The Comic Self: Toward Dispossession

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A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself

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 comedyengaging 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.

Reviews

"You cant reassure the frightened child. Your letter must add to the childs terror. Welcome to the world of racism in America. Brilliantly original, mixing Heidegger and Chappelle, Grant Farred proves that Baldwins genre has not exhausted its magical potential to provoke and instruct. By a mysterious dialectical legerdemain, he bestows on his son an unlikely endowment: a sort of Afro-optimism, both outraged and salvific."Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary

"Phrased as an epistle to his young son, Grant Farred's An Essay for Ezra grapples with difficult loci of racial violence in U.S. culture and in various philosophical traditions, from the Black exile of Baldwin to Heideggerian questionability of self. He proposes new genealogies and new problems for struggles of becoming and judgment amid the perpetual crisis that is the American racial order."Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine

Author Bio

Timothy Campbell is professor of Italian at Cornell University. He is the author of Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben and Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (both from Minnesota).

Grant Farred is author of several books, including An Essay for Ezra: Racial Terror in America, Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, and Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now (all from Minnesota).