Ethical comicality and the Fool: an essay on<i>King Lear</i>

Bidgoli, Mehrdad

doi:10.1080/2040610x.2020.1729491

Cited by 2 publications

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“…This culminates in act three, scene four, where he openly welcomes Poor Tom as the wretched Other (Shakespeare 2009b: 3.4.26-110). In one sense, Lear's ethical awakening comes about as a result of the Fool's ethical comicality (Bidgoli 2020).…”

Section: From Comedy and Carnival To Dialogue To Hospitalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, I will comment on two tragedies by Shakespeare which contain comic elements and moments, and these are highly effective when we look at them from an ethical perspective. Also, I have extensively discussed the ethical role of the Fool's comedy in Lear elsewhere(Bidgoli 2020). 4 I am perfectly aware that this is a somehow reductive explanation because Levinas talks about this "preoriginality" as a past that never comes to present ("an immemorial past"), yet this is a risk to be taken if we are to rationalise the way effective comedy/humour has already gained an ethical significance prior to its initiation.…”

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Comedy and humour: an ethical perspective

Bidgoli

2020

EJHR

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In this essay, I aim to study comedy and humour from an ethical perspective. My main proposal is that comedy and humour can be understood alternatively in the light of ethics, and in one sense, they actually begin, more effectively, with an ethical sensibility. Effective comedy and humour initiate through an ethical sensibility called “hospitality”; ideally, they are preceded by this ethical openness. I will argue that it is this pre-original ethical hospitality and openness that can give rise to more effective moments of comedy, humour, carnival, festivity and also laughter, opening the Self to the Other in order to be able to enter into a disinterested humorous (dialogic) experience. Hospitality is of prime importance here because it turns out to be part and parcel of comedy as it also underlies the ethics of alterity. I therefore suggest that the thoughts of both Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin can give rise to a fruitful study of ethics, comedy and humour. I will “reduce” socio-political complexities of our daily life-world to comic moments through Bakhtin, and then expose the reader to a Levinasian simplicity and ethical openness that actually takes place before effective comedy and humour can begin. In this essay, I mainly have literary/critical aims, and to fulfil that aim, I will briefly discuss two Shakespearean works and contextualize my thesis. The matter of studying comedy, humour and ethics in a broader cultural, social and/or philosophical context is open for other thinkers.

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Section: From Comedy and Carnival To Dialogue To Hospitalitymentioning

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Comedy and humour: an ethical perspective

Bidgoli

2020

EJHR

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Ethics, Subjectivity, and Alterity in King Lear

Bidgoli

2021

Relig. Arts

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Cordelia’s defiance during the first scene of King Lear is among the thorniest issues in Lear criticism. There are also questions about her defiance in the first act and her sacrificial return in the fourth. Generally, critics either interpret her defiance negatively and condemn her (the question of her sacrifice remains equivocal), or they lay the blame on Lear’s absurdity and justify Cordelia’s silence (thus somehow explaining her sacrificial return). I will turn to the recent ethical approach to Lear in which critics usually treat Cordelia as an excess that both foregrounds the ethical themes of the play and resists our understanding. She is said to be like a trace, an evasive Other who can hardly be grasped or explicated. Her defiance and sacrifice thus mark her incomprehensibility and divinity. There are, however, problems and shortcomings with this view that I will enumerate and try to resolve here. I will mainly study Cordelia’s role and discuss her subjectivity with a closer attention. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, I suggest that Cordelia’s defiance/sacrifice is not simply a choice; she (dis)embodies a logic of heteronomy and absolute openness to and receptivity of the other, a passivity which is beyond any onto-political sense of passivity and activity. Her silence and sacrifice can be discussed as pre-voluntary, nonintentional sensibility. We can connect the dots to explain her defiant behavior in the first act and her sacrificial return in the last acts. Her uncanny ethicality will finally bridge the current gap and explain her alterity as the other as well. Hence she is both a responsive self and an uncanny other in a peculiar combination of qualities.

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Ethical comicality and the Fool: an essay onKing Lear

Cited by 2 publications

References 8 publications

Comedy and humour: an ethical perspective

Comedy and humour: an ethical perspective

Ethics, Subjectivity, and Alterity in King Lear

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