Ethics, politics and comedy
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 11, 2024
We need to reflect on the singular circumstance that the two maxims which tried to define with greater acuteness the ethical and political status of humanity in modernity come from comedy. Homo homini lupus — cornerstone of Western politics — is in Plautus (Asinaria, v.495, where he jokingly warns against the one who does not know who the other man is), and homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, perhaps the happiest formulation of the foundation of all ethics, we read in Terence (Heautontim., v.77). No less surprising is that the definition of the principle of law “to give to each his own” (suum cuique tribuere) was perceived by the ancients as the most appropriate definition of what is in question in the comedy: a gloss on Terence enunciates it unreservedly: comic is par excellence to assignare unicuique personae quod proprium est. If one assigns to each man the character that defines him, he becomes ridiculous. Or, more generally, any attempt to define what is human necessarily results in a comedy. This is what the caricature shows, in which the gesture to catch at all costs the humanity of each individual turns, according to all evidence, into a joke, it really makes one laugh.
Plato must have had something like this in mind, when he modeled the characters of his dialogues on the mimes of Sophron and Epicharmus — decidedly comic. “Know thyself” is the antithesis principle to any tragic arrogance and can only give rise to a game and a joke, even if these can be and are perfectly serious. The human, indeed, is not a substance whose boundaries can be traced once and for all — it is, rather, an always ongoing process, in which man does not cease to be inhuman and animal and, altogether, to become human and talking. For this reason, while tragedy brings to expression what is not human and, at the point in which the hero abruptly and bitterly gets awareness of his inhumanity, results in silence, the person, i.e. the comic mask, entrusts the smile with the only possible enunciation of what is no longer and yet is still human. And against the West’s incessant, obnoxious attempt to assign the definition of ethics and politics to tragedy, it must be remembered every time that man’s dwelling on earth is a comedy — perhaps not divine, but which anyway betrays into the laugh its secret, quiet solidarity with the idea of happiness.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 11, 2024
We need to reflect on the singular circumstance that the two maxims which tried to define with greater acuteness the ethical and political status of humanity in modernity come from comedy. Homo homini lupus — cornerstone of Western politics — is in Plautus (Asinaria, v.495, where he jokingly warns against the one who does not know who the other man is), and homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, perhaps the happiest formulation of the foundation of all ethics, we read in Terence (Heautontim., v.77). No less surprising is that the definition of the principle of law “to give to each his own” (suum cuique tribuere) was perceived by the ancients as the most appropriate definition of what is in question in the comedy: a gloss on Terence enunciates it unreservedly: comic is par excellence to assignare unicuique personae quod proprium est. If one assigns to each man the character that defines him, he becomes ridiculous. Or, more generally, any attempt to define what is human necessarily results in a comedy. This is what the caricature shows, in which the gesture to catch at all costs the humanity of each individual turns, according to all evidence, into a joke, it really makes one laugh.
Plato must have had something like this in mind, when he modeled the characters of his dialogues on the mimes of Sophron and Epicharmus — decidedly comic. “Know thyself” is the antithesis principle to any tragic arrogance and can only give rise to a game and a joke, even if these can be and are perfectly serious. The human, indeed, is not a substance whose boundaries can be traced once and for all — it is, rather, an always ongoing process, in which man does not cease to be inhuman and animal and, altogether, to become human and talking. For this reason, while tragedy brings to expression what is not human and, at the point in which the hero abruptly and bitterly gets awareness of his inhumanity, results in silence, the person, i.e. the comic mask, entrusts the smile with the only possible enunciation of what is no longer and yet is still human. And against the West’s incessant, obnoxious attempt to assign the definition of ethics and politics to tragedy, it must be remembered every time that man’s dwelling on earth is a comedy — perhaps not divine, but which anyway betrays into the laugh its secret, quiet solidarity with the idea of happiness.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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