Comic Intelligence and Its Anarchic Origins in Modernity

This paper examines what constitutes comic thinking in light of Agnes Heller’s understanding of freedom in modernity. Heller famously argues that freedom in the modern age is based upon a fundamental paradox. Freedom is the foundation of everything; but in itself is groundless, making freedom constitutively anarchic. The paper investigates two key efforts to conceptualize comedy in modernity under such an ambiguous and anarchic idea of freedom. Taking as the point of departure Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction between two types of experience of reality in the modern world—the short-term experience of Erlebnis and the long-term Erfahrung—the paper connects their relation to the concept of the comic in Charles Baudelaire and Henri Bergson. It further examines how they are in effect two different types of responses towards the singular tension opened by the paradox of freedom. Such a dynamic of modernity would generate what we would call the “problem of comic intelligence.” Moreover, the paper would try to argue that while Bergson seeks to overcome the anarchic impasse of modernity torn between mechanical utilitarianism of technology and the vitality of meaning and life, Baudelaire envisions a more complex image of modernity which cannot reconcile the fundamental opposition of modernity