiar categories of social science, what else is there? Flatly stated, my argument is that irony provides a different sort of analytical and political strategy which better addresses contemporary social situations-as well as obliquely shedding light on the past. Irony can accomplish this by working to explode the ideology of the unity of complete answers and ultimate liberation with an ironic politics of possibility. This politics of irony will be demonstrated through an examination of how Confucius and Marx have been written and rewritten into Chinese