The Comic Self

"Intelligent, persuasive, and compelling, The Comic Self transcends disciplinary boundaries, hovering somewhere between philosophy, theory, and criticism. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred offer a clear notion of the comic self that they then proceed to brilliantly embody in their own writing, ingeniously defining the comic self not in sheer opposition to the tragic self but in a kind of dialectical relation against it."—Dimitris Vardoulakis, author of Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism"A bracing and beguiling set of reflections, intense and playful, on the possibilities and parameters of the comic self. The authors make a passionate and principled plea for dispossession, with one eye trained on its genealogy and another on its charged  present, real and virtual."—Ian G. Balfour, York University

"You can’t reassure the frightened child. Your letter must add to the child’s terror. Welcome to the world of racism in America. Brilliantly original, mixing Heidegger and Chappelle, Grant Farred proves that Baldwin’s genre has not exhausted its magical potential to provoke and instruct. By a mysterious dialectical legerdemain, he bestows on his son an unlikely endowment: a sort of Afro-optimism, both outraged and salvific."—Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary"Phrased as an epistle to his young son, Grant Farred's An Essay for Ezra grapples with difficult loci of racial violence in U.S. culture and in various philosophical traditions, from the Black exile of Baldwin to Heideggerian questionability of self. He proposes new genealogies and new problems for struggles of becoming and judgment amid the perpetual crisis that is the American racial order."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine