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• Synopsis
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Book synopsis

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.

Book details

• Full title: Comic Self
• Subtitle: Toward Dispossession
• Author: Timothy C. Campbell, Grant Farred
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160
• EAN: 9781517914929
• ID: 42493533
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Weight: 227 g
• Dimensions: 216 × 140 × 8 mm
• Date of publishing: 18. April 2023

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