Comedy, Seriously This page intentionally left blank Comedy, Seriously A Philosophical Study Dmitri Nikulin comedy, seriously Copyright © Dmitri Nikulin, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-41513-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-49051-6 ISBN 978-1-137-41514-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137415141 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nikulin, D. V. (Dmitrii Vladimirovich) Comedy, seriously : a philosophical study / Dmitri Nikulin, New School. pages cm 1. Comedy—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Philosophy. I. Title. PN1922.N55 2014 809'.917—dc23 2013046854 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Amnet. First Edition: May 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xv I History of Comedy 1 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: On the Ancient Origins of Comedy 3 2 The Moderns: The Romantic Loss of Comedy 23 II Logic of Comedy 3 Everyone Joins the Fight: The Dialectic of Comic Action 47 4 Whatever Works: Structure and Topics of Comedy 69 5 The Catastrophe of the Good Ending 93 III Ethics of Comedy 6 Foolish Wisdom: The Philosopher as a Comic Figure 113 Conclusion 133 Notes 137 Bibliography 177 Index 185 This page intentionally left blank Preface Philosophy likes to think of itself as confronting the most urgent challenges of modernity and as addressing the fundamental questions of human existence. Yet, while comedy plays an important role in shaping our lives, philosophy has for too long neglected a significant discussion of it. Although there have been many excellent critical studies of its history and poetics, of its different aspects and genres, philosophy has yet to take comedy seriously. It is the aim of the present text not only to offer a humble remedy to this omission but also to reveal the essential relation between philosophy and comedy. As I will show, comedy is in fact the very dramatization of philosophical reasoning, and, as such, it deserves a central place as a subject of philosophical inquiry. Already in antiquity, Plato and Aristotle were suspicious of comedy for its depictions of people as vulgar and base. Nevertheless, as readers of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose will recall, Aristotle apparently dedicated a whole book of his Poetics to comedy. But because this book was unfortunately lost to posterity, philosophy still needs to produce a version of this text. Not only was comedy neglected in ancient times—modern philosophy, too, has tended to dismiss comedy. Here, the reasons have to do with the modern preference for tragedy and its deep roots in the formation of modern subjectivity. The modern Cartesian subject thinks of itself as autonomous and fully rational. It constitutes itself as the center of all meanings, as the navel of its own spiritual world. Yet the self-sufficiency apparently enjoyed by the modern subject is characterized by solitude, monologue, and solipsism.1 The “I” inevitably suffers in its isolation, even as it narcissistically takes this loneli- ness as a mark of its own nobility and sublimity. For, behind its majestic and heroic pretense, the isolated subject is petty and pathetic. In the tragic theat- rical trial of its everyday life, the modern subject appears at once as accused, prosecutor, defender, and judge.2 Similarly, as hero, producer, and director of its own tragic drama within philosophy, the modern subject is both protago- nist and sole actor.3 In this lonesome predicament, it always confronts its own end and, consequently, is oriented toward death. The modern subject wants, viii ● Preface even needs, to die. And yet it cannot get rid of itself. Like Hamlet, the mod- ern philosophical hero wants to commit suicide, but it cannot step outside of itself to commit the deed. Still under the spell of the Romantics, we too tend to define ourselves in terms of finitude and death. The spell cast by the Romantics clouds our view of comedy in other ways. Indeed, the Romantic view of civilization epitomizes what I see as our (mis) understanding of both tragedy and comedy. Not only did the Romantics understand civilization in terms of a “quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” but they also privileged the Greek world over the Roman world. Figures such as August Schlegel and G. W. F. Hegel, for instance, argued that ancient tragedy—through which they thought the Greek world was revealed—was sublime but that comedy was not even beautiful. And in their consideration of comedy, both Schlegel and Hegel thought Old Comedy superior to New Comedy and Greek comedy superior to Roman comedy. I want to argue, instead, that comedy speaks more acutely than tragedy to human existential, moral, political, and erotic needs. However, by com- edy I mean primarily New Comedy and not Old Comedy, which, however, should not be altogether dismissed but rather radically reevaluated. As I hope to show, it is neither Sophocles nor even Aristophanes who is truly mod- ern. Rather, it is the main representative of Greek New Comedy, Menander, and the Roman dramatists Plautus and, especially, Terence who established the comic genre that is still meaningful and alive today. New Comedy has survived throughout history, living on in the Renaissance and early moder- nity in Shakespeare and Molière, up to contemporary existential comedy and Woody Allen. In what follows, when speaking about comedy, I thus refer to the type created by New Comedy, as it was first established in Menander and Terence, flourished in modern comedy, and still lives on in contemporary comedy. The comedy I am discussing has a descriptive dimension, since it presents many complexities and inequalities in our lives. It also has a normative dimension, since it diagnoses problems and pathologies, allows for the rectification of these problems, and eventually offers the possibility of achieving well-being shared with others. Since many comedies use a mixture of genres and media and keep experimenting with them, this understanding of comedy will not match all existing comedies. Yet deviation from a norm is itself a comic norm, which comedy often uses as a device. Comedy is perennial because the very human condition is comical. For comedy is the only genre that allows for the realization of human well-being and freedom as being with others. Such freedom is never a given, yet it is always possible—as a task that can be accomplished together with others. Comedy is defined by its structure and by its ending—a good ending that Preface ● ix only comes about through a diligent, persistent, and often unexpected shared action by everyone involved in a comedy. Well-being, then, is not an atempo- ral or transcendent good, somehow always there just waiting to be discovered. Rather, comic well-being, which is achievable, is an assertion of love and the good life that comes as a resolution of a conflict at the end. Yet, as life itself, this good is in need of constant reproduction, renewal, and reaffirmation. Therefore, unlike tragedy, which is the celebration of death, comedy is the celebration of life. Yet the achievement of human good, the reliving of love, and the repro- duction of life need a careful and consequential—“logical”—reasoning. This is why, in my account, comedy is a profoundly philosophical enterprise and philosophy is a comic enterprise. Unsurprisingly, however, modern philoso- phy has missed its affinity with comedy. For, from its very inception, modern philosophy was constituted as the monological thinking of a lonely self or as the self-directed account of an isolated subject whose only determination was thus being toward death, which is tragic. Nonetheless, as I aim to show, com- edy is the reproduction of practical philosophical reason on stage. Because of its affinity with philosophy, which, as a Socratic enterprise, is a dialogical realization of being with others, comedy reproduces the structure of a philo- sophical argument in its very plot. Beginning with a “problem” that comes as a trespassing of the initial state of affairs, the action moves through a number of steps that are interrelated through complicated yet coherent moves, which result in the “solution” of the problem, not by an act of a deus ex machina but by the careful calculation and mutually responsive action of the participants. Yet among all the actors one figure becomes (often unwillingly) the center of action: the comedian par excellence, the practical thinker responsible for tying together all the loose ends and advancing the action toward the resolution in the good ending. Paradigmatically represented by a slave, a servant, or a maid, the central comic character enacts the “foolish wisdom,” distinctly rep- resented in Socrates, who always fools around and, seemingly not knowing anything, advances an argument toward a resolution. The main comic char- acter is a philosopher onstage. Being in a socially subdued position, the comic thinker becomes the one who makes the advancement toward the good end- ing. Here, comedy displays its goodness once again in the comic practical realization of justice, which comes as freedom that is reached only at the end, and as a result of the unfolding of the comic action and plot, and which becomes a treasured achievement of love and life and especially of personal freedom for the dispossessed. I have divided the book into three main parts.4 The first part is “his- torical,” as it presents an overview of the existing approaches to comedy. I begin in antiquity, moving from Aristotle to the fourth century CE Roman