“Staying with the Trouble”: Comic Politics in the Anthropocene

• In Event: Comedy and Political Theory

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to consider how comic politics can empower democracy in the Anthropocene – the proposed name for our new geological epoch. While the Anthropocene typically is associated with tragedy, no doubt due to our global climate crisis, it is also replete with incongruities that bring out experiences closer to comedy and the comic tradition. This is particularly evident in the many entanglements of human and nonhuman life that make it harder and harder to tell which is which. As the human becomes both more and less than the nonhuman – and as the nonhuman similarly becomes more and less than the human – new encounters arise that may resemble the ones we find in the old comedies by Aristophanes and Rabelais, but that now require us to rethink the polis and its constitutive power. Is democracy for humans alone, or must we also include animals and other forms of nonhuman life? And if we must, what might be the consequences for procedures of deliberation and decision-making?

Addressing these questions from within the comic tradition, the paper tries to advance a new model of democracy appropriate for the challenges associated with the Anthropocene. The first part of the paper draws on Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016) in order to delimit and conceptualize the kind of entanglements that we find in the Anthropocene (and that Haraway nuances through her notion of the “Chthulucene”). The second part looks to the work of Frans de Waal – in particular his account of animal intelligence – as a way to expand our conception of deliberation and decision-making. The third part brings the insight from Haraway and de Waal into a more explicit conversation with comic texts, using examples from not only Aristophanes and Rabelais but also new social media (memes, tweets, etc.). The fourth and concluding part draws out lessons for democratic theory more generally and shows how democracy might be reignited in a time marked by an unprecedented climate crisis.

Author

• Lars Toender, University of Copenhagen