Homer Beyond Ideology

“A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling,” Nietzsche once wrote, meaning that laughter requires a high degree of intellectual hardness. One could also say that an ideology is an epigram on the death of both feeling and laughter, since ideologies arise when the twisting and turning ambiguities of life become intolerable. In the perspective of ideology, art, which embodies life’s complexity, needs to be policed before it can be experienced. And if it does not reflect current pieties, it must be chastened, even rejected.