ABSTRACT
To pose the destabilizing agent of humor against political identity is the central strategy in the fiction of young British punk writer Stewart Home. Comic characters are unstable by nature, and politics requires serious identification with ideals, causes, end-goals. Home's radicals are logocentric, mistaking signs for reality, exterior markings for interior character, and also the political equivalent of first graders, eager to do their job, but not yet capable of any sophistication. The thinking of Home's characters is all derived in one way or another from Georg Hegel, though Hegel gone astray. Throughout Stewart Home's fiction, the author believes Home is struggling with the same articulation. There is cruel humor in Home, and smart political commentary, but too few of the wide panoply of emotions which Hegel's aesthetics calls for. The limitations of punk hatred, as with the limitations of Marxist political polarizations, must be superseded by not only love and compassion, but a humor filled with new emotional becomings.
