The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin’s Entangled Bank

Abstract

This chapter aims to measure the biopolitical stakes of Darwin’s thinking of variability and natural selection in a historical ontology of ourselves today. When most contemporary ontologies point to catastrophe and mass extinction, what kinds of aesthetic and political strategies does a biopolitical reading of Darwin make available? One possibility, the chapter argues, is through a reconsideration of comedy and its associated pratfalls, the result of the law of gravity having been exiled from Darwin’s Origin of Species.