Fluhrer S (2020)
Publication Type: Journal article, Original article
Publication year: 2020
Book Volume: 11
Pages Range: 104–120
Journal Issue: 1
URI: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IMCJ5FCCMATXX377IHZM/full?target=10.1080/2040610X.2019.1692548
DOI: 10.1080/2040610x.2019.1692548
Open Access Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IMCJ5FCCMATXX377IHZM/full?target=10.1080/2040610X.2019.1692548
In his essay ‘On the Critique of Violence’ (1921), Walter Benjamin explores the fateful entanglement of law and violence. Drawing on myth and religion, Benjamin looks for an escape from the perpetual dynamics of ‘law-positing’ and ‘law-preserving’ violence. Revolutionary action and messianic thinking appear on the horizon of his argument as forms of ‘pure’ violence and, eventually, as non-violent forms of political action. This paper argues that there are forms of the comical that approximate the structural scope of Benjamin’s essay – forms that, through a specific use of verbal and bodily language, try to take the unsettling qualities of the comical and of laughter to the extreme of ‘pure comicality’, which attacks all forms of authority. My examples are performative texts centring on the clownish body in the public sphere – produced by comical ‘folk singer’, actor, playwright, and film maker Karl Valentin (1882–1948), on the one hand, and, on the other, by comedian, musician, actor, and writer Helge Schneider (*1955), who, in his TV dialogues with film maker and author Alexander Kluge (*1932), develops a ‘clownosophy of pure nothingness’.
APA:
Fluhrer, S. (2020). Comical Critiques of Violence: Karl Valentin and Helge Schneider/Alexander Kluge. Comedy Studies, 11(1), 104–120. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040610x.2019.1692548
MLA:
Fluhrer, Sandra. "Comical Critiques of Violence: Karl Valentin and Helge Schneider/Alexander Kluge." Comedy Studies 11.1 (2020): 104–120.
BibTeX: Download