Success in failure: from the destruction of the tragic to the self-negation of the comic

Crisis and Critique 10 (2):30--54 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This essay explores the interrelationship between tragedy and comedy, with specific focus given to the potential that comedy can provide in transforming the most tragic of situations. In building this claim, the very dynamics and distinctions that divide the tragic from the comic are considered in view of the self-negation that the comic posits. That is, while tragedy requires a certain acceptance of the finite, from which destiny and circumstance come to certify the hero’s tragic predicament, in comedy, what succeeds is that which functions through an act of self-negation. This, it is argued, offers a subversive redefining of tragedy, one that proves constitutive of a comic fatalism that does not mourn one’s tragic predicament or fated end, but, instead, fully identifies with our comic predicament. Going beyond the pitfalls of political nicety and moral condemnation, which seek easy gratification or cynical distance, the conclusion examines the conceptual artist, Vanessa Place, and her performance of rape jokes.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Comic Vision of Life.John Morreall - 2014 - British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (2):125-140.
Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis.Leon Golden - 1992 - Oxford University Press.
Kenneth Burke's Comedy of Motives.Angelo Anthony Bonadonna - 1994 - Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago
On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Comedy for Life.Russell Ford - 2004 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35 (1):89-105.
Hegel on the Crucifixion as Comedy.Rachel Aumiller - 2018 - Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 1:25-31.

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-11-17

Downloads
121 (#152,925)

6 months
92 (#56,273)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jack Black
Sheffield Hallam University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Melancholy and the Act.Slavoj Žižek - 2000 - Critical Inquiry 26 (4):657-681.
The Comic Mimesis.Mladen Dolar - 2017 - Critical Inquiry 43 (2):570-589.
Serious Theory.Todd Mcgowan - 2007 - International Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (1).

Add more references