the Odalisque myths: irony as ingredient of the temptation

Marathe's most direct diagnosis in the whole Marathe-Steeply serial, and it lands on the register itself. Steeply reflexively ironizes — "haven't we come a long way" — treating irony as a stance that keeps the fatal temptation at arm's length, the sophisticate's immunity. Marathe turns the reflex into evidence: the irony and the self-contempt are not defenses against the lethal pleasure, they are ingredients of it. The disease the Entertainment exploits is precisely a culture that despises its own selves, and the ironic reflex — which is contempt for the earnest, contempt finally for the self that might earnestly want something — is that self-loathing in its everyday form. Irony as symptom, not armor: the thing you thought was protecting you is the vulnerability.