In Praise Of [Rortian] Irony

From Eduardo Mendieta's "Introduction" to Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself:

Irony reflects the power that we all have to reinscribe and redescribe. In this way, ironism is active, activist, critical, forward-looking. It is the power of irony that turns our confessed ethnocentrism into the imperative to create ever more critical pictures of what we have turned into and what we have failed to become. Irony, which is often seen as a form of cruelty, disdain, and derogation, is really linked to solidarity. Irony liberates us to a greater humanity. Irony grants us the power to abandon narrow, cruel, exclusivist, versions of our old and inherited "we." It grants us the power to create a larger "we," whose outer perimeter is drawn and redrawn from the perspective of marginalized people, from the perspective of those we have been socialized to think of as "they" rather than "us."

~p. xxii.