WHY SO SERIOUS?

Abstract

The Western philosophical tradition shows a marked fondness for tragedy. From Plato and Aristotle, through German idealism, to contemporary reflections on the murderous violence of the twentieth century, philosophy has often looked to tragedy for resources to make suffering, grief, and death thinkable. But what if, in showing this preference, philosophical thought has unwittingly and unknowingly aligned itself with a form of thinking that accepts injustice without protest? What if tragedy, and the philosophical thinking that mobilizes it, gives a tacit assent to injustice?

This collection explores possibilities for philosophical thinking that are revealed by deliberately refusing the tragic model of thought, by turning instead to its often-overlooked companion: comedy. Comprising a series of experiments ranging across the philosophical tradition, the essays in this volume propose to break, or at least suspend, the use of tragedy as an index of truth and philosophical worth. In so doing, they explore new conceptions of solidarity, sympathy, critique, and justice.

In conjunction with the extended network of projects and ideas with which they engage, the essays collected here provide ample reason to believe that philosophical thinking, aligned with comedy, is capable of important and original insights, discoveries, and creations. The prejudicial acceptance of tragic seriousness only impoverishes the life of thought; it can be rejuvenated and renewed by laughter and the comic.

Look at the person across from you or mentally designate the one whose sudden absence you would find most enervating, the one that would hollow you out, and realize that only the most negligible spacetime twitch is required to disappear them. Realize as well that the disappearance would be irrevocable and fixed, and if you find these concepts to be uninterestingly commonplace think for a moment if it really had to be this way and whether you haven't actually uncritically internalized something that in truth evinces highest-level cruelty.

Sergio de la Pava, Personae

If comedy was interesting it wouldn't need an introduction.

If comedy was interesting, the fragments of the Presocratics would be anagrams of knock-knock jokes. Socrates would be a wayward tourist, butchering lines supplied by a cheap phrasebook, earnestly trying to get back to his ship before the buffet closes. Plato would have written himself into the Phaedrus. Plato's stories would feature the adventures of a swashbuckling band of orphans, or lightsaber-wielding Vikings, or otters, or ninjas, or otter ninjas, or … well, really anyone other than a cranky old pederast. Aristotle's Metaphysics would open with a Spartan cry of “This! Is! Ontology!” Plotinus' Enneads would have been the first book of a trilogy, the second and third volumes detailing the zany antics of the Two and the Three. The Summa Theologica would be liberally sprinkled with pastry recipes. The univocity/equivocity debate would revolve around optimal Scrabble plays. Descartes's critics would have replied with instructions on how to light his stove. Hobbes' Leviathan would be read as a cry for help. Spinoza would have crafted a death ray. Berkeley’s God would be a hypnotist, suggesting that the good bishop write a book about a hypnotist who suggests that he is God. Hume would have announced his Treatise of Human Nature by shrieking, “A billion pages of personal invective against the reader! All unerringly accurate. Sanity dissolved between the tanned wings of angels!” Kant would have … well, Kant is perhaps the most potent demonstration that comedy is interesting. Hegel's Geist would have a side-kick, scrappy Little Geist, shouting “Anstoss!” at the slightest sign of danger – especially the nefarious machinations of that arch-villain Black Udder – and falling into wells. Hölderlin would have been given a kazoo, not a piano. Schopenhauer's will would have accomplished its desire if it hadn't been for those meddling kids. Nietzsche would have lived. Heidegger would have collapsed on the podium in 1933, cradling a hammer and weeping. Ricoeur would have declared The Three Stooges to be the “masters of suspicion” before taking a pie to the face from a hurt and resentful Marx. Brother, of course. Derrida would have been, indisputably, with completely authentic and exhaustive documentary evidence, a world-famous impostor.

If comedy was interesting there would be some non-Europeans in the preceding paragraph. And some women, too.

If comedy was interesting it would dissemble, hide, erase its own tracks, blend into its surroundings, create a distraction, plant false clues, set up dead drops, communicate in code, assume an air of normalcy, disavow its own existence, feign its own death.

If comedy was interesting it would drop the mic.¹

anecdote synecdoche

(1) The moral of the story?

Who says stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die.

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

The story in question here is that of a certain Remo, also known as X9, a dashing young Italian who proudly declaimed his political allegiance to the Fascists by strutting about World War II Italy dressed all in black – a color that Belbo, the narrator of our story, archly notes matched the color of his teeth. When X9 switches his outfit – adopting the red scarf and beige tunic of the partisans – he promptly disappears – abducted? – before turning up dead, murdered. But by whom? The Fascists? Partisans? Was he a spy? A double-agent? Or a triple-, or more? Belbo’s story, one among many in the perambulating itinerary of Eco's beautifully intricate novel – a novel that is composed almost entirely of stories that reinforce, contradict, and extend each other, forming together a skein stretched delicately over nothing – prompts Casaubon's difficult question that, given the approaching denouement, is crucial to the entire work. A reductio ad fatalitas? Eco's previous novel, The Name of the Rose, prominently featured the fortunes of the ur-text of Western literary theory, Aristotle's Poetics – the director's cut, though, not the theatrical release – but there the Poetics was the McGuffin; in Foucault's Pendulum, on the other hand, Eco creates a text that performatively explores the powers of various kinds of fictions.²

The reluctantly-given moral of Belbo's story is, of course, familiar and dear to both literature and philosophy. In the Phaedo it is Socrates' death that secures – or hopes to – the dramatic play of the other dialogues. Setting aside the mischievously enigmatic last words to Crito – “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius” – Socrates' death sets a seal on the seriousness of his philosophical sojourns.³ The work of philosophy is more important than mere human life. This is a moral on clear display, of course, in the Republic, in which one also finds the well-known prescriptions regarding the exclusion of the wrong sorts of poets, those who may overvalue finite life.⁴ And yet, at the end of the Symposium, the debate as to whether a single poet might be capable of writing great comedies as well as great tragedies is left unsettled, Aristophanes having been able to carry on the debate with Socrates throughout the night.

It's not clear whether Aristotle composed his projected treatment of comedy or, if he did, what sort of influence it enjoyed. There is the mention of such a treatment in the accepted text of the Poetics; there is also a fragmentary line at the end of a manuscript copy of the Poetics that reads: “Regarding lampoons and comedy … ”; apart from the Poetics, there are accounts of an Aristotelian “comedic catharsis” in the work of both Iamblichus and Proclus. Most tantalizingly, there is the Tractatus Coislinianus. The Tractatus Coislinianus was rediscovered in Paris in the nineteenth century, in the midst of a sixth-century abstract of Aristotle's logical works (which, on reflection, makes a lot of sense). On the one hand, the Tractatus Coislinianus, which reads like the abstract of a longer work (again, strong evidence that this text is an authentic work of Aristotle), exhibits structural similarities with the first book of the Poetics and portions of it also harmonize well with other passages from Aristotle's works that deal with comedy. On the other hand, however, the brevity and schematic nature of the Tractatus Coislinianus, its incorporation of several seemingly un-Aristotelian claims and, perhaps most importantly, its particular account of comedic catharsis, all provide ample evidence that it is not an Aristotelian text. The Tractatus Coislinianus has thus given rise to a tremendous number of publications that either argue for the Tractatus Coislinianus as Aristotle's account of comedy, or (re)construct Aristotle's theory from the Tractatus Coislinianus with some help from various other sources. Indeed, it's hard not to see a remarkably tragic form to the history of Aristotle's book on comedy: immediately eliminated, vaguely recounted by several disciples, and now a proliferation of accounts of its resurrection.⁵

It is perhaps in regard to tragedy, in the acceptance of the importance of death for the demonstration of the most vital and serious truths, that the Western philosophical tradition shows itself to be, in Whitehead's apt if pithy phrase, a “series of footnotes to Plato.”⁶ In the Poetics, of course, Aristotle sets out to treat all three kinds of dramatic storytelling: tragedy, comedy, and history. As with Plato, the concern is not simply with the classification and identification of stories but with the particular way in which the performance of these stories can function as a mode of communication that achieves ethical and political ends. Aristotle famously writes that “poetry is more philosophical than history [the dramatization of actual events from the past] because the former speaks of universals while the latter confines itself to particulars” (1451b), thereby securing the value of the death of each one in the experience of tragedy. But this statement applies to comedic as well as tragic poetry, and so presumably also opens the possibility of a comedically cathartic experience of a drama, one that is not forged by the event and spectacle of death. But this poetic alternative, embarrassingly, got lost. No resources – or at least no non-flammable resources – were on hand to resist the injunctions of the Church Fathers, of Augustine and Tertullian, who warned against the dangers of attending any worldly “spectacles” lest the enjoyments there – of death or something less serious – prevent one from enjoying, after a suitably serious death, the eternal drama of the damned: “Have you a mind for blood? You have the blood of Christ!”⁷ The moral of this story: your death will produce the truth of what I say – the essence of Christianity is the spectacle of death. Remarkably, though, even Tertullian can't quite keep a straight face, swiping a choice line from his detractors to grab a cheap laugh: “This is he whom the disciples stole away, that it might be said he had risen – unless it was the gardener who removed him, lest his lettuces should be trampled by the throng of visitors!”⁸

And so the sketch goes on. Having apparently dispensed with the profane entirely only to realize the rather dire consequences for architecture and interior design, the Church Fathers settle in for the long work of developing arguments as to the permissibility of images of holy figures and biblical events (as in the work of John of Damascus and the debates on holy icons), or the definition of beauty, especially as an ideal (an argument that would continue for centuries and consistently work to develop an account of the linkage between beauty and a transcendental Good).⁹ In the Arabic tradition, various commentators and interpreters of Aristotle treat aesthetics as a matter connected with political issues, justifying this approach through appeals to the connection between Aristotle's Poetics and his discussion of imagination (phantasia) in On the Soul.¹⁰ Beyond – or beneath – all of this, however, it was comedic drama that flourished across the fragments of the Roman Empire and the emerging states of Europe as traveling minstrels and bands of entertainers traveled from city to city staging bawdy variety shows. And it was the inter-city and -state communication that these entertainers made use of and generated that would ultimately yield the Renaissance, born more from the laughter of the Decameron than the pious musings of the Summa.

(2) Taceant colloquia. Effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.

Attributed to Giovanni Morgagni

“Let speech cease. Let laughter flee. Here is the place where death gives aid to the living.” Morgagni's epigraph could well stand over the Western philosophical tradition – if it weren't already used as the standard inscription on the wall of morgues. Despite the proliferation of drama – comedy, history, as well as tragedy – in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, it is tragedy that again monopolizes the attention of philosophers and theorists amidst the emergence of modernity. Kant's critical philosophy marks a particularly important milestone in the development of the Western tradition's preoccupation with tragedy. Not only did the critical philosophy seem to masterfully sum up and dispose of the most vexing philosophical questions but it did so in a way that simultaneously provided a ready-made new problem for Kant's immediate successors: how to systematically join the domains of freedom and necessity. This problem was pursued primarily via the Critique of Judgment's rigorous treatment of that chameleon of faculties, the imagination. While Kant presents his analysis of aesthetic judgments as one of the power or faculty of judgment, and so into a third piece of the critical triptych of the higher powers of human thinking, his interpreters hoped to find in the Critique of Judgment a way of recasting the critical philosophy so as to make clear the unity of the mind's various domains.

The connection of such an endeavor with tragedy is not immediately apparent, but can be clearly seen from the Introduction to the anthology Philosophy and Tragedy. There, Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks describe the organizing hypothesis of that collection as follows:

if such a passage to tragedy [the “infatuation” with tragedy that characterizes German aesthetic and philosophical thought at the end of the eighteenth century] was able to take place, then it was only because tragedy was itself envisaged as passage, as a bridge thrown over the abyss opened by the critical philosophy.¹¹

Significantly, Kant himself has virtually nothing to say about tragedy – he mentions it in the Critique of Judgment precisely once, in §52, “On the Combination of the Beautiful Arts in One and the Same Product,” as one type of art in which the sublime can be expressed. He does, though, have quite a bit – relatively speaking – to say about jokes, humor, and the laughable in a long Remark after §53, “Comparison of the Aesthetic Value of the Beautiful Arts with Each Other.” Kant carefully and decidedly puts the laughable (and its rowdy friends) in its place, assigning it to the realm of “gratification” which is essentially different from what pleases “merely in judging.”¹² Tragedy, on the other hand, is a member of that highest of the beautiful arts, poetry, and, even more, is described as verse that combines the presentation of the sublime with a beautiful form. It is thus the attempt to adequately express the unity of the human mind that results in the special status accorded to tragedy, an instance of the highest art that, by “[p]ushing [the order of freedom and the order of necessity] to their ultimate expression [ … ] presents each of these orders in their own demand and according to their own logic.”¹³ Tragedy functions as a kind of “schema” that presents the “figure-less” domain of freedom in a work of art (not nature). The suspicion that tragedy ought perhaps to be accorded a special status, that there is something distinctively and importantly disclosive about the presentation and experience of a certain kind of pain, of grief, loss, that whatever “logic” may constitute the “ultimate expression” of freedom and necessity it is certainly bound tightly to death, all this is given its most succinct formulation by the poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “The tragic [ … ] is the metaphor of an intellectual intuition.”¹⁴

Hölderlin's work on tragedy – especially his translation of and commentary on the plays of Sophocles – is decisive for understanding both the self-conceptualization of the post-Kantians and for more recent philosophical efforts that link up with this tradition. This is already strange. Imagine that you were told that, 200 years from now, the major contours of a number of philosophical debates would be determined by the fragmented, scattered, and rather paltry writings of that weird guy you dimly remember from your freshman year of college. You remember the one: he spent hours strumming a badly-tuned guitar on the steps of the library, humming inscrutable but earnest lyrics that he wrote himself, before he was asked by the administration to “take some time off to rededicate himself to his studies,” and disappeared into the Southwest in his parents' Camry. It's not just that Hölderlin makes for a rather unlikely protagonist in the philosophical saga of post-Kantian philosophy – in fact, what's strange is just how well-suited he seems to be – what is really striking is how the post-Kantian preoccupation with tragedy is ultimately underwritten by such a small and tenuous bit of the master's system. In hewing so closely to Kant's critical system, and to the place that tragedy is accorded there, without questioning the categorizations – often overtly subjective, as when Kant explains the superiority of poetry to rhetorical speeches – tragedy comes to seem naturally suited to figuring the powers of the human mind.

In the wake of Kant it has thus come to seem natural that the very form of the discovery of truth and the development of knowledge should have a distinctively tragic cast: the incessant Anstösse of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, the figuration of the world as the suffering of God in Schelling's philosophy, and, of course, the pain and death that accompany Geist as it works to attain absolute thinking. As David Krell writes in The Tragic Absolute,

[o]n the one hand, for many [German Romantic and Idealist thinkers and writers] Greek tragedy occupies a position of absolute importance, not only for their theories of literature and aesthetics in general, but also for their metaphysics and moral philosophy; on the other hand, the metaphysical or ontotheological absolute itself [ … ] is now seen as subject to a tragic reversal of fortune.¹⁵

Where for Kant tragedy seemed to be no more than a form of art that beautifully depicted the sublime, in his readers it grows and develops until it is the form of the very unity of freedom and necessity sought by Kant's early interpreters. “The last-ditch effort by Hegel [ … ] to elevate comic over tragic poetry, and systematic-categorical philosophy over all poetry and art, was destined to founder.”¹⁶ Or maybe Hegel wasn't the best person to entrust with the task of elevating comedy over tragedy?

In addition to Krell’s work, a concern with the pervasive importance and value of tragedy also informs Dennis Schmidt's On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life which is organized around three “sets of questions” or themes: that tragedy as a model of thinking “is privileged, even mandated, by history itself”;¹⁷ how can the specific experience of suffering be communicated;¹⁸ and why – or how – tragedy can be beautiful.¹⁹ While the last question clearly arises from Kant (although not only from Kant), and the second has an extensive pedigree to a large degree anchored in Aristotle, the first question involves an assessment of thinkers such as Hölderlin for whom the tragic form is not merely a case or example but the model of the truth of history as well as its interpreter, reason. Schmidt isolates in Sophocles the element that is “common to all forms of tragedy”: to deinon, a term that designates the exposure of the individual existent to a world that outstrips both their knowledge and determination not just contingently, in a way that might be overcome by a more authentic existence or determined application of reason, but necessarily. Tragedy is the mode of communication adequate and appropriate to to deinon, to a “knowledge that cannot be grasped, only suffered.”²⁰ The common element of tragedy therefore has the character of a birth, not a death.²¹

(3) One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood.

Albert Camus, The Rebel

From the historical trajectory of the fatefully truncated Poetics of Aristotle, to the determination of tragedy as the key for the idealist reworking of Kant’s critical philosophy, the Western philosophical tradition has long had suffering, grief, and loss as traveling companions. After Kant and the post-Kantians, after Hegel, philosophy's affinity with tragedy continued to develop through the work of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, work that has continued to assure suffering an important role in the achievement, discovery, and disclosure of truth. Especially in the wake of Heidegger, whose philosophical affinity to both Aristotle and Hölderlin is amply documented, the twentieth century has seen the philosophical preoccupation with and privileging of tragedy again rise to prominence, but in new ways. The name of tragedy in contemporary thought is indissociable from that other, almost incomprehensible name: Auschwitz. So shocking is Auschwitz that even as it seems to validate and confirm the indissoluble link between history, truth, and tragedy, its qualitative and quantitative enormity also threaten to unmask this link as an unthought prejudice. In the wake of the global atrocity that is the record of the twentieth century, there is good reason to ask after this privilege accorded to suffering, to death, and to grief.²² Camus's line, quoted above – coming early in a work whose epigraph, taken from Hölderlin, inscribes it within a familiar lineage – could be taken, on the one hand, as posing to philosophical reflection a by-now-familiar task: the comprehension of tragedy. Oedipus, Antigone, the Gulags, the gas chambers, murderous force and the suffering it yields are the ineluctable substance with which philosophical thought must wrestle, emerging from its struggles with a truth that redeems suffering. Or one could disavow his imperative and simply renounce the evidence of history's abattoir. Perhaps there is thought – even truth – that cannot be bent to the yoke of tragedy.

Lacoue-Labarthe's important and influential Heidegger, Art and Politics (La Fiction du politique) offers a useful central place for the discernment of the contours of the contemporary recasting of the problem of philosophy and tragedy. For Lacoue-Labarthe, it is Auschwitz that calls into question the aptness of tragedy for thinking the contemporary situation because, as he says, “the Extermination – is for the West the terrible revelation of its essence.”²³ Key to Lacoue-Labarthe's text is the notion of the tragic caesura that he takes from Hölderlin. According to his analysis of tragedy, which closely tracks that of Hölderlin, there is a moment in the tragic logic of a succession of appearances, of a tragic drama, when these representations are made visible as such by a “counter-rhythmic” intervention that throws the oppositional representations into relief as representations. This is the caesura. In Antigone and Oedipus Rex it is the moment when Tiresias appears and makes clear the conflict that drives the action. In his notes on Oedipus Rex, Hölderlin describes tragedy as a lesson about finitude, one that teaches the separation of the finite and the divine (whose union is hubris), that teaches that “[t]he immediate [ … ] is impossible for both mortals and immortals [ … ] But rigorous mediateness is the law. It is this law which founds and governs tragedy. It may be called the law of finitude.”²⁴ In the caesura, the “empty,” “zero” moment at the heart of tragedy, there is the “catastrophe” of the turning away of the divine, accompanied by the submission of the hero to death, to mortal finitude, in a way that forbids the resumption of the time ruptured by the caesura. Auschwitz, though,

belongs to a sphere beyond tragedy, at once more and less than tragedy: more because the infinite separation is absolutely hyperbolic: less because no (re)presentation of it is possible and Auschwitz is, very precisely [ … ] the useless residue (le déchet) of the Western idea of art, that is to say, of techne.²⁵

Here, tragedy seems to be set aside in favor of a superior form of suffering that thinking must take account of and, significantly, Lacoue-Labarthe at this point turns from tragedy to history, raising “the caesura to the rank of a concept, if not the concept, of historicity,” on the hypothesis that tragedy “held the secret of historicity.”²⁶ The caesura is, then, “that which, within history, interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, or else closes off all possibility of history.”²⁷

But what necessitates the acceptance of this hypothesis? What prevents the deployment of other hypotheses, ones that resist the invitation of the Western philosophical tradition to acknowledge an affinity between aesthetic tragedy and history, thereby also inviting not only a justification of suffering and murder but an aestheticization of it? As a recent example of such a movement of resistance, consider Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, a comedy about the Holocaust that serves as a kind of model for the experiment attempted by this volume. At the heart of the film is an interpretive overlay by which the father recasts the world of the camp into a playing field where they are competing against the other prisoners for a tank. While the specific character of this overlay occupies much of the attention of the viewer, and provides the film with much of its humor, the proliferation of other overlays – notably the one that yields the startling misunderstanding between Benigni's character and his chess-playing acquaintance – shows that this operation, of fictionalizing the world, is the key to the film. At the end of the film, riding on the American tank that he has “won,” the young boy is reunited with his mother and, joyously, affirms to her that “it’s all true!” The ridiculous game whose description he greeted with skepticism – and all that it entails – is true precisely because it overwrote the murderous machinations of the camp and its personnel with a lampoon. What is “understood,” to use Camus's phrase, by the son at the end of the movie is not the motivations and causes of the atrocity to which he was victim but the love of his father for him and his mother, a love that succeeded in carrying him beyond the murderous forces that had trapped and ensnared him. And if the father dies in his efforts, this does not confirm the deeper truth of tragedy but acknowledges that death, and suffering, and grief, just as much as love and joy, have a place in history, and in truth, and in thought. It is not tragedy that is to be rejected, but rather its exclusivity.

If one finds in Lacoue-Labarthe's work the possibility of extending a traditional thought of tragedy, with its attendant conception of history, so that even the most monstrous crimes of the past century can be theoretically accommodated, one can also find several other, disparate, voices agitating for other trajectories of thought. In his Manifesto for Philosophy, Alain Badiou wonders at the shock that Auschwitz delivers to philosophy, throwing into stark relief its long infatuation with tragedy, such that

in face of the proceedings instituted by our epoch against us [philosophers] and upon reading the records of this trial, the major evidence of which is Kolyma and Auschwitz, our philosophers, taking on the burden of the century and, when it comes down to it, all of the centuries since Plato, have decided to plead guilty.²⁸

Could the tragic complicity that compels the plea have the character of a hypothesis, one that could be discarded? Again, in the midst of a lecture course on Aristotle in 1965, Theodor Adorno pauses to consider his remark that one could no longer write poetry after Auschwitz and, after considering the misinterpretations to which this statement has given rise, rephrases it:

It is the question whether one can live after Auschwitz. This question has appeared to me, for example, in the recurring dreams which plague me, in which I have the feeling that I am no longer really alive, but am just the emanation of a wish of some victim of Auschwitz.²⁹

(4) – What did you say to Brown?

– I asked him, What's laughter.

– And I suppose he told you it distinguishes us from beasts.

– He said, It makes the present. He said, it must be shared, and being so, makes the present. Laughter.

 William Gaddis, The Recognitions

The intention of this collection is to explore the possibilities that are made possible by separating tragedy from philosophy. It does not, however, insist that tragedy has been a purely negative or destructive force for the Western philosophical tradition, or that contemporary efforts to explore, develop, and otherwise work from and within that tradition are ill-conceived. What it does propose is to break, or at least suspend, the use of tragedy as an index of the worth and truth of philosophical thinking. The indications offered by the essays collected here, and by the extended networks of the projects and ideas in conjunction with which they are developed, provide ample reason to believe that philosophical thinking, aligned with comedy, is capable of insights, discoveries, and creations that are quite different from – and in many cases directly challenge – those that tragedy can conceive or attain. To think and to do philosophy comically enriches and expands the life of thought.

All of the essays collected here – with the exception of those by Jennifer Bates, Richard Doyle, and Sonja Tanner who are each too classy to be associated with such a venture – were delivered at the conference “Why So Serious? Philosophy and Comedy,” at DePaul University in September 2012. The participants were given no guidelines or themes for the organization of their contributions. The conference was conceived as experimental, as an opportunity to explore different avenues of thinking according to each author’s interpretation of the conference title and theme. The range and quality of the papers is impressive. They are organized here in a roughly chronological order (by topic), with some consideration given to the resonances between the various pieces.

The first essay, Michael Naas' “Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter,” fittingly begins with the very question of seriousness. Presenting Plato as “a great comic philosopher,” Naas exhaustively works through the pedagogical but comic strategies of Socrates as directed by Plato in what, to some extent, amounts to a series of restagings of the Republic's scene of laughter. Through these stagings one is forced to conclude that, indeed, comedy is no laughing matter.

It is impossible to recreate here the brilliant staging of Naas' paper, just as it is impossible to recreate the brilliance of Bernard Freydberg's immediate rejoinder. In partial compensation for this shortcoming, Freydberg's essay here immediately follows Naas'. In “Homage to Penia: Aristophanes’ Plutus as Philosophical Comedy,” Freydberg extends his Philosophy and Comedy to what is perhaps Aristophanes' most misunderstood and wrongfully maligned play. Arguing that Plutus should rightfully be regarded as Aristophanes' most philosophical play, Freydberg traces the way in which Aristophanes uses his drama to raise compelling questions of justice.

Sonja Tanner's “Prostrating Before Adrasteia: Comedy and ‘One’s Own’ in Republic V” returns us to Plato and, indeed, to a central moment of the Republic. In the account of the city based on physis rather than nomos, and its accompanying question of “what is one’s own?,” Tanner finds a question posed by comedy, not a formula of justice. And the danger of this question is that we may lose sight of what is our own, improperly laugh, and thereby become ridiculous.

The fourth essay, Rick Lee's “At Least They Had an Ethos: Comedy as the Only Possible Critique,” manages to parley an extended riff on The Big Lebowski into an argument that not only might comedy be one among several means by which ideology might be critiqued but that comedy is, in fact, the only possible method for showing up ideology. Positioning Hegel against Aristotle – who finds an unexpected ally in Eco's Jorge – Lee shows that the very survival of the comedic persona – its “abiding” – accomplishes its critical operation amidst the inevitable collapse of totalizing ethics.

The fifth essay, Jennifer Bates's “Absolute Knowing: Consternation and Preservation in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” marshals the considerable etymological resources latent in “consternation” in order to develop a tragi-comic exposition of Hegel’s absolute knowing. Juxtaposing the scenes of Hegel's tragi-comedy with the comic-tragedy of Shakespeare's play, Bates argues that the latter engenders a consternation that pushes its audience to think as surely as the former.

No volume on comedy and philosophy can avoid Bergson's essay On Laughter, which provides the occasion for Rich Doyle's essay “Something Mechanical Encrusted on the Living or, ‘Que Signifie le Rire?’” Rather than providing yet another commentary, Doyle's essay reinscribes Bergson's work in the laughter that it aims to name and describe and aligns the power of laughter – and of Bergson – with the paradox, always against the sign.

Russell Ford's essay, “Humor, Law, and Jurisprudence: On Deleuze’s Political Philosophy,” is included here only because the editor lost a bet. It traces Deleuze's discussion of comedy in several of his texts from the 1960s – Nietzsche and Philosophy, Coldness and Cruelty, and the Logic of Sense – to argue that comedy is, for Deleuze, a tool for escaping the normative dead-ends of traditional ethics. “Deterritorializing” the normative form of ethical questions, Deleuze's deployment of comedy rejects conclusive judgments in favor of a kind of wonder that works and reworks ethical thinking instead of seeking refuge in finished law.

Robert Valgenti's “Go Bleep Yourself! Why Censorship is Funny” would have been included next had there proven any feasible way of editing the stream of profanity that constituted the entirety of the presentation. The reader could have then seen how Valgenti argued that censorship itself constitutes a comedic technique, one that exposes the founding gesture of any community beneath the everyday censorship of meaningful speech. The editor hopes that the several pages filled by black lines conveys some of the original presentation's incisive brilliance.

Tony Clifton refused to contribute an essay to the current volume – and, indeed, refused in such a manner as to require legal action and several orders of protection – but his place was taken, at the last minute, by H. Peter Steeves who has contributed “Quantum Andy: Andy Kaufman and the Postmodern Turn in Comedy.” Identifying in laughter the aporia of identity, Steeves shows the way in which Kaufman challenges the most sacrosanct element of the dramatic tradition: that every story has an end, a destination, a point. Refusing the classical rhythm of teleology, Kaufman's comedy creates a real liberation amidst the evacuation of identity.

“Every moment is the strait gate through which the Messiah might appear,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “Being Funny: Ontology is a Queer Subject (or, Tractatus Cucumber Saladicus) (a Zen Maoist Koan),” Bill Martin's essay that closes this collection, reminds us that the divine toaster isn't going to pop if we’re watching it. Seriously, perhaps it’s time to cease our fastidious lamentations over the rising pile of the detritus of history. That we may then be in joyous and laughing solidarity with those who have been buried.

Notes

1 In his “If Armstrong Was Interesting,” Steve Aylett imagines what Neil Armstrong might have done when he held the world's attention in a live television feed (Steve Aylett, Toxicology (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1999) 31–33). His famous declaration – and subsequent career – seems to Aylett like a lost opportunity. The gravity of Armstrong's words is soporific, their propriety renders the moment unsurprising and uninteresting. Some of the alternative declarations imagined by Aylett – “He’d shout ‘Jeez Louise I could use a bacon sandwich’ or ‘Praise be to Satan’ or ‘More land to pillage and despoil’ or ‘This is nowhere’ or ‘Lock up your daughters' or ‘Who farted?’ or ‘I’ve never been so bored’ or ‘I’ve never been so hard’ or ‘Looky here – a million strawberries' or ‘Kill the white man’ or ‘I was brought here against my will’ or ‘I can’t live a lie any more – I’m gay’” (31) – might have made of that moment something unexpected, something interesting.

Originally, this volume was to have no Introduction. However, I was informed by my editor – in no uncertain terms – that an Introduction was absolutely essential for establishing its bona fides. So it seemed (perversely) appropriate to begin by inviting the reader (indirectly) to consider how philosophy has, so often, failed to be interesting. How it has too often been a conservative repository for artfully rendered commonplaces rather than an experimental opening of thought to the alien, to the unforeseen. Philosophy's historical alliance with tragedy has fostered this conservatism. Comedy – what philosophy has insistently shunned – is the style and strategy of an inventive, entertaining, other thinking. Such is the conceit of this volume.

2 See the fourth essay below, Rick Lee's “At Least They Had an Ethos: Comedy as the Only Possible Critique,” for an interesting discussion of the importance of context for the plot of The Name of the Rose.

3 The scholarly discussions that have sprung up around this line are legion and their ranks are continually growing. In a 2003 essay, “An Authentically Socratic Conclusion in Plato's Phaedo: Socrates' Debt to Asclepius” in Desire, Identity, and Existence, ed. N. Reshotko (Edmonton, CA: Academic Printing and Publishing, 2003), Sandra L. Peterson notes twenty-one different interpretations of the final lines.

4 See the first as well as the third essay below – Michael Naas' “Plato and the Spectacle of Laughter,” and Sonja Tanner's “Prostrating Before Adrasteia: Comedy and ‘One's Own’ in Republic V” – for more nuanced treatments of Plato's work, and especially the Republic.

5 Richard Janko published two influential books on the Tractatus Coislinianus in the 1980s that are chiefly responsible for the contemporary interest in it: Aristotle on Comedy: Toward a Reconstruction of Poetics II (London: Bristol Classical, 1984), and Aristotle: Poetics, with the Tractatus Coislinianus, Reconstruction of Poetics II, and the Fragments of the On Poets (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). More recently, Walter Watson has written a compelling book that aims to restore the lost parts of the Poetics: The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012).

6 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 2nd ed. (New York: Free, 1979) 39.

7 Tertullian, Apology and De Spectaculis, trans. T.R. Glover (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1931) 297.

8 Ibid. 299.

9 For St. John of Damascus' defense of divine images, see his On the Divine Images: Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, trans. David Anderson (Yonkers: St Vladimir's Seminary, 1981). For an excellent overview of the iconoclasm debate, see Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon's Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).

10 For the Arabic reception of Aristotle's Poetics, see Salim Kemal's The Philosophical Poetics of Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroës: The Aristotelian Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). An excellent overview of the role of aesthetics in Scholastic philosophy is given by Umberto Eco in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000).

11 Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks, “Introduction” in Philosophy and Tragedy (New York: Routledge, 2000) 1.

12 Kant's well-known definition of laughter – which has given rise to what is known as the incongruity theory of humor – is that it is “an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, eds. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 209). It's also important to note that Kant consigns music to this same sphere of gratification, but this assignation has not permitted the tragic-minded post-Kantians from resuscitating music. The laughable has not been as lucky.

13 De Beistegui and Sparks 6.

14 Friedrich Hölderlin, “On the Difference of Poetic Modes” in Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988) 83.

15 David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005) 1. In addition to Krell's work, and Dennis Schmidt's (discussed below), other important recent contributions to the discussion of tragedy in relation to German Idealism include Peter Wake, Tragedy in Hegel's Early Theological Writings (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2014), and Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014).

16 Krell 3.

17 Dennis Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 6.

18 Ibid. 10–11.

19 Ibid. 12.

20 Ibid. 15.

21 Ibid.

22 For a philosophically pointed account of the twentieth century, see Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2012).

23 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 37.

24 Ibid. (quoting Hölderlin) 43.

25 Ibid. 46.

26 Ibid. 45.

27 Ibid.

28 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999) 28.

29 Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 110.