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Sort of tangential, but there’s a riff from Zizek somewhere that I like to the effect that moderns always imagine they invented ironic distance & so misread older works as much more straightforward & ingenuous than they really are.
Machiavelli’s Prince is an extreme example. Many 18th c. commenters read it as satire, but today I get the impression it’s often taught without even raising the possibility of an ironic or critical subtext.
(That’s not to say it’s right to read it as a pure spoof either, but my god, there are some winks in there you have to almost willfully refuse to notice.)
