In his essay 'On the Critique of Violence' (1921), Walter Benjamin explores the fateful entanglement of law and violence. Drawing on myth and religion, Benjamin looks for an escape from the perpetual ...dynamics of 'law-positing' and 'law-preserving' violence. Revolutionary action and messianic thinking appear on the horizon of his argument as forms of 'pure' violence and, eventually, as non-violent forms of political action. This paper argues that there are forms of the comical that approximate the structural scope of Benjamin's essay - forms that, through a specific use of verbal and bodily language, try to take the unsettling qualities of the comical and of laughter to the extreme of 'pure comicality', which attacks all forms of authority. My examples are performative texts centring on the clownish body in the public sphere - produced by comical 'folk singer', actor, playwright, and film maker Karl Valentin (1882-1948), on the one hand, and, on the other, by comedian, musician, actor, and writer Helge Schneider (*1955), who, in his TV dialogues with film maker and author Alexander Kluge (*1932), develops a 'clownosophy of pure nothingness'.
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