The Comic Self
Toward Dispossession
Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self proposes an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy to uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible.
Intelligent, persuasive, and compelling, The Comic Self transcends disciplinary boundaries, hovering somewhere between philosophy, theory, and criticism. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred offer a clear notion of the comic self that they then proceed to brilliantly embody in their own writing, ingeniously defining the comic self not in sheer opposition to the tragic self but in a kind of dialectical relation against it.
Dimitris Vardoulakis, author of Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism
Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?
The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy—engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Intelligent, persuasive, and compelling, The Comic Self transcends disciplinary boundaries, hovering somewhere between philosophy, theory, and criticism. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred offer a clear notion of the comic self that they then proceed to brilliantly embody in their own writing, ingeniously defining the comic self not in sheer opposition to the tragic self but in a kind of dialectical relation against it.
Dimitris Vardoulakis, author of Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism
A bracing and beguiling set of reflections, intense and playful, on the possibilities and parameters of the comic self. The authors make a passionate and principled plea for dispossession, with one eye trained on its genealogy and another on its charged present, real and virtual.
Ian G. Balfour, York University
Contents
Preface: The Art of Self-Dispossession
Introduction: The Fallacy of Self-Possession
1. The Sunset of the Self
2. Renunciation and Refusal = Rupture and Rapture
3. Elide Tragedy
4. The Comic Self Is Not Comic
5. “I Think”
6. David Hume: The Master Critic of Identity
7. Temporality contra Cogito Ergo Sum
8. From a Terminal Walk to a Tightrope Walker
9. Don Quijote’s Comic Selves
10. The Unequal
11. Tragic Repetition
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
