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Full Description
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 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.
Contents
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
