The Object of Comedy

THE
OBJECT
OF
COMEDY
PHILOSOPHIES AND
PERFORMANCES
E D I T E D BY
Jamila M. H. Mascat
A N D Gregor Moder
Performance Philosophy
Series Editors
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, UK
Alice Lagaay
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences
Hamburg, Germany
Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, NC, USA
Performance Philosophy is an interdisciplinary and international field of
thought, creative practice and scholarship. The Performance Philosophy
book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the
relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range
of philosophical traditions and performance practices, including drama,
theatre, performance arts, dance, art and music. It also includes stud-
ies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy itself.
As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as
performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance.
Series Advisory Board

Emmanuel Alloa, Assistant Professor in Philosophy, University of St.
Gallen, Switzerland
Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA
James R. Hamilton, Professor of Philosophy, Kansas State University, USA
Bojana Kunst, Professor of Choreography and Performance, Institute for
Applied Theatre Studies, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany
Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Professor of Theatre Studies, Goethe University,
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Martin Puchner, Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative
Literature, Harvard University, USA
Alan Read, Professor of Theatre, King’s College London, UK
Freddie Rokem, Professor (Emeritus) of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University,
Israel
http://www.performancephilosophy.org/books/
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14558
Jamila M. H. Mascat • Gregor Moder
Editors
The Object of
Comedy
Philosophies and Performances
Editors
Jamila M. H. Mascat Gregor Moder
Utrecht University University of Ljubljana
Utrecht, The Netherlands Ljubljana, Slovenia
Performance Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-030-27741-3 ISBN 978-3-030-27742-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: cineclassico / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction to the Object

of Comedy 1
Jamila M. H. Mascat and Gregor Moder
Part I Comic Philosophy 13
2 The Uncanny and the Comic: Freud avec Lubitsch 15

Mladen Dolar
3 How They Fought 35

Sandra Laugier
4 Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness: On

Comedy and Revolutionary Partisanship 51
Jamila M. H. Mascat
5 The Aborted Object of Comedy and the Birth of the

Subject: Socrates and Aristophanes’ Alliance 75
Rachel Aumiller
v
vi Contents
Part II Comic Psychoanalysis 93
6 The Three Moments of Comedy 95

Robert Pfaller
7 From Objects of Desire to Objects of Comedy in

Chaplin’s Modern Times111
Alfie Bown
8 Where Does Dirt Come From?129

Alenka Zupančič
Part III Screening Comedy 143
9 Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of It All145

Benjamin Noys
10 Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence and Comedy in

Buster Keaton’s The General163
Lisa Trahair
11 Bad Cops191
Todd McGowan
Part IV Performing Comedy 209
12 Richard Pryor, the Conedian211

Alexi Kukuljevic
Contents vii
13 Comedy as Performance231
Gregor Moder
14 After Death Comes Humor: On the Poetics of Alexander

Vvedensky247
Keti Chukhrov
15 Asking for It: An Exchange between Cassandra Seltman

and Vanessa Place263
Cassandra Seltman and Vanessa Place
16 Of Organic Comedies: Interview with Romeo Castellucci281

Jamila M. H. Mascat
Index287
Notes on Contributors
Rachel Aumiller is a Researcher in Ethics at the Institute for Humanities

and Social Change International Foundation, Hamburg. She also lectures
in philosophy at the University of Hamburg. As a Fulbright Scholar in
Slovenia, she trained in the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. She
is the author of The Laughing Matter of Spirit (Northwestern University
Press, forthcoming).
Alfie Bown is lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of
London. He is author of The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017) and
In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy
(Bloomsbury, 2018). He also writes for The Guardian, New Statesman,
and The Paris Review.
Romeo Castellucci is a theatre director and playwright. In 1981, jointly
with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, he founded the company
Societas Raffaello Sanzio. He has supervised the theatrical section of the
Venice Biennale (2005), and was an Associated Artist of the Avignon
Festival 2008. Among his most recent works are Moses and Aron
(2015), Orestie (Un comédie organique? 2015), Democracy in America
(2017), Salome (2018), and Il Primo Omicidio (2019).
Keti Chukhrov is an Associate Professor in the Department of Сultural
Studies at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Her research inter-
ests include philosophy of performativity, the impact of socialist political
economy on the epistemes of historical socialism, and art systems and
philosophy. Her books include To Be—To Perform. “Theatre” in
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Philosophic Critique of Art (European Un-ty, 2011), Pound &£ (Logos,

1999), and a volume of dramatic writing, Merely Humans (translit,
2010, in Russian). She is currently working on a book dealing with
the communist epistemologies in the Soviet Marxist philosophy of
the 1960s and 1970s.
Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Department
of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His principal areas
of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German ideal-
ism, and art theory. He has lectured extensively at universities in the
United States and across Europe. His books include, most notably, A
Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006) and, with Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s
Second Death (Routledge, 2001).
Alexi Kukuljevic is an artist and philosopher based in Vienna. He is the
author of Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently (MIT Press,
2017). His art work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Palais de
Tokyo, Paris, the ICA in Philadelphia, and the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. He is a University Assistant in the
Art Theory department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
He is currently working on a book entitled Like Hell It Is addressing
the vertiginous intersection between comedy and horror.
Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-
Sorbonne and a Senior member of Institut Universitaire de France. She
has published extensively on philosophy of language (Wittgenstein,
Austin), on moral philosophy (perfectionism, ethics of care), on
democracy and civil disobedience, and on popular culture—film and
TV series. She is the translator of Stanley Cavell’s work. Among her
most recent publications are Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy
(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Recommencer la philosophie,
S. Cavell et la philosophie en Amérique (Vrin, 2014), Le Principe démocra-
tie (with A. Ogien, La Découverte, 2014), Antidémocratie (with
A. Ogien, La Découverte, 2017), Formes de vie (with E. Ferrarese,
CNRS éditions, 2018), and Nos vies en séries (Climats, 2019). She is
also a columnist at the French newspaper Libération.
Jamila M. H. Mascat has been a Lecturer in the Department of Media
and Culture Studies at the Utrecht University since 2016. Her research
focuses on Hegel and contemporary Hegelianism, as well as on postcolo-
nial theory and its critical relation to the legacy of modernity. She is the
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
author of Hegel a Jena. La critica dell’astrazione (Pensamultimedia, 2011).

Her articles have appeared in Radical Philosophy, Archives de Philosophie,
Droit et Philosophie, and Polemos.
Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont.
He is the author of Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory
Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019), Only a Joke Can Save Us:
A Theory of Comedy (Northwestern University Press, 2017), Capitalism
and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press,
2016), and other works.
Gregor Moder is Assistant Professor and Research Associate at the
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he teaches philosophy of art. He
is a member of the editorial board of Problemi Journal, book series editor
at Maska, and the President of the Aufhebung Association. He is the author
of Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (Analecta, 2016, in Slovene) and
of Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (Northwestern University
Press, 2017).
Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of
Chichester. Noys’s work includes The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh
University Press, 2010) and Malign Velocities (Zero Books, 2014).
Robert Pfaller is a philosopher who teaches at the University of Art and
Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. He is a founding member of the
Viennese psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicadenti.” He is the author
of The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners (Verso,
2014), which won the “Best Book Published in 2014” award from the
American Board of Professional Psychology (ABAPsa) in 2015,
Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment (Edinburgh
University Press, 2017) and Erwachsenensprache: Über ihr Verschwinden
aus Politik und Kultur (Fischer, 2017).
Vanessa Place is an artist, poet, and criminal defense attorney.
Cassandra Seltman is a writer and psychoanalyst in private practice in
New York City. She also supervises and conducts research. Her publica-
tions include a poetry collection, Palimpsest: Down (Inpatient Press,
2014). Recent publications can be found in The LA Review of Books, Flash
Art International, _Zeta_, Logos Berlin, and DIVISION/Review.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Lisa Trahair is Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts and Media,

University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her research interests include
early cinema, cinematic comedy, the philosophy of comedy, cinema and
psychoanalysis, theories of vision and the image, film and philosophy, the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and the philosophy of comedy. She is the
author of Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic
Slapstick (SUNY, 2007) and is currently completing the book
Understanding Cinematic Thinking (Edinburgh University Press), co-
authored with Robert Sinnerbrink and Gregory Flaxman. She is also co-
editing a book with Josephine Gray entitled Second Nature: Comic
Performance and Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield).
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She works
as Research Advisor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research
Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and at the Graduate
School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana). She is the author of numerous arti-
cles and books on psychoanalysis and philosophy, including Ethics of
the Real: Kant and Lacan (Verso, 2012), The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s
Philosophy of the Two (MIT Press, 2003), Why Psychoanalysis: Three
Interventions (NSU Press, 2008), The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT
Press, 2008), and, most recently, What Is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017).
List of Figures
Fig. 12.1 A conedian belongs to the humaniry, screenshot, 2018 (Courtesy

of the author) 212
Fig. 12.2 The ultimate in snobbism (Ed Sullivan, November 27, 1966),
2018 (Courtesy of the author) 219
Fig. 12.3 Wiping a smile off his face (Ed Sullivan, December 17, 1967),
2018 (Courtesy of the author) 225
xiii
CHAPTER 1
A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction

to the Object of Comedy
Jamila M. H. Mascat and Gregor Moder
What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy transformative, reparative, or

rather restorative? What kinds of mechanisms are at play when it comes to
comedy? And what is at stake in comic performances? This book aims at
investigating the object of comedy—its core and invariances—as well as its
objectives—that is, its goals, targets, and (side) effects.
It seems evident, almost too evident, to claim that comedy objectifies;
that is to say, that it produces objects. When we consider an individual or
group as being the butt of a joke, we are thinking about them as objects,
reduced to a single trait that is associated with them. Accordingly, “the
object of comedy” is understood as the target against which the complic-
ity between the joke teller and the joke listener, or the cast and the audi-
ence of a play, is oriented. The tendency to objectify, in this specific
sense, is a tendency which comedy shares with humor in general and
which we could call, by way of a synecdoche, the tool of the caricature.
J. M. H. Mascat (*)
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
e-mail: j.mascat@uu.nl
G. Moder
University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
e-mail: gregor.moder@ff.uni-lj.si
© The Author(s) 2019 1

G. Moder, J. M. H. Mascat (eds.), The Object of Comedy,
Performance Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_1
2 J. M. H. MASCAT AND G. MODER
When such a device is used by the dominant party against an underdog,

for instance against sexual or ethnic minorities, we see it as foul play, no
different from bullying. When the weapon of humor is used by the
oppressed against their oppressor, instead, it is perceived as a legitimate
means in the political arena.
In his Epistle to Augustus, the satirical poet Alexander Pope wrote that
satire “heals with morals what it hurts with wit.” Like classical satire—
from Horatius to Swift and from Juvenal to Voltaire—comedy may oper-
ate as a moral whip—castigat ridendo mores—aiming at criticizing both
human vices and social injustices. In such cases, comedy employs humor
as an ideological instrument to guide us morally to the path of the
righteous.
Yet, comicality cannot be easily reduced to humor or to satire. In the
classical Freudian interpretation, humor is understood as a subversive psy-
chic device: as Freud argues, “humor is not resigned; it is rebellious”
(Freud 2001, 163). Regarded as a social practice, comedy, on the con-
trary, reveals a much deeper ambivalence. Umberto Eco points out that,
at first sight, comedy seems to be intrinsically liberating, since it allows us
to break rules (Eco 1998). Indeed, comedy allows the uncanny to appear
while allowing us to speak about the unspeakable, to laugh at misfortune,
to turn reality upside-down. This is why, to a certain extent, in Eco’s
account comedy may be considered as exerting a transformative function
on the existing reality. But precisely insofar as it only involves a temporary
transgression, the comical relies on and strongly reaffirms the same rules it
is supposed to break. In this respect, instead of representing a way of
rebelling against norms and subverting the social order, comedy may
operate as a normative tool that can be used to impose codified roles and
social behaviors, discriminate, dominate, and eventually oppress.
Comedy, in fact, can be extremely conciliatory, and laughter—as
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer remark—can be extremely
“wrong” when it becomes a sign of surrender to the coercion of the status
quo (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002). What the carnivalesque theory of
comedy—historically perhaps most vocally argued for by Mikhail Bakhtin
(Rabelais and His World 1984), and more recently to some extent by
Simon Critchley (On Humor 2002)—does not take into account is the
fact that laughter is not in itself opposed to the dominant discourse. Quite
to the contrary, laughter and comedy can just as well serve as ideological
weapons for reinforcing the existing order of things.
1 A HEAD OR A CANNONBALL? AN INTRODUCTION TO THE OBJECT… 3
This book, however, does not concern itself with the question of the
legitimacy of comedy as a political, ideological, or moral device, nor does
it ask to what extent humor can be acceptable or improper. It rather
addresses the question of what exactly it is in the nature of comedy that
makes it appropriate for ideology in the first place. The book primarily
engages with the very structure of comedy, the structure that, entre autres,
allows it to be recognized by politics as a formidable instrument for exer-
cising power. What is it that makes comedy so useful and powerful on the
ideological battlefield? What does comedy have in common with power?
One could argue that comedy is power, and that the power of comedy
lies precisely in its ability to produce objects, in its ability to subsume the
multitude of the particular details and to round it up in a single marker, to
produce the totality with one single stroke. This may be the reason why
Hegel revered comedy and even considered it, as the only philosopher in
the entire European tradition, as above tragedy and as a quintessentially
dialectic form.
* * *
In her seminal book The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič proposes the for-
mula that comedy “puts the universal at work” and thus consists in the
becoming concrete of the universal, or in the concrete work of the univer-
sal (Zupančič 2008, 11–22). Placing the understanding and analysis of
comedy back on the agenda for contemporary critical theory, Zupančič
separates what she calls “conservative comedy” from “subversive com-
edy.” While the predominant discussion about comedy praises its capacity
to “heal”—that is, its power of delivering us from everyday routines and
from the seriousness of real concerns and real obstacles—Zupančič argues
for a comedy that does not offer merely comic relief from the tragedy of
the real world, but rather presents us with a demand for our (more) active
role in it. What she calls conservative comedy is the type of comedy that
defines itself in binary opposition with the seriousness of official language
and habits. Historical examples for this kind of comedy abound in the
culture of carnivals, where the official rules are suspended within a clearly
defined temporal and spatial framework.
Developing Hegel’s concept of comedy, a proper comic procedure,
argues Zupančič, aims at grasping the symbolic, universal function itself as
something concrete; and, we might add, as a kind of object. Jacques Lacan
famously stated that “a madman who believes he is a king is no madder
than a king that believes he is a king.” Paraphrasing Lacan, Zupančič

claims that what is truly comical is not a madman who believes he is a
king—which is the formula of conservative comedy—but precisely the
king that believes he is a king. Her point is that real comedy does not
merely result from the difference between the symbolic function of the
king (or the judge, the bishop, etc.) and the flawed human being carrying
out that function. In other words, comedy does not inhabit the gap
between a pure ideal and its necessarily failed realization, but rather the
gap or the failure within the pure ideal itself. If comedy relies on incongru-
ity, such a discrepancy does not originate when the ideal encounters real-
ity; it is rather an intrinsic character of the ideal itself.
Another of Zupančič’s striking examples is the baron who keeps falling
in the mud: what is truly comic in this routine is not the baron’s all-too-
human failure at performing the dignified symbolic function, but rather
his rising up again and again, his indestructible belief that he truly is the
baron. “This ‘baronness’ is the real comic object, produced by comedy as
the quintessence of the universal itself,” she writes (Zupančič 2008, 32).
Zupančič also draws on the concept of the object small a from Lacanian
psychoanalysis, where the term designates a certain surplus involved in the
pursuit of a subject’s goal: the immediate object of the pursuit—a lover,
for instance—is to be strictly separated from the object that emerges in the
detours of the pursuit and concerns the enjoyment brought about by the
ritual of seduction itself. In fact, what Lacan calls the “object” is an inad-
vertent by-product of the subject’s purposeful pursuit of his or her goal.
Object small a clearly has a characteristic germane to comedy. This allows
Zupančič to locate the object of comedy not outside of the subject, but
also not exactly within the subject itself. In a dense formula, she declares
that the comic object is “a surplus of a given subject or situation which is
the very embodiment of its fundamental antagonism” (Zupančič 2008,
101). We can unpack this phrase by recalling Zupančič’s own example of
the baron who keeps falling in the mud: the comic object as the surplus of
the subject—the indestructible “baronness” of the baron—is the embodi-
ment of the subject’s fundamental antagonism—of the baron’s inextin-
guishable belief that he is the baron. In Zupančič’s account, by placing the
object of comedy in the excess of subjectivity, as the by-product of the
subject’s own activity, the pleasure of comedy is not explained as a pleasure
that arises at the expense of an external target; paradoxically, comedy
reveals that a certain kind of pleasure is to be gained at the subject’s

own expense.
* * *
Through its excesses and lacks, comedy once again brings us back to
Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel takes on the task of explaining
the historical necessity of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror,
and writes:
The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too
which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty
point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all
deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swal-
lowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel 1977, 360)
Even though he is evoking cabbage heads, Hegel is clearly discussing

the guillotine and its terrifying efficiency in delivering instantaneous death.
Hegel seems to understands this terrible device as a metaphor for, or, bet-
ter, as the very image that encapsulates, the French Revolution as such.
The guillotine and what it immediately stands for—the abrupt death and
the absolute terror—is not understood as a necessary evil that accompa-
nied the historical project of emancipation, as a kind of an unfortunate
side effect of bringing about the idea of universal freedom, but precisely as
its “sole work and deed.” In a short formula, we could say that the guil-
lotine is the concrete work of the idea of universal freedom. If the image
of monarchy is the image of Louis XIV in his majestic pose, identifying his
own body with the body politic of the monarchy, then the image of uni-
versal freedom is the image of the guillotine, negating “the empty point of
the absolutely free self.” What seems to be so interesting about the image
of the guillotine is that it strikes us with an almost palpable sense that
something is missing, that something essential is absent from the picture—
something like the head. In fact, the guillotine is nothing but this absence
of the head made palpable, this void made visible. And it is precisely the
idea of the embodiment of the absence (of the head) that allows us to
apprehend this image—as strange as it may appear at first glance—as struc-
turally equivalent to the idea of the comic object as discussed above. It is
not the head (of the king) itself that is the proper comic object, but rather
the palpable absence of the head—the absence, the void, the nothingness
that has itself become a thing. In his brilliant new study Liquidation World,
Alexi Kukuljevic formulates this peculiar comic procedure from the per-
spective of the comic subject: “To make comedy requires standing in the
place of one’s own absence” (2017, 6). To come back to the powerful
image that Hegel gives us with his understanding of the French Revolution:
is the guillotine not precisely the king himself, standing in the place of his
own absence?
A publicity shot that was circulated to promote Buster Keaton’s silent
film The General (1926) shows Keaton sticking his head into the mouth of
a cannon (take a look at the cover of this book). In the large armed con-
flicts of the early stages of modernized warfare—The General takes place
during the American Civil War—regular conscripts were often reduced to
“cannon fodder.” There is nothing heroic about the lot of a conscript: he
marches onto the battlefield; he dies; the end. Keaton’s publicity shot
seems to take the idea of cannon fodder quite literally: Why even bother
with marching to the battlefield, when you can just directly feed the cannon?
The current of comedy in this visual gag runs deeper, though. There is
something strange about this publicity shot, showing us Keaton minus the
head, given that the face is an actor’s most recognizable feature and his or
her single most essential instrument, the very mask they use to perform
with. How do we even know that it is really Keaton, when we cannot see
his legendary “Great Stone Face”? The head is missing, but as if this were
not enough, there is a multiplicity of cannonballs lying around. It is clear
that we are looking at a case of a failed replacement: what should have
been the cannonball going into the mouth of the cannon turns out to be
the person’s head. This example exhibits another layer, important for the
debate about the object of comedy. Apparently, the comic object involves
not only an essential absence or lack with regard to the subject, but also a
surplus: in this case, the multiplicity of cannonballs. It is as if the embodied
absence of the head is juxtaposed with the superfluous meaninglessness
and rigidity (as well as multiplicity) of those cannonballs. The replacement
suggested by the publicity shot—the head for a cannonball—results in a
double failure, in a shortage of heads and an excess of cannonballs. This is
perhaps the very image of the object of comedy: the subject caught
between a palpable absence and an empty excess.
* * *
While inquiring into the very nature of the object of comedy, we inevitably
bump into the question: What is comedy as an object? Or, in other words,
can we think of comedy as a medium, a device, or a language, rather than
as a genre? Can we conceive of any comical paradigm that could provide a
reference for comical practices and theories in general? Is there any comi-
cal invariance that could be labeled as such beyond cultural and linguistic
differences? The present volume cannot hope to provide complete answers
to this set of questions. Instead of approaching comedy through its canon
by isolating and analyzing the distinctive quintessential traits of comedy,
this book explores and crosses boundaries between different disciplinary
fields densely inhabited by comical practices and theories—Philosophy,
Psychoanalysis, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies—and
engages with a wide range of various comical supports: from marionettes
to marriages, from the Hegelian consciousness to the Lacanian phallus,
from dirt to death.
The book is divided into four parts. Their titles should be self-
explanatory: the first part is on Comic Philosophy (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5),
the second on Comic Psychoanalysis (Chaps. 6 and 7), the third part focuses
on Screening Comedy (Chaps. 9, 10, and 11), and the fourth on Performing
Comedy (Chaps. 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16).
The Comic Philosophy part begins with a chapter by Mladen Dolar in
which the author takes on the dichotomy of comedy and tragedy in the
Western tradition and traces its philosophical significance back to the pre-
Socratic figures of the laughing Democritus and gloomy Heraclitus react-
ing to the same human condition. Instead of picking a side, comedy or
tragedy, however, or attempting, as Plato perhaps suggests in the conclu-
sion of the Symposium, to overcome the dichotomy in the general medium
of philosophy, Dolar emphasizes what he calls the parallax view, the very
gap that excludes any possible reconciliation between the two. Thus the
author suggests considering Sigmund Freud and Ernst Lubitsch as a spe-
cial exemplary case of this irreducible parallax by looking at the way in
which they both engaged with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The
Sandman” (1816), which at the very same time, in 1919, inspired Freud
in writing his famous paper on “The Uncanny” and Lubitsch in producing
his delightful comedy “The Doll.”
In Chap. 3, Sandra Laugier engages with Stanley Cavell and his well-
known work on Hollywood’s genre of the “comedy of remarriage.”
Focusing on an already constituted couple rather than addressing the pro-
cess of the constitution of a new couple, this kind of comedy illustrates the
overcoming of a separation and narrates how two lovers eventually and

happily get back together. However, by exposing it to the danger of its
dissolution, the comedy of remarriage challenges the very nature of the
couple and of its romance suspended between dream and real life. For this
reason, Laugier suggests considering the comedy of remarriage as a para-
digm through which we can understand the political dimension of mar-
riage and the romantic dimension of everyday politics.
Hegel’s rising consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit becomes the
clumsy protagonist of Jamila M. H. Mascat’s contribution (Chap. 4)
which delves into the political resonances of his phenomenological com-
edy. Faithful to its own experience of the world and the substance as well
as to its own failures, the phenomenological consciousness proves to be
both widely comical and deeply political precisely because of her being
engagé; that is, for enacting commitment to the Thing-in-itself. By focus-
ing on the key notions of experience, failure, and repetition, Mascat sug-
gests conceiving of revolutionary partisanship through the prism of
Hegelian comedy.
In the following chapter (Chap. 5), Rachel Aumiller opposes and com-
bines the traditional platonic image of Socrates as a speculative “midwife”
who aids in the birth of truth with Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates in the
Clouds, where the philosopher accidentally performs an abortion on the
verge of delivering a new concept. Aumiller claims that with the image of
the midwife-abortionist an alliance is drawn between Aristophanes and
Plato, who self-consciously mimic one another in the act of aborting the
very object of aesthetic or philosophical reflection. Thus, the author
locates in the double movement of coming-in-to-being and coming-out-
of-being a theory of subjectivity in the shape of the monstrous compound
of the aborted object and its phantom double.
The second part, Comic Psychoanalysis, opens with a chapter by Robert
Pfaller, “The Three Moments of Comedy” (Chap. 6). The contribution
engages with the aesthetic effects of comical illusion. By drawing on clas-
sical comedies such as Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and Kiss Me Stupid,
as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The 39 Steps, the paper identifies three
different logical stages of comedy with regard to the peculiar role that illu-
sion plays in comical plots—the deception of a naïve other, the deception
of the deceivers themselves (comic heroes), and the disruptive moment
when the means end up destroying the protagonists’ goals. It finally argues
that tarrying with an illusion which is not one’s own can be considered the
universal principle of cultural pleasure.
In Chap. 7, Alfie Bown considers “objectification” as a key function in

the making of modern subjectivity. The contribution focuses on how
Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times dramatizes this “objectification
of the subject” and how this becoming-object of the subject transforms
and constructs our desires. Against interpretations which see Chaplin’s
film as invested in a “true” desire that escapes or exists outside of moder-
nity, the chapter shows in a Lacanian way that actually the movie portrays
the birth of the modern subject and its modern desire by exploring how
modernity fabricates its subjects through libidinal organization. For Bown,
by making objects of desire into objects of comedy, Modern Times reveals
the structures of our desire and threatens to unseat any claims that desires
are “free” from modern regulation.
In Chap. 8, Alenka Zupančič examines the sufficiency of William James’
definition maintaining that “dirt is matter out of place.” With respect to
James’ assumption, Zupančič argues that the thesis is too short if one does
not take into account Freud’s theory of repression. The chapter then
focuses on a very particular kind of “dirt,” namely the enjoyment involved
in the practice of joking and of comedy, and shows that enjoyment, which
by definition has no place of its own but exists only at the intersection of
the subject and the Other, gets its own place in comedy, but at a price of
its paradoxical “deprivatization”: enjoyment’s room only exists as a com-
mon room—the room of comical interaction.
Benjamin Noys’ chapter on comedy and authority (Chap. 9) inaugu-
rates the third part, on Screening Comedy. His contribution analyzes Lars
von Trier’s self-declared “harmless comedy” The Boss of It All (2006),
which according to Noys offers the capacity to critique the integration of
comedy and authority; that is, an authority which presents itself as comic,
as capable of laughing at itself, but which nevertheless remains in charge.
The film does so by taking the appearance of authority seriously, and so
indicating how authority constantly displaces itself through the “comic”
masking of its function. The truth lies not beneath the mask, but in the
masks, especially the comic mask, that authority presents to us. In this way
The Boss of It All allows us to trace what Noys calls “the psychopathology
of everyday authority.”
The next chapter, by Lisa Trahair (Chap. 10), engages with the rela-
tionship between Buster Keaton’s work and the philosophy of Stoicism, in
order to analyze Keaton’s rendering of the Stoic physical universe for
comic purposes. The chapter asks whether Keaton’s work could be consid-
ered as the first evidence of “modern” Stoicism by teasing out how
Keaton’s film The General participates in and redefines Stoical ideas. In

arguing that Keaton condenses what was once a systematic conception of
the universe into a mode of behavior that implies a particular conception
of the physical world—of natural causality, everlasting recurrence, and
divine providence—she analyzes the comportment of the film’s protago-
nist in relation to the Stoic formulation of passion and reason.
In the last chapter of the third part (Chap. 11), Todd McGowan takes
bad cops as an entry point to investigate comedy and the structure of the
law. If the comic happens at the intersection of excess and lack, the law
turns out to be intrinsically comic precisely because it always delivers
excess while at the same time producing lack in the subject through pro-
hibitions and renunciations. From Creon to Spinoza via Chaplin and
Kafka—the “great comedian of the law”—McGowan’s contribution not
only maintains that the law is comic, but also reveals that comedy
needs the law.
The fourth and most extensive part, Performing Comedy, starts with a
chapter by Alexi Kukuljevic (Chap. 12), who explores the work of the
African American comedian Richard Pryor (1940–2005), whom the
author dubs the “conedian,” along the lines of Borges’ bestiary, as a trib-
ute to Pryor’s “monstrous hilarity.” Much more than a portrait, the paper
recalls through Pryor’s jokes, performances, and interviews the vulnerable
and injured humanity that inhabits his comic universe. Kukuljevic also
values Pryor’s conviction that humor, and in particular black humor, is the
only way to approach the “serious,” and shows to what extent in Pryor’s
comic art comedy is no exception to the serious.
The following contribution (Chap. 13), “Comedy as Performance” by
Gregor Moder, opens with a twofold premise: that (theatrical) perfor-
mance is always a kind of repetition, and that comedy, too, both as a liter-
ary practice as well as a practice of performance, is virtually synonymous
with repetition. Does this suffice to pursue the idea that comedy is perfor-
mative in its very nature, more so than could be said of other (theatrical)
genres? Or, conversely, does performativity (necessarily) involve an ele-
ment of comedy? Moder argues that comedy does indeed rely on the same
logic that is at work, for instance, in performance art (or live art): just as
performance art exists only as its own execution, its own performance, so
comedy only treats truth as belonging to the order of appearances, and the
original only emerges through its own repetition.
In Chap. 14, Keti Chukhrov explores the poetics of Russian artist
Alexander Vvedensky (1904–41), a member of the avant-garde art group
Oberiu that was well known at the time for its provocative performances.
Challenging traditional interpretations that focus on Vvedensky’s eschato-
logical apprehension of time from its end, through the notions of death
and void, Chukhrov provides a different reading of the dramatist and of
his work. Thus, her chapter presents Vvedensky as a poet of nonsense and
of the absurd, whose nonsensical humor always arises in the proxim-
ity of death.
Chapter 15 features a performative exchange—“Asking for it”—
between Vanessa Place and Cassandra Seltman, revolving around Place’s
performance piece “I’ve got this really funny joke about rape.” The per-
formance, in which the artist tells a series of astonishing rape jokes, seems
hardly to fit in the comic genre. Yet, as Place herself highlights, rape and
comedy share a common peculiar mechanism in relation to consent: the
rape joke works like a rape insofar as we do not consciously consent to its
comicality.
In Chap. 16, Italian theatre director and playwright Romeo Castellucci,
interviewed by Jamila M. H. Mascat, speaks about his notion of “organic
comedy” and about his understanding of comedy as such. First performed
in 1995 (and then again in 2015), his show Orestea (una commedia organ-
ica?) draws on texts by Aeschylus, Lewis Carroll, and Antonin Artaud to
embrace Oresteia’s tragic trilogy from the viewpoint of the fourth missing
piece, the satirical drama Proteus that, according to Castellucci, represents
“a comedy that weighs as three tragedies.” For Castellucci, this absent
final comedy incarnates a meaningful positioning from where one can ret-
rospectively look at the rest of the tragedy. However, such a positioning is
neither a safe space nor a cathartic one; it is rather a suspended locus that
translates the impasse of tragedy in another language and experience, the
comic one.
* * *
The present volume was conceived back in 2011 when the editors were
working as postdoctoral research fellows at the Theory Department of the
Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands. We were both
eager scholars of Hegel, interested in exploring the extent to which
Hegel’s concept of comedy was relevant in the contemporary theoretical
conjuncture, and so we enlisted another fellow of the Jan Van Eyck
Academy, Luisa L. Corna from the Design Department, to help us con-
ceive and organize a conference on “the object of comedy.” It turned out
to be a huge success, and so it was decided then and there that we would
produce a book. For various reasons the production was delayed, and thus
this volume includes significantly evolved versions of some of the papers
presented, as well as many contributions by authors who greatly shaped
the field in recent years and whose work complemented the ideas already
collected. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues
from the Jan van Eyck Academy who shared the comic enjoyment and
commitment with us, especially to Luisa L. Corna, Dhruv Jain, Katja
Kolšek, Oxana Timofeeva, Nathaniel Boyd, Michele Filippini, Tzuchien
Tho, Mladen Dolar, Katja Diefenbach, Dominiek Hoens, and to the direc-
tor Koen Brams. We thank the University of Ljubljana for kindly support-
ing this book by funding part of the research and editorial work within the
framework of the research project on the Theatricality of Power (J6-1812).
We would also like to thank the Performance Philosophy series editors
Laura Cull, Alice Lagaay, Will Daddario, and Freddie Rokem for their
insights and support, and Vicky Bates at Palgrave Macmillan for never giv-
ing up on us.
References
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World, Trans. Helene Iswolsky.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Chaplin, Charlie. 1936. Modern Times, US.
Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humor. New York: Routledge.
Eco, Umberto. 1998. The Comic and the Rule. In Faith in Fakes: Travels in
Hyperreality, Trans. William Weaver, 269–278. New York: Vintage.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Humor. In The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its
Discontents and Other Works, Vol. 21 (1927–31). Trans. James Strachey, 159–
166. London: Penguin.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. C.
Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keaton, Buster. 1926. The General, US.
Kukuljevic, Alexi. 2017. Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Von Trier, Lars. 2006. The Boss of It All, Denmark.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
PART I
Comic Philosophy
CHAPTER 2
The Uncanny and the Comic: Freud avec

Lubitsch
Mladen Dolar
Let me start with the pre-Socratics, always a good place to begin. If one
does not know where to start, then as the very last resort one can eventu-
ally always fall back on the idea of beginning at the beginning, which is
with the pre-Socratics. Heraclitus and Democritus, two of the most prom-
inent pre-Socratic philosophers, were not contemporaries—the former
died before the latter was born (Heraclitus 535–475 BC, Democritus
460–370 BC; the dating is uncertain)—but they were paired off already in
antiquity, presented as doubles of each other. Heraclitus soon acquired the
epithet Skoteinos, the obscure, the dark one, the gloomy one, while
Democritus was known as the laughing philosopher, always mocking
human follies. He was apparently called the mocker or the scoffer already
by his Abderite fellow citizens.1 Both Heraclitus and Democritus left us
with the puzzle and the predicament of their numerous fragments, the
object of close scholarly scrutiny and exegesis, but I will not pursue in any
way their philosophical work here. I am only interested in the image they
1
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (14th edition, 1989) proposes “Abderitan laugh-
ter = scoffing laughter, and Abderite = scoffer.”
M. Dolar (*)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_2
16 M. DOLAR
have cut in the Zeitgeist and in cultural history. The point of their being
presented as a couple, a didactical duo, was that they both looked at the
same human condition and misery, but this inspired the one with crying
and tears and the other with laughter. There is like a parallax between the
two: one either sees one or the other, one cannot see both at once—but
what would be the “objective” picture, the “real state of affairs” that they
looked at? Can one get to it independently of the two biased views? Should
one remedy their partiality by proposing a compromise, a synthesis, a
wider frame?
There is a whole cultural history of this doubling. At the beginning, in
the second century AD, we have two great Roman satirists mentioning
this coupling, first Juvenal (early second century) and then Lucian (125–
80), who in his delightful “Auction of Philosophers” (also known as
“Philosophers for Sale” or “Sale of Creeds”) had them being sold at auc-
tion as a couple: “One of them does nothing but laugh, and the other
might be at a funeral; he is all tears.”2 In the long history of this coupling
it turned into a kind of cliché,3 but nobody captured this commonplace
opposition better than Montaigne (in the 1590s), in one of his essays
entitled “Of Democritus and Heraclitus”:
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, find-
ing the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but
with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and com-
passion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes
filled with tears. I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh
than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than
the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we
deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the
thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think
there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity.
We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are
worthless. (Montaigne 1991, 339)
2
Democritus says, e.g., “You and your affairs are all one vast joke. […] There is no taking
it seriously. All is vanity. Mere interchange of atoms in an infinite void.” And Heraclitus: “I
am thinking, friend, upon human affairs; and well may I weep and lament, for the doom of
all is sealed. Hence my compassion and my sorrow. For the present, I think not of it; but the
future!—the future is all bitterness. Conflagration and destruction of the world” (Lucian
1905, 195).
3
Let me just mention the wonderful self-portrait of young Rembrandt in the guise of a
laughing Democritus, 1628.
2 THE UNCANNY AND THE COMIC: FREUD AVEC LUBITSCH 17
This is vintage Montaigne, with all his wit and perspicacity. Here we
have the most vivid depiction of this doubling which proposes a parallax
gap: they both look at the same picture, but they see a different image; the
same human misery inspires two opposed reactions. Is it all in the eye of
the beholder? Is the picture the same? What shift does it take to get from
one to the other? And furthermore, there is much to be made of
Montaigne’s opposition between on the one hand malice, evil, and wretch-
edness, and on the other hand vanity, stupidity, inanity, and worthlessness.
This could be read as not a bad introduction to comedy, which constantly
thrives on superficiality rather than on profundity, but which maybe
reaches further than tragedy for that very reason. It could also be an intro-
duction to Lubitsch, with whom I will deal here, the master of the comedy
of vanity, stupidity, and inanity, rather than the drama/tragedy of malice,
evil, and wretchedness.
And since I began in antiquity, let me further recall the very ending of
Plato’s Symposium, the last page, the point when only three interlocutors
are still left standing, after the night of heavy drinking: Agathon,
Aristophanes, and Socrates, the tragedian, the comedian, and the philoso-
pher. They debate, of all possible topics, the question of whether the same
person can write both comedies and tragedies: “Socrates was trying to
prove to them that authors should be able to write both comedy and trag-
edy: the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet” (223d).4
This is the question to which everything boils down at the end of the day,
or rather at the end of a very exciting night devoted to discourses on love.
The debate now involves not two emblematic philosophers, but two play-
wrights, with a philosopher as a “medium.” So for Socrates, it was essen-
tial that the parallax shift between the two views of life, tragedy and
comedy, was not to be distributed between two separate persons and atti-
tudes; the same author should be able to adopt both stances if they are to
be up to the level of their task. This shift should ultimately be the test of
4
“[Socrates] was about to clinch his argument, though, to tell the truth, sleepy as they
were, they were hardly able to follow his reasoning. In fact, Aristophanes fell asleep in the
middle of the discussion, and very soon thereafter, as day was breaking, Agathon also drifted
off” (223d.). The verge between comedy and tragedy is placed on the verge between wake-
fulness and sleep, as well as on the verge of night and day. There is a further curious detail
that the report of this discussion is curtailed: “Aristodemus [who reported on this] couldn’t
remember exactly what they were saying—he’d missed the first part of their discussion, and
he was half-asleep anyway” (Ibid.). So all we get is a cut-off bit of this discussion, much in
need of its “missing half.”
18 M. DOLAR
the author’s true capacities, their ability to inhabit precisely the gap
between the two. But can a playwright accomplish this? It rather seems
that it takes a philosopher. So one way of reading this passage is this:
what Socrates said is that only the philosopher, searching for the full and
complete “truth” […] can encompass both tragedy and comedy. Plato has
obviously set up his dialogue so that Socrates, the philosopher, has the abil-
ity to unify the tragic and the comic modes of expression. And this makes
him superior to both of the dramatists, who represent only half of this com-
plete totality because they write in one of the genres only. (Rokem 2010, 37)5
No doubt this may well be what Plato had in mind, although the pas-
sage is cryptic and we only get a fragment, a snippet of the argument. I
would rather press for another reading, against Plato’s intentions: not in
the direction that it is only the privilege of the philosopher to incorporate
two souls in their breast, but that the parallax cannot be reconciled in a
higher totality, hence the task of philosophy would rather be to address
this parallax gap between two views that cannot be simply taken as two
sides of a bigger whole.
The image of two masks, one crying and one laughing, put side by side,
serves as the emblem of the theatrical art. This goes back to the very origin
of theatre in Greece, and Greek museums and sites abound in specimens
of this doubling. Apart from tragedy and comedy there was also a third
genre in Greek theatre, the satyr play, but only one survives and it never
deserved a separate image. Why just two masks, two attitudes, two oppo-
site takes, two perspectives? With the multifaceted expansiveness and infi-
nite diversity of human experience, how come there are only two, tragedy
and comedy? No doubt the development of theatre, particularly in mod-
ern times, brought a vast variety of genres, addressing the multiplicity of
5
Rokem’s book provides an excellent and ample commentary on this passage. Curiously,
Leo Strauss took a very different view, based on a close scrutiny of Aristophanes’ work and
adopting his perspective: “The second trait that, according to Aristophanes, distinguishes
Socrates from the poets is his ineptitude in judging human beings and in handling them. The
man who above everything else worries about the things aloft has a very inadequate knowl-
edge of the manners and souls of the various kinds of men: From on high one does not see
human beings as they are […]. Socrates, one may say, is a leader of souls […] without being
the knower of souls” (Strauss 1996, 313). Thus poets, both in tragedy and (particularly) in
comedy, can see what philosophers cannot; philosophy’s limitation would precisely be its all-
encompassing stance “from above.” Philosophy’s fault would thus be to purport to be a
meta-genre, disavowing its being a genre, actually in its loftiness an inferior one.
shades between the two extremes, but it can be argued that the dual take
of two basic paradigms still holds, the manifold multiplicity is permeated
and ultimately conditioned by this division and the tension between two
ultimately irreconcilable perspectives. Maybe the bottom line of (our
western) theatre, despite all the proliferating shades and nuances, is this:
there is a parallax. No fifty shades of gray in between can bridge this gap.
As an aside, this is not so in other cultures. Borges, in a wonderful story
“Averroës’ Search”, tells us of Averroës, the great Arab philosopher from
the twelfth century, who was one of the most prolific and astute commen-
tators on Aristotle’s work. The great connoisseur nevertheless could not
make sense of some passages:
The night before, two doubtful words had halted him at the very portals of
[Aristotle’s] Poetics. Those words were “tragedy” and “comedy”. He had
come across them years earlier in the third book of the Rhetoric. No one in
all of Islam could hazard a guess as to their meaning. […] Yet the two arcane
words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics—it was impossible to avoid
them. (Borges 1998, 240)
We hardly ever think about this duality being special and specific to our
tradition. Is our view more limited or rather enhanced by this strange
“binary code”? And what does it mean to be caught in these two, ulti-
mately irreconcilable viewpoints? Since one cannot expand on this crucial
duality in the abstract, let me take up a particular case which may cast
some light on it.
Let me jump over several millennia and look at the fall of 1919, and
propose Sigmund Freud and Ernst Lubitsch as the new avatar of this par-
allax gap. On the one hand Lubitsch the great comedian, on the other not
quite a tragedian, but someone who definitely sounds gloomy and serious
in tone. Indeed psychoanalysis, with its heavy reliance on Oedipus,
Antigone (Lacan), and Hamlet as the paradigms of human desire, seems
to have adopted the tragic setting as the model of the human condition.6
By the oddest of coincidences, both Freud and Lubitsch looked at the very
same object at the very same time, in the autumn of 1919, namely at E. T.
A. Hoffmann’s notorious and very famous story “The Sandman,” written
6
I guess deceptively so—and Alenka Zupančič’s book on comedy (2008a) is a great
attempt to argue for comedy as the attitude which comes ultimately closer to the psychoana-
lytic basic insights. All subsequent work on comedy is indebted to her path-breaking book.
The present chapter is but an attempt to further embroider the issue.
20 M. DOLAR
almost exactly a century earlier, in 1816, at the heyday of romanticism.

Freud treated it at length in his (again) notorious and very famous paper
“Das Unheimliche,” “The Uncanny,” published in autumn 1919 in
Imago; Lubitsch in his film Die Puppe, premiered on 4 December 1919. It
looks as if this story made one weep and the other laugh—but are they on
opposite strands? Can one say Freud the Skoteinos, the gloomy Heraclitus,
and Lubitsch the scoffer, the laughing Democritus? Something is perhaps
amiss in this too easy picture.
Lubitsch started his film career as a director during World War I in
Berlin, at first making some short farces and sketches which often served
for the entertainment of German troops on various fronts.7 By the end of
the war Lubitsch was so flourishing and established as a film-maker that in
1919 he shot no fewer than six films,8 among them at least two very suc-
cessful ones. To finish off this very productive and auspicious year there is
Die Puppe, The Doll. It starred Ossi Oswalda, one of his first muses, along
with Pola Negri, on the long road that will lead him to the biggest divas,
Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Carol Lombard. In July 1947, a few
months before his death, Lubitsch gave a retrospective appraisal of his
career in an interview and about Die Puppe he said the following: “Bis
heute halte ich diesen Film für einen der einfallsreichsten, die ich je gedreht
habe.” “Up to this date I hold this film to be one of the most imaginative/
inventive/inspired among all that I have made.”9 As far the production
goes, one cannot compare it with his later lavish, sophisticated Hollywood
productions (here we have cardboard scenery and very modest technical
means), yet it was still one of the closest to his heart—and one has to trust
him on his word.
7
His oldest existing movie, Als ich tot war, As I Was Dead (1916), was actually found in
Slovenia, of all places, in 1992, given that one of the biggest fronts was on the Soča river. A
single specimen survived in an attic.
8
Actually eight, if we consider the two that premiered in January 1919 and were produced
in 1918. The great successes were Die Austernprinzessin, The Oyster Princess—a vintage
Lubitsch to the point that on his memorial plaque in Berlin only the three most memorable
films are mentioned, Die Austernprinzessin, Ninotchka, and To Be or Not to Be. The other one
was Madame Dubarry, a costume piece, a historical spectacle set in the time of the French
revolution, which was his first big international success (in America, too: this was one of the
films that led to the American invitation in 1923).
9
Already in 1921, when he had attained a wide reputation, he looked back on his career so
far and said: “Possibly I like a little fantastic film of mine, The Doll, best of all” (Lubitsch
quoted in Eyman 1993, 66).
He co-wrote the screenplay with Hanns Kräly, his regular collaborator

at the time. Lubitsch practically always based his films on already existing
stories, bestsellers, commercially successful novels, plays and operettas
(except for To Be or Not to Be, which was for once his own brainchild, the
only exception). But in his career he never touched anything so ambitious,
a model taken from canonical high literature,10 as Hoffmann’s “The
Sandman,” one of the most celebrated and paradigmatic German short
stories, an obligatory item on every standard reading list, something of a
German national myth. The story is impossible to summarize, for its
extraordinary power is all in the way it is told. Still, I can try to give some
basic pointers, in a condensed paragraph, as compressed as I can make it.
It is like there are three acts. Act one: the student Nathanael was
plagued by a great childhood trauma, which he recounts in letters to a
friend. The sandman, a mythical figure from folklore, is supposed to sprin-
kle sand into children’s eyes so that they fall asleep. This is a bedtime story
and the sandman is usually a benevolent character—it appears as such in
Hans Christian Andersen—but Hoffmann evoked its uncanny flipside.
The nanny told poor Nathanael that the sandman sprinkled the sand into
the eyes of children who do not want sleep “so that they [the eyes] start
out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them
to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up
there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes
of naughty human children.”11 Nathanael as a child identified this sand-
man figure with the old advocate Coppelius who used to visit his father
late at night, the two of them seemingly engaged in occult business,
alchemy, magic. When Nathanael once tried to observe their dealings
from a hidden place, he was caught and Coppelius did indeed try to pluck
out his eyes. There was an accident, apparently caused by their magic
experiments, and as a consequence his father died, Nathanael firmly believ-
ing that he was killed by Coppelius. (There we have it, the myth of the
murder of the father, delegated on the sandman Coppelius.) But in the
10
If one does not count the two Shakespeare parodies that immediately followed Die
Puppe: Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920), a parody of The Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo und Julia
im Schnee (1920), a parody of Romeo and Juliet. Apparently Die Puppe gave him a taste for
poking fun at “great literature,” but not for long.
11
Gruesome nannies evoke Struwwelpeter, which was written by another Hoffmann,
namely Heinrich Hoffmann, in 1845, and was one of the most popular German educational
books. It is now widely known due to The Tiger Lillies and their adaptation, Shockheaded
Peter, in 1998. It makes one wonder about German special education methods!
22 M. DOLAR
years to follow the trauma was forgotten and everything seemed to be

going well, particularly once he years later met his fiancée Clara (the
clear one).
Act two. Nathanael is a student, studying physics with Professor
Spalanzani, and there appears an Italian optician and merchant Coppola
(hmm, Apocalypse Now?) whom he believes to be the reincarnation of the
same evil man from his childhood. This Coppola sells him a small tele-
scope, with which he then starts to observe the young lady opposite,
namely Spalanzani’s beautiful daughter Olympia. She seems to be very
quiet and withdrawn, but Nathanael falls madly in love with her. He
dances with her at a party, listens to her singing; he starts visiting her in the
evenings, having lengthy amorous conversations during which he is almost
the sole speaker while she is very reticent, uttering just a few words here
and there. He wants to marry her—but then it turns out that Olympia is
an automaton, die Puppe, carefully designed and pieced together by
Spalanzani (it took him twenty years), while Coppola provided the hardest
part, namely her eyes. There is a struggle between the two men (Coppola
and Spalanzani), during which the doll falls apart, Coppola throws her
eyes at Nathanael claiming that these were his own eyes, whereupon
Nathanael sinks into madness.
Act three. After a very long illness Nathanael eventually recuperates his
forces and his senses. He rejoins his beloved Clara, and there is the pros-
pect of a future happy life. But when they take a walk in the town, they
climb on a tower and from there Nathanael suddenly sees again the
accursed Coppelius/Coppola, and in a fit of madness he finally throws
himself from the parapet.
In this very peculiar and singular story, the second part was the one that
fueled most reactions and imagination. A young man falls in love with a
beautiful young girl who turns out to be an automaton. If the story is
gruesome, indeed unheimlich (offering an easy clue to Freud), then this
second part presents a sort of counterpart to the uncanny setting. The
middle episode has also all the makings of an incipient comedy, a social
satire, an allegory—already in the story a professor by-stander comments
on this incident: “Ladies and gentlemen, do you not perceive where the
trick lies? It is all an allegory—a sustained metaphor.” This middle episode
turned into a true success story: in 1852 there was the first opera based on
this story, La poupée de Nuremberg, composed by Adolphe Adam, a pro-
lific French opera composer of some standing (his ballet Giselle, 1843, is
still a standard piece today). Then in 1870 his pupil Léo Delibes composed
the ballet Coppélia, still part of the standard ballet repertoire, based on this
story. Then most famously Jacques Offenbach based the first (and the
most famous) act of his opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (1881), The Tales of
Hoffmann, on the Olympia episode. At the end of the century, during
which the Olympia story seemed to be the buzzword and a commonplace,
we have the operetta La poupée composed by Edmond Audran, a very suc-
cessful follower of Offenbach, carrying on his spirit. That brings us to
Lubitsch, who was the man of operetta—think of The Merry Widow
(1934), think of his initiation of the musical comedy as a genre, Love
Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), and so on. The moment the sound
film was invented, Lubitsch wasted no time and proceeded to invent the
musical comedy, the film operetta, as early as 1929. So it comes as no sur-
prise that Lubitsch took his cue from Audran’s operetta version. The inge-
nious shift (and this is indeed a stroke of genius) on which the Lubitsch
movie is based stems from the librettist of the Audran operetta, Maurice
Ordonneau, an unsung genius in need of appraisal.12 Lubitsch thus took
as the model the last version of the Olympia story, after its numerous ava-
tars during the nineteenth century.
Freud, in his 1919 paper, exhaustively deals with the uncanny, das
Unheimliche, introducing this notion, this dimension, as a term that can
serve as an introduction to psychoanalysis in general, a sort of condensa-
tion or a focal point of its various efforts and concepts.13 The German
word has the fortunate property that it stems from heimlich, which cur-
rently means secret, but originally meant homely, familiar, so its negation
would be “unhomely,” something disrupting home and homeliness from
within, the short-circuit between an external frightening threat and the
most shielded intimate interiority. Freud famously gives a major state-
ment, a kind of definition: “The uncanny is that class of the frightening
which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 1985,
PFL 14, 340). Translation into any other language is difficult, although
12
In the credits of the movie, and then in filmographies, we find an Alfred Maria Willner
as the author of the adaptation of the story, which is misinformation. Willner was merely the
German translator of the French operetta libretto, and this is the text that Lubitsch had in
his hands; one cannot to ascribe any authorship to Willner.
13
I started with some general considerations of the tragic and the comic paradigm. One
has to add that das Unheimliche presents a specific modern turn, emerging in the early nine-
teenth century, in the aftermath of the French revolution, and cannot be simply subsumed
under the tragic tradition, despite the fact that all these stories invariably have a tragic
ending.
24 M. DOLAR
English fares pretty well with the term uncanny. The French is less fortu-
nate, but Lacan invented a great term that captures it and also makes it
available to many languages: the extimate. The externality in the very inti-
mate—the major claim that can follow from there is that the extimate is
perhaps what defines the human condition as such. No being human with-
out the extimate. Freud approaches this dimension in various ways, and
one of the privileged examples of the uncanny is the uncertainty of the line
between what is alive and what is dead. The living dead, zombies, vam-
pires, the undead, and so on—there is a long list of phenomena that the
horror movies have amply exploited ad nauseam. If one cannot draw a
clear line between the dead and the living, then what appears at the edge
between the two, in the area of overlap, is endowed with uncanniness—
something dead at the core of what is alive, something alive at the core of
what seems dead. This uncertainty was of key importance for Ernst
Jentsch, Freud’s only predecessor in this field of “uncanniness studies,”14
who wrote a paper “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” in 1906 which
served as inspiration for Freud. It was Jentsch who actually brought up the
sandman story and Olympia; Freud was following his cue. Yet Freud is not
convinced that this blurring of the line between dead and alive can really
be the key:
But I cannot think […] that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all
appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most
important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled
atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere
heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia
with a faint touch of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s ideal-
ization of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary,
something different, something which gives it its name, and which is always
re-introduced at critical moments: it is the theme of the “Sand-man” who
tears out children’s eyes. (348)
Thus, to follow Freud, it is misleading to focus on the blurred line

between the living and the dead, the automaton which appears to be alive,
and so on—this is rather the part where the comedy and the satire come
in. This episode is actually an entertaining interlude where the uncanny
14
It has become an expansive field in the last decades, but one can perhaps single out in
particular two monographs: Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (2003), and Anneleen Masschelein,
The Unconcept, (2011). There is a lot more.
swings for a moment onto the side of the comical—what could be more
comical than a young lover confessing his everlasting love to a doll? For
Freud the key must be sought elsewhere, in the prevailing motif of the
eyes, the loss of eyes, the tearing out of the eyes, and so on. This is the
theme which for Freud immediately evokes castration, the loss of the most
vital and the most intimate, the cutting off, the partial objects. There is a
long history to this connection—just think of Oedipus blinding himself,
to take this massive example, with castration being the proper punishment
for incest. And Freud also speaks of severed limbs in his paper as the major
source of uncanniness, precisely because they are the evocation of castra-
tion. Furthermore, the sandman figure, responsible for the death of the
good father, evokes the figure of the terrible father, the primal father,
heavily threatening with castration. So if there is a key to the whole, this is
at least one major part of Freud’s argument, then it is the castration anxi-
ety constantly lurking behind the scenes, and the Olympia episode is
framed by it. After all, Coppola co-authored the doll, he provided its
essential part, the eyes, and he sold Nathanael the telescope, he provided
the viewpoint for his gaze, framing the doll for his gaze, his infatuation
was due to a trap set up by Coppola. What Freud seems to be ultimately
saying is that there is a choice, or a parallax shift: either you go for the
Olympia episode, but then you lose the key to the uncanny, castration, and
so on; or else you focus on the uncanny, but then the Olympia episode
appears rather as comic relief, a side-show, a diversion, a relief from anxi-
ety, a step away from what we ought to do, to look the uncanny straight
in the face, as it were.
Indeed, the Olympia episode, if isolated from this framing, has by itself
all the makings of a comedy. The doll appears as a screen on which one can
project one’s heart’s desires, passion and love. There is a strange reversal
in this situation. The problem is not simply that Olympia turns out to be
an automaton, it is Nathanael who strangely reacts in a mechanical way:
his love for an automaton is itself as if automatic, his fiery feelings as if
mechanically produced; “his senseless compulsory [zwanghafte] love for
Olympia,” says Freud (354). It takes so little to set up that blank screen
from which he only receives his own message. The appearance of the
automaton calls for an automatic response, it entails an automatic subjec-
tivation. Hoffmann’s ironical twist, the social parody implied in the epi-
sode, first highlights the role socially assigned to the woman: it is enough
to be there, at most to utter an “Ah!” at the appropriate moment to pro-
duce that specter of The Woman. But this is not just about women, for the
26 M. DOLAR
mechanical doll then further highlights the mechanical character of “inter-

subjective” relations, including the most intimate ones.15 When the doll
appears it is we who seem to turn into mechanical dolls.
But this is the proper terrain of comedy. In comedy, by one of its key
features, the complexity of human relations is reduced to the superficiality
of a mechanism, persons are like dolls driven by mechanical springs: instead
of a living organism, a mere mechanism; instead of the depths of the
human heart, automatism and repetition. This perspective runs parallel to
Freud’s focus on extracted eyes, castration, the uncanny, the focus that
points toward the depth, the unfathomable horror, the anxiety, the ghastly,
the unspeakable.
Freud in the first part of his paper quotes Schelling’s definition of the
uncanny: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for something that ought to have
remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (345). This is to my
knowledge the only time that Freud quotes Schelling and this is the one
definition of the uncanny that he finds useful and intriguing, the only one
to which he comes back later in the paper (364)—for once there is a phi-
losopher who seems to meet his approval. The object that ought to have
remained concealed comes to the fore in the guise of the extracted eyes,
the partial objects, of the sandman figure himself, and once this object
appears it has the capacity to disrupt the familiar reality, it “de-homes” the
home, and it drives one into madness. One way to deal with it in its very
uncanniness is to claim that this is supernatural and fantastic: one trans-
lates it into the sphere of the imaginary, the unreal, the fairy-tale, and, to
use the Hoffmannian word, the sphere of the fantastic.16 If it is fantastic,
then it is already dealt with in a way, it is assigned a place outside of com-
mon reality where other rules apply. But the uncanny proper emerges pre-
cisely when we cannot place it either in the fantastic or in the common
objective reality, when we cannot assign it a place, its status cannot be
decided, and this is what derails the experience and disrupts reality. The
15
This is the feature exploited by the position of the analyst: the analyst, too, utters at the
most an “Ah!” here and there, he turns into an automaton to give rise to the dimension of
the Other, the real interlocutor of the patient’s “monologue,” and also to produce that
strange kind of love, perhaps love in its paramount sense, which is what Freud called transfer-
ence love. Nathanael’s lengthy conversations with Olympia prefigure the analytic sessions.
16
“Hoffmann’s fantastic tales,” as the phrase goes. Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier was
the title of his first book that made his fame in 1814, while “The Sandman” story belongs to
the volume Die Nachtstücke, 1815–16.
extra-natural happens, but in a mode which is neither fantastic nor objec-

tively verifiable.
One crucial thing: in the Schelling definition of the uncanny, some-
thing appears that should have remained hidden—but what is it that
should have been secret and not come to light? To address this properly
one should maintain that it is not some positive element that can be pinned
down and described, it is rather that the uncanny objects that appear can
take different shapes (partial objects, dead/undead, the double, uncanny
coincidences etc., to follow Freud’s list). What they have in common is
that they evoke no positive reality of existing things, but a void, a constitu-
tive lack, a lack constitutive of reality, which does not have a shape or
existence. They all point to something that is excluded from the consti-
tuted reality, but they can only evoke it, give shape to something that has
no shape in itself. It is not some other reality that they evoke, different
from the usual one—this would then fall into the category of the fantastic;
nor do they evoke simply something existing that happens to be hidden.
This is where Lacan’s theory of anxiety offers the most handy and eco-
nomical formula: the lack comes to lack. It is not that in anxiety one fears
being deprived of something—this is what castration anxiety seems to
imply; the true object of anxiety is that we get something too much, some-
thing comes too close, we cannot keep it at bay, we cannot take our usual
support in the lack. Thus, castration anxiety would ultimately be not the
anxiety of castration, but the anxiety of losing the support of castration.
The lack, implied by castration, protects our reality, and if it comes to lack,
if the lack appears in the guise of an object evoking it, then one loses one’s
bearings. The uncanny stories, including “The Sandman,” invariably finish
badly: the prospect is madness, suicide, annihilation of the subject.17
But again, if we say that the uncanny emerges when “the impossible
happens,” then this is also what describes the proper terrain of comedy, its
elementary setting: the most improbable happens and keeps happening, it
cannot stop, there are series of implausible coincidences, and everything
miraculously succeeds at the end (what Robert Pfaller called das Prinzip
des Gelingens, the principle of success of the most unlikely: one succeeds
too much in comedies). The inanimate mechanism inhabiting the living is
revealed, there is mechanical repetition, the partial objects keep flying
around—but none of this produces horror or annihilation. The impossible
keeps happening, over and over again, relentlessly, yet this does not
I tried to argue all this at more length in my old paper on the uncanny, see Dolar (1991).
17
28 M. DOLAR
rovoke anxiety but laughter. Instead of the fatal eclipse of the subject
p
faced with the uncanny (madness, suicide), there is like a reinvention of a
subject—following from the same constellation.
Freud maintains, to give the gist, that the Olympia story is like a comic
insert, comic relief in the midst of the uncanny story of Nathanael,
Coppelius-sandman, castration, plucked-out eyes, the murder of the
father, in the midst of heavyweight psychoanalysis, and as such a digres-
sion, a deviation from the uncanny proper. It is like a straying away which
does not quite depart from the main axis, but nevertheless offers relief
from the terrible pressure of the uncanny, a side perspective, “looking
awry.” Yet, with the notion of comic relief, one cannot but be reminded
of Lubitsch’s emphatic statement (apropos of To Be or Not to Be):
I was tired of the two established, recognized recipes, drama with comedy
relief, and comedy with dramatic relief. I made up my mind to make a pic-
ture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything, at any time. (Quoted
in Barnes 2002, 55)
This is a wonderful formula: comic relief without relief, a relentless

comic relief. It takes comic relief as the lever which does not divert us from
the serious business of the uncanny, but offers a side perspective which
perhaps enables us to see something that the front view cannot quite see
(it rather pushes the subject into madness and catastrophe). There is an
elementary parallax shift between the front view and the side view. Turning
this comic episode into the main theme is not an evasion or disavowal of
the “tragic” theme of castration, but instead taking it as a lever that allows
for a shift of perspective. The cut is thereby not filled or obfuscated, but
perpetuated as the driving force of comedy.
In psychoanalytic terms, both tragedy and comedy deal with castration,
but they offer two very different perspectives on it. On the face of it castra-
tion is tragic: the very term evokes a loss, a crippling, a cut, an injury, a
lack. But the basic asset of psychoanalytic theory is also that castration is
not simply a loss, it involves a gain, something that conditions subjectivity
and opens up its possibility. Can this be the way to conceive the parallax
shift that we are after? The tragic view of the loss versus the comic view of
the gain through this loss? This would be too simple. In both cases, the
uncanny and the comic, castration has to do not simply with a loss, but
with a gain. The problem with castration in psychoanalysis is always that
we get something too much—to be sure, there is a loss, we are cut off
from something, there is a minus, but the place of the lack is also the place
where we get a surplus, an excess. The trouble is that this surplus cannot
fill the lack; it is rather something that cannot be placed, it has no proper
place, it is an object in excess, in excess in regard to the usual reality and
common life (if such a thing existed). What we lose is always “compen-
sated,” as it were, but this does not solve the problem, which instead only
starts there. There is more than we can deal with (a constitutive “too-
muchness,” to use Eric Santner’s term). There is “too much” of repeti-
tion, of the mechanical in the living, of partial objects in both the uncanny
and the comic, and these excessive elements come to flock in the topologi-
cal space of a cut, a lack. Perhaps the simplest way to account for the shift
between the two could be to refer it to the very basic shift in psychoanaly-
sis between desire and drive. Desire is the heroism of the lack (no object
can measure up to the negativity of desire and satisfy it), the yearning for
the Thing forever lost—but if the Thing appears then the lack comes to
lack and the reality crumbles, along with the desiring subject that sus-
tained it, in the abyss of the uncanny. Drive, as opposed to desire, deals
with the satisfaction that one always gets, whether one wants to or not,
but one always gets it in a dislocated way, from unexpected and wrong
quarters, which makes for the comedy of it. The tragedy of desire versus
the comedy of the drive?18 But this is not to say that one can opt for one
or the other; both are essential for the human condition and one has to
address the shift between the two, without collapsing them and without
turning them into two supplementing parts of a bigger whole. I must
leave it here with these not quite satisfactory formulas.19
18
When dealing with comedy we all follow in Zupančič’s footsteps: “It is the logic of con-
stitutive dislocation (as immanent nothing) that links the comedy to the dynamics of the
drives, and distinguishes it from the uncanny, which is bound to the dynamic of desire with
its logic of constitutive lack (as transcendent nothing)” (2008b, 75).
19
Robert Pfaller proposed an elegant formula for the distinction between the comic and
the uncanny: the comic is what is uncanny for others (Pfaller 2005, 209). His picturesque
example is the case of the sneezing corpse: if an actor who is supposed to be dead on stage
sneezes, this would produce hearty laughter. The assumption of this laughter is the fictional
“naïve observer” who would take the theatrical fiction for reality and for whom such an event
would indeed appear as uncanny. What we laugh at is the observer to whom we have dele-
gated the belief in the reality of fiction. Zupančič retorted that what we delegate in this
instance of a naïve observer is not the belief, but the knowledge which can discriminate
between theatrical fiction and reality, and having deposited this knowledge with the Other
we can believe in the theatrical illusion: “As long as the big Other knows that this is only a
play and not reality, I can believe it is reality” (2008b, 66). Thus we would have two Others:
30 M. DOLAR
Lubitsch’s Die Puppe comes close to the gist of comedy, not by simply
taking the comic relief of the Olympia story and disentangling it from the
uncanny frame, but by giving this story another twist, a double inversion,
as it were. Lancelot, the hero of the movie (with all the pedigree of the
King Arthur legend, the knights of the round table etc.), has the opposite
problem in regard to Nathanael: he does not want to marry, he does not
want to fall in love, he does not care for women, he tries hard to escape
them, to the point of taking refuge in a monastery. But he wants to get his
rich uncle’s inheritance, and according to his uncle’s will the condition for
getting it is his getting married, so that the family will breed and prosper
(which also makes him particularly interesting as a prospective bride-
groom). What he wants, in order to fulfill the condition, would ideally be
to marry a doll; he longs for a woman who would be merely an empty
screen. This is where the master Hilarius comes in (the hilarious reincarna-
tion of Spalanzani and Coppola), the virtuoso doll-maker, whose expertise
is to produce dolls for “bachelors, widowers and misogynists,” those who
want to have a woman (for whatever social reasons) without all the trou-
bles attached to women—the doll is the woman minus the Other. All is
arranged for the best, but at the crucial moment before the planned wed-
ding the doll gets broken, so that now the doll-maker’s daughter has to
step in to play the role of the doll, just for the ceremony. The girl’s prob-
lem is exactly the opposite of Olympia’s: how to convincingly play a doll.
On the one hand is the automaton designed to be human-like; on the
other, the lively woman endeavoring to be machine-like. So Lancelot
believes he has to do with a doll, not knowing that this is a woman, a very
lively one at that—this is why the girl has a lot of problems with her
mechanical role. Olympia could sing and dance, but in a very mechanical
way, keeping her beat too accurately, but for the girl it is very hard to
squeeze her vivacious feminine nature into a lifeless beat. The sandman
was der Störer der Liebe, says Freud, a disturber of love (1985, 353), the
obstacle, a stumbling block, but here the doll appears as the facilitator, the
catalyst of love—love could not be brought about without the detour of
the mechanical doll. It is not the immediacy of feelings and affection, the
the one who believes (and takes the theatrical illusion for reality) and the one who knows
(that there is a firm demarcation line between the two). The situation is perhaps more trou-
bling if we consider that “there is no Other of the Other,” to take Lacan’s dictum, so “that
the two others tend to collapse, that the other and the Other are easily confounded […] The
other who believes and the other who knows cannot be quite held apart” (Dolar 2017, 581).
This threatening collapse caused a major problem for Plato and his take on mimesis, what
one could call his panic. It is not easy to disentangle knowledge and belief.
depth of passion, the infatuation, but the comedy of impersonating the

mechanism (the immechanization of a person rather than impersonation).
Love? They will make do “Ungefer,” which is the name of the registrar on
their marriage certificate, ungefähr—just about, roughly, more or less,
give or take.
A quarter of a century ago I wrote a paper on the uncanny with the title
“I shall be with you on your wedding-night” (October vol. 58, autumn
1991), the words of the creature created by Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s
novel (written in 1818, two years after Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” in
what one could call “the era of the uncanny”). This is the sentence that
the creature (mark that he is nameless) launches at his creator, announcing
his revenge—and he will keep his promise, he will indeed turn Frankenstein’s
wedding-night into a catastrophe, carnage. And here we have the flipside
of this same sentence; one can imagine that it could be put into the mouth
of this girl-doll, if she were allowed to speak. She is indeed a version, a
double, of Frankenstein’s creature, the living creature hatched from the
lifeless automaton. She could very well say “I shall be with you on your
wedding-night,” and she too will keep her promise.
Henri Bergson’s famous theory of the comical has it that the ultimate
source of the comical is “le mécanique plaqué sur le vivant,” the mechani-
cal encrusted upon the living. Something alive behaves like a machine,
with the tics, repetitions, replication, automatism. The comic character is
as if mechanically driven by a single impetus (and this is, by the way, why
for Bergson every character is ultimately comical; character is the comical
part of the supposedly unique and ineffable personality). It looks like this
film embodies Bergson’s theory to perfection, as its crown exhibit: the
mechanical doll is very literally encrusted upon the sprightly young
woman, her liveliness at all times lurks within the automaton and produces
its “symptoms.” Life is the symptom of the machine, something it cannot
quite contain, and the tension between the two, the animated life and the
soulless machine, seems to be the key to the whole. But is this enough? Is
the spring of comedy the affirmation of life that ultimately cannot be
squeezed into a mold? Bergson would no doubt be happy with this film,
with his belief in the élan vital, the unrepeatable potent life force as
opposed to the mechanical, to the automatism standing in external oppo-
sition to it. But we can be less happy: maybe it is precisely this externality
that comedy constantly puts into question, displaying the impossibility of
setting them up in an external opposition, as two realms foreign and
extraneous to each other. The trouble is that they cannot do without each
other, so that there is ultimately no life force without the automaton at its
32 M. DOLAR
core. I cannot do better than to quote Zupančič, who developed this mag-
isterially in her book on comedy:
How is it that liveliness (or the impression of liveliness) can emerge at the
very core of the mechanical, and the mechanical at the very core of life?
How can the mechanical itself function as belonging to an essential feature
of (“organic”) life itself, of its inner impulse or drive? Or of that “indestruc-
tibility of life” that is so often mentioned in relation to comedy? (Zupančič
2008a, 125)
Here we are: is the mechanical at the core of life not precisely what
Freud called der Trieb, the drive? That which drives life, an excess of life,
“larger than life,” in life more than life, but without which life could not
subsist? Ultimately the drive, and more pointedly what Freud called the
death drive, Todestrieb, is precisely this amalgamation of the mechanical
and the excess of life, a too-muchness of life, a surplus of life that quasi-
mechanically asserts itself. Was not one of the indications which pushed
Freud to the death-drive hypothesis precisely the compulsion to repeat, at
the very core of life? Thus, the object of comedy would ultimately be the
death drive. Another quote:
it is not that there is a pure life vigor, a “basic instinct/drive” of life that
keeps encountering different obstacles […] that try to tame, suppress, and
repress it, or to make it uniform. It is not that some lively and vivid spirit
would constantly have to find its way around the dead letter which impedes
it. What is at stake is that the spirit itself comes to life only with the (dead)
letter, that vivacity as such emerges only with the repetition, and does not
exist outside of prior to it. (Ibid.)
In this light I would like to consider Lubitsch’s masterpiece: not as the

young woman compelled into the role of a doll, but through the way by
which the automaton enables life and love. All the figures in this movie are
driven by a mechanical impetus: the monks uniformly driven by gluttony
and greed (like a new version of Rabelais),20 the clichéd jealous mother,
the old Chanterelle with the mechanical gulping of medicine, forty women
20
The film was well received at the time, except for the extremely negative reviews in the
Catholic press: “The content of this concoction which exhibits the low-point of our contem-
porary cinema by a sad example, is in its whole course nothing else but a shameless mockery
of the life of catholic orders” (Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Puppe).
in a frenzied pursuit of inheritance, the self-engrossed Hilarius, the inge-

nious young assistant—all of them are like the figures of commedia
dell’arte, like puppets mechanically propelled by a single push which
mechanically asserts and imposes itself, all of them automata (not soulless,
this impetus is their soul), all impelled by a compulsion to repeat, driven
by a uniform relentless and inexorable force. This is what troubles Bergson:
that the comedy does not deal with the unique, unrepeatable live person-
ality, but with the generic, the stereotype, the reduction of the complexity
of personalities and feelings to a single quasi-mechanical spring. The
young girl is actually the most non-stereotypical of all, the closest to a
“unique personality,” but it is she who has to assume the role of the
automaton, paradoxically thereby opening the space of love—not as some-
thing authentically uniquely human beyond all automatisms, but as some-
thing that is enabled and artificially contrived by the automatism. Lubitsch,
in the astounding scene that opens the movie, appears for the only time in
his career in the role of a puppeteer: he sets up the cardboard scenery, he
is the master puppeteer, indicating that we will be dealing with a theatre
of marionettes.21
No doubt Lubitsch’s Die Puppe can be taken as a comic pendant to
Freud’s serious involvement with the uncanny, but if there is a lesson to be
learned from Lubitsch then it is that one must take comic relief without
relief, with no relief from relief. Thus, the comic side perspective can per-
haps teach us more than the direct view of the uncanny—the latter leads
to madness and destruction, to evil and the diabolical. But here we should
be reminded of Montaigne’s lesson that opposes evil and inanity, wretch-
edness and vanity, maintaining that we get closer to the core by what
seems more superficial, by inanity rather than by the gravity and fateful-
ness of evil; by the superficiality, triviality, and inauthenticity, or by the
authenticity of the thoroughly contrived.
So Heraclitus or Democritus? For whom does our heart beat? Do we
have to choose? Freud or Lubitsch? One should by all means add that
Freud was not merely the man of the uncanny, but also the man of Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), someone coming close to
the Socratic ideal of the same author writing comedies and tragedies, or at
21
If we are to follow Kleist’s famous piece on Marionettentheater, then the marionettes
lead us directly to the core of the human. Their advantage is the absence of consciousness
and self-reflection, which is not unrelated to the comic figures in their mechanical drivenness.
Kleist wrote his piece in 1810, in the same historical moment as Hoffmann’s Sandman.
34 M. DOLAR
least being able to thoroughly adopt both views. I have tried to describe
the parallax shift between the two views by a series of oppositions: side
view versus direct view; surface versus depth; inanity versus evil; drive ver-
sus desire; generic versus individuality. They offer different perspectives on
our problem, different viewpoints from which to consider it, without
quite resolving it. And this is not a choice where one would have to, or
where one could, simply opt for the one or the other, for they subsist only
in their tension. It is the parallactic shift itself that detains the clue, the
shift where our scrutiny has to persevere.
References
Barnes, Peter. 2002. To Be or Not to Be. London: BFI.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1998. Collected Fictions, Trans. A. Hurley. New York: Penguin.
Dolar, Mladen. 1991. ‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and
the Uncanny. October 58 (Autumn): 5–23.
———. 2017. The Comic Mimesis. Critical Inquiry 43 (2): 570–589.
Eyman, Scott. 1993. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. New York: Simon
& Schuster.
Freud, Sigmund. 1985. Art and Literature. The Pelican Freud Library (PFL). Vol.
14. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lucian. 1905. The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Vol. 1. Trans. F. G. Fowler.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Masschelein, Anneleen. 2011. The Unconcept. New York: SUNY Press.
Montaigne, Michel de. 1991. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Ed. and Trans.
M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane.
Pfaller, Robert. 2005. The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic. In Lacan:
The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso.
Rokem, Freddie. 2010. Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Strauss, Leo. 1996. Socrates and Aristophanes. Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008a. The Odd One In. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2008b. Why Psychoanalysis? Uppsala: NSU Press.
CHAPTER 3
How They Fought
Sandra Laugier
Translated by Daniela Ginsburg
Why spend your life in a couple rather than all alone?

The question is philosophical—metaphysical even. In his classic book
Pursuits of Happiness, which is dedicated to Hollywood “remarriage com-
edies,” and in all of his recent work (his book on melodrama, Contesting
Tears, and his books on Ralph Waldo Emerson), Stanley Cavell has looked
to philosophy and cinema together to show not only that the question of
the couple and marriage is a philosophical one (others have said the same,
and the observation is not necessarily interesting), it is the philosophical
question, rivaling traditional questions such as: What can I know? Why is
there something rather than nothing?
For Cavell, it is not a matter of renouncing philosophy in favor of
film, for example, but rather of showing the mutual interiority of their
expressions. This does not mean proclaiming the end of philosophy, but
rather showing how to begin it again differently, regaining its original
desire—not in some mythical return to origins, but in the idea of a new
beginning and a new departure, an idea proper to America and the
remarriage comedies Cavell brilliantly analyzes in Pursuits of Happiness
(Cavell 1981a).
S. Laugier (*)
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Institut des Sciences Juridique et
Philosophique de la Sorbonne (ISJPS, UMR 8103 CNRS-Paris1), Paris, France

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_3
36 S. LAUGIER
Cavell’s method in his books on film is to demonstrate how seeing and

reading a film are a matter of simply letting the work show what it has to
show, hearing what it says (its voice, a central Cavellian concept). This is
particularly important in cinema, where what matters is learning from the
experience of a film, letting oneself be educated by this experience. Cavell’s
method of reading (not interpreting) films reverses an entire critical tradi-
tion: the philosophical importance of a film lies in what it says and shows,
not in what we, brilliant minds that we are, discover or say about it—
“What we are to see is the intelligence that a film has already brought to
bear in its making” (Cavell 1981a, 10). Cavell’s books on cinema thus
concern an education that is philosophical as well as cinematic: learning to
let oneself be educated by a film and regaining the passivity of experience
puts one on the path to returning to the ordinary. It also means learning
to overcome skepticism within the finite framework of a projection of the
world—overcoming it not with new knowledge, but by acknowledging
our condition. Cavell has shown that cinema talks about us, by projecting
and making visible our world (“the world viewed”); early on, he demon-
strated the same fact with regard to Shakespearian tragedy. I am not
Othello, and do not mistake me for him, says Cavell, but his problems
literally are mine—in that sense, he represents me, not through a mimetic
or iconic relation, but rather one that is internal, private.
But I claim to see how his life figures mine, how mine has the makings of
his, that we bear an internal relation to one another; how my happiness
depends upon living touched but not struck by his problems, or struck but
not stricken; problems of trust and betrayal, of false isolation and false com-
pany, of the desire and the fear of both privacy and of union. (Cavell
1979, 453)
The relevance of Shakespearean tragedy, of which Hollywood cinema is

the descendant, lies not in the effects it has on us (terror, pity), but in what
it shows about us, about our shared human nature—in the intimate rela-
tionship it creates between me and the other, the character. It has to do
with the ordinary, not the extraordinary. This also means that what is
shown in tragedy can be shown in a comic mode, as Marx said of the
18th Brumaire.
The tragic expression of skepticism (perceptible in many of Shakespeare’s
works, such as The Winter’s Tale) can thus be expressed as comedy, and the
genius of remarriage comedies is to stage this, and thus to open the way to
3 HOW THEY FOUGHT 37
a happy resolution of the problem of skepticism. Skepticism is not a matter

of knowledge, but of tragedy: this is the argument Cavell makes in The
Claim of Reason, which proposes a radical reconception of philosophical
skepticism. We may hypothesize that his theorization of skepticism is only
completed in Pursuits of Happiness, with its reading of Shakespearian
themes at the heart of remarriage comedies. Cavell discovers first in film,
and then in Emerson’s transcendentalism, an alternative to the traditional
theory of knowledge.
From the Tragic to the Comic

It might seem paradoxical, at the least, that a medium like film, which is
said to be “artificial” and a “diversion,” could be a response to skepticism
and to the remoteness of the world—if Cavell had not shown in Pursuits
of Happiness precisely that Hollywood movies pick up the problem of
skepticism where tragedy abandoned it. Cavell’s genius was to discover
that the solution to skepticism is not a refutation but rather a “turning”—
what he calls the “turning of our natural reactions” in The Claim of
Reason (Cavell 1979, 125). Skepticism concludes that the human condi-
tion is separateness, that I am irremediably distant from others and from
the world. It is the avoidance of this conclusion that turns out to be
deadly; circumventing that fate requires the opposite of avoidance:
acknowledgment. Cavell’s innovation, at once obvious and unprece-
dented, is to conceive of comedy as the turning and conversion of tragedy
on the basis of similar data. What in tragedy is fatal avoidance of the
intolerable idea of separateness becomes in comedy not its forgetting, but
rather a happy (as much as possible) acceptance of this unavoidable state.
It is ironic and remarkable that American talking films (and not literature
or contemporary theater, for example) realized Emerson’s vision of an art
that would describe not “the great, the remote,” but rather “the famil-
iar,” and would come back to ordinary existences and conversations in
order to regain contact with the world and thereby proximity to the other
(Emerson 2000, 57). This happened well after Emerson’s time, but he is
quite present throughout American cinema, from Capra and Sirk to more
recent productions. We may note, for example, a kind of Emersonian
tone in recent Hollywood movies—in particular, in Spielberg’s and
Malick’s war movies, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. This
return of the Emersonian repressed to film confirms many of Cavell’s
hypotheses.
38 S. LAUGIER
Skepticism and Finitude
As we know, The Claim of Reason distinguishes between two types of skep-
ticism: skepticism about our knowledge of the world (philosophical skep-
ticism) and skepticism about our relation to others. The former can
disappear or be suspended through philosophical arguments or simply
thanks to the solicitations of life, as Hume said: when I go out, talk with
my friends, play backgammon, I am naturally inclined to suppose that an
external world exists. But the second skepticism is lived. It runs through
my everyday life; my actions and words can only strengthen it. There is
nothing that can suspend it; it is constitutive of my ordinary existence. For
Cavell, the first skepticism—concerning knowledge—is the cover for the
second. Or rather, skepticism turns into a question of knowledge a deeply
radical question: the question of my contact with others, my recognition
of the other as human, and thus my acknowledgment of my own condi-
tion. In this way, skepticism disguises my inability to accept my condition
and presents it instead as an intellectual incapacity, an inability to know.
Cavell shows the stubborn tendency shared by Othello and Lear to trans-
form into doubt (about fidelity, or, emblematically, about paternity) what
in reality is an intolerable certainty, knowledge that one does not want to
accept. At the origin of skepticism is an attempt to transform humanity’s
condition—metaphysical finitude—into an intellectual difficulty or lack;
into an enigma.
The tragedy of Othello, for example, lies not in the doubt he has about
Desdemona’s fidelity, but rather in his refusal to accept the obvious: that
she is indeed his wife, and his (she is made of the same flesh and blood as
him). He fears her infidelity less than her very fidelity. Thus, in The Claim
of Reason, doubt about the existence of the other is shown to be a mask
for the unbearable certainty of her reality, and tragedy is defined as the
paroxysmal moment when one chooses the death of the other in order to
avoid this certainty: “[Othello’s] skepticism over [Desdemona’s] faithful-
ness is a cover story for a deeper conviction; a terrible doubt covering a yet
more terrible certainty, an unstatable certainty” (Cavell 1979, 493).
In his essay on King Lear, Cavell compares the modern philosopher
and the tragic hero insofar as they both search for certainty, for proof of
the existence of the world. The invention of Shakespearean tragedy is
inseparable from historical moment when a new will to know emerged at
the same time as new sources of uncertainty: this was the time of Galileo
and Descartes, Shakespeare’s contemporaries. But, we should add, this
was also the time of the discovery of America and the beginnings of its
history. Skepticism (in its modern form) was invented within this new
epistemology, whose discoveries opened the way to a more radical igno-
rance. We hear an echo of this in Wittgenstein: “even when all possible
scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain com-
pletely untouched” (Wittgenstein 1974, 6.52, 88). The modern philoso-
pher (“the epistemologist”) thus loses the world by wanting to seize and
master it, due to an inevitability inherent to all procedures of knowledge
and to our nature—as the first words of Kant’s first Critique indicate:
“Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it
is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to
it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot
answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason” (Kant 1998,
A VII, 99).
Conversation
Skepticism expresses and dissimulates the loss of a natural proximity to the
world, and it is revealed to be a loss of natural expression, of conversation
with others and things. As Emerson says in “Experience”: “An innavigable
sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and con-
verse with” (Emerson 2000, 309, emphasis added). Skepticism is thus a
symptom of our linguistic vacuity, our inability to say anything whatso-
ever. It is not enough to speak in order to mean, as the title of Cavell’s
book Must We Mean What We Say? indicates. We may think here of
Emerson’s indignation in “Self-Reliance”: “every word they say chagrins
us” (Emerson 2000, 137). Emerson’s chagrin refers to the loss of mean-
ing of our language and the need to take back possession of it. Skepticism
is a disease whose origin and cure lie in language. If, as Thoreau remarked,
most people lead lives of “quiet desperation,” it is because they have lost
the use of words; they have lost the context in which our words have
meaning, or have lost the ability to give them meaning, to give them voice.
Thus, one way of representing skepticism would be as the impossibility
of conversation, the impossibility of entering into relation with others in
language. This impossibility is presented in tragedy, but it is also our fate
every day. Quiet desperation is the ordinary form of skepticism. To mean
what one says, to overcome skepticism, would be to acknowledge the
nature of our language, which is both inherited and reappropriated. Our
language is nothing but an inheritance: it is up to us to give it life. There
40 S. LAUGIER
is nothing else. The human condition, finitude, is identified with our life
in language and in its limits. “The limits of my language mean the limits
of my world,” says Wittgenstein (1974, 5.6, 68). This linguistic condition
of humanity—our form of life in language, Wittgenstein calls it—is shared
by all of us, but it appears most radically in America, a country that inher-
ited and reappropriated a language that had already long existed. Thus,
ordinary language is not a haven, for it is entirely shot through with skep-
ticism—that is, by the question of whether I mean what I say, whether my
words are my own: “all my words are someone else’s” (Cavell 1989, 139).
Skepticism is born not from the limits of knowledge, but rather from the
limits of our natural capacities, of our condition: to use Cavell’s play on
words, the limits of our speaking together, our “con-dition.” Tragedy
thus arises in language, in the awareness of our life in language: it is not
that there is nothing other than language, but rather, as Wittgenstein
showed throughout the Investigations, that language is our form of life;
that we are, as Emerson said, “victims of expression.” What is unbearable
is not the inexpressible, the impossibility of being expressive; it is expres-
sion itself. The fantasy of privacy takes our fear of being public and expres-
sive and transforms it into or disguises it as a symmetrical fear of
inexpressiveness. Understanding that language is our form of life means
accepting our condition, which is to be expressive—and thus mortal, as
Emerson’s formulation “victims of expression” highlights: expression is
exposure to the other, and to accept expression is to accept counting for
the other. To accept expression is to accept exposing oneself to the other,
recognizing one’s own fragility. Thus, conversation is defined as accep-
tance of our linguistic condition, which implies exposing oneself to others.
Film is the ideal site for such expression, and film actors have the mysteri-
ous ability, which Cavell calls “photogenesis,” to make themselves sensible
to spectators (as others, as other minds), and to thus to constitute their
experience. Thus, the experience of cinema, though it is only the experi-
ence of a “world projected,” is experience itself—“there is only one experi-
ence” (Kant 1998, A110, 234)—the moment when we can learn if not to
control experience (through repetition, as Cavell suggests in Pursuits of
Happiness), at least to have it; and when we know that everything is there,
before our eyes, and that there is nothing more, nothing hidden from us.
The majority of Hollywood movies have focused on the question of the
couple. The permanent success of romantic comedies or melodramas, the
constancy of the “love story” as the raw material of cinematographic
works, is not a coincidence. Film is a key site for the invention of the
couple. A crucial step in the process of this invention was a group of films
from Hollywood’s classic period (1934–47) that all follow the same for-
mat: a couple, separates at the beginning of the movie and reconciles by
the end. Anyone who goes to the movies regularly (and does not snub
mainstream movies) will know that this model, while emblematic of clas-
sical cinema, is a tried-and-true recipe that remains current: from Abyss by
James Cameron to When Harry Met Sally by Rob Reiner, The Wedding
Banquet by Ang Lee, Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, or Intolerable
Cruelty by Joel and Ethan Cohen, remarriage is an inevitable or minimal
storyline (it is also frequently found in disaster films such as Twister or The
Day After Tomorrow, where the couple in crisis reunites as the end of the
world looms, and in several TV shows; see Laugier 2019).
Why does the remarriage comedy represent such an important structure?
The particularity of this form is to put us in the presence of an already-
constituted couple, without having to recount their meeting and the stages
of their becoming a couple (which are sometimes hinted at). Thus, remar-
riage comedies are closer to what Northrop Frye called “Old Comedy” à la
Shakespeare than to “New Comedy”: it is not a matter, as in romantic
comedies, of showing a young couple gradually overcoming the external
obstacles (social or physical, such as geographic distance or lack of commu-
nication) to their union. It must be said that today it is difficult for a mov-
iemaker to set up this type of scenario (unless the film is historical), since the
prejudices that might oppose the couple’s initial constitution have been
greatly reduced. As a result, we see a need to create obstacles: homosexual
love and/or cultural incompatibilities and/or differences of species (love
for an alien, a vampire, a robot) and/or various handicaps. There is no lon-
ger any impossible love, unless the other is dead or in a different space-time.
The moral interdictions that drove the storylines of earlier romantic com-
edies and melodramas must today be reactualized or radicalized somehow,
a task often taken up by science fiction movies or movies for teenagers.
In contrast, in “Old Comedy” and comedies of remarriage, it is not a
matter of bringing the heroes together, but of putting them back together
again. This makes all the difference and it also explains the permanence of
the genre. It is a matter of overcoming separateness, and thus of overcom-
ing not external obstacles but internal ones, the impossibility of staying
together. In short, it is a matter of putting the couple to the test, showing
the “state of the union” (the particularly suitable title of one remarriage
comedy) of the couple faced with the threat of separateness. We find the
structure of remarriage in a considerable number of films; those m entioned
42 S. LAUGIER
in Pursuits of Happiness are among the most famous: The Lady Eve by
Preston Sturges, It Happened One Night by Frank Capra, Bringing Up
Baby by Howard Hanks, The Philadelphia Story and Adam’s Rib by George
Cukor, The Awful Truth by Leo McCarey. All these films portray a divorced
or separated couple who, over the course of the film, learn to come
together again, for reasons that clearly have nothing to do with morality.
One remarkable element of these films is that they are focused on the
couple as such, unlike a good number of other films from the period that
include children. It is important that the couples in these movies are child-
less, since it makes it possible for the question of the couple to be asked in
all its radicality: why live as two instead of as one? It is only when this point
is resolved that it becomes imaginable to welcome children into the pic-
ture (this seems obvious, but it is not at all, to the extent that in cinema as
in life, the question of children often makes it possible to avoid the ques-
tion of the couple).
Skepticism and Acknowledgment
The films discussed in Pursuits of Happiness pose the question of the cou-
ple in connection with the question of skepticism. Philosophical skepti-
cism casts doubt on the existence of the world and others by the very fact
of desiring and seeking proof of their existence. Cavell connects this harm-
ful desire with Shakespearean tragedy: Othello wants (physical) proof of
Desdemona’s faithfulness, but in wanting to know, he loses all certainty.
Remarriage comedies represent in a comic mode this feature of skepticism:
the loss of confident contact and proximity with the world and others,
which is caused by the very fact of wanting to confirm or prove them.
For Cavell, the problematic of proximity to the world is the source of
skepticism (Cavell 1971). It is internal to the cinematographic medium,
which shows the difficulty we have being in the world, the impression we
have of living in a strange world, one from which we are absent. This is an
experience both metaphysical and ordinary: the feeling (which is non-sense)
that we could just as easily not exist, and that we are like strangers to this
world, which could just as easily exist without us. By establishing a distance
between the spectator and the “world projected,” cinema reproduces this
distance from the world and our skeptical feeling of being a stranger in it.
A remarkable film in this respect, which presents the difficulty of being
in the world along with the difficulty of being in a couple, is Arnaud
Desplechin’s Comment je me suis disputé … (ma vie sexuelle) (English title
My Sex Life … or How I Got into an Argument). This is not necessarily the
best example, since Desplechin, along with his screenwriter Emmanuel
Bourdieu, draw on Cavell’s philosophy. We may also think of Capra’s It’s
a Wonderful Life, in which an angel pulls the hero, James Stewart, out of
suicidal despair by confronting him with a world identical to the real world
but in which he never existed. The movie is a reflection on cinema as a
means of overcoming skepticism by showing you not a world that does
not exist (that is easy to imagine), but rather a world in which you are not.
Thus, cinema heals skepticism by showing us on the one hand a world that
exists all by itself, outside of our control, and on the other how to be
affected by this world, how to be educated by this shared experience.
Skepticism is not a problem of knowledge, but of experience. The
problem is not our ignorance of the world or others, but our refusal to
know and expose ourselves to them. This is not a theoretical difficulty but
a practical anxiety. Remarriage comedies bring to light, in order to over-
come it, the theoretical difficulty or practical anxiety surrounding charac-
ters’ reappropriation of contact with the other: the capacity, beyond
knowledge, to acknowledge the other.
Here we find the deep connection between film and skepticism. For a
philosopher like Hume, when I eat my breakfast, go out, talk with my
friends, and so on, I am naturally inclined to suppose that an external
world exists. But the second skepticism is lived. It is internal to my every-
day life, the circumstances of which only strengthen it: conversation and
ordinary relations become strange and anxiety ridden. There is nothing
that can suspend this first type of skepticism, which cinema represents
through separation: it is simply ordinary.
The Tragedy and Comedy of the Couple

As we have seen, the tragedy of Othello lies not in his doubt (or igno-
rance) about Desdemona’s fidelity, but rather in his refusal to accept the
obvious: that she is indeed his wife, and his (she is made of the same flesh
and blood as him). Thus, he fears her infidelity (doubt) less than her fidel-
ity (knowledge). Doubt about the existence of the other is shown to be a
mask for the unbearable certainty of her reality, and tragedy is the parox-
ysmal moment when one chooses the death of the other in order to avoid
this certainty. Remarriage comedies, on the contrary, represent the
moment when tragedy is turned around, when this certainty is accepted
without avoidance: when skepticism is overcome by conversation.
44 S. LAUGIER
Skepticism expresses and obscures the loss of a natural proximity to

others and to things. This accounts for the importance of the moment of
separateness—the starting point for remarriage comedies—which repre-
sents the loss and impossibility of conversation, of being in relation with
the other in language. The loss implied in separateness sheds light on the
conversational nature of the couple relationship: divorce shows what mar-
riage is, just as skepticism shows the nature of our knowledge. To accept
conversation is to accept being expressive, exposing oneself to the other.
This explains why every film centered on a couple has an “out in the open”
moment when one or both members of the pair express themselves; that
is to say, they accept exposure to language and the expression of their fra-
gility. Thus, conversation is defined as acceptance of the linguistic condi-
tion, which implies exposing oneself to the other, passing from the private
to the public. Cinema is an ideal site for such exposure, which is made
possible by conversation; conversation, in turn, makes it possible to over-
come the state of skepticism and separateness, to find oneself again. In the
heady days of the early “talkies,” comedies offered unrivaled examples of
conversation: think of the conversations between Katherine Hepburn and
Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, or between Cary Grant and Irene
Dunne in The Awful Truth. Cavell cites Milton, for whom the desire for
“meet and happy conversation” (Cavell 1981a, 87) is not only the founda-
tion of marriage, it is the fact of marriage itself. Milton makes this observa-
tion in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, thus demonstrating that
marriage can only be defined through separation.
In movies, conversation is the tool of acknowledgment and forgiveness,
as well as the space in which a relation of equality within the couple is cre-
ated. Remarriage comedies explore the same themes as tragedy or skepti-
cism—adultery, jealousy, fear of feminine sexuality, denial of
acknowledgment—but by turning them around. In these comedies, a wall
(between humans and the world, or between a man and a woman) some-
times represents an initial skepticism: the blanket held by Clark Gable
(“the Walls of Jericho”) in the motel room in It Happened One Night, or
the swinging door that separates the couple, or the two separate doors by
which the cuckoos on a cuckoo clock enter and exit in The Awful Truth.
These two films end with a wall coming down: the blanket falls at the
sound of the trumpet in It Happened One Night, and the two cuckoos go
back through the same door at the end of The Awful Truth. Remarriage
comedies do not deny the separateness of beings or their difference: rec-
onciliation is acceptance of the state of separateness through a new
roblematic, that of equality, which makes it possible to be both near and

p
far, different. Acknowledging the other means accepting being their equal,
their fellow, both the same and other, and opening oneself to the intimate
and explosive mixture of friendship and amusement on the one hand and
romance and sexuality on the other hand that defines the conversation
of marriage.
For Cavell, this ideal of marriage as conversation constitutes a “yes” to
marriage, reversing the tragic or skeptical “no.” This “yes,” itself the reit-
eration of an original event, is also an acceptance of repetition (the “re-”
in “remarriage” and “reunion”), acceptance of the ordinary. This is dem-
onstrated by scenes in these comedies that show couples sharing prosaic
moments together, for example when Clark Gable and Colette Colbert act
out a domestic dispute in It Happened One Night, or when Katherine
Hepburn, in Woman of the Year, (dir. George Stevens 1942) decides to
make breakfast for her husband, creating a disaster in the kitchen. In this
staging of the ordinary, which is found only in movies, what may be called
a domestication—in every sense of the term—of skepticism by the ordinary
is accomplished. Thus, American comedy brings to light the capacity of
the ordinary to reinvent the couple.
In Praise of Bickering
It is particularly important that this redefinition of the couple is possible
only within the framework of reflection on divorce and separation. What
in tragedy is fatal avoidance of the idea of separateness in comedy is neither
forgotten nor repressed, but rather accepted as inevitable. It is indeed
separateness that defines marriage, for the marriage relation can only be
defined on the basis of the possibility of a split, just as my natural relation
to the world is defined by accepting the possibility of its loss. We may thus
define the couple on the basis of the need to overcome separateness every
day and to resolve or express the conflict that the couple relationship cre-
ates. This relationship is in theory a relationship of equality, but there is an
inequality of words that must be constantly overcome. That is why equal-
ity cannot be given but must be claimed. It is for this reason that Cavell
calls comedies of remarriage “equality comedies” and sees in them the
emergence of the woman “as an autonomous human.” We see the feminist
stakes of the question of marriage very clearly in It Happened One Night,
which, although it does not include an actual remarriage, is a foundational
work of the genre. The film can be said to be a remarriage comedy because
46 S. LAUGIER
it shifts the stakes of comedy from the usual question “will this young
couple marry?” to discussions of the nature of marriage and the equilib-
rium to be achieved within the couple (who is going to educate whom?).
The marriage between Gable and Colbert is a remarriage because they
have already established a relationship of conjugality during their trip and
have created a familiarity that appears in a scene when, at their first camp-
site, their breakfast is interrupted by private investigators looking for them,
and they pretend to be a real couple, proving their status by arguing vio-
lently: “As if there may be a bickering that is itself a mark, not of bliss
exactly, but say of caring. As if a willingness for marriage entails a certain
willingness for bickering” (Cavell 1981a, 86). Bickering is essential to the
remarriage genre and to representations of the couple. The concepts of
argument and conflict are thus internal to that of conversation: a true
conversation is one in which claims are made and in which one therefore
learns to speak the same language as the other. This mutual education
through language learning is essential to the couple: “to imagine a lan-
guage is to imagine a form of life” (Wittgenstein 2000, §17, 8). Learning
a common language requires conflict: “In those films talking together is
fully and plainly being together, a mode of association, a form of life, and
I would like to say that in these films the central pair are learning to speak
the same language” (Cavell 1981a, 88).
So, finally, why be in a couple rather than all alone? There is no more
answer to this question than there is to the question of why there is a
world (it is in this sense that it is philosophical). The question is also one
of how to spend one’s time within a finite existence. To be in a couple, in
conversation, is to be able to spend time together, to have fun and waste
time together (and this is why, in this definition based on remarriage, so
many different forms of couples are possible and agreeable: same-sex,
more than two, etc.). The moment of reunion in Bringing Up Baby is the
moment when Cary Grant recognizes that he “has never had so much
fun.” Cavell gives the following beautiful definition in Pursuits of
Happiness: “What this pair does together is less important than the fact
that they do whatever it is together, that they know how to spend time
together” (Cavell 1981a, 88). This is what gives the couple relationship
the quality of friendship. But there is also something different about it,
something nostalgic, in the sense that it also implies accepting separate-
ness, as if it were a matter of overcoming solitude by asking, at each
moment, what is preferable to spending one’s life alone.
There is a political resonance to this observation, which brings us to the

final stakes of the question of marriage and remarriage. These appear
clearly in Milton’s discourse on divorce and marriage: a bad marriage is
like a state in which the citizens are unhappy, in which there is no political
conversation. In this comparison, it is not a matter of seeing marriage as
an institution of power in which one member is the sovereign and the
other the subject, but rather of conceiving of marriage in terms of a social
contract, in terms of association: we prefer to spend our lives together
instead of alone. In the American context of remarriage comedies, the
question takes a specific form: there is an association between the citizen
and the state, who must mutually express one another. If this conversation
disappears or degenerates into hollow, conformist discourse (which hap-
pens every day), the union must dissolve, and at that point it may in fact
be better to be alone (as Thoreau tells himself at Walden, cf. Cavell 1981b).
The Philadelphia Story

The conversation of marriage makes marriage both a private and public
affair; thus, it is a political affair. In The Philadelphia Story, which is set in
one of the foundational sites of the American republic, we hear several
times that the marriage announced (between the heroine, Tracy, played by
Katherine Hepburn, and George, a businessman, which will end in the
remarriage of Tracy and Dexter, her ex-husband, played by Cary Grant) is
“an affair of national importance.” The film closely follows the remarriage
structure, including the failure of conversation in the first marriage: when
Tracy reproaches Dexter for his earlier fondness for drink, on which she
blames the failure of their marriage, he replies, “Granted. But you took on
that problem when you took me, Red. You were no helpmate there. You
were a scold.” The cause of divorce thus was not alcoholism, but the
unsatisfied need to find within marriage a “help meet,” to use Milton’s
expression, a remedy to the solitude of all beings, and thereby a conversa-
tion. The couple’s conversation becomes allegorical or exemplary of the
conversation of society in its entirety, whence the idea that something “of
national importance” goes on within it. This is confirmed by Cavell’s
choice of title, Pursuits of Happiness, which quotes the American constitu-
tion almost exactly.
How can marriage, which is part of our personal, private existence, be
“of national importance”? That is the whole question, and the massive
presence of the issue of marriage in cinema constitutes an answer in itself.
48 S. LAUGIER
If it is a matter of deciding whether it is better to spend our lives together

or alone, the question is not merely theoretical: it is political. Milton stated
this clearly when in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, he wrote that
as a whole people is in proportion to an ill government, so is one man to an

ill marriage. If they, against any authority, covenant, or statute, may by the
sovereign edict of charity save not only their lives but honest liberties from
unworthy bondage, as well may he against any private covenant, which he
never entered to his mischief, redeem himself from unsupportable distur-
bances to honest peace and just contentment. (Milton, cited in Cavell
1981a, 150)
We see the political radicality of this statement: we are always right to

revolt—against any government, or any marriage—if they do not guaran-
tee “just contentment,” for nobody seeks their own unhappiness (a useful
reminder, since with regard to marriage it is easy to feel a certain… skepti-
cism about that). This connects with Thoreau’s idea of the right to dis-
obey, to separate oneself from a state that one no longer recognizes as
one’s own.
This is the “national” (or political) importance of marriage: if the mar-
riage contract is a reduced-scale model or example (in the minimal, not
moral, sense) of the nation’s founding contract, then we owe the nation a
relationship of “meet and happy conversation.” Public and private duty
thus come together in the demand that the relationship conform to an
ideal of justice and equality. Remarriage comedies, in their pursuits of hap-
piness, seek political conversation and demand that it be a true conversa-
tion: the circulation of words among equals. This is both a dream and a
daily reality: ordinary life, the “domestic,” is the potential site for the
invention of this conversation. Making dream and reality live together
constitutes the whole question of the couple, just as it does (or should) the
whole question of politics. My consent (to a society, to a marriage, to a
form of life) is never given once and for all; it is constantly, ordinarily,
in dispute.
References
Cavell, Stanley. 1971. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film.
Cambridge, MA: Viking Press.
———. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1981a. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1981b. The Senses of Walden. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1989. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson
After Wittgenstein. Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press.
———. 1997. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown
Woman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2000. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
New York: Modern Library.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Laugier, Sandra. 2014. Recommencer la philosophie, Stanley Cavell et la philosophie
en Amérique. Paris: Vrin.
———. 2019. Nos vies en séries. Paris: Flammarion.
Milton, John. 1959. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. II, ed. Don Wolfe.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stevens, George (director). 1942. Woman of the Year. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Film.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Trans. D.F. Pears and
B.F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2000. Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition,
Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
CHAPTER 4
Hegel and the Misadventures
of Consciousness: On Comedy
and Revolutionary Partisanship
Jamila M. H. Mascat
In his lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel argues that “in general, nowhere can
more contradiction be found than in the things people laugh at” (Hegel
1975, II 120). He believes indeed that people laugh at nothing—triviali-
ties, “the flattest and most tasteless things”—and that, even more aston-
ishingly, they can actually laugh at everything—mocking the highest and
noblest values, “the most important and profound matters” (ibid.). And
yet, in his view the laughable (das Lächerliche) should not be confused
with the comical (das Komische). It is actually true, he remarks, that every
disproportion and “every contrast between something substantive and its
appearance, between an end and the means may be laughable […]. But for
the comical we must make a deeper demand” (1199–1200). What could
this alleged greater depth of comedy consist of?
Hegel seems to suggest that the core of comedy may have to do with
manners rather than matters, since nothing in reality is comical per se and
J. M. H. Mascat (*)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_4
52 J. M. H. MASCAT
comicality arises only from the incongruities and discrepancies that mani-
fest themselves with respect to someone’s wishes, aims, and expectations.
In order for it to handle inner and outer contradictions, comicality requires
of the subject a certain plasticity—a mixture of “infinite light-heartedness
and confidence”—which is poles apart from the rigidity typical of “a nar-
row and pedantic mind,” as well as from the abstract dogmatism charac-
teristic of beautiful souls, Romantic ironists, and tragic heroes (1200). If
the tragic hero is the one who dies solemnly proclaiming the ancient
motto “frangar non flectar” (I will break, but I will not fold), the comic
hero is the one who triumphantly restates “flectar non frangar” (I will
fold, but I will not break) as everything collapses around him. Far from
merely indulging in light-heartedness, the comic hero does not retreat
from the world to contemplate its misery and laugh at it, or keep the cha-
otic unfolding of unlucky circumstances at a distance, but shows instead
the “bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frus-
tration of his aims and achievements” (ibid.). For the comic hero, it seems
as if the “unbearable gravity of being” in fact turned out to be bearable.
In the Aesthetics, Hegel also takes great care to distinguish the essential
pattern of comicality from that of similar attitudes such as irony, satire, and
“subjective humor”—and this is where the ambivalence of comedy
appears. In defining the principles at the core of dramatic genres, he
explains that in comedy “the mastery of all relations and ends is given as
much to the individual in his willing and action, as to external contin-
gency” (1194). Both tragedy and comedy deal with characters struggling
to accomplish their goals, and both enact collisions and conflicts between
individuals, means and ends, finally providing a solution. However, while
in tragedy “the individuals destroy themselves through the one-sidedness
of their otherwise solid will and character, or they must resignedly accept
what they had opposed even in a serious way,” in comedy “the characters
dissolve everything, including themselves,” in such a way that “the victory of
their own subjective personality […] nevertheless persists self-
assured” (1199).
This preservation through dissolution typically resonates with the very
familiar process of Aufhebung that dominates Hegel’s speculative logic
and constitutes the omnipresent motive force of the Phenomenology of
Spirit. Indeed, at every single step of the phenomenological journey, both
consciousness and its object concretely enact their “being-towards-
sublation,” so to speak. However, the dialectical taste and sense of the
phenomenological itinerary through the different stages of consciousness
4 HEGEL AND THE MISADVENTURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: ON COMEDY… 53
and the various Gestalten of the Spirit are actually best expressed by the
key notion of Erfahrung, loaded in turn with contradictions, reversals,
and Aufhebungen. “Experience,” Hegel notes in his Preface to the
Phenomenology, is “the name we give to just this movement, in which the
immediate, the unexperienced, i.e., the abstract […] becomes alienated
from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation” (Hegel 1977,
21). But what is actually comical about it?
In the Name of the Substance: The “Severe”

Experience of Consciousness
“No philosophy was so profoundly rich; none held so unswervingly to the
experience to which it had entrusted itself without reservation,” wrote
Adorno in the first of his Drei Studien zu Hegel (1966), claiming that
“These days it is hardly possible for a theoretical idea of any scope to do
justice to the experience of consciousness, and in fact not only the experi-
ence of consciousness but the embodied experience of human beings,
without having incorporated something of Hegel’s philosophy”
(Adorno 1993, 2).
In “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” Adorno cele-
brates the Hegelian notion of Erfahrung precisely with the intent to coun-
ter the hegemonic intellectual trends of his age. Against the positivistic
cult of objectivity, as much as against the existentialist, vitalist, and phe-
nomenological excesses of subjectivism (i.e., against Kierkegaard, Bergson,
and Husserl), he thus mobilizes Hegel’s notion of experience as an imma-
nent critical practice aimed at contesting the much-praised value of empir-
ical immediacy in vogue in those days.
Adorno notes: “The less human immediacy is tolerated by the omni-
present mediating mechanisms of exchange, the more fervently a compli-
ant philosophy asserts that it possesses the basis of things in the immediate”
(55). With the purpose of shaking, on the one hand, the “myth of the
given” and, on the other hand, the subjectivist hypertrophy of the ego—as
the one that is at stake in Hegel’s critique of Romantic irony (Mascat
2013)—Adorno employs Hegel’s pivotal understanding of experience qua
mediation against immediacy, a fetish concept dominating the whole land-
scape of scientific knowledge at the time. In doing so, he remarks that in
actual fact “Hegel does not simply sacrifice the concept of immediacy […]
if he did, his own idea of experience would lose its rational meaning […],
54 J. M. H. MASCAT
but turns immediacy into the outcome of mediation” (Adorno 1993, 59).
For Adorno, Hegel’s challenge to immediacy does not involve a dismissal
of concreteness in favor of abstraction. As he stresses in the same passage,
although “because of his idealism, Hegel has been reproached with being
abstract in comparison with the concreteness of the phenomenological,
anthropological, and ontological schools […], he brought infinitely more
concreteness into this philosophical idea than those approaches, and not
because his speculative imagination was balanced by a sense of reality but
by virtue of the approach his philosophy takes—by virtue, one might say,
of the experiential character of his speculation itself” (67). Yet, the “experi-
ential character” of Hegel’s speculation does not coincide with the alleged
“experiential content” of his system. Rather, it is derived from the “expe-
riential substance” of his philosophy, to which Adorno pays tribute. In this
regard, he writes: “What I have in mind is closer to what Hegel, in the
introduction to his System of Philosophy, calls the ‘attitude of thought to
objectivity’” (54). For Adorno, in other words, Hegel’s understanding of
experience highlights the crucial function that objectivity plays in specula-
tion, even in idealist philosophies such as his own.
As for Hegel, he provides a few significant definitions of his notion of
Erfahrung, a notion whose quintessential role in the Phenomenology is
confirmed by its inclusion in the subtitle of the volume conceived as the
first part of his Gesamtsystem: “Science of the experience of conscious-
ness.” Firstly, in the Introduction, he clarifies that experience does not
merely represent an early stage in the pathway of consciousness, inasmuch
as it designates an all-encompassing dimension totalizing the whole phe-
nomenological trajectory: “The experience of itself which consciousness
goes through can, in accordance with its Notion, comprehend nothing
less than the entire system of consciousness, or the entire realm of the
truth of Spirit” (Hegel 1977, 56). Hence, Erfahrung is crucial to knowl-
edge at all stages and “nothing is known that is not in experience,” as Hegel
states in the final chapter of the Phenomenology devoted to “Absolute
Knowing” (487).
There the obvious question arises as to what kind of experience is to be
found at the heart of Hegel’s speculative knowledge. The explanation that
appears in the concluding section of the Phenomenology—“experience is
just this, that the content—which is spirit—is in itself substance and there-
fore an object of consciousness” (487)—only points to the emergence of an
object for consciousness and establishes that such a content/object is the
substance. This synthetic definition can be complemented and clarified by

what Hegel describes in the pages of the Preface (21):
The Science of this pathway is the Science of the experience which conscious-
ness goes through; the substance and its movement are viewed as the object
of consciousness. Consciousness knows and comprehends only what falls
within its experience; for what is contained in this is nothing but spiritual
substance, and this, too, as object of the self. But Spirit becomes object
because it is just this movement of becoming an other to itself, i.e. becoming
an object to itself, and of suspending this otherness. And experience is the
name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate, the unexperi-
enced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous [but still unsensed] being,
or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns
to itself from this alienation, and is only then revealed for the first time in its
actuality and truth, just as it then has become a property of consciousness also.
Here, Hegel restates that experience is indeed key to knowledge and

defines Erfahrung as a peculiar kind of relationship that “happens”
between the subject (consciousness) and its object (the substance and its
movement, that in turn depends on its relation to consciousness). Through
this movement named “experience” not only does the subject come to
know the object of its experience as well as its own self, but the object
itself—the “unexperienced”—equally undergoes a significant transforma-
tion; that is, an alienation (Entfremdung), whereby it becomes an-other,
an object-to-itself, so as to finally sublate its own otherness by coming
round to itself from out of its otherness.
What is particularly meaningful in Hegel’s notion of experience is
precisely the fact that experience does not merely affect and alter the
subject who “gains experience,” but it equally alters the object and ele-
vates it to a higher degree of truth. Both the subject and the object
transform themselves by transforming each other through experience.
Such a relationship allows the subject to act as the one that guarantees
the preservation of the object undergoing reiterative processes of nega-
tion. As Hegel remarks, “the result of an untrue mode of knowledge
must not be allowed to run away into an empty nothing, but must neces-
sarily be grasped as the nothing of that from which it results—a result
which contains what was true in the preceding knowledge” (56). Thanks
to the experiential continuity ensured by the subject, the new object of
knowledge “contains the nothingness of the first, it is what experience
56 J. M. H. MASCAT
has made of it” (55). In fact, continuity throughout the long path that
consciousness traverses is not maintained by consciousness alone, and
another, superior phenomenological viewpoint—incarnating a mature
speculative stance and significantly ascribed to the standpoint of the
reader—is meant to keep track of the chain of sublations and reversals
unfolding along the way: the “für uns”—or “for us”—that provides
meta-experiential unity and meaning to the endless series of the misad-
ventures of consciousness.
At this point, before answering the question raised above—what is
indeed comical about Hegel’s Erfahrung?—three key aspects of the
Phenomenology that have so far emerged and that manifestly resonate with
mechanisms at play in revolutionary partisanship—properly understood as
partisan revolutionary engagement (Ypi and White 2016; Dean 2016)—
can be pinpointed: (1) the high value of experience conceived as a way of
learning by trial and error (and failure); (2) a strong investment in the
active transformation of the self and the world; and (3) the ability to obsti-
nately reiterate experiences that have previously met with failure and ret-
rospectively provide them with meaning.
Whilst the final section of this chapter will return to these three ele-
ments, a fourth and decisive aspect—more fundamental in regard to com-
edy and not devoid of political connotations—emerges in the Phenomenology
as a crucial trait of experience: namely, its deep entrenchment in the “real
issue” or the-Thing-itself. For Hegel, experience is first and foremost
Erfahrung der Sache selbst, a dedicated commitment to the object at stake
that should not be confused with mere reliance on sensuous immediacy.
To come full circle, this “attitude of thought to objectivity” is precisely the
main aspect that Adorno praises while celebrating Hegel’s meaningful
comprehension of experience as an immanent critique of the status quo
(Adorno 1993, 54).
The notion of Erfahrung—“the dialectical movement which conscious-
ness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object”
(Hegel 1977, 54)—provides us with a different entry point to the under-
standing of the comical plot of the Phenomenology, one that does not only
focus on comedy as negativity—which, as Alenka Zupančič (2008) has
brilliantly highlighted, remains nevertheless an essential component of
it—but rather shifts the focus to the peculiar attachment that binds the
comic hero to reality qua objectivity, to the object-matter or, in a slightly
more Hegelian jargon, substantiality. Comedy, in other words, does not
simply elucidate the presence of negativity in the heart of the Thing-itself
(die Sache selbst), but also expresses some sort of subjective commitment
to the things themselves, the “way of the world,” der Weltlauf.
Clearly, this commitment has nothing to do with that well-known “ten-
derness for things” or “for the world” that Hegel famously reproves in
Kant (Hegel 2010, 201 and 367). It is indeed a much more severe atti-
tude, in line with the severity that Hegel attributes to fine art in its begin-
ning and that Gillian Rose, in Hegel Contra Sociology, transposes and
ascribes to Hegel’s political theory, a politics “in the severe style” (Rose
1981). Interestingly enough for our reflection on comedy, the severe style
(der strenge Stil) stands at the antipodes of Romantic irony: it lays hold of
the object, deals with what is “given,” and “grants domination to the
topic itself” (143). In the severe style, Hegel maintains, “it is as if nothing
at all were granted to the spectator; it is the content of substance which in
its presentation severely and sharply repulses any subjective judgment”
(Hegel 1975, II 620).
I would suggest that Hegel’s phenomenological consciousness, in spite
of its inevitably clumsy pace and comical indulgence, makes a “severe”
experience of the things themselves, which allows for the emergence of the
substantial sphere and leaves to negativity the very task of negating the
unsubstantial; that is, the subject’s subjectivist drifts. The severe experience
of consciousness thus relies on the latter’s dedication to the world in fieri,
and shows consciousness to possess the twofold ability of negating both
the things and the self, a gesture that resonates precisely with the dynamic
at stake within Hegelian comedy.
Comedy Is Said in Many Ways: On Hegel’s Aesthetics

In Hegel’s Aesthetics the decline of comedy coincides with the end of
(modern) art and with the end of the outlining of Hegel’s own philosophy
of art. While maintaining Aristotle’s distinction between comedy and trag-
edy as two different genres, Hegel manifestly holds comedy higher than
tragedy: not only does comedy come after tragedy, but it is considered as
a superior artistic form. The “drama of reconciliation” described by Hegel
(in the introduction to the system of dramatic genres) as the final superses-
sion of both tragedy and comedy is eventually confined to a marginal and
allusive role. Indeed, even though drama, and particularly modern drama,
is seen as surpassing comedy, the lectures on Aesthetics conclude with
Hegel’s praise of a new “type of comedy which is truly comical and truly
poetic,” the best examples of which are found in Shakespeare (Hegel
58 J. M. H. MASCAT
1975, II 1235). This new type of comedy emerges as the antithesis of

modern comedy epitomized by Molière and his comedies of intrigue, and
marks the “dissolution of art altogether” and “the real end of our philo-
sophical inquiry” (1236).
What is so special and fatal about comedy? What makes it capable of
bringing art to an end? Hegel seems to point to the predominantly nega-
tive and destructive character of comedy, resulting from the lack of unity
between the Absolute and the subject on which comicality depends. “All
art aims at the identity, produced by the spirit, in which eternal things,
God, and absolute truth are revealed in real appearance and shape to our
contemplation, to our hearts and minds,” he writes in the final pages of
the Aesthetics (ibid.).
But if comedy presents this unity only as its self-destruction because the
Absolute, which wants to realize itself, sees its self-actualization destroyed
by interests that have now become explicitly free in the real world and are
directed only on what is accidental and subjective, then the presence and
agency of the Absolute no longer appears positively unified with the characters
and aims of the real world but asserts itself only in the negative form of cancel-
ling everything not correspondent with it, and subjective personality alone
shows itself self-confident and self-assured at the same time in this dissolution.
(Ibid., emphasis added)
Interestingly enough, Hegelian comedy does not embody the genre of

reconciliation, but quite surprisingly, as has been noted, “starts with rec-
onciliation and ends in havoc” (Nikulin 2014, 33), since in comedy both
the self and the Absolute collapse as a consequence of their attempts to
affirm themselves unilaterally, and unity emerges only via negativa.
In Hegel’s Berlin lectures, comedy, together with tragedy and drama,
appears as part of the wider constellation of dramatic poetry. Dramatic
poetry, generally speaking, is “an art form whose defining characteristic is
action,” but Hegel remarks also that “The dramatic action […] rests
essentially on an action producing collisions, and the true unity can only
be grounded in the total movement, i.e., given the determinate nature of
the particular circumstances, the characters, and their ends, the collision is
displayed as conforming with the characters and their ends, and finally
their contradiction is annulled and unity is restored” (Hegel 1975, II
1166). In this sense, unity—incarnating the very cipher of drama that
distinguishes it from lyric and epic—can only be restored after conflicts
have been staged, as that which results from the dissolution of the one-
sidedness of opposite powers confronting each other and finally encoun-
tering their own debacle. If collision and unity are the structural ingredients
of dramatic poetry, substance (namely ethical life, religion, the State, or, in
Hegel’s words, “what is in substance good and great, the Divine actualized
in the world, as the foundation of everything genuine and absolutely eter-
nal in the make-up of an individual’s character and aim”) and subject
(“the individual himself and his unfettered self-determination and free-
dom”) are its main components (1194). Depending on the inner relation-
ship between the two, drama can be comic or tragic.
For Hegel, the discriminating factor for comedy is the predominance of
“subjective caprice, folly, and perversity,” while in tragedy what prevails
“in the individuals and their actions and conflicts is their substantive basis”
(ibid.). Or, in other words, “in tragedy the whole treatment and execution
presents what is substantial and fundamental in the characters and their
aims and conflicts, while in comedy the central thing is the character’s
inner life and his private personality” (1205). Thus, subjectivity is not
only the dominant trait of Romantic art, to which dramatic poetry belongs,
but also, and to an even greater extent, the hallmark of comedy.1
Hegel’s emphasis on the subjective sphere in comical plots—“In comedy,
conversely, it is subjectivity, or personality, which in its infinite assurance
retains the upper hand” (1199)—has convinced Hegelian interpreters
to argue almost unanimously that subjectivity is what is actually at stake when
it comes to comedy (McFadden 1982; Moland 2016; Paolucci 1978; Roche
1998; Schneider 1997). Yet, in spite of being undoubtedly essential to com-
edy, the subjective dimension on which comedy visibly relies is meant to be
negated—and actually self-negated—in the name of substantiality. True
comedy is expected to undermine vice, protect virtue, and mock subjective
passions rather than substance, since “it keeps precisely within this objective
and substantive sphere” (Hegel 1975, II 1221). If modern comedy embraces
a despicable subjectivist twist, “in the old comedy,” Hegel notes, “it is
also the general public interests that are emphasized, statesmen and their way
of steering the state, war and peace, the people and its moral situation, phi-
losophy and its corruption, and so forth. Therefore neither the various
1
According to Hegel’s outline, Romantic art is the third and last form of art, after Symbolic
art and Plastic art—that is divided in turn into the three stages of painting, music, and poetry.
Poetry in turn consists of three different components: epic (objective pathos), lyric (subjec-
tive pathos), and dramatic poetry (the genre of reconciliation).
60 J. M. H. MASCAT
descriptions of the human heart and personal character nor particular com-
plications and intrigues can find their place completely in Greek drama; nor
does the interest turn on the fates of individuals” (1206). The much-debated
focus on subjectivity that Hegel attributes to comedy should then be com-
plemented by at least one additional remark regarding the very status of the
subject and its attitude toward the goals it strives to achieve: the comic hero’s
subjective aims are mostly self-defeating and doomed to fail, but the charac-
ter does not fully identify with them in the way the tragic hero does (Moland
2016, 87).
Given this premise, comedy can indeed be qualified as the dramatic
genre of (self-negating) subjectivity. A self-negating gesture is what is at
play in the three main typologies of comedy outlined in the Aesthetics. On
the one hand, Hegel generally portrays comedy as the dramatic genre “in
which the mastery of all relations and ends is given as much to the indi-
vidual in his willing and action, as to external contingency” (Hegel 1975,
II 1194). On the other hand, the subject’s mastery cannot be found any-
where but in its peculiar ability to embrace its own destiny of self-
dissolution. The first comical pattern operates when “the characters and
their aims are entirely without substance and contradictory and therefore
they cannot accomplish anything” (1200). In the case of avarice, for
example, Hegel observes that means and ends are “inherently null”; but
what makes comedy real is also an attitude consisting in not taking one’s
goals too seriously—an attitude peculiar to the comic hero. “If an indi-
vidual is serious in identifying himself with such an inherently false aim and
making it the one real thing in his life, then, the more he still clings to it
after he has been deprived of its realization, the more miserable he becomes
[…. and] there is none of the real essence of the comical,” Hegel remarks
(ibid.). Instead, comedy happens when the goal is trivial and the individual
“is not ruined in fact when his purpose fails but can surmount this disaster
with cheerfulness undisturbed” (1201). A second pattern of comical
action results from the discrepancy between the character’s noble goals
and the inadequacy of the means employed to reach them. Comedy thus
“occurs where individuals plume themselves on the substantial quality of
their characters and aims, but as instruments for accomplishing something
substantial their characters are the precise opposite of what is required”
(ibid.). In this case we encounter a combination of substantial ends and
unsuitable means that leads to a “contradiction whereby an achievement
of the imagined character and aim is frustrated” (ibid.). Hegel recalls here
Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, in which “the women wish to decide on and
to found a new political constitution, but they still retain all the whims and
passions of women” (ibid.).2 Lastly, comedy springs up in presence of acci-
dentals that mediate the relationship between a goal and its achievement.
Here comicality relies on “various and peculiar complications” through
which “aims and their accomplishment, inner character and external cir-
cumstances, are put in contrast with one another comically and then they
lead to an equally comical solution” (ibid.).
Mark Roche (1998) has efficiently named each one of the three
schemes, distinguishing the “comedy of futility,” the first pattern, from
the “comedy of frustration” (the second) and the “comedy of circum-
stances” (the third). If the “comedy of errors” of the Phenomenology
mostly unfolds according to the first and second schemes, the second and
third patterns have a manifestly political flavor, and may be understood as
comical modes of revolutionary partisanship. But above all, what clearly
emerges from Hegel’s definition of the three typologies of the comical
genre is the fact that comedy’s focus on subjectivity does not result in pay-
ing tribute to the cult of the individual, but rather consists in unmasking
the pretentious performances of the subject together with its ungrounded
beliefs and claims. In this way, paradoxically, comedy expresses its commit-
ment to objectivity.
In spite of its subjective connotation demanding “for the emergence of
comedy […] in a still higher degree the free right of the subjective person-
ality and its self-assured dominion” (Hegel 1975, II 1205), for Hegel
comedy sides with objectivity precisely by negating and dissolving the
“abstract negativity”—or one-sidedness—of which the subject’s futile
aims and attitudes are the individual incarnation. As has been noted, in
Hegel modern comedy “is viewed as liberation from an oppressive objec-
tivity,” while Old Comedy qua good comedy—finding in Aristophanes its
supreme expression—celebrates the irrevocable value of the substantial
sphere and argues for subjectivity to return to substantiality in order to
fulfill its role within it (Roche 2002, 428). In other words, notwithstand-
ing its subjective characterization, Hegelian comedy manifests its pro-
found attachment to the substantial. Hence, regardless of its humorous
lightness, comical experience remains a “severe experience” aimed at
restating its attachment to the gravity of the objective world.
2
For Hegel, Aristophanes’ comedy “presents to us the absolute contradiction between (a)
the true essence of religion and political and ethical life, and (b) the subjective attitude of citi-
zens and individuals who should give actuality to that essence” (Hegel 1975, II 1222).
62 J. M. H. MASCAT
The Phenomenology as a Comedy

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s treatment of comedy follows quite
a different scheme from that informing the Aesthetics lectures. Comedy
emerges here after epic and tragedy as the final outcome of “The spiritual
work of art”—the third element in the triad along which the whole por-
trait of Greek art is outlined by Hegel under the label of the “Religion in
the form of art” (the first two elements being respectively the abstract and
the living work of art). This is the second section in the chapter titled
“Religion” and occupies an intermediate position between the section on
“Natural Religion” (the archaic religion of nature to be found in Persia,
India, and Egypt) and the one on modern “Revealed Religion”
(Christianity). “Religion,” in turn, constitutes a pivotal moment in the
very structure of the Phenomenology: after the accomplishment of the
“Spirit certain of itself” in the previous chapter, it is here that the sub-
stance eventually becomes the subject and, for the rest of the journey,
takes over the role that consciousness has performed so far. The subjecti-
vation of the substance in its capacity to alienate itself and be itself out-of-
itself culminates with the advent of the Christian religion and preludes to
the attainment of “Absolute Knowing,” where subject and object finally
become perfectly adequate to each other. Once the march of Spirit has
reached the point of “Absolute Knowing,” two specular processes of alien-
ation have been accomplished: the alienation of the subject into the sub-
stance and the alienation of the substance into the subject. Thus, “Absolute
Knowing” embodies “the knowledge of this subject as substance and of
the substance as this knowledge of its act” (Hegel 1977, 485). Therefore,
the chapter on religion, in which comedy is included, is nothing but a
preliminary stage in view of this goal.
In the Phenomenology we find even more evidence of the paradoxes and
peculiarities of the alleged triumph of subjectivity in Hegelian comedy:
here, what marks the specificity of comedy is not the mere centrality of
subjectivity (which is at stake in other modern genres such as irony or
subjective humor, harshly criticized by Hegel because of their excess of
abstract subjectivism), but rather the fact that, as Zupančič has aptly
remarked, “in comedy, the subject is (or becomes) the universal, the essen-
tial, the absolute” (Zupančič 2008, 28). That is also to say, Zupančič adds,
that in comedy “the universal, the essential, the absolute become the sub-
ject,” and therefore “Comedy is not the story of the alienation of the
subject, it is the story of the alienation of the substance, which has become
the subject” (ibid.). The becoming-subject of the substance does not sim-
ply result in a celebration of the power of the subject to preserve itself
through the dissolution of everything around it. It also allows for the
Darstellung of what one might call the “pathos” of objectivity exposed to
its intrinsic finitude and contingency. But above all, what the comical pat-
tern clearly expresses is the “double bind” of subject and objectivity, or the
subject’s being-in-the-world as a being-committed-to the world in which
it exists.
What happens then in the sub-section of the Phenomenology devoted to
the religion of art (Kunstreligion)? Hegel describes here the flourishing
and the decline of ancient comedy. The religion of art reaches its peak with
the advent of Greek comedy, whereby consciousness experiences for the
first and only time the condition of a certain “well-being” (Wohlsein) and
of “letting-oneself-be-well” (Sich-wohlsein-lassen) (Hegel 1977, 453,
transl. modified). This is quite unusual for the register of the Phenomenology.
It is a pretty exceptional situation in the series of deceptions and disap-
pointments that natural consciousness is used to going through, and
Hegel himself points out that this feeling “is not to be found anywhere
outside of this comedy” (ibid.). Where does this positive feeling originate?
Hegel explains that what the comical self-consciousness “beholds is that
whatever assumes the form of essentiality over against it, is instead dis-
solved in it—in its thinking, its existence, and its action—and is at its
mercy” (452). The Self’s mastery of everything provides comical con-
sciousness with levity; or, as Hegel clarifies elsewhere, “what is comical
[…] is a personality or subject who makes his own actions contradictory
and so brings them to nothing, while remaining tranquil and self-assured
in the process” (Hegel 1975, II 1220). However, while in the Aesthetics
Hegel seems to explicitly insist on comedy’s attachment to the preserva-
tion of substantiality, in the Phenomenology it is as if the well-being of the
comic hero prevailed on everything else, to the point of causing the dis-
solution of all substantial values. In comedy, indeed, the Self stands for
“the negative power through which and in which the gods, as also their
moments, viz. existent Nature and the thoughts of their specific charac-
ters, vanish,” but in this vanishing, consciousness nevertheless remains
cheerful and placid (Hegel 1977, 452). Therefore, as has been noted,
comedy embodies “an art form in which our pleasure, to a large degree, is
generated by seeing things undone” (Law 2000, 114).
Yet, the Self—that is for itself the “absolute essence”—seems unable to
durably hold its own assurance. Once the comical consciousness has
64 J. M. H. MASCAT
vacated the whole pantheon—trust in the eternal laws of the gods has col-
lapsed, and the Oracle has become dumb; the statues are now only corpses
from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from
which belief has gone—the unhappy consciousness takes center stage and
breaks the jovial mood that the comical consciousness had been enjoying
as it contemplated the vanishing of everything it had engendered. In fact,
the unhappy consciousness is not another consciousness: it incarnates, as
Hegel puts it, “the counterpart and the completion of the comic con-
sciousness that is perfectly happy within itself” (Hegel 1977, 454–455). It
is, in other words, the double from which the comical consciousness can-
not be separated. This indissoluble twofold structure reveals what Hegel
defines as the “tragic fate of the certainty of itself that exists in and for
itself” (ibid., transl. modified). The unhappy consciousness embodies “the
knowledge of this total loss,” its pain being expressed by “the hard saying
that ‘God is dead’” (ibid.). However, God did not die a natural death: it
was killed by the comical consciousness and the unhappy consciousness is
now mourning its death. The paradox of the phenomenological con-
sciousness then lies precisely in its dual profile, whereby the calm of bliss
and the anxiety (Angst) arising from the loss of the substantial are closely
interwoven.
But if the well-being and good mood ascribed to the comical con-
sciousness do not have the last word, what is left of the alleged triumph of
subjectivity Hegelian comedy seemed to be striving for? Despite their lim-
its, as Hegel remarks in the Aesthetics, comical characters “reveal them-
selves as having something higher in them because they are not seriously
tied to the finite world with which they are engaged but are raised above it
and remain firm in themselves and secure in face of failure and loss” (Hegel
1975, II 1221). Such an affirmation may sound at odds with what has
been claimed so far concerning the tie of subjectivity and objectivity that
comedy is supposed to illustrate. Yet, by pitting Hegel against his own
words, we might realize the extent to which the initial hypothesis can still
be considered valid. Indeed, if comical characters “are not seriously tied to
the finite world,” it is because they are actually comically tied to it; that is,
they recognize the finitude of their world and its contingent existence
while reaffirming their absolutely necessary attachment to it (ibid.).
Thanks to their comic awareness, comic heroes are raised above the fini-
tude and remain firm while facing “failure and loss.” It is precisely their
exposure to failure, which is at the same time an exposure to the world’s
finitude and fallibility, that allows comic heroes to preserve themselves,
and to do so not by avoiding failure, but rather by embracing it. This is the
highest reconciliation that comedy can offer to consciousness.
The Comedy of Consciousness

Bataille claimed that humor cannot find any room in Hegel’s philosophy
as it can never match the serious work of the Begriff (Bataille 1990, 13).
Siding with Bataille to criticize Hegel’s restricted and preservative econ-
omy of meaning, Derrida also considered Hegel’s philosophy as being
“indifferent to the comedy of the Aufhebung” (Derrida 1967, 325). Pace
Bataille and Derrida, it will be argued here that Hegel’s Phenomenology is
rather the mise en scène of the comedy of the Aufhebung. In fact, Hegelian
comedy is perfectly compatible with the seriousness of conceptual labor, as
Zupančič has acutely highlighted to the point of identifying comicality
with the very work of universality, or rather, in her words, with “the
universal-at-work” (2008, 22). Along the same lines, the work of con-
sciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit can be considered as a peculiar
sort of comical labor. Yet, unlike Bataille, in whose philosophy of laughter
as a philosophy of non-savoir it is “the unknown [that] makes us laugh”
(Bataille 2004, 135), Hegel locates comicality at the heart of knowing.
Accordingly, in the Phenomenology, comedy results from the reiterated
series of efforts that consciousness makes to attain “Absolute Knowing.”
Common features such as negation, contradiction, and sublation show
a further degree of proximity between the dialectic route undertaken by
natural consciousness and the very essence of comedy (Desmond 1992,
252). The Phenomenology of Spirit as a whole can thus be listed under the
genre of comedy, precisely as the comedy of consciousness. The series of
Aufhebungen building the chain of consciousness’s comical experiences
may be considered as the paradigmatic device of Hegel’s phenomenologi-
cal comedy. Judith Butler has already observed that “Aufhebung is actually
more comic than its critics tend to realize,” and that “its sense of humor
is generally underrated” (Butler cited in Desmond 1989, 175). Aufhebung,
Butler adds, is not “purely appropriative,” as many of its detractors have
claimed, but allows consciousness to expose itself to its own limits and
errors (ibid.). Indeed, in the Phenomenology, more than anywhere else in
Hegel’s philosophy, sublation does not result in a reconciliatory confirma-
tion of the contents of knowledge that consciousness has previously expe-
rienced and accrued in the earlier stages of its path; rather, Aufhebung
becomes the hallmark of the immense (and comical) fallibility of
66 J. M. H. MASCAT
c onsciousness by way of repetition and escalation. Like a comic hero, nat-

ural consciousness is exposed to many subsequent delusions and nega-
tions, whereby it becomes “an infinitely resilient subject who not only
recovers from every deception and reversal, but proves more capable and
accommodating as a result” (ibid.). Errors, delusions, failures, reversals,
sublations circumscribe the ground and the scope of comedy almost to the
extent to which they mark the deployment of the phenomenological route
of consciousness; that is, of that dialectical movement which “conscious-
ness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object”
and “is precisely called experience” (Hegel 1977, 55).
Yet, in spite of being “an antithetical genre, [that] generates a multi-
plicity of negative and internally contradictory positions,” comedy seeks
happy endings (Roche 1998, 140). Its truth does not lie in negativity as
such, but rather in the negation of abstract negativity because of its absur-
dity and obstinate one-sidedness. Drawing on Arnold Ruge’s interpreta-
tion of Hegelian comedy as “immanent negation” (or self-negation),
Mark Roche has argued that “comedy functions as an aesthetic analogue
to Hegel’s practice of immanent critique, by which the philosopher seeks
to unveil self-contradictory and thus self-cancelling positions” (139). In
so doing, Hegelian comedy aims at achieving a “positive” outcome, pre-
cisely like the Phenomenology does. But what kind of reconciliation does
comedy provide, for Hegel to candidly admit to his preference for “happy
denouements” (Hegel 1975, 1232)? And why should such a reconcilia-
tion not be considered as “purely appropriative” or as the epitome of
Hegel’s alleged closed economy of meaning?
The peculiarity of comical happy endings lies in their ability to “tarry
with the negative” of failure (Hegel 1977, 19). As Moland has noted,
“While tragedy ends with the subject reuniting with substance either by
being destroyed or through renunciation of his original aims, comedy
reunites the subject with substance through showing the individual’s aims
themselves to be self-negating” (Moland 2016, 84). Self-negation allows the
comic hero to overcome the tragic hero’s destiny of disintegration by
external forces (gods, fate, circumstances) and to fail with ease. A similar
comical pattern pertains to the unfolding of natural consciousness in the
Phenomenology of Spirit. The phenomenological experience in fact corre-
sponds to the bumpy road by which the inexperienced natural conscious-
ness reaches the goal of truth. All the stages of the Phenomenology are
marked by the incongruities that systematically arise for natural conscious-
ness in the course of its attempts to achieve the substantial aim (science as
“Absolute Knowing”). The march of consciousness appears to be haunted

by an inescapable logico-temporal disjunction whereby the correspon-
dence between knowledge and its object, certainty and truth is constantly
deferred until the end of the journey. By positing itself as absolute at each
and every stage—its posture being an imposture, as Desmond aptly remarks
(Desmond 1992, 282)—natural consciousness inevitably ends up negat-
ing itself together with its own immediate attainments, and thus failing.
Consciousness then acts comically, since in Hegel’s terms “the comical is
to show a person or a thing as it dissolves itself internally in its very gloat-
ing” (Hegel 1955, I 427–428).
At first sight it may be difficult to pinpoint any common features
between the clumsy consciousness climbing the steps of the Phenomenology
and the comical subject “which is raised in its freedom above the downfall
of the whole finite sphere and is happy and assured in itself” (Hegel 1975,
II 1202). The mastery of the comic hero “who remains undisturbed in
himself and at ease” seems to be worlds apart from the precipitous spiral
of Umkehrungen to which natural consciousness is bound (ibid.). The
confidence of the comical character seems to be far away from the constant
vacillations that make the route of consciousness a “pathway of doubt”
and a “way of despair” (Hegel 1977, 49). At a closer look, though, the
drama of consciousness displays its strong comical texture. With each step
on the path, the experience of consciousness exhibits an almost invariable
performance through the different settings that come in succession.3
Natural consciousness assumes the existence of an external object to which
it relates, this relationship being the cognition it acquires of such an object.
From the standpoint of consciousness the truth lies in the object itself—
and in its independent being, which does not coincide with the cognition
consciousness has acquired of it. Thus, the phenomenological enterprise
consists of examining the (non-)correspondence between the being of the
3
The beginning provides a good example of the logic of failure at play in the Phenomenology.
The journey starts with the unwary natural consciousness struggling with its sense-certainty
and the slippery contents it attempts to seize (Hegel 1977, 58–66). Sense-certainty takes as
true only what it can access through the senses, namely the singular now and here, and by
investing all its efforts in the grasping of immediate knowledge, it pursues an inconsistent
goal which nonetheless it attempts to achieve with seriousness and conviction. However,
since both its goal and the means are revealed to be “inherently null” as in the first type of
comedy (Hegel 1975, II, 1200), sense-certainty deserves to fail, its alleged rich and concrete
content turning out to be the poorest and most abstract one, its truth vanishing into its
opposite, namely into a being at the mercy of any consciousness.
68 J. M. H. MASCAT
Thing-in-itself (truth) and the being of the Thing-for-consciousness

(knowledge). Consciousness must “alter its knowledge in order to make it
conform to the object,” and throughout this process suffers several defeats
and proceeds by perpetual reversals (54). Each time it is required to aban-
don its ungrounded certainties. Nevertheless, the dissolution of its knowl-
edge as determinate negation does not lead to a purely negative result;
rather, it allows for the appearance of a new object which “contains the
nothingness of the first, it is what experience has made of it” (55).
Here, as in comedy, when something comes to nothing, then something
else comes from this nothing. Subjectively, from the viewpoint of conscious-
ness, its own experience of self-negation is perceived as a mere failure,
since natural consciousness ignores the secret presence of the cunning at
work through the entire process as the immanent activity accounting for
the positing and dissolving of each determinacy and for the transforming
of each concrete content into a moment of the whole (51). Behind the
back of consciousness, as it were, unsubstantial goals and ineffective means
serve to fulfill the substantial aims of “Absolute Knowing.” Meanwhile the
für uns, the silent audience attending to the drama and purely looking at
what is going to happen (das reine Zusehen), may indulge from time to
time in the pleasure of sober, moderate laughter.
Laughing Last: Comicality, Partisanship, Meaning,

and Nonsense
Comical patterns and phenomenological experiences outline similar par-

adigms of subjectivity. What, in Hegel’s view, are the laudable features
that the comic hero and the phenomenological consciousness have
in common?
The first one is undoubtedly their entrenchment with negativity. Both
comical and phenomenological performances, as recalled earlier, are emi-
nently negative practices (consisting of errors and sublations), for which
nevertheless negativity is never unbound or in excess of every determina-
tion, but rather always determined as the negation of the subject’s own
means and ends; that is, as self-negation. Secondly, mismatches and incon-
gruities are at the heart of comical plots as much as they are at the heart of
the phenomenological unfolding. A third and crucial element is failure as
the hallmark of both comical and phenomenological experiences.
Accordingly, a certain savoir faire that I propose to call “savoir-fail” seems
to be the most precious ability that the comic hero on the one hand, and
natural consciousness on the other, have gained through their obstinate

and resilient drive toward pursuing their own way. Lastly, as mentioned,
through the failure of their subjective endeavors, comical protagonists and
phenomenological characters lay hold to the substantial and restage their
attachment to the object-matter.
Fallible and obstinate, committed to and at odds with the world, the
comic hero shares the existential idiosyncrasies of partisan consciousness,
a scheme of subjectivity for which Hegel does not explicitly show any par-
ticular interest but that he nevertheless, interestingly (although indirectly),
portrays in the shape of the comical character. Comedy, in other words,
can be seen as incarnating the very dialectic of revolutionary engagement
by displaying the double bind of the subject to the object-matter (the
thing and the cause – die Sache) as well as the subject’s resilient obstinacy
in failure. To analyze radical partisanship through the prism of comicality
allows one to focus on the peculiar significance of failure that lies at the
heart of Hegelian comedy and haunts the very experience of revolutionary
militancy in the twenty-first century. Such an approach embraces a differ-
ent perspective from the one proposed by Wendy Brown in her remarkable
1999 essay “Resisting Left Melancholy” (Brown 1999). By no means is
emphasis on comicality intended to underplay the negative affects (such as
disenchantment, unhappiness, loss, defeatism) that weigh on left-wing
partisanship and from which the comical consciousness, as noted earlier, is
far from immune, in the name of an allegedly more joyful attitude. Rather,
Hegelian comedy provides the tools enabling a reflection on today’s revo-
lutionary engagement focused on the very core of its dialectic of failure
and persistence.
At first sight, tragic heroism may seem more appropriate to supply a
suitable scheme for conceiving radical partisanship. As Hegel recalls, “In
tragedy the individuals destroy themselves through the one-sidedness of
their otherwise solid will and character, or they must resignedly accept
what they had opposed even in a serious way” (Hegel 1975, II 1199). For
obvious reasons, tragic characters, because of their obstinate devotion and
dedicated persistence, seem to perfectly fit the shape of the resolute revo-
lutionary partisan. Yet, it is in comedy, where characters learn through trial
and error, that their goals and aims, as well as their attempts to fight and
sacrifice themselves, may end up being rooted; but even in such adverse
circumstances, where their subjective inclinations manifestly fail, comic
heroes do not give up. “In comedy,” Hegel writes, “there comes before
our contemplation, in the laughter in which the characters dissolve
70 J. M. H. MASCAT
e verything, including themselves, the victory of their own subjective per-

sonality which nevertheless persists self-assured” (ibid.). This may sound
purely consolatory, but does in fact teach a greater lesson: while aims and
means that are contingently chosen, posed and pursued turn out to be
unsubstantial, substantiality lies in the very attachment to the world-sub-
stance that allows the comic hero to fight without surrender. Comic heroes
accept the possibility of failing from the outset, remaining “tranquil and
self-assured” while facing the undoing of all they had created (1220). In
failing, the comical character shows wit and perseverance. The same can be
said of the phenomenological consciousness who knows how to fail and
how to persevere through its own defeats: by testing the adequacy between
its own certainties and the truth, “consciousness provides its own criterion
from within itself,” and, as it discovers the inadequacy of the object vis-à-
vis its knowledge, it “spoils its own limited satisfaction,” suffering this
violence at its own hands (Hegel 1977, 51 and 53). In this regard, not-
withstanding the contingent despair arising from perceiving its own dis-
solution as a loss, natural consciousness blissfully fails, and its failure is no
catastrophe at all.
Comical bliss seems to depend on and stem from the very ability to fail
that consciousness shows. As Hegel writes: “[comedy] implies an infinite
light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above
his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all: this is
the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustra-
tion of his aims and achievements” (Hegel 1975, II 1200). Indeed, comi-
cal characters can laugh at everything as easily as they laugh at themselves,
and by doing so they prove themselves at ease even in failure, precisely to
the extent to which they can and know how to fail. Revolutionary partisan-
ship finds in failure its primary concern because of the fundamental fallibil-
ity involved in its radical political engagement. Being engaged inevitably
implies being exposed to failure, and fallibility is not only a side effect, but
rather a constitutive property of partisan consciousness. Partisan con-
sciousness knows failure as a crucial dimension of its own commitment,
but also—as Bob Dylan would put it—“knows there’s no success like fail-
ure/and that failure’s no success at all” (Dylan 1965).
The comical and the partisan consciousness thus share the same ability
to endure failure and to do so with unperturbed ease, an ability deriving
from the subject’s resilient attitude and persistent dedication to substanti-
ality that allows it to constantly reiterate the effort to accomplish its goals.
Another major source of ease for the subject is the link to the substance
that consciousness maintains in spite of the adversities it encounters. For

Hegel, the constant feature of comical plots is their final outcome, invari-
ably based on a failure that brings things to nothing. At the same time in
comedy, as mentioned, failure induces neither torment nor pain, inasmuch
as “what is destroyed in this solution cannot be either fundamental prin-
ciple or individual character” (Hegel 1975, II 1201). Hence, in comedy
both substance and subjectivity might (and do) fail, but will not perish as
long as the substance is preserved. According to a similar scheme, for the
phenomenological and the partisan consciousness, when something comes
to nothing, then something else comes from this nothing. Or, as William
Desmond phrases it, every “breaking down” is simultaneously a “breaking
through” (Desmond 1992, 229). This is particularly evident in the course
of the Phenomenology, where the negation of the knowledge belonging to
consciousness as determinate negation does not lead to a purely negative
result, but rather produces the appearance of a new object which “con-
tains the nothingness of the first, [and] it is what experience has made of
it” (Hegel 1977, 55).
Is one facing, in the last instance, “the blind spot of Hegelianism, fall-
ing into the trap of preserving meaning in its restricted economy,” as
argued by Derrida (Derrida 1967, 259)? Shall we then understand the end
of the phenomenological comedy as a happy ending? And, in that case,
shall we assume that “Absolute Knowing” would play the role of the
comic hero who laughs last? But, above all, what would the partisan con-
sciousness see as a happy ending, other than the triumph of its own camp?
It seems indeed that Hegel, in comedy as much as in the Phenomenology,
is interested in “preserving” some substantial meaning for the subject-
matter precisely by exposing it to and connecting it with the fragile and
unsubstantial experience of subjectivity. Yet, what is actually “preserved”
in the course of the phenomenological and partisan experience is the very
obstinate tie of consciousness to the substance. The “something” that
“comes” from a previous “nothing” stands for the very endurance of the
Erfahrung of consciousness, the persistence of an attachment to objectiv-
ity and of a subjective commitment to transform the world. This is pre-
cisely where the cipher of comedy lies: neither in the world as it is nor in
its apocalypse, neither in the subject per se nor in its aims and aspirations,
but in the liaison between the two. Such a comical liaison is actually the
senseless ground for which meaning can be provided.
Premised on this senseless experience, Hegelian comedy and the phe-
nomenological trajectory of consciousness, as much as revolutionary
72 J. M. H. MASCAT
artisanship, thus neither meet happy endings nor amount to the preser-
p
vation of a restricted affirmative economy of meaning, as Derrida would
suggest, but rather epitomize the reiterative staging of “the relation of
meaning to nonsense” (Trahair 2007, 33).
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1993. Hegel: Three Studies, Trans. Shierry Wever Nicholsen.
Bataille, Georges. 1990. Hegel, Death and Sacrifice. Trans. Jonathan Strauss. Yale
French Studies 78: 9–28.
———. 2004. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Trans. Michelle Kendall
and Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Brown, Wendy. 1999. Resisting Left Melancholy. Boundary 2 26 (3): 19–27.
Dean, Jodi. 2016. Crowds and Party. London: Verso.
Derrida, Jacques. 1967. Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Desmond, William. 1989. Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of
Hegel. New York: SUNY Press.
———. 1992. Beyond Hegel and Dialectic. New York: SUNY Press.
Dylan, Bob. 1965. Love Minus Zero/No Limit. Bringing It All Back Home.
Columbia Records.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1955. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Trans.
E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson, 3 vols. New York: Humanities Press.
———. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Arts. Vol. I and II. Trans. T.M. Knox.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
———. 2010. Science of Logic, Trans. George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Law, Stephen C. 2000. Hegel and the Spirit of Comedy. In Hegel and Aesthetics,
ed. William Maker, 113–130. New York: SUNY Press.
Mascat, Jamila M.H. 2013. When Negativity Becomes Vanity: Hegel’s Critique of
Romantic Irony. Stasis 1 (1): 230–245.
McFadden, George. 1982. Discovering the Comic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Moland, Lydia. 2016. ‘And Why Not?’ Hegel, Comedy and the End of Art.
Verifiche XLV (1–2): 73–104.
Nikulin, Dmitri. 2014. Comedy, Seriously. A Philosophical Study. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Paolucci, Anne. 1978. Hegel’s Theory of Comedy. In Comedy: New Perspectives,
ed. Maurice Charney, 89–108. New York: New York Literary Forum.
Roche, Mark W. 1998. Tragedy and Comedy. A Systematic Study and a Critique of
Hegel. New York: SUNY Press.
———. 2002. Hegel’s Theory of Comedy in the Context of Hegelian and Modern
Reflections on Comedy. Revue internationale de philosophie 56 (221
(3)): 411–430.
Rose, Gilian. 1981. Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Verso.
Schneider, Helmut. 1997. La théorie hégélienne du comique et la dissolution du
bel art. In L’esthétique de Hegel, ed. Véronique Fabbri and Jean-Louis Vieillard
Baron, 217–247. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Trahair, Lisa. 2007. The Comedy of Philosophy. Sense and Non-sense in Early
Cinematic Slapstick. New York: SUNY Press.
Ypi, Lea, and Jonathan White. 2016. The Meaning of Partisanship. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In. On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 5
The Aborted Object of Comedy

and the Birth of the Subject: Socrates
and Aristophanes’ Alliance
Rachel Aumiller
The familiar image of Socrates as a midwife presents the philosopher as the

one who aids in the birth of truth in the presence of the Good and the
Beautiful. In contrast to the figure of the philosopher-midwife,
Aristophanes’ Clouds depicts Socrates as the abortionist. In a moment of
comic horror, a knock at the door disrupts the concentration of the
philosopher-midwife, who accidentally performs an abortion on the verge
of delivering a new concept (Cl. 130–40). The comic poet is often seen as
mocking the philosopher with the dark, comic image of the midwife-
abortionist. However, Plato himself shifts from presenting the philosopher
as the midwife who delivers living truth into the world (Symposium) to
the image of the abortionist who induces labor only to snuff out the life of
the newly born concept (Theaetetus). I suggest that with the image of the
midwife-abortionist an alliance is drawn between the comic poet and the
philosopher, who self-consciously mimic one another in the act of abort-
ing the very object of aesthetic or philosophical reflection.
R. Aumiller (*)
The University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_5
76 R. AUMILLER
I set the stage for Socrates and Aristophanes’ alliance by beginning with
Hegel’s question, what is the object of art?, in the context of his analysis of
ancient Greek “art-religion.” Hegel traces the shifting object of art through
a variety of artistic practices before arriving at comedy, which he identifies as
the last stage of Greek aesthetic life. He finally asks, what is the object of
comedy? Unlike other artistic practices that are positively defined by their
created object or creative activity, ancient comedy appears to be purely
destructive, terminating anything that might be traditionally recognizable as
an object of art. Hegel points to Aristophanes and Socrates as representing
two sides of the defacement of the object of art-religion as such. We can eas-
ily identify this negative force in Aristophanes’ plays in which the gods—the
object of other forms of Greek art—evaporate into a puff of air. Negativity
in comedy manifests itself in the determinate negation of this or that object
of art, objects once celebrated or revered. Comic negativity expresses itself
most powerfully, however, when comedy turns on itself, offering nothing
that may be traditionally recognized as comedic (as I will explore through
Clouds). The playwright himself sets fire to his stage to the horror of his
audience. But is this aesthetic stage, which not only lacks but destroys its
own object/objective, wholly negative? Hegel proposes that a shadowy fig-
ure can almost be detected lurking in the negative space left by the termi-
nated object of art at the end of ancient Greek art-religion. He names this
figure Subject. The object of art is aborted. A subject is born. This shadow,
which is more similar to a phantom than a defined self or ego, does not
resemble anything that will become traditionally recognizable as the mod-
ern subject. And yet, for Hegel, the birth of this phantom figure, which is
attached to the aborted object, represents the first abstract conception of a
self—not in the form of an artist or actor, but in the form of the Subject.1
Moving beyond Hegel, I turn to Aristophanes and Plato to consider
how in the performative destruction of the object of aesthetic and philo-
sophical reflection, something slips into being that may be identified as the
phantom form of the Subject. Throughout the Socratic dialogues, we find
suggestions of theories of subjectivity, not yet fully realized, but phantoms
that are later taken up by modern philosophers to be raised into some-
thing concrete. In this sense, Socrates, in his role as a midwife, leaves
behind orphan concepts that he neither affirms nor rejects. I claim that
one of these orphan concepts is the unrealized form of the Subject. In my
view, it is not accidental that the phantom-shadow of the Subject lurks in
1
In Hegel’s work, the first mention of the subject has a theatrical character, as if subjectiv-
ity were itself a comic trope. I capitalize Subject in this context to treat the concept as a
proper name of a stage character.
5 THE ABORTED OBJECT OF COMEDY AND THE BIRTH OF THE SUBJECT… 77
places where Socrates takes on the contrary duties of the m

idwife-abortionist.
One strange metaphor leads to another. I pay particular attention to the
metaphor of “twin birth.” Plato’s repeated metaphor of twin birth sug-
gests that the subject is not one but always already two: a double. Plato’s
myths and metaphors allow the double to be rendered differently. For
example, the Symposium’s myth of the birth of the human being as a con-
sequence of the circle people being sliced into two allows us to grasp the
subject (1) as a composite of two positive halves joined and separated by a
split (the subject as constituted by a split or metaxu); or (2) as a composite
of a positive half and a negative half, a missing or fantastical double (the
subject as constituted by an originary lack or erōs). By turning to the
repeated theme of midwifery and twin birth in the Theaetetus, I locate a
third formulation of the double: the subject as a composite of determinate
negation (the aborted object) and a fantastical appearance (the birth of a
phantom subject). The appearance of subjectivity is constituted by an
objective side, which cannot be reached. The Socratic figure of the
midwife-abortionist points to a double movement of coming-in to-being
and coming-out-of-being. In this movement, I adopt a theory of subjec-
tivity in the shape of the monstrous compound of the aborted object and
its phantom double.
Hegel on the Terminated Object of Art-Religion

In the last two paragraphs of the “Art-Religion” of the Greeks in the
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977, §§746–7), Hegel reflects on the
merging of the spirit of ancient comedy with the spirit of Platonic skepti-
cism. He identifies Plato’s appropriation of the destructive power of
Aristophanes’ comedies as giving birth to the first concept of the subject.
Hegel at last arrives at this conception of the subject by pursuing the
question, what is the object of art? To answer this question, he also asks,
what is the object of religion?, since art and religion in ancient Greek
society are intertwined. Hegel traces the shifting object of art in Greek
aesthetic and religious practice, beginning with the marble statue that
depicts the idealized human form as a deity. The statue reflects none of
the sculptor’s own passions or angst. It is a product that conceals its
maker along with the creative process that engendered it (§708). Hegel
contrasts the marble statue to art in the form of spoken or sung words.
Unlike the statue, which presents the object of art as a thing to be pas-
sively admired or worshiped, performed speech makes artistic practice
itself the object of art. In singing a hymn, for example, a community is at
78 R. AUMILLER
one with its art-object (and with the divine). In contrast to the statue,
which outlasts and erases its origin, the hymn vanishes when its own pro-
duction comes to an end (§714). The shift from the object of art as a
product to the object of art as creative production is also expressed in the
festivals of Dionysus and Demeter. At the festivals devoted to the gods,
the festival goers reflect on their own activity, since each god represents a
different aspect of human life (§ §722–3). The various activities and cus-
toms that comprise human life are each upheld as something sacred in
itself. The aesthetic representation of the activity of the gods and the
activity of human beings become indistinguishable, as reflected in the epic
in which the gods and human heroes mirror each other’s actions (§729).
On the theatrical stage of tragedy, however, gods and human beings do
not often intermingle. The object of tragedy is rather the individual
human being who boldly steps forward before the audience. However,
the object of tragedy is not only the human individual who is one with
the immediacy of her action. The tragic object is also the reflective
account of that action, which the tragic hero must provide in defense of
her deed before the chorus. In the process of defending her action, the
tragic subject fully identifies with her action, defending the absolute
rightness of that action even at the cost of her own life. Art in the form of
individual human activity becomes indifferent to the human agent. In
this sense, tragic performance resembles the inanimate sculpture more
than the performed hymn. The art-object—even in the form of action—
becomes an impersonal maxim as the creative expression of the individ-
ual vanishes.
Art-religion begins with an art-object that is separate from the artist.
The object of art is given to the audience as something to be passively
admired; the art-object shifts to the immediacy of human activity, some-
thing transient that comes in and out of existence with the immediate
expression of its makers; and finally, the art-object takes the form of a
reflective account of human activity. And yet, in this moment of aesthetic
reflection the individual is most alienated from the production of her art
(that is, the action that she mistakenly identifies as most essentially her
own). Indeed, the art-object, for which she sacrifices herself, will continue
to be reproduced by new actors with the same conviction. This irony is
not lost on comedy, which breaks with the progression by aborting the
object of art-religion altogether (§745). Hegel’s pursuit of the question,
what is the object of art?, leads him to ancient comedy, which answers
“Nothing.”
Hegel identifies the art-religion of the Greeks as ending in comedy and

connects what occurs on the theatrical stage to the philosophical stage of
Platonic skepticism. In tragedy, the character who first steps forward
before the audience is terminated, leaving the defense of her action as a
placeholder for her missing individuality. Comedy looks with irony upon
the tragic hero who sacrifices herself for the sake of an action that was
given to her as an absolute imperative. But rather than opposing this self-
destructive character of tragedy, comedy elevates it, bringing tragedy’s
vanishing act to completion. Aesthetic production turns on itself, destroy-
ing its final remaining object, its own reflective account of its activity. On
the comic stage, the gods—each of which enforces a different aspect of
social activities and customs—now dissolve into laughter. Hegel sees this
destructive spirit of the comic toward the gods and the ethical ideals that
they enforce as paralleled in philosophy by the forms of the Good and the
Beautiful, which ultimately show themselves to be comic spectacles
(§747). Plato’s forms may at first seem like a strange place to locate comic
destruction within philosophy. However, Hegel suggests that even a dog-
matic reading of Plato—one that identifies a positive metaphysics in the
theory of the forms—results in a kind of cultural or ethical skepticism. The
forms, which are without determinate content, challenge the ethical max-
ims and customs of an earlier cultural stage. Because the forms are without
determinate content, they may be continually reinterpreted to various
ends without offering certain instructions concerning our daily ethical
life.2 We can thus say of the gods and the societal maxims that they enforce:
“They are clouds” (§746). As comedy may be viewed as an aesthetic stage
that betrays itself—destroying its own object—so might skepticism be
viewed as a philosophical stage that betrays itself, extending its critical
spirit to its own determinate contents. Despite the fully negative character
of these movements, Hegel sees comedy and skepticism as producing a
2
Certain strands of ancient skepticism attempt to avoid the disruption of skepticism on a
social and political level by limiting the skeptic’s mode on inquiry to a theoretical register.
Sextus Empiricus notably argues that because philosophical inquiry cannot lead us to abso-
lute ethical maxims, it is advisable to conform on a practical level to the laws and customs of
one’s society (Outlines of Scepticism). Tragedy, however, shows us that “going along” with
the laws and customs of one’s society is exactly what leads an individual into a practical
epoché, caught between two ethical actions that are both demanded by one’s society but in
conflict with each other. Comedy exposes the underlying societal and political contradictions
that placed the individual in conflict with herself and her community. The result is total
upheaval of the political and ethical systems that structured the tragic stage.
80 R. AUMILLER
pathos that is an expression of absolute certainty. In the process of over-

turning the values of a former stage, nothing could be more certain than
negativity itself. The sun sets and darkness covers all that we once knew to
be true. But this is not yet the midnight of consciousness.3 Darkness, for
the moment, is met by the skeptic’s tranquility and the comic poet’s
detached laughter. As their vision adjusts to the darkness, they begin to
sense with certainty “the coming-to-be of a shape whose existence does
not go outside of the Self, but is purely a vanishing object” (§754).
Ancient comedy and skepticism abort their own objective contents,
leaving nothing positive in its place. And yet the negative space of the
object of art-religion is a clearing with which one (the artist, the audience,
the philosopher) fully identifies. The vanishing object is at once the nega-
tive shape of a sense of self4:
The individual self is the negative power through which and in which the
gods [and all that they represent …] vanish. At the same time, the individual
self is not the emptiness of this disappearance but, on the contrary, preserves
itself in this very nothingness, abides with itself and is the sole actuality. In it
the religion of Art is consummated and had completely returned into
itself. (§747)
The birth of the subject comes at the price of the termination of an entire
form of life (since the gods are not separate from us, but rather representa-
tions of different aspects of our experience of nature and culture). Thus,
the subject is formed in the shadow of the aborted gods, a shadow she
cannot shake. The negative space of the aborted gods, however, will not
be completely filled by the new gods and new values and customs of the
3
For Hegel, self-consciousness is the main stage character of art-religion. In other words,
he is interested in how self-consciousness changes shape through different aesthetic, reli-
gious, and philosophical representations of human life. Through skepticism and comedy,
self-consciousness grasps itself as a pure negativity and, for the moment, will have no sense
of despair or nihilism, but will be perfectly at peace with its negative content.
4
The skeptic’s path of doubt leads her to absolute certainty in self. This narrative may
sound vaguely Cartesian; however, this foundational self cannot even be counted as a think-
ing ego. As I will argue, the emergence of the subject out of skepticism takes the form of
double negativity. In my framing, this double negativity will not take the form of a negation
of a negation (that results in a new positive position), but rather takes the form of negativity
redoubled or negative twins: the aborted object and the phantom appearance of the
subject.
next stage of history. Instead, Hegel suggests the subject is necessarily

constituted by a kind of negative concept, represented at the end of the
ancient world by the comic abortion of the object of art-religion. Each
new appearance of the subject will be sustained by the negative space of an
aborted object.
In this brief but crucial passage at the end of “Art-Religion,” we wit-
ness the emergence of a newly formed subject, who will develop into the
leading role of “Revealed Religion.” The strongest embodiment of our
new protagonist is in the image of Christ, who embodies the new form of
God-in-man, but also the vanishing form of God-as-Absolute (since God-
in-man is characterized by division, one dividing into two).5 At the end of
“Art-Religion” passing into “Revealed Religion,” Hegel tends to rush
over what he sees as the embryo of the subject conceived between comedy
and skepticism, only making indirect allusions to the specific crossings of
Aristophanes and Socrates in his discussion of the forms as clouds. In the
following, I leave Hegel aside and turn to Clouds and the Theaetetus to
offer my own analysis of the subject that emerges as a result of the con-
summation of ancient comedy and Platonic skepticism. My first proposal
is that the comic poet and philosopher come together in the figure of the
midwife-abortionist. My second proposal is that the midwife-abortionist
on the shared stage of comedy and skepticism delivers a phantom notion—
the negative outline of the unrealized concept—of the subject as that
which is necessarily conjoined with an aborted object of aesthetic and
philosophical reflection.
5
The comic compound of that which appears as subject and that which is aborted at birth
is repeated in what Hegel calls “the divine drama” of Christianity. On this stage, God himself
mimics the comic poet and skeptic philosopher. In ushering in the birth of the Son of Man,
God terminates the object of religion in the form of an absolute One. Thus, the nativity
causes even the skeptic to gasp: “Oh my God, what has God done” (Hegel 1977, §752). At
the incarnation what occurs on the comic stage sinks in deeper.
Hegel refers to Christ as a “monstrous-compound” (Hegel 2007, 457): a compound of a
new appearance of the divine human subject and a terminated object of religion as an undis-
turbed unity. At the crucifixion of Christ, we come to fully realize something that was con-
ceived between the philosopher and the comic poet, when, in a moment of comic horror, we
recognize that this “monstrous-compound” belongs equally to all.
82 R. AUMILLER
Aristophanes’ Intentional Flop in Honor of Socrates

Aristophanes’ Clouds is by far his most celebrated play because of its con-
nection to the historical life and death of Socrates. Clouds is often taught
as a satire of Socrates that contributes to the negative public image of the
philosopher, leading to his execution twenty-three years later. The first
irony of Clouds’ legacy is that it is built on a mischaracterization of both
Aristophanes’ framing of Socrates and of Socrates’ framing of
Aristophanes.6 In my view, Clouds does not drag the great philosopher
down from his high seat in the sky, but rather pays him homage. The
second irony of Clouds’ historical legacy is that its first performance in
422 at Dionysia was a flop—possibly Aristophanes’ only flop. What is
more, it appears to have been an intended flop. Following four consecu-
tive wins for the category “best comedy” at the festivals, Clouds was
likewise anticipated to be a great success. Aristophanes dashes his audi-
ence’s expectations for the comedy on a number of levels. I see these two
ironies as closely connected. Aristophanes pays tribute to Socrates, whom
he portrays as an abortionist, by purposefully aborting his own comedy
to the horror of his audience.
Clouds employs none of the usual comic conventions that Aristophanes’
audience had come to expect of his drama. It is his only surviving play, for
example, that does not end with resolution for the protagonist, or, if not
for the protagonist, then for the communal whole. Instead, the play ends
as it begins. It begins with an uneducated countryman, Strepsiades, who
has accrued a great deal of debt due to his own arrogance and foolishness.
He pretends to be a pious man so that the gods might come to his aid.
When the gods fail to come to his aid he redirects his desperate plea to the
philosophers, whom he naively imagines have special powers to bend the
will of the gods and humans alike. Of course, this image of the philoso-
pher has nothing to do with the philosopher, but is rather a product of
Strepsiades’ greedy fantasy of employing philosophy to cheat his way out
of debt. The play’s characterization of the philosopher highlights the para-
dox of Strepsiades’ expectation for the philosopher, whom he imagines to
be both lofty and removed while at the same time ready and able to serve the
ambitions of corrupt men. The absurd depiction of the philosopher does
6
Halliwell makes a similar case about the relationship between Socrates and Aristophanes
in the introduction to his translation of Clouds (Halliwell 2015, 4–6).
not mock Socrates’ view of himself or reflect Aristophanes’ critical view of

Socrates. The perspective belongs to Strepsiades, who might be seen as
representing the average Athenian (although Aristophanes counts on the
fact that his audience will not recognize themselves as the object of
laughter).
Strepsiades bangs on the door of what he childishly refers to as “The
Thinking Institute” and demands that Socrates take him on as a student.
Although Socrates is mildly amused by the man’s astonishing shallow-
ness, he has no interest in coming to the aid of this despicable protago-
nist. Rather Socrates, in his usual way, plays along with his new
interlocutor’s assumptions, guiding them to their contradictory dead
ends. Socrates responds to Strepsiades’ feigned piety with a series of fart
jokes that make up the majority of the dialogue. “Don’t wait on the old
gods to deliver you from your troubles. You’ll have just as much luck
praying to the thundering clouds, those billows of farts from the great
anus in the sky” (Cl. 240–99, my paraphrase). This overt mockery is not
intended to be clever. It might have provoked a more reflective man to
blush, coming to terms with his hypocrisy. But the joke is lost on
Strepsiades, who, to Socrates’ astonishment, immediately redirects his
prayers to the Clouds. When the Clouds do not come to his rescue,
Strepsiades becomes like Alcibiades (Symp. 213b–222b). His childish
admiration for Socrates turns sour. In one last pathetic attempt to over-
come his impotency, Strepsiades sets fire to “The Thinking Institute.”
Not only does the play end as it begins, but there is no comic inversion
of power dynamics. In Frogs, for example, Dionysus is dragged through
the underworld and treated like a slave, while his human slave Xanthius
is worshiped as a god. In Clouds, however, the poor uneducated fool
remains just that, while Socrates and his students walk off the stage
unharmed by the flames.
Twentieth-century comedy, taking place on the bleak historical stage of
world wars, has made us accustomed to dark comedies that offer no relief
from misfortune, which make us suffer the company of protagonists for
whom we have little sympathy and tedious plots which lead us nowhere.
But Aristophanes’ audience was not at all prepared for a play that had no
pay off. They hated Clouds. And, what is more, it seems that Aristophanes
intended for them to hate it. At the parabasis—the monologue in which
the chorus leader walks forward to explain the forthcoming moral of the
84 R. AUMILLER
comedy—the head Cloud steps out. In a shocking moment, he leans in

toward the audience and speaks in the voice of the playwright himself:
Listen here. I’m going to give this to you straight. Your love for my come-
dies has made me famous, it’s true. But you praise my work for all the wrong
reasons. My cleverness is completely lost on you and I’m losing my mind.
Each time one of my plays is performed, it’s like I’m a virgin midwife about
to deliver a firstborn. But you greedy bastards pluck the baby from between
the mother’s legs and raise the child to be as stupid as you. Well, this time
you’re not going to do that. This comedy is not for you but for the virgin
midwife herself, Artemis, goddess of childbirth, goddess of the hunt. (Cl.
510–626, my paraphrase)
In the midst of a comedy of fart jokes, Aristophanes takes a dark turn,

essentially promising to sacrifice his comedy before allowing his audience
to appropriate it. He confesses that in his view it is his most successful
work, although he knows that it will be misunderstood. The play seems
to poke fun at Socrates by portraying him as mishandling fragile con-
cepts, which he inevitably terminates—for example, when a gnat farts or
a gecko shits (Cl. 161–77). This is often interpreted as a criticism of
Socrates for failing to deliver his own positive concepts. But given the
emphasis of the parabasis, we might conclude instead that Aristophanes
admires the way Socrates refuses to give his followers what they want. If
Socrates delivers anything at all—and is not simply full of gas—it is a
hideous child resembling himself that no one would want to claim as
their own (in truth, not even Plato will want to claim Socrates’ concepts
as his own).
Clouds makes an alliance between comedy and Socratic philosophy,
mocking the Athenian attitude toward both. Aristophanes stresses the
contradictory framing of the philosopher as one who is both too removed
and too involved, too frivolous and too cunning. Such expectations will
lead to bitter disillusionment when the philosopher, who claims to be nei-
ther a cosmologist nor a rhetorician, fails to offer solutions. The comedy
is a prophecy. When the philosopher fails to deliver you from your misfor-
tune, you will in turn identify him as the source of that misfortune. The
farce that the Athenians have created for themselves will surely end in
horror: the termination of one of Athens’ greatest offspring by
her own hand.
Theaetetus’ Sextuplets
I suggest that as Clouds may be read as paying homage to Socrates, Plato’s
Theaetetus might be read as paying homage to Clouds. Or at the very least,
the two works suggest that Aristophanes and Plato were aligned in their
view of Socrates as the midwife-abortionist with one foot on the comic
stage and one foot in horror. While Clouds, in my reading, defends phi-
losophy against Athenian public opinion, the Theaetetus defends comedy,
even when its laughter is at the expense of the philosopher. Plato’s most
explicit defense of Aristophanes is in the Apology, in which Socrates at his
trial carefully distinguishes between those who attack him “with animus
and malice” and the comic poet’s harmless “nonsense” (Ap. 18d, 19c).
The Theaetetus echoes this defense of comedy, offering a lengthy digres-
sion about self-deprecation and the virtue of being able to take a joke.7
These passages about critical laugher (katagelōs) might seem out of place
in a dialogue dedicated to epistemology rather than poetics.8 Beyond the
explicit discussions of humor, the Theaetetus takes the form of a joke book.
Although Plato’s humor is expressed throughout the Socratic dialogues,
he chooses this work on the nature of true knowledge to be an explicit
exercise in comic writing.9 The Theaetetus mirrors Clouds in a number of
ways: (1) in the tone of the dialogue, which borders on comic horror—
after all, the book of fart jokes is dedicated to Theaetetus, who is dying of
dysentery (Tht. 142b5); (2) in the explicit defense of joking and mockery;
(3) in Socrates’ portrayal of himself as the midwife whose primary func-
tion is to perform abortions; and (4) in presenting itself as a work of epis-
temology, but failing to deliver a single successful theory of knowledge:
like Clouds, it strings the reader along and if it delivers anything at all in
the end—and is not simply full of gas—it is something unrecognizable
from what the reader had expected.
7
The philosopher as the object of ridicule and laughter: Tht. 172c, 174a, 174c. The phi-
losopher’s own ridicule and laughter: Tht. 174d, 175b, 175d.
8
As Halliwell argues (Halliwell 2008), the Athenians were deeply apprehensive concerning
the volatile nature of mocking laughter. Given this cultural background, Socrates’ defense of
critical laughter, at least in the Theaetetus, is significant. Just as the philosopher needed a
comic defender, so was the comic poet was in need of a philosophical defense.
9
One of Socrates’ standup routines rides on Protagoras. Socrates jokes that instead of call-
ing man the measure, Protagoras might have chosen the pig, baboon, or tadpole (Tht. 161c–
d). Socrates’ ridicule in the Theaetetus always allows the joke to be turned back onto himself.
If Protagoras is correct, Socrates continues, then all of his own philosophy is the laughing
stock (Tht. 161–2a).
86 R. AUMILLER
The Theaetetus extends Clouds’ motif of the philosopher-abortionist by

adding a twist to several concepts introduced in the Symposium, which is
traditionally marked as an earlier dialogue. In the Symposium, Diotima
presents the young Socrates with the inspirational vision of the philosopher-
midwife who aids in the birth of new living concepts (Symp. 210a–12c). In
the Theaetetus, the older Socrates likewise presents himself as a midwife to
his new young friend, whom he declares to be pregnant with fledgling
concepts of knowledge (Tht. 149a–51e5). Like Clouds, the dialogue opens
with an evocation of Artemis: “Isn’t it strange,” Socrates notes, “that the
skilled huntress, a virgin herself, is given the task of overseeing childbirth?
But then again the farmer who plants a crop also tends to the harvest; the
midwife too oversees the process of coming into being as much as the
process of coming out of being, as in the case of miscarriages” (Tht.
149b10, my paraphrase). The peculiar tasks belonging to the midwife of
concepts involve overseeing the fruitful birth of living concepts as well as
phantom births. Socrates admits that it is often difficult to identify the
phantom birth. In the case of the birth of living concepts, the midwife
must help the mother decide whether the concept is worth raising into a
mature theory or whether it should be disposed of immediately. Thus,
there are four diagnoses that the midwife of concepts might arrive at: (1)
the individual is not spiritually pregnant at all but full of gas; (2) the indi-
vidual is pregnant but the concept should be terminated before coming to
full term; (3) the concept is deserving of being raised into a developed
theory, taking the risk that others will steal it and raise it as their own; or
(4) the individual is pregnant but with a phantom, a sort of orphan con-
cept that slips through the midwife’s hands, so that it can neither be nur-
tured nor terminated.
The dialogue takes off as Socrates prods the young Theaetetus into
labor, provoking him into conceiving a definition of true knowledge. As it
turns out, Theaetetus is not suffering from gas but is pregnant with trip-
lets. After much intellectual labor, he gives birth to three unique concepts
of knowledge: knowledge as perception, knowledge as true belief, and
knowledge as true belief with an account. In a rather perverse joke—which
is explicitly delivered as a joke—Socrates snuffs out the life of each of
Theaetetus’ newborn concepts: “Okay, my boy, now that you’re ready to
give birth, let’s see if it’s worthy of seeing the light of day” (Tht.
160e5–61a5, my paraphrase).
And yet, although Socrates ultimately judges each newborn to be an
unfit concept of knowledge, he never fully rejects the corresponding con-
cepts of perception, belief, and account. With each concept, which is ter-
minated as a concept of knowledge, something slips by which Socrates
neither affirms nor denies. From this we might further speculate that
Theaetetus is not pregnant with triplets but rather sextuplets, in the form
of three sets of twins.10 One twin is terminated at birth. The other sur-
vives. What then is conceived in the failed concept of knowledge? The
concept shows itself to be a monstrous compound of a terminated birth
and a phantom birth. The surviving twin that escapes the judgment of the
midwife-abortionist is shadowed by the negative outline of the terminated
twin that attaches itself to its sibling.
The configuration of the twins—one of which is terminated and one of
which survives by slipping past the midwife—structures the delivery of
each of the three sections of the dialogue. The model of the twins is also
explicitly taken up in the content of each of the three failed theories of
knowledge: (1) in the theory of perception as a twin birth (Tht. 156a–8a);
(2) in the metaphor of belief as a combination of two birds, one that takes
flight as true judgment and one that is flightless and false (Tht.
198d1–200c1); and (3) in the analysis of an account as a compound,
which Socrates illustrates with the example of a syllable (such as “Ba”) that
is composed of an unvoiced consonant (B) and a vowel (A) (Tht.
202d10–3e5). In each case, there is one side that represents the continual
process of slipping out of being, retreating into the background. But the
passive or failed side of the compound proves to be a necessary condition
for the expression of the second twin’s visibility (in the model of percep-
tion as twins), motion (in the model of belief as two birds), and voice (in
the model of the account as a compound of consonant and vowel).
In the first of these three iterations, Socrates reveals that the “humble”
position of the relativist—who only claims that x appears as F for me—
houses stronger ontological claims that the relativist attempts to avoid.
Protagoras’ weak epistemology leads us to Heraclitus’ metaphysics. It is
not only the case that you and I perceive x differently, but it is also the case
that I will experience x differently from one moment to the next: x appears
to me as F at T1 but as Y at T2. The only thing that may be said to be true
of the perceiver and the perceived is F, the place where the two both touch
and fail to touch. But F itself is inconsistent from one moment to the next.
Thus, every phenomenological observation involves a hidden implication
10
Theaetetus’s surprise birthing of sextuplets is replayed by Trudy Kockenlocker in Preston
Sturges’ comedy The Miracle of Morgen’s Creek (Sturges 1944).
88 R. AUMILLER
about time and change. The framing of (lower case t) truth in the claim—
it is true that you perceive x one way and I perceive x another way—relies
on a stronger truth claim about being in time as always in flux: Being
as Becoming.
It only takes a tiny push for phenomenological description to yield its
latent metaphysical contents. With this tiny push Socrates shows the
impossibility of remaining both epistemologically and metaphysically neu-
tral. The tiny push furthermore results in a provocative suggestion about
the nature of the subject herself, as Socrates shifts the metaphor of the
twins, originally introduced as a description of perception, to a metaphysi-
cal register.
In the beginning of his discussion of how Protagoras’ measure doctrine
immediately slips into Heraclitus’ metaphysics, Socrates presents percep-
tion as the twin offspring of two kinds of change. Change itself takes the
form of twins: in each instance, change in the form of some kind of activity
is accompanied by change in the form of what is acted upon. Change is a
kind of ontological double, opposite forces that always occur together. We
might think of change as an “odd couple” that takes the appearance of
identical twins; as Socrates later argues, in every instance it is impossible to
show which twin acts upon which (Tht. 157a–b1). As we experience
through the exercise of meditating on our own hands folded in prayer, we
can focus on the right hand as grasping the left or the left grasping the
right. But it is difficult to experience both sides as simultaneously grasping
and being grasped at once.11 Change as an ontological double gives birth
to another double in the form of perception. A perception strikes us as
such when something shifts in our horizon (what Socrates calls fast
change). Perception is thus the twin experience of something that is per-
ceived—coming-into-being as it shifts into the foreground—and some-
thing coming-out-of-being, as it slips into the background:
From the coming together of these two motions [belonging to change], and
the friction of one against the other, offspring come into being—unlimited
in numbers of them—but twins in every case, one twin being what is per-
ceived, the other a perception, emerging simultaneously with what is per-
ceived and being generated along with it […] as for the kind of thing that is
perceived, it shares its birth with the perception. (Plato and Rowe 2015,
156a–c5)
11
See for example (Husserl 1989, §§36–7).
When Socrates discusses the “unlimited number” of perceptions within a

relativist framework, he does not describe perception as infinite difference
in flux. Instead the perception of change, of something new in my horizon
or acting on my body, is always the product of the tension between two (a
proposition that seems to lean into Heraclitus’ theory of opposites over
his theory of flux). The ontology, which Socrates identifies as attached to
Theaetetus’ first born, does not flow organically like a river, but rather in
the process of doubles infinitely redoubling themselves without resolving
the original tension between two: “kindred births in every case”
(Tht. 156c5).
Relativism identifies conflict as arising between at least two inconsistent
positions: either between two people who perceive “the same thing” dif-
ferently at the same time; or between the contrasting perceptions of the
same person concerning the “same thing” experienced at at least two dif-
ferent times. To avoid conflict, we agree only to make descriptive claims
about our own perception rather than truth claims about the world or
ourselves. But as Socrates follows relativism to what he sees as its own
conclusions, we find that avoiding conflict is not so easy. Conflict also
exists in what is typically identified as one: one perception, one stance, one
belief, one body, one identity. As the skeptic shows us, if we dwell with any
one (perception, stance, belief, body, identity) long enough, we will run
into a paradox that was present in the one from the beginning. One is
already divided into two. In shifting from a weak epistemology to meta-
physics, Socrates extends the theory of perception as “co-generated” (Tht.
156e5) to all identities:
The consequence of all of this, according to the theory, is that nothing—as

we were saying at the being—is just one thing, itself by itself, but instead is
always coming to be in relation to something. The verb “is” must be removed
from every context […] we shouldn’t consent to using something, or some-
body’s, or mine, or this, or that, or any other names that bring things to a
standstill. Instead our utterances should conform to nature and have things
“coming to be” [… and] “passing away” […] the rule applies to talk both
about the individual case and about many collected together—the sort of col-
lection for which people posit entities like human being. (Plato and Rowe
2015, 157b1–5)
The argument about the non-identity of things over time becomes an

argument for the non-identity of things in a given moment. And this rule
applies not only to objects, but to the human subject, in the form of both
90 R. AUMILLER
the individual and the community (Tht. 157b1–c1). For each subject that
comes into being there is also a disappearing object: something that comes
out of being, an aborted twin who attaches itself to its sibling.
The Theaetetus’ specific configuration of the twins—one of which
appears as subject against the background of its terminated double—puts
a twist on the Symposium’s myth of the origin of the human being. In the
Symposium, Plato’s Aristophanes offers the erotic (meaning a drive that
is fueled by a lack) model of each individual as separated from her mir-
rored half (Symp. 189c–93e). This passage about the flayed circle people
inspires Lacan’s lamella myth in Seminar XI (Lacan 1998, 197–200).
Earlier in this same lecture, Lacan makes the strange claim that the ana-
lyst performs the dangerous work of the abortionist, often failing to
bring something not unreal but unrealized up from limbo to the surface
(Lacan 1998, 23). And yet the myth of the twin birth and abortion in
the Theaetetus appears much closer to Lacan’s lamella: a sort of original
skin shed at birth that continues to haunt us. Aristophanes’ myth rests
on the fantasy of recovering an original wholeness (the hope that the
subject might be restored to her intended purpose and well-being). The
first appearance of the subject in the Theaetetus rests on the fantasy and
nightmare of the aborted fetus reattaching itself (the fear that the sub-
ject might be exposed as nothing more than a fantasy or the paradox of
non-identity). Negativity in the first myth is in the symbolic split between
two positive halves. Negativity in the second myth is not only in the split
between the twins, but also in the position of one half, which is aborted
from the beginning. The split in this case separates and holds together
something not unreal but unrealized with the phantom appearance of
the subject.
Conclusion: The Orphan Subject of Comedy

Socrates asks Theaetetus for his thoughts on the proposal that all percep-
tions—and indeed all entities—are expressions of twins coming in and out
of being. Theaetetus responds for all of us: “I’m not sure, Socrates, and
actually I can’t make out where you stand on it, either,” (Plato and Rowe
2015, 157c5). Socrates carefully dodges the question, avoiding taking his
own stance on the matter: “You’re forgetting, my friend, that I myself
neither know anything of such things nor claim to know anything of
them; none of them is my offspring. I’m acting as a midwife to you”
(Plato and Rowe 2015, 157c5–d5). As a result of Socrates’ concealment of
his own position (if he has one), the passage about Protagoras and
Heraclitus has become one of the most influential and disputed passages in
the history of philosophy. On the one hand, Socrates, in his role as the
midwife, clearly terminates the concept of knowledge as perception, since
the claim “everything is as it seems for me” leads us to the conclusion that
“nothing is as it seems for anybody” (Tht. 158a). There is always some-
thing that fails to appear that conditions an appearance. On the other
hand, in aborting the concept of knowledge, a concept of perception—
which entails an ontology of the subject—slips by the judgment of the
midwife. The subject herself cannot be defined by a single identity or set of
fixed properties, but is rather the expression of pairs brushing past one another.
There is always something that fails to appear that allows the subject to appear
as such. Some scholars argue that Socrates embraces aspects of the ontol-
ogy that unfolds from his framing of Protagoras. Others insist that Socrates
thinks that all aspects of the argument about perception are absurd, leading
to the impossibility of language.12 As I see it, each definite termination of
Theaetetus’s three theories of knowledge leaves behind a philosophical
orphan as the result of a secondary phantom twin birth. On one level,
Socrates’ role as the midwife in the Theaetetus is purely destructive, since
he does not allow a single one of Theaetetus’ theories of knowledge to
survive. Like the comic stage that turns on itself, destroying its own object,
this skeptical method induces a line of thinking only to bring it to its own
destruction (the germ of which is in the beginning). And yet, this
destruction leaves behind strays that may be adopted by future philoso-
phers who will raise the orphan into their own developed theory or school
of thought (which was indeed the destiny of several of Theaetetus’ aban-
doned strays). These philosophical orphans sometimes take the form of
philosophical fragments, underdeveloped concepts still in their infancy.
12
In his commentary on the Theaetus, Burnyeat (1990) demonstrates that how one
chooses to interpret Socrates’ treatment of Protagoras in 151d–84a will determine one’s
overall approach to the entire text, which due to the ambiguity of this passage lends itself to
very different readings. Burnyeat represents “Reading A” by George Berkeley, who argues
that while Socrates embraces a Protagorean framing of perception, he denies perception as a
definition of knowledge, since the object of knowledge for Socrates is imperceptible. Berkeley
nevertheless identifies Socrates as cherry picking aspects of the philosophies of Theaetetus,
Protagoras, and Heraclitus to arrive at his own theory of perception. Burnyeat represents
“Reading B” with Richard Price, who argues that Socrates follows Theaetetus via Protagoras
and Heraclitus to its own absurd conclusion that culminates in the impossibility of language
(179c–83c).
92 R. AUMILLER
But philosophical orphans also take a negative form. Hegel thinks that the
negative space left in the aborted object of comedy and Socratic philosophy
becomes the phantom form of the subject. The comic hero—including both
the actor and spectator—leans into the space of its aborted twin and experi-
ences tranquility in the negativity of its aborted essence, a negative space
that gives rise to the sense of “pure certainty of self” (Hegel 1977, §754).
References
Burnyeat, Myles. 1990. The Theaetetus of Plato. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.
Halliwell, Stephen. 2008. Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from
Homer to Early Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliwell, Stephen, and Aristophanes. 2015. Clouds, Women at Thesmophoria,
Frogs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller. New York:
Oxford Press.
———. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter
C. Hodgson and Trans. Robert F. Brown, Michael Stewart, and Peter
C. Hodgson. New York: Oxford University Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. Vol. II, Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André
Schuwer. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Seminar
XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton.
Plato, and Christopher Rowe. 2015. Theaetetus and Sophist. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sturges, Preston. 1944. The Miracle of Morgen’s Creek. Paramount Studios.
Sextus, Julia Annas, and Jonathan Barnes. 2000. Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge:
PART II
Comic Psychoanalysis
CHAPTER 6
The Three Moments of Comedy
Robert Pfaller
The aesthetic effects of comedy stem from comedy’s specific relationship

to illusion. The fact that comedy deals with illusion in a quite special and
paradoxical way has partly been remarked on by some astute philosophers
and, maybe for the first time in a systematic examination, by the psycho-
analyst Octave Mannoni (1969, 2003).1 In comical illusion Mannoni
found a paradigmatic case of a “belief” which is nobody’s belief; as opposed
to the more common case of “faith”—an illusion which is somebody’s
own and recognized as such.2 Examining comedy and the specific struc-
ture of “comical illusion,” Mannoni was able to state that theater in
1
Even Aristotle’s famous remark that “Comedy aims at representing men as worse,
Tragedy as better than in actual life” (Aristotle, Poetics, part II)—i.e., that tragedy’s heroes
are of a higher rank than the spectators, whereas comedy’s characters belong to a lower
one—can be read in this sense. This remark need not only be read in a sociological sense. It
can also be read psychoanalytically: in tragedy, spectators relate to their superego. In comedy,
on the contrary, they relate to an agency of observation which they locate definitely below
their ego. For this agency I have suggested the notion of the “under-ego” (see Pfaller 2017,
193–201).
2
For this distinction see Mannoni (2003) and Pfaller (2014, 35–72).
R. Pfaller (*)
University of Art and Industrial Design, Linz, Austria
e-mail: robert.pfaller@ufg.at

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_6
96 R. PFALLER
eneral is based on belief—or, as I have suggested calling it, on an “illu-

g
sion without owners” (Pfaller 2014). Theater’s aesthetic efficiency has
thus, according to Mannoni, to be explained by the theoretical construc-
tion of a “naive” Other—a purely virtual observer against whom actors
and spectators team up and together establish and maintain an illusion.3
Yet in comedy, this universal basic structure of theater gets redoubled.
Comedy presents a theater within theater and thus even allows the naive
Other to appear, now embodied by some characters on stage. Therefore,
as opposed for example to tragedy, comedy draws its crucial effects from
its explicit (as well as implicit) engagements with the naive Other. The dif-
ferent twists that these engagements can then take are, as I want to dem-
onstrate in this chapter, to be distinguished as the three moments
of comedy.
Moment One: The Deception—The Naive Other

on Stage
The opening move of comedy comes when the heroes or heroines start
building up a deception.4 In Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), for
example, two male musicians, after having witnessed the Valentine’s Day
massacre and in order to escape the mafia killers, have to disguise them-
selves as female musicians and join a ladies’ band. The deception has to be
established due to some ardent necessity of life and its corresponding
goal—for example, to save one’s neck. This true, initial goal gets now
superstructured by a second, deceptive goal; in this case, earning one’s life
as a female musician. One may say that it is the “drive for self-preservation”
3
“En un mot, […] il semble que nous ayons cependant besoin de quelqu’un qui lui, pour
notre satisfaction à nous, soit en proie à cette illusion. Tout semble machiné pour la produire
mais chez quelqu’un d’autre, comme si nous étions de mèche avec les acteurs” (Mannoni
1969, 163f).
4
I make this bold universal statement here, albeit of course being aware of the fact that it
may only concern a certain type of comedies—a genre that may be called “comedies of
deception.” To this type belong obviously the comedies by Billy Wilder which are examined
here, as well as a good number of screwball comedies, for instance Libeled Lady, The Awful
Truth, and I Love You Again, and many newer comedies, like Confidences trop intimes or
L’étudiante et Monsieur Henri, as well as a number of films which are usually not regarded as
comedies, like Hitchcock’s Steps and North by Northwest. Leaving the question of universality
open, I claim that these comedies provide the clue for understanding the genre, just as com-
edy has, for Octave Mannoni, provided the clue for understanding a general principle of
theater.
6 THE THREE MOMENTS OF COMEDY 97
that makes this operation of deception necessary, and, just like in Freud’s
description of early libidinal development, one could state that the erotic
drives (of deception) take their beginning in an “anaclitic” relation to the
initially stronger drive for self-preservation.5
By deceiving the other characters, the heroes or heroines create a kind
of “theater within the theater”; they play something for other dramatic
characters. And they establish a complicity with the real spectators:
together, just as described by Mannoni, they now share a secret which has
to be kept from the other characters. Now, since success is comedy’s prin-
ciple, the deception miraculously succeeds—however poor the means may
be. In comedy, appearance is always taken for truth. Everybody who is not
let in on the secret starts believing what the heroes or heroines play for
them. Joe and Jerry are actually being taken for women by everybody. All
the other characters buy the illusion, just as in the story from Pliny’s
Naturalis Historia the birds come to pick the grapes that painter Zeuxis
has skillfully depicted.6
A most transparent appearance, a cheap theater of which we can clearly
see that it is theater, but which nevertheless, by some necessity, has to be
staged—this is the feature of comedy that causes people to speak of “com-
edy” even in cases of everyday life, off stage, and in cases that are not
necessarily comical or funny. In this sense the French philosopher Alain
spoke of politeness as a “comedy” (1973, 44f), new theologists speak of
“theology as comedy” (Aichele 1980; Oden 2006), and German sexolo-
gist Krafft-Ebing even did the same with regard to the various types of
masochist mise-en-scène (1997, 125). For the same reason we may be
entitled to speak of a “comedy logic” at work in movies which are not in
the first place seen as comedies—for instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39
Steps (1935). In this movie, a man has to escape from prosecution by the
police as well as from a network of enemy agents, and he manages to do
so by forcing a woman to whom the enemy agents have handcuffed him
to act as if they were a loving couple. The fact that the “couple” now
always have to stand close to each other is remarked on by the warm-
hearted owner of a Scottish countryside hotel, and nicely perceived as
5
One may regard deception here as an expression of the erotic drive: not only because in
comedy the deception very often is about staged love, but also since every deception implies
the erotic act of stimulating the imagination of the other.
6
Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 35, 29 (Plinius 1978, 55).
98 R. PFALLER
proof of how ardent the young couple’s new love must be. For the specta-
tors, as well as for the heroine and hero, this is not without funniness.
This is comedy’s first type of comicality: those in the know can now
mock themselves about the clueless naive people. Together with the heroes
or heroines, the spectators can amuse themselves about those who buy the
deception, and about the “economic” difference between the poor means
and the rich effects.
As I have argued in my book The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions
without Owners (Pfaller 2014), tarrying with an illusion which is not one’s
own can be seen as the universal principle of cultural pleasure. It need not
always be comical pleasure, however. Facing a trompe-l’oeil painting, for
example, we may just smile a little bit, tenderly amused, when we delight
in an illusion that “somebody (else) might have believed.” As this example
shows, it also need not always be the case that some actual believers in the
illusion are available. It may be sufficient for our pleasure that it is not us
who succumb to the illusion—whoever the succumbers may be. Yet for
our pleasure to become comical, actual believers may be required. They
allow us to compare them to ourselves and to measure the difference of
psychic “expenditure”: what they perceive as a full meaning is to us non-
believers just the effect of a few silly tricks. They may get excited, whereas
we merely smile. Or, on the contrary, they may find everything quite nor-
mal, while we know how strange the situation actually is. For example,
Marilyn Monroe and her colleagues from the ladies’ band do not find it
strange to let “Josephine” and “Geraldine” come into their sleeping com-
partments on the train, and even into their beds, to engage in girlish play
with them, whereas we, just like Joe and Jerry, may find that most extraor-
dinary and exciting.
Sigmund Freud has explained the “comical” by the principle of “saved
psychic expenditure” (1905, 187): the energy that we can save in compari-
son to somebody else can be let out—that is, “decathected”—by laughing
it off. Yet, as comedy allows us to see, this “saving” does not necessarily
mean that we keep cool while naive others have to “spend” excitement.
Actually, it can be the case that we get excited while the other does not
notice anything special at all. The difference thus does not always lie in the
amount of manifest affect. Instead, it sometimes is the difference between
the naive perception of a “rich” imaginary meaning and the perception of
the “poor” symbolic means required to produce that meaning. For the
ladies, Joe and Jerry “are” women, whereas for us, they are just badly try-
ing to appear as such. The fact that for the ladies these simple efforts are
so convincing while we remain able to save our conviction establishes the

difference in expenditure. What for them appears as a full image remains
for us (just as for Joe and Jerry) a collection of cheap tricks—a fact that, by
the way, in a most comical way reverses the usual relationship between
these two sexes where, as a rule, what appears to men as the fascinating,
full image of a woman is perceived by women just as a number of cheap
tricks. For these reasons, the ladies’ naive belief may thus appear to us as a
reason to laugh—a first moment of comicality.
Yet obviously we do not compare ourselves only to these cool ladies.
Rather, we compare our superior knowledge to their imaginable surprise:
“how perplexed and excited would they be if they knew”—this calculus
underlies our comic pleasure of these scenes and allows us to decathect
expendable psychic energy in laughter. In an analogous sense, Mannoni
has beautifully demonstrated, with his famous example of an actor’s invol-
untary sneezing while representing a dead character, how we become able
to laugh about some mishap in the theater by comparing our superior
knowledge to the horrified surprise this scene would cause on the side of
the naive Other (Mannoni 1969, 163f.). Thus, we could read the comical-
ity of the scenes in the train beds also as the difference between a naive
Other’s view, who sees the incredible event of men entering women’s beds
without any of the usual hindrances, and our own view that disposes of an
explanation for why this most extraordinary thing (a kind of lucky, unde-
served, obscene surplus that would actually be most difficult to enjoy for
any man) is possible. In this sense we encounter here again a “saving of
expenditure” that allows for our comical profit.
This leads to an important general point: comedy lets the impossible
appear—the impossible in the view of the naive Other. The mishap of the
“sneezing corpse” that Mannoni describes could well be a scene in a com-
edy about theater. Comedy lets dead bodies on stage sneeze, just as Some
Like It Hot lets men sneak into women’s beds without any restrictions by
the monogamous heterosexual order. This is why alliances across sexual
discrepancies (“nobody is perfect”), polygamy, doppelgängers, repetitions,
and all other kinds of unlimited wish-fulfillments happen in comedy, and
why silly little magic acts achieve full symbolic efficiency (think, for exam-
ple of Woody Allen’s Scoop; or of Eduardo de Filippo’s La grande magia,
beautifully staged once by Giorgio Strehler).
In this way comedy, as Sigmund Freud has remarked, regularly touches
on the issues that pertain to the uncanny (Freud 1919; Pfaller 2006).
What is normally excluded by some social law or ontological rule can well
100 R. PFALLER
happen in comedy—at least, it appears to happen, for the view of a naive

Other. The “object of comedy” can therefore at this stage (i.e., at the first
moment of comedy’s illusions) be identified with the object of “symbolic
castration”: everything we had to leave behind when we quit primary nar-
cissism—all the cozy illusions about redoubling ourselves, about negating
time, space, sexual difference, generational sequence, or wishes becoming
true—is the object of comedy.
If the entirety of these illusions can psychoanalytically be summed up as
the “imaginary phallus,” it is no wonder, from a psychoanalytic perspec-
tive, that comedy, as Jacques Lacan has remarked (Lacan 2002, 314),7
delights in presenting the phallus—from the early literal stagings in
Ancient Greek tradition through Aristophanes’ explicitness8 up to modern
examples such as John Wilmot’s dramatization of his poem “Signor Dildo”
(Wilmot 2005). Psychoanalysis should however prevent us from interpret-
ing these strange historical facts as proofs for a male, patriarchal bias of
comedy. For the imaginary phallus (of the mother) is, according to psy-
choanalysis, what children of all sexes in their primary narcissism identify
with (Evans 1997, 121; Verhaeghe 2009, 45, 67, 97). The imaginary
phallus is not a mark of masculinity, but, on the contrary, a symbol for the
negation of sexual difference (this can probably most clearly be seen in
fetishism, where this imaginary phallus is being attributed to women). The
appearance of the phallus in comedy in this precise sense is rather to be
taken as another proof of comedy’s remarkable ability for self-reflection.
In this enigmatic symbol (which had a long time to wait for psychoanalysis
to decipher it), comedy depicts the fact that it deals with the impossible.
This allows us, finally, to draw a few conclusions about the specific
nature of the naive Other at work in comedy. The naive Other is the ideal
7
Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 3.3 where he states that comedy may have originated from “those
who lead off the phallic processions.”
8
See for this for example Eder, who beautifully remarks with regard to Aristophanes’
Lysistrata: “For the phallos that gets here focused upon Aristotle finds many different word-
ings and wordplays ... Aristophanes transfunctions as it were the phallos into a rule for peace:
the thicker the phalloi, the more probable it gets that men will over it forget about war. The
citizens of Athens will not have taken umbrage at that; they had - due to the not yet long
forgotten cult of the phallos - a different relationship to these matters.” (My translation,
R.P.) German original: “Für den Phallos, der hier zum ‘Mittelpunkt’ wird, findet Aristophanes
viele Wortvarianten und Wortspiele … Aristophanes funktionert den Phallos gewissermaßen
zu einem Friedensregulativ um: je dicker die Phalloi, desto wahrscheinlicher wird es, daß die
Männer darob den Krieg vergessen. Die Athener werden daran gewiß keinen Anstoß genom-
men haben; sie hatten—durch den noch nicht lange vergangenen Phalloskult—ein anderes
Verhältnis zu diesen Dingen” (Eder 1968, 73).
observer that fully believes in appearances. When somebody appears to be

in love, they are, for the naive Other, a lover (just like in The 39 Steps). And
when someone appears to be a psychoanalyst, they can, for comedy and
the naive Other, conduct a successful psychoanalysis (as in Patrice
Leconte’s lovely comedy Confidences trop intimes, 2004). This full belief in
appearances obviously distinguishes the naive Other from the real specta-
tors (just as from comedy’s heroes), and it could be argued that the inabil-
ity to doubt appearances was a remainder of primary narcissism—a mark
of lacking the reality principle and symbolic castration. Yet we have to
remind ourselves here of what the examined examples teach us: what the
naive Other perceives in the appearances is the impossible. This is what sur-
prises and horrifies the naive Other so much as an uncanny fact (whereas
we, due to our superior knowledge, can laugh; knowing that it is not actu-
ally impossible, but just an appearance). The naive Other is thus able to
perceive the impossible as impossible—he is not naively indulging in fan-
tasies about doppelgängers, repetitions, and symbolic causality, but knows
quite well that such things can impossibly happen in this world. Therefore,
he is touched by uncanniness. This means that we have to describe the
naive Other as an Other that has quit primary narcissism. The naive Other
is a symbolically castrated Other—and even an agent of the symbolic order.
This becomes of crucial importance for the next moment of comedy.
Moment Two: The Deceived Deceivers

The second moment of comedy comes when it turns out that the heroes
and heroines truly succumb to what, until then, they have only staged for
surprisingly naive others. This may, as a consequence, split them off from
other heroes: Joe, for example, is utterly astonished and shocked when
Jerry, who prefers to be called Daphne, hopes to marry a wealthy man.
However, this moment inevitably arrives in the comedies of deception.
At some point the very illusion that had been so silly and transparent to
the heroes and heroines as well as to the real spectators reveals itself as a
kind of mighty spell under whose power the heroines and heroes helplessly
fall. Whatever they may have staged for others, and with what poor means
whatsoever, now becomes an undoubtable truth for themselves. This is a
strange, probably even perverse movement of “appropriation”: what may
have only appeared to be a Hegelian “in itself” (“an sich”) now turns out
to be a true “for us” (“für uns”) in their eyes. Thus, the handcuffed couple
in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps finally discover, as the last people to do so, that
they actually love each other. What happens to them may remind one of
what German poet Heinrich Heine has beautifully described in a poem:
102 R. PFALLER
‘Tis time that, more sober and serious grown,

From folly at last I break free.
I, who so long in comedian’s gown,
Have played in the play with thee.
[…]
Ah God! All unwitting and wholly in jest,
What I felt and I suffered I told.
I have fought against Death who abode in my breast
Like the dying wrestler of old. (Heine 2014, 77f.)9
What is at work here is the same symbolic causality that Immanuel Kant
has remarked on with regard to another transparent illusion—politeness.
Politeness is a lie, Kant states, but still it is morally fine, since nobody gets
deceived by it—due to this very transparency, Alain had called it a “com-
edy” (Kant 1978, 38f.; Alain 1973, 45). Yet what is even more remarkable
about this lie by which no one gets deceived is the fact that, as Kant notes,
it finally deceives the deceiver himself, transforming him into the very
good person he pretended to be. As Kant states:
For when men play these roles, virtues are gradually established, whose
appearance had up until now only been affected. Those virtues ultimately
will become part of the actor’s disposition. To deceive the deceiver in
ourselves, or the tendency to deceive, is a fresh return to obedience under
the law of virtue. It is not the deception but rather the blameless deluding
of ourselves. (Kant 1978, 39)
9
The German Version appears to render this paradoxical structure a bit more clearly:
Nun ist es Zeit, daß ich mit Verstand

Mich aller Torheit entled’ge;
Ich hab so lang’ als ein Komödiant
Mit dir gespielt die Komödie.
[…]
Ach Gott! im Scherz und unbewußt
Sprach ich was ich gefühlet;
Ich hab’ mit dem Tod in der eignen Brust
Den sterbenden Fechter gespielet. (Heine 2014, 139)
Literally this would read: “I played the dying fencer, while having death in my own breast”
(my translation). The true thing was there, but under the pretense of being just a representa-
tion, or “comedy.”
In this sense, Immanuel Kant in his remarks on politeness can be seen

as an eminent theorist of comedy’s logic (precisely for the very reason
Alain was right to call politeness a “comedy”).10 The tricksters become the
only victims of their tricks, and the players become the toys of their own
silly game. In its uncanny aspect, the whole thing may remind us of Pascal’s
remark about “children taking fright at a face they have daubed them-
selves” (Pascal 1995, 41).
Yet in its comical aspect, it is clear that this opens up a new source of
amusement. If until then the spectators had been the allies of the trick-
sters, they now can start laughing about (and against) them. Comedy’s
heroes and heroines, hitherto subjects of laughter and amusement about
naive others, now become the objects of such laughter. It is very comical
to see that what had merely been a number of silly tricks is now a bitter
truth to them. The deceptive feeling of “just playing a silly comedy” now
produces the true comedy.11
The object of comedy (or of its laughter) has clearly shifted here. If
comedy had, in the first moment, been about the comicality of the naive
others, it is now about the comicality of the heroes and heroines.12 This
can also be seen as the comical triumph and revenge of the naive Other
who now prevails over the alleged “cynical” tricksters. Yet this fact does
not only concern the poor succumbing heroines and heroes, but to a cer-
tain extent even us—the real spectators. If, in the first moment, we had
been laughing about the naive Other’s funny inability to distinguish
between appearance and true condition (a distinction which allowed us,
unlike him, to avoid the feeling of uncanniness), we now laugh about the
fact that the naive Other seems to be right. We laugh not only about the
heroes who succumb to this Other’s strangely powerful laws, but also
about ourselves—the real spectators who, in the first moment, had sided
10
Of course, this second moment of “symbolic causality” in comedy where imitations
become true has not escaped Alain’s attention either. Alain states: “Polite behavior can
strongly influence our thoughts. And miming graciousness, kindness, and happiness is of
considerable help in combating ill humor and even stomach aches; the movements involved—
gracious gestures and smiles—do this much good: they exclude the possibility of the contrary
movements, which express rage, defiance, and sadness. That is why social activities, visits,
formal occasions, and parties are so well liked. It is a chance to imitate happiness; and this
kind of comedy certainly frees us from tragedy—no small accomplishment” (Alain 1973, 45).
11
Cf. Pfaller 2005, Introduction.
12
Alenka Zupančič has remarked on this most aptly. She writes that the comical element
“can stand at the two sides of an opposition. […] We could even say that what is comical is
this reversibility as such” (Zupančič 2008, 112f.).
104 R. PFALLER
with the clever tricksters in the know. Also this laughter about ourselves
may be explained by a “saving of expenditure”: we can now do away with
all the energy that was afforded to maintain our precious superiority; that
is, the subject-position of knowing better. Yet there may well be an addi-
tional source of comicality, on the meta level, where a redoubling happens:
we now laugh also due to the fact that we laugh. Obviously we, laughing
people, are not without comicality: for it is quite funny that we are now
brought to laugh about the position that we had taken before; that we
now laugh about ourselves. So we can, in a redoubling, also laugh about
this—about our laughing about ourselves.13
Just like comedy heroines and heroes, we ourselves are now the object
of comedy. Against all apparent “superior” knowledge, even we ourselves
now have to admit that “appearance counts”: acting as if one was in love
is not without influence on real love; acting as if one was good may finally
not allow one any more to be a bad person (both facts get acknowledged,
for example, by Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons); and acting as if one was
tired hardly allows anyone not to get tired (as Lars von Trier once nicely
remarked, just like Alain, when commenting upon the sentence “you will
never forget this movie” that occurs in Zentropa, one of his early films,
which, by the way, can also be seen as more or less unacknowledged
comedies).
Our distinction between truth and illusion now turns out to be the very
illusion that prevented us (just like comedy’s heroines and heroes) from
acknowledging the truth of appearance—the fact that appearance counts.
This principle can well be called comedy’s “materialism” (Pfaller 2008,
2011, 60–77). The truth is what we have got, and not what we errone-
ously, in our spontaneous Platonism, may have regarded as some “deeper
truth.” The deception at work in this moment of comedy may well be
compared to the trick performed by painter Parrhasios when he presented
a painted veil. Zeuxis, who before had so bravely deceived the birds with
his fake grapes, now himself succumbs to an illusion by taking the veil as
what veils the painting (and asking Parrhasios to unveil it), instead of
understanding that what he sees is already the truth of the painting and its
13
It can be argued that what distinguishes an affect from an emotion is precisely such a
redoubling—as the song line “I love to love you, baby” aptly tells: when we love the fact that
we love, when we hate the fact that we hate, or when in shame, as Günther Anders has
pointed out (Anders 2010, 28), we shame ourselves about our feeling of shame. With the
second moment of comedy, laughter would thus be turned into an affect.
painted veil. What we may regard as just veiling the truth has, so comedy
teaches us, to be taken as the truth. By failing to do so, Zeuxis, who had
been the subject of the deception of the birds, now becomes the object of
deception—a comical shift proper to comedy’s transition from the first to
its second moment.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this recalls what we have discovered
before: the naive Other is a symbolically castrated Other. And he now
turns out to be even an agent of symbolic castration: for he forces come-
dy’s heroes, just like the real spectators, to do away with their silly illusions
about “how things really are while appearing differently.” Precisely this
mistrust in appearances has now to be seen as a remainder of primary nar-
cissism that blocks our access to reality. The naive Other in his new role
imposes on everybody the reality principle by proving to them that what
they take to be just “superficial” veilings and deceptive appearances are
actually the things that count.
This is of particular importance and relevance for all social interactions
in which the quality of symbolic actions is decisive: how one shakes hands
with somebody, how one has to dress for a certain occasion, what to say in
order to speak politely, and so on—the success of all these gestures and
actions depends not on what they should symbolize or what we want them
to mean, but on what they actually symbolize due to the quality of their
performance. This is why, as Alain notes, politeness has to be learned and
exercised just like dancing or fencing (Alain 1973, 221). Also art, of
course, is such a social field where what counts is not intention but quality
of performance (as German artist Horst Janssen once wittily remarked
when stating: “Käthe Kollwitz meant well; Goya actually was good”).
These matters may be more obvious to “outer-oriented” cultures in which
the moral principle of shame dominates. In a more “inner-oriented” cul-
ture of guilt, like today’s predominant Western culture, they tend to get
more and more paradoxical and ununderstandable—so that many people,
for example, wonder why big exhibitions like documenta have become so
bad and boring precisely while attempting so much to be morally good
(Schiff 2017, 74; Hübl 2017, 81; Rauterberg 2017).
For comedy, this second moment is the point where the heroes’ and
heroines’ initial goals—for example, saving their necks—get reconciled
with their pretended goals—for example, gaining somebody’s love, being
regarded as a woman, or being married. The “true” goals reconcile with
those of the “deception,” and both are equally achieved, due to comedy’s
graceful principle of success. In many comedies this is either the happy
106 R. PFALLER
ending, just like in The 39 Steps, or the beginning of a final turn in which,
starting from the achievement of the pretended goal, it has to be ensured
that the initial goal does not also get sacrificed. From the viewpoint of
psychoanalysis, we could describe this outcome as the moment when the
initial anaclisis of the (deceptive) sexual drives on the drive for self-
preservation is overcome, when the erotic drives have established their
autonomy, and when both autonomous drives manage to achieve a co-
existence in harmony.
Moment Three: When the Means Start Destroying

the Goals
Although many comedies end when moment two is reached, we should

not overlook the fact that comedy sometimes—and maybe in its very best
turns—can arrive at a third moment. It need not actually be the last point
in a chronological sequence or dramaturgy, but under the logical aspect it
has to be regarded as a third moment.
In Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid we can observe such an outcome.
Hero Orville J. Spooner, a notoriously jealous piano teacher and hobby
composer of pop songs, living in the sad little village of Climax, Nevada,
together with his beautiful wife Zelda, gets into a predicament when
famous pop-singer and womanizer Dino stays at his house. Orville needs
Dino’s help to make his songs famous; on the other hand, he is certain
that womanizer Dino will seduce Zelda who, in her youth, had even been
president of a Dino fan club. This is why Orville gets Zelda out of the way
and replaces her by Polly the Pistol, a waitress from a local club. Polly is
now supposed to pretend to be Orville’s wife, and to respond approvingly
to Dino’s predictable erotic advances, in order to promote Orville’s musi-
cal career. As always in comedy, every detail of the deceptive plan succeeds.
Yet at the very point when Orville and Polly have managed to sell Orville’s
songs to Dino and when Polly has succeeded in fully attracting Dino’s
interest, while Orville has left the house under some silly pretext, a sudden
change occurs. Orville now not only succumbs to his own deception of
Polly being his wife; he also rages in jealousy and an almost revolutionary
arousal about “those arrogant famous people who believe that they can
take everything, even our wives.” So he returns home and violently kicks
Dino out of the house in order to defend his “wife’s” honor.
This is a precious moment that transcends the harmonious logic of

reconciliation between comedy’s two goals. The deception that in the first
moment may have only been a means for achieving some initial goal of
self-preservation (in this case, becoming rich and famous), and which in
the second moment may turn out to have some erotic truth to itself
(Orville then actually treats Polly with utter respect as his wife), in this
third moment starts to sabotage the initial goal. What the hero originally
undertook in order to reach his goal now becomes so powerful that it even
destroys the pursuit of this goal.
This third moment of comedy logic can also be seen in Hitchcock’s The
39 Steps when the varieté artist Mr. Memory, who pretends to know the
answer to every question, has to answer truthfully when the hero asks him
about the secret organization named 39 Steps—with lethal consequences
for him, of course. Again, what this sad hero undertakes for his subsis-
tence—the skillfully established illusion of his omniscience—becomes so
powerful that it destroys his subsistence.
The comicality of this may in the first place appear similar to that of
moment two. We may find it funny that the hero becomes an object of his
objects, an instrument to his own instruments, and that the trick prevails
over the trickster. The same can also be said about the two goals. We may
be amused that the goal of deception now prevails over the initial “actual”
goal. Yet there seems to be something far more existential at work here. If
we take Henri Bergson’s formula for comicality, “something mechanical
encrusted upon the living/du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant” (Bergson
1999, 39), we may at first sight feel inclined to apply it to this moment: is
it not a kind of automatism, pertaining to the deception, that not only
subjected the deceivers themselves but now even does not hesitate to jeop-
ardize their goal of self-preservation? Is it not the mechanism of deception
that now threatens their poor lives? Yet, following the excellent criticism of
Bergson’s formula that Alenka Zupančič has presented with regard to
comedy, we may come to a different, if not opposed conclusion (Zupančič
2008, 110–26): what is at work here, should we not call this rather the life
of a deception (and not its automatism)? Is the fact that this deception
cannot be brought to an end in its action and efficiency a proof of its being
alive? Was the whole erotic enterprise of deceiving not something full of
life, and undertaken in the name of life?
We may feel inclined now to describe the third moment of comedy with
an inverse formula: as “some living substance encrusted upon the indi-
vidual being,” or, more precisely, “Infinite life encrusted upon the finite
108 R. PFALLER
living individual.” However, we are facing the impression of something

which is pure life, and which for its purpose uses individual lives, like a
player uses their puppets. And this pure life appears to be ready even to
ride over the dead bodies of its bearers.
Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič have recently given to Freud’s notion
of the “death drive” an innovative, specific reading (Žižek 2014, 89;
Zupančič 2017, 91): according to them, the death drive is precisely some-
thing “undead,” something unstoppable, an indestructible life that, by its
unstoppable nature, kills living individuals. Following this reading, we
may say that the third moment of comedy lets the death drive appear.14
Comedy’s object (in the sense of a theoretical object) at this stage is this
indestructible life called the death drive. It may be difficult to tell, though,
what the object of laughter might be, and also from what subject-position
exactly one may laugh here. Is it imaginable that what we are saving here
is the expenditure that we usually call our individual life?
It has to be noted, however, that this third moment of comedy logic
never happens to be comedy’s last word. As mentioned before, the jeop-
ardizing of the initial goal by the goal of deception (or, as we have trans-
lated it, the frustration of the drive for self-preservation by its initial ally,
the erotic drive) has to be avoided, and the original goal has to be reached,
just like the secondary one. This is not because comedy had a kind of
mercy for its characters. As can be seen, especially in Billy Wilder’s movies
(just think, for example, of One, Two, Three, or of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not
to Be), comedy can be completely ruthless to all of its heroes and heroines.
As opposed to tragedy that, by its own necessity, has to take sides with its
heroes and heroines, comedy can laugh about all of them and not give a
dime about their fortune (in this sense, we could call comedy an
Althusserian “process without a subject”).
The reason seems to be another one: comedy must end well. Again, this
need for a happy ending is also not caused by any mercy on comedy’s side,
neither for the heroes nor for the real spectators. Rather, it stems from
comedy’s naked self-interest: for comedy, as we have stated, wants to pres-
ent the impossible—of which a happy ending is a most appropriate
instance. Therefore, comedy must suppress its own destructivity—in the
name of its own principle, impossible success. It is not that, in comedy, life
triumphs over death. Rather, comedy’s uncanny impossible success prevails
14
In her discussion of Bergson, Zupančič appears to come close to this conclusion, yet
does not draw it. If there is a misunderstanding at work here, it is therefore fully mine.
over comedy’s notion of infinite life. The indestructibility of comedy thus

triumphs over the indestructibility of life as revealed by comedy. Or, as
psychoanalysis would call it, the imaginary phallus prevails over the
death drive.
References
Aichele, George. 1980. Theology as Comedy: Critical and Theoretical Implications.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Alain. 1973. Alain on Happiness, Trans. Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell. New York:
Frederick Ungar Publishing.
Anders, Günther. 2010. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Bd. 1: Über die Seele im
Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Bergson, Henri. 1999. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.
Copenhagen and Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer Books.
Eder, Klaus. 1968. Antike Komödie. Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terenz.
Hanover: Friedrichs Verlag.
Evans, Dylan. 1997. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
London and New York: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [SE],
vol. 8. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1919. The Uncanny. SE 17: 219–256.
Heine, Heinrich. 2014. Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine, Trans. Emma
Lazarus. Auckland, New Zealand: The Floating Press.
Hübl, Michael. 2017, August–September. Kopfüber im flachen Wasser. Kunstforum
International Bd. 248/249: 78–89.
Kant, Immanuel. 1978. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Trans.
Victor Lyle Dowdell. London and Amsterdam: Fetter & Simon.
von Krafft-Ebing, Richard. 1997. Psychopathia Sexualis. Munich: Matthes & Seitz.
Lacan, Jacques. 2002. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller
and Trans. D. Porter. London: Routledge.
Mannoni, Octave. 1969. L’illusion comique. Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre
Scène, 161–183. Paris: Seuil.
———. 2003. I Know Well, But All the Same…. In Perversion and the Social
Relation, ed. M.A. Rothenberg and D. Foster, 68–92. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Oden, Thomas C. 2006. The Living God. Systematic Theology, vol 1. Hendrickson:
Peabody, MA.
Pascal, Blaise. 1995. Pensées. Trans. with an Introduction by A.J. Krailsheimer
et al. London: Penguin.
110 R. PFALLER
Pfaller, Robert (ed.). 2005. Stop That Comedy! On the Subtle Hegemony of the
Tragic in Our Culture. Vienna: Sonderzahl (in English and German).
———. 2006. The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic. In Lacan: The
Silent Partners, ed. S. Žižek, 198–216. London and New York: Verso.
———. 2008. Materialism’s Comedy. In Bedeutung Magazine. Philosophy –
Current Affairs – Art – Literature – Review – Analysis, vol. 1, 20–28. London:
Bedeutung Publishing.
———. 2011. Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt. Elemente materialistischer Philosophie.
Frankfurt/M.: Fischer.
———. 2014. The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners. London
and New York: Verso.
———. 2017. Erwachsenensprache. Über ihr Verschwinden aus Politik und Kultur.
Frankfurt: Fischer.
Plinius Secundus d. Ältere, C. 1978. Naturkunde. Lateinisch – Deutsch, Buch
XXXV. Farben – Malerei – Plastik (C. Plinii Secundi: Naturalis Historiae, Libri
XXXVII. Liber XXXV). Trans. and ed. R. König with G. Winkler, Lizensausg.
Darmstadt.
Rauterberg, Hanno. 2017. Im Tempel der Selbstgerechtigkeit. Die Zeit, Nr.
25/2017, 14. 6. 2017. https://www.zeit.de/2017/25/documenta-kassel-
kunst-kapitalismuskritik. Accessed 30 July 2018.
Schiff, Hajo. 2017, August–September. Kaum eine begehbare Brücke oder Der
fehlende Schlüssel. Kunstforum International. Bd. 248/249: 66–77.
Verhaeghe, Paul. 2009. Liebe in Zeiten der Einsamkeit. Drei Essays über Begehren
und Trieb. Vienna: Turia & Kant.
Wilmot, John, and Earl of Rochester. 2005. Signor Dildo. In Der beschädigte
Wüstling. Satiren, Lieder und Briefe. (in English and German), 48–57.
Hamburg: Männerschwarm Skript Verlag.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Absolute Recoil. Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical
Materialism. London and New York: Verso.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In. On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2017. What Is Sex? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 7
From Objects of Desire to Objects

of Comedy in Chaplin’s Modern Times
Alfie Bown
At the Entartete Kunst exhibition hosted in Hitler’s Germany in Munich

in 1937, threatening material with the potential to put fascism into ques-
tion was exhibited to spectators as the object of ridicule and laughter. At
such events, artworks deemed “degenerate” or otherwise “insulting to
German feeling”, including van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet, were pre-
sented to viewers as the objects of hilarity and humour, to be treated with
disdain and derision. With a bit of historical distance and even the lightest
smattering of psychoanalytic understanding, it seems obvious that the
logic of these so-called mock museums was to turn objects of anxiety into
objects of laughter, temporarily securing precarious fascist subjectivity by
displacing its own fragility into a violent attack on another. This laughter,
we can say, expelled the “other” (the art of Jewish and black artists was
prominent, as was art deemed to positively represent women and homo-
sexuals) and secured the position of those laughing, banishing the anxiety
initially surrounding or approximate to the exhibits, their creators and
Thanks are due to Cindy Zeiher and Gregor Moder for invaluable suggestions on
the drafts of this chapter.
A. Bown (*)
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_7
112 A. BOWN
their content. This chapter considers what must happen—from a psycho-

analytic perspective—for anxiety and its objects to become objects of
laughter. It then goes on to consider whether laughter, or at least certain
eruptions of it, might be conceived of as a response to or a way of dealing
with the subject’s problematic relationship with their desire rather than as
a response to anxiety.
After outlining the relationship between laughter and anxiety that con-
stitutes the point of departure for the argument, the chapter considers the
possibility of a process moving from desire to comedy via Charlie Chaplin’s
1936 movie Modern Times. Emerging from the same moment as those
infamous mock museums, Modern Times is a film dealing more directly
with the idea of laughter as a process that shifts subjectivity and re-orients
it around its objects than Chaplin’s other movies, including his later film
The Great Dictator, which might seem to have more in common with the
fascist laughter just mentioned. Modern Times presents something like a
counterpart to the logic of the Entartete Kunst exhibition. It shows laugh-
ter operating not so much or at least not only as a way to deal with anxiety,
but as a way to handle an unwanted or troubling change in the subject’s
relationship to its objects of desire. Such a deliberation also confronts the
relationship between desire and anxiety, which at times seems to be trian-
gulated with laughter.
Jonathan Hall discusses a laughter that operates as a “fascist joy” involv-
ing “collaboration with the powerholders”, and it is precisely such a laugh-
ter that is to be found in the Nazi mock museums (1995, 17). To borrow
the language of Bulgarian-French psychoanalytic philosopher Julia
Kristeva, we could say that laughter such as this “abjects”.1 In Kristeva’s
formulation, the abject refers to a threat posed to subjectivity, to the object
which is repelled from the subject’s body, but it also describes the affectual
response the subject experiences when it encounters this threat (see
Kristeva 1982, 2–12). Abjection, in this sense at least, is a model for
understanding how the subject deals with anxiety, and to bring laughter
into the discussion in these terms is not merely fortuitous, but rather
points to a connection between laughter and anxiety, where anxiety is a
confrontation with the horror of division and laughter may help cope with
such moments. In fact, the link recalls the little-known but interesting
1
Jeannie B. Thomas has discussed laughter in terms of abjection in Featherless Chicken,
Laughing Women and Serious Stories (1997, 59), though the connection has recieved surpris-
ingly little attention.
7 FROM OBJECTS OF DESIRE TO OBJECTS OF COMEDY IN CHAPLIN’S… 113
psychoanalytic thinker Charles Mauron, whose Psychocritique du genre

comique, written in 1964, was the only properly theoretical study of the
relationship between psychoanalysis and comedy to be written until Alenka
Zupančič’s 2008 The Odd One In.
Mauron’s primary argument is that comedy involves “la renversement
des situations d’angoisse”, which can be translated as meaning that com-
edy is the reversal of a situation characterized by anxiety (1964, 72).
Developing ideas of laughter as linked to anxiety, such as Northrop Frye’s
more well-known claim that “psychologically [comedy] is like the removal
of a neurosis or blocking point and the restoration of an unbroken current
of energy”, Mauron complicated matters to pay attention to laughter as a
process involving a shift in the subject’s connection to its own anxiety (Frye
1957). Abjecting laughter might offer a clue to the nature of this shift that
takes place in anxious laughter and would additionally emphasize the role
of the object in the subject’s interpellation of anxiety with comedy, some-
thing missing from Mauron’s account. For comedy to reverse (or rather
harness) anxiety, it must give anxiety an object. While in typical psycho-
analytic terms anxiety tends to become fear when it is attached to an
object, in some cases it might (or might additionally) become comedy.
Freud himself first treated the subject of anxiety in 1895, where he
wrote that “the mechanism of anxiety is to be looked for in a deflection of
somatic sexual excitation from the physical sphere, and in a consequent
abnormal employment of that excitation” (SE 3, 108), making anxiety
related to a psychic blockage in a way not too dissimilar to the view of
Frye. This idea of anxiety as a result of a more originary sexual drive—as
the result of an impediment to the subject’s development—was to stay
dominant in Freud’s work, appearing again in The Interpretation of Dreams
(Freud SE 4, 337–8) and in Three Essays on Sexuality (Freud SE 7, 224),
but in fact as early as 1897, a mere two years after the initial discussion of
anxiety, Freud had written to Fliess that he had “decided henceforth to
regard as separate factors what causes libido and what causes anxiety”,
complicating the dominant way in which anxiety is treated in his early
work (cited in Masson 1986). In 1926 with Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety, Freud’s first argument about anxiety as a symptom of other things
is replaced by something more like the one expressed in the letter to Fliess.
Here Freud expresses the idea that anxiety is itself primal.
The relevant point to take from Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety is that while fears and phobias may be the result of the relationship
between the subject and the object in question, anxiety does not originally
114 A. BOWN
have an object and can be seen as unattached (Lacan would later use the
term “unmoored”), paradoxically preceding the object which appears to
provoke—and therefore to proceed—it. This later Freud is more useful
than the earlier in understanding the anxiety-laughter of the Nazi mock
museums, which are less about responding to objects that provoke anxiety
and more about providing a false object for already existing anxiety to ori-
ent itself around. While a whole history of laughter studies focuses on
laughter as only the effect of a cause, Anca Parvulescu has argued that
laughter’s effects can be more important than its causes, and that “the
question of laughter’s cause or origin is [often] beside the point”
(Parvulescu 2010, 3). In this case certainly, the effect—generating fascist
sentiment—is the key function of the laugh, and the cause of laughter (the
apparently ridiculous art) is only a cause by virtue of an illusion which
allows those laughing to experience their laughter as a reaction to the
object in front of them or within their gaze. It therefore operates with a
peculiar looping of time by which laughter’s effect appears as its cause.
This retroactive or Nachträglichkeit-inducing power of laughter is, in this
case, that which allows it to serve fascism. Such laughter has not been
caused by an object, but it has caused an object to be.
Lacan, building on this later idea in Freud’s work, argues for a third
position in relation to the question of whether or not anxiety has an object.
He clarifies the suggestion in Freud, saying playfully in contrast to Freud
that anxiety “is not without an object” (Lacan S10, 77). For Lacan, the dif-
ference between anxiety and fear is not that anxiety lacks an object where
fear possesses one, but that in fear the subject knows what it is scared of,
while in anxiety the subject “does not know what object is involved” (Lacan
S10, 77). The subject’s anxiety surrounds “an object which is outside any
possible definition of objectivity” (Lacan S10, 75). In other words, the
object of anxiety is outside of the symbolic and cannot be consciously artic-
ulated in language: it is the objet a proper, a link which would also connect
the object of anxiety with the object of desire. In these terms we can sug-
gest that certain forms of laughter might function to give anxiety an object,
or to create an illusory object to which the subject can consciously relate,
thus hiding its more threatening originary anxiety. This function of laugh-
ter ought at least to be politically concerning, given its retroactive ability to
make it seem that the object involved was the cause of the very response
that turned it into the abjected object, as in the earlier example.
So here laughter functions to give anxiety an object; however, it might
be worthwhile to consider the question of whether laughter might have a
comparable but antagonistic relationship with desire (see also Bown 2017,
163–76). While the subject of anxiety and laughter has been significant for
philosophy and within psychoanalysis, the relationship between desire and
comedy has received less theoretical attention, despite the whole genre of
comic romance (studies of which have tended to keep laughter and laugh-
ing to the side). Despite the fact that love and comedy are almost indistin-
guishable in the realm of Hollywood, we might say that while the theory
and philosophy of love have tended to leave out laughter, theories of com-
edy have tended to leave out love. Despite this, love is an important prob-
lematic in this debate because it directly implicates itself into laughter—we
love laughing and we also laugh at love.
Like anxiety, in psychoanalytic terms desire can be or might originally
be objectless (though desire may not have the primacy of anxiety in
Lacanian terms), but it may also always be directed towards an object,
even if that directed desire is only substitutional, illusory or displaced. This
apparently secondary directed desire is the only form of the desire the
subject can handle and so desire is always-already object oriented in order
to protect the subject from the objet a. As suggested above, the link
between anxiety and desire might surround the function of the objet a,
which the subject must be protected from even as it is driven or propelled
towards it. While in these terms it might not be ultimately possible to
separate objects of desire from objects of anxiety, since these desires are
always-already directed and oriented around objects (rarely the same
object), there is at least an apparently clear divide between the object of
anxiety and the object of desire from the subject’s point of view. From this
perspective there is a significant difference between the relationship of
laughter to objects of anxiety and the relationship of laughter to objects of
desire, even if ultimately the distinction between the object of desire and
the object of anxiety cannot be sustained. The idea here is that while
laughter might give anxiety an object, it may deal with the loss of an object
for desire. This form of laughter is in some ways a momentary promise of
suturing, appearing when the subject confronts the failure of the symbolic.
The connection between desire and comedy in this regard also has a
psychoanalytic antecedent. In Lacan’s discussions of French dramatist
Paul Claudel’s The Humiliated Father, he writes that “love participates in
what I call the comic feeling” and claims that “love is a comic sentiment”
(S10, 243). His reading of Claudel’s play hinges on Pensée de Coûfontaine
as the ultimate object of desire, whom Orso must comically surrender
when he realizes that she was not what she appeared to be. The humour
116 A. BOWN
comes in the realization that it can be easy enough to relinquish the object
of desire, no matter how passionately attached you may seem to be to it
(Orso may even mock Romeo’s attachment to Juliet and his willingness to
die for the link between their subjectivities, itself already comic), when
that object is only one of many possible substitutes for the earlier lost
object of desire. Comedy erupts when the desires the subject holds most
dear—the desires which define the subject itself—are shown to be nothing
but one among many replacements for a lost object which remains end-
lessly out of reach. This out-of-reach object, the object beyond the sub-
ject, is “objective” as well as “object”; it is what the subject wants and
what the subject wants to be, both the object of desire and the object-
cause of desire that sets desire on its course. If love is a comic sentiment it
is because it involves error and mistake: to love—at least in the most tradi-
tionally romantic (Romeo) way—the subject must misrecognize desire.
This misrecognition perhaps involves the subject acknowledging that
desire is “set” on an object, as Romeo does, but mistakenly believing that
it cannot be re-set on another, a lesson Romeo really should have learned
from his own history of desired objects moving from Rosaline to Juliet.
We might provisionally hypothesize that if in the anxiety–laughter rela-
tionship laughter gives anxiety an object, in the desire–laughter relation-
ship laughter deals with the loss of an object for desire. In anxiety-laughter
the subject moves from unmoored to moored laughter at the comic
object, whereas in desire-laughter the subject moves from moored desire
to a comedy of realization where desire is (perhaps only temporarily)
understood as shifting between objects. This comedy may start from a
situation in which “my heart’s dear love is set” on an object—to quote
Romeo—but emerges when that desire becomes un-set and the subject is
confronted with the structure of its own desire (Romeo and Juliet, II.3).
At such moments, desire moves on to a new object, or the object of com-
edy temporarily stands in for the object of desire. This might make such
laughter truly opposed to that of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, a hypoth-
esis that will be tested in relation to Chaplin’s movie in what follows.
Modern Times is about fulfilment, and from its opening intertitle to its
closing scene it asks to be read in relation at least to the popularized
Lacanian idea of desire as unfulfillable, or even as predicated on an infinite
lack which is needed to sustain the subject’s narcissism sufficiently for the
subject to function. The opening intertitle reads:
“Modern Times”. A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity

crusading in the pursuit of happiness.
This sets the movie up as a critique of the American Dream, mocking

the language used in the Declaration of Independence and drawing con-
scious attention to the fact that happiness can only be pursued but never
achieved, which will be a stripped-down version of the final message of the
movie. While there is plenty of scope for a Marxist reading of the film and
it is certainly a commentary on the failings of the Republican Party which
led into the Great Depression, the film only critiques the contextual cir-
cumstances of unfulfilled desire and does not lament the subject’s unfulfil-
ment or construction as lacking as such. The problem of Modern Times is
not that its subjects are unfulfilled, but that they are promised fulfilment.
In other words, there is no Deleuzian Modern Times. On the contrary,
Modern Times presents a necessary lack at the centre of the subject which
must be sustained if the subject is to go on desiring. Its two central char-
acters come to a comic recognition about the structure of their desire,
which allows them to continue living against the odds of a “modern”
American discourse of hard work and the pursuit of happiness.
To reach this conclusion, the film must be seen in three discrete seg-
ments which divide up the action. The first part of the movie tells the story
of Chaplin’s Tramp persona before he meets Ellen, “the Gamin,” played
brilliantly by Paulette Goddard. At the beginning of the movie Chaplin’s
character represents a kind fragmented self who does not desire in a way
compatible with either the Lacanian model or the modern desiring
American subject. The film presents desire in this opening section as the
result of necessity only, with Tramp and the Gamin not driven to desire as
full desiring subjects, but propelled only by circumstance and a survival
drive. Ultimately both characters are heading towards nothing, going
nowhere not only on the social level and in terms of achieving the American
Dream, but also on the level of desire itself. The second part of the movie
represents the process of falling in love and shows the first meeting
between the lovers not only as a typical love encounter, parodying the idea
of love at first sight, but as the birth of the modern desiring subject, the
meeting which sets the objet a in motion and puts desire on its course.
From the meeting with the love object onwards, the structure of desire is
irrevocably transformed for both subjects. Lacan argues that there is no
desire if there is no fantasy to sustain that desire and the movie shows just
this: the bringing to life of a fantasy which creates desire that would
otherwise be nothing more than a desire for a void (the kind of desire seen
in the movie’s first section). Despite this, the subject appears as something
like the kind of bourgeois desiring subject created by American political
discourse during this middle section of the movie. The final part of the
118 A. BOWN
movie deals with the thwarted desires of the young lovers—now becom-
ing Lacanian subjects living with their symptoms—but presents their infi-
nite failure to achieve their dreams as an oddly positive force which sustains
desire and allows the comic subject to continue living, even against the
unjust rhetoric of American political discourse. Modern Times therefore
arrives strangely on the side of “the pursuit of happiness”, while also mak-
ing a scathing critique of the American political language that used such
ideology to prop up its unjust class politics.
Modern Times begins with Chaplin’s Tramp driven mad by modern
working conditions and as a result seeking a life in jail, on the grounds that
such an existence is preferable to the conditions of the insecure worker on
the factory floor. The early part of the movie introduces the idea that there
is nothing natural about desire and love, which will become a key part of
the film’s critique of marriage conventions and property ownership. In the
film’s most famous scene, after a long day screwing nuts onto bolts,
Chaplin experiences a process of becoming-machine as he is sucked into
the factory machinery and spat out with only one desire, the comic drive
of an obsessive neurotic: the desire to tighten anything that resembles a
nut with his large caricatural spanner. Passion and pleasure are written over
Chaplin’s expression as he tightens cogs on the machinery, noses on peo-
ple’s faces and anything hexagonal or spherical that he can find in the
dystopic factory that employs him. Applying the framework developed by
Zupančič, Simon Hajdini has commented on the Laninanism of the
scene, writing:
here, the passage to comedy consists of a replacement of a thing for an

object; the passage from the bolt to the button is the passage from a thing,
or a Gegenstand, to the (comic) object which remains irreducible to the but-
ton and is nothing but an embodiment of the void that separates the func-
tion of tightening from itself. (Hajdini 2015, 203)
This sets up desire as endlessly displaced from object to object and sets
up the comedy for the comic scene which follows. Tramp encounters two
women, the first to appear in the movie, one with hexagonal buttons on
the back of her skirt and another with spherical buttons on the breast of
her jacket. Chaplin furiously pursues the women, who interpret his behav-
iour as sexual predation and believe him to be a sex-crazed maniac pursu-
ing their nipples and backside respectively, while the audience is aware that
he is driven only by a desire to use his spanner on the attractive buttons on
their clothing. The comedy of this misunderstanding displaces another

one, the joke being that desires are misunderstood as natural (and indeed
sexual) drives when they are in fact underwritten by technology (the
machine Chaplin has been recalibrated by) and by economic conditions
(his factory work). The joke also shows that he is not a subject with desires
until he is a lacking subject, which at this point he has yet to become. In
other words, the audience are asked to imagine the infantile Chaplin as a
pre-mirror stage figure, as yet without the armour of an alienating identity
that would drive the subject as we know it.
Ellen has a likewise pre-mirror stage introduction during the first
36 minutes of the movie, the time before she bumps into Chaplin’s Tramp.
These early scenes oscillate between Ellen and Chaplin’s character, show-
ing the subjects who are both to be retroactively and irrevocably trans-
formed when they meet each other and set desire on its course. In her
initial scenes, Ellen is shown to be driven only by basic human needs,
though she appears far less financially comfortable than Chaplin’s Tramp.
As with the later scenes (discussed below), the cinematography exceeds
the point made by the movie’s content. Goddard’s performance points to
the bread and bananas she seeks to acquire not only as objects of desire as
a result of hunger, but also as her own version of commodities. The “win-
dow shopping” scene where Ellen browses various breads out of sheer
hunger parodies in advance the famous Hepburn scenes of the Hollywood
version of Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which likewise show the gaze at
the object of desire, with the window separating subject and object. In
Modern Times this all goes before the main event of the film—the love
scene which starts desire on its course—but these moments introduce the
centrality of objects in subjectivity, which will be the continuing theme of
the movie.
The second great mix-up of the movie comes as the film moves into
stage two, exploring the process by which the two central characters fall in
love. The meeting between Ellen and Tramp is characterized primarily as
a misunderstanding, mocking the idea of the instant connection at the
“love at first sight” moment by showing in plain terms that “there is no
sexual relationship”: the two are speaking completely opposed languages.
Ellen, starving and with a family to feed, steals a loaf of bread from the
bakery, but is caught in the act by a well-dressed bourgeois woman who
reports her to the baker and then to the police. Trying to make her escape
with the bread, Ellen runs into Chaplin and is apprehended by the police-
man. Chaplin, desperate to return to jail, pipes up and takes the blame for
120 A. BOWN
the theft, simply hoping to return to the comfort of incarceration, which

he considers far preferable to living as a working-class factory-floor
American. The camera closes in on Goddard’s face, showing a glimmer of
anxiety mixed with shock and desire as she first considers the man who
would make such a magnanimous gesture for her, though the audience
knows she has wholly mistaken his intentions.
A few scenes later, with both Ellen and Tramp in the police van headed
to jail, the vehicle crashes and Ellen sees the chance to escape. By this
point, Tramp has begun to desire the girl and has started to form some
hopes and desires on the basis of having an object to attach his desire to,
no longer desiring only the void of jail and a life of comfortable continua-
tion. When she asks him to escape with her, he is momentarily torn
between the cushy life in prison that he has been working so hard to
achieve and the possibility of a future with Ellen. The subject is torn
between its past and its future, opting not so much for the possibility of
fulfilment in a kind of bourgeois model. In this crucial moment on which
the entire logic of the film rests, Chaplin follows the girl and escapes from
the police and from the city with renewed hope for a future that contains
more than nothing, a future previously unconsidered happiness, possible
fulfilment and, most of all, a future of desire itself.
Seconds later in the movie, running from the city, the two sit down in
a parody of suburban America and watch another couple—the perfect
product of the American Dream—part from each other in the sunny
morning. The pinafore-wearing wife kisses her briefcase-wielding husband
goodbye before Chaplin turns to Ellen and asks whether she can imagine
the two of them living a life like the one they have just witnessed. In a
dream sequence, the movie shows how Tramp imagines this American
Dream paradise, a perfect 2.4 children-ready semi-detached house in the
suburbs with grapes growing down through their kitchen window and a
cow producing milk on demand, before the couple embrace in pure hap-
piness and sit down to their ideal patriarchal family dinner. The presence
of the cow and the grapes mocks the naturalization of desire (adding to
the factory scene discussed above), mocking how 1930s American dis-
course was able to present suburban marriage as inevitable regardless of
one’s interpretation of desire. Coming out of Chaplin’s dream sequence,
the camera pans to Goddard’s face again and slows down slightly, focusing
in on the utter shock of her expression as the idea of being a desiring sub-
ject is consecrated once and for all in her mind. From this irrevocable
moment, desire is set on its course. Lacan calls the endless and impossible
process of filling the void in the subject with another object fantasy, and
Chaplin’s movie shows it as clear as day: presenting a fantasy (Chaplin’s
dream) which makes desire possible and transforms the subjects involved
into desiring identities who will never be the same again after their con-
struction as such. Goddard’s brilliant performance embodies this shift in
subjectivity perfectly, as she briefly touches her stomach in response to
hunger before subtly shaking her head to dismiss her survival instincts and
then gazing desirously into the future, now not a subject whose desires are
based on necessity and survival, but a subject whose desires are based
on fantasy.
From here, the two become aspiring bourgeois subjects in a humorous
parody of the way 1930s Americans were encouraged to pursue that which
is just beyond their means. They visit the department store—for Walter
Benjamin the embodiment of capitalist desire—and dream of silk gowns
and soft mattresses, before they set up home in a swamp, trying to pre-
cisely re-create the scene depicted in Chaplin’s earlier dream sequence.
The couple face a number of frustrations when their attempts to realize
their dreams are inevitably thwarted due to economic conditions, a repres-
sive state police with a bias against the working class and unethical political
conditions. Yet, while the film is usually read as lamenting their inability to
achieve the fulfilment promised by their contemporary society, the final
stages of the film take the politics of Modern Times in a different direction.
During the second period in the movie, the couple are bourgeois American
desiring subjects, but they change once again into Lacanian subjects happy
to live with their symptom. The subjects change from those lamenting
their lack of fulfilment into comic subjects able to bear their frustrations
and even happier in their frustrated and destitute state than otherwise.
To punctuate this final and largest portion of the film dealing with
unfulfilment, the famous comic finale is a parody of “Je cherche après
Titine” sung by Frenchman Léo Daniderff in 1917. Titine is a diminutive
form of female names ending in “tine” (for example Justine or Martine),
suggesting a pet-name objectification of the object of desire and showing
Chaplin’s own reflection on the film as a text about the search for infinitely
elusive little objects. The lyrics of the song, the first time Chaplin’s voice
was included in a movie, are a medley of languages, with the only clear
extractable phrases taken from the verses in French which read “Je cherche
après Titine et ne la trouve pas”, which can be translated here as meaning
“I searched for my little object of desire and could not find it”. The voice
is particularly important in this final scene and may be a crucial object in
122 A. BOWN
the discussion of anxiety and desire. Mladen Dolar has argued for a con-
ception of the voice which sees voice neither as a vehicle of meaning
(Chaplin’s certainly is not in this scene) nor as a source of aesthetic admi-
ration (again, Chaplin’s voice is definitely not this), but as an object voice
which points to a troubling blind spot in the subject (Dolar 2006, 4). For
Dolar, the voice is the object which the subject struggles to integrate all
the while it is emanating from the subject, and Chaplin’s voice can be seen
in precisely this light. For Dolar, the voice can be connected to the objet
petit a and to drive, but not to fulfilment or to the achievement of a goal.
Using the psychoanalytic distinction between aim and goal, he writes:
If the goal of the utterance is the production of meaning, then the voice, the
mere instrument, is the aim attained on the way, the by-product of the way
to the goal, the object around which the drive turns; the side-satisfaction,
but one which suffices to fuel all the machinery. (Dolar 2006, 74)
Chaplin’s comic subjectivity therefore mirrors the function of the voice

when seen in this light. The comedy at the end of Modern Times involves
siding with aim over goal, rejecting fulfilment (the logic of the political
discourse the film parodies from the start) and siding with the continua-
tion of desire. If this is indicated by the voice, it may be important that the
voice is the only pathway on which laughter can emerge.
Chaplin’s performance—which highlights the voice-object as caught
between language and body—of a song dealing with thwarted desire in a
highly positive comic attitude recalls Hegel’s discussion of comedy at the
end of Aesthetics, even if Hegel might seem to be speaking about a more
deliberate and less spontaneous kind of comic. Hegel writes that the
“comic as such”
implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised

altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in
it at all: this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can
bear the frustration of his aims and achievements. (Hegel 1975, 1200)
This ability of the comic subject to deal with the frustration of its desire
is a vital insight into the desire–comedy relationship, perfectly embodied
in Modern Times. After this scene, Ellen and Tramp suffer one final failure
at the hands of the oppressive state authorities and economic overlords
before they retreat from the city once more, to sit down at the roadside in
a mirror of the scene that started their journey on its course. After a
momentary sadness, the couple decide they are able to bear the “frustra-
tion of their aims and achievements” and go on living and desiring regard-
less. The final message of the film is that thwarted desire is preferable to
the impossibility of fulfilled desire, and the two comically walk into the
sunset with desire sustained—the most necessary thing in order to go on.
If the symptom indicates the distinction between objects which can be
directly experienced and the hidden causes of those objects, then these
comic figures learn to live with their symptom or realize the Lacanian
point that when one symptom disappears it is simply replaced by another.
Comedy, therefore, involves opting for desire rather than fulfilment,
and acknowledging that the former might be the preferable option. In this
formulation, since the subject cannot handle the realization of their
desires, the object of desire is translated into the object of comedy. The
final scene of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, discussed in these terms by
Gregor Moder, would be a perfect illustration, comparable to Orso’s will-
ingness to give up Pensée (Moder 2017, 169–72). In Wilder’s movie,
when the comic subject—Osgood—realizes that his love object is in fact a
man and not the perfect woman he believed him to be, rather than the
expected reaction of catastrophic disappointment, Osgood simply replies,
“Well, nobody’s perfect.” At the crisis point of desire, the subject admits
it does not want the object that promised fulfilment and prefers to go on
desiring. All husband/wife jokes might also fall humorously into this cat-
egory—not so much coping with the absence of fulfilment (the disap-
pointing marriage), but turning desire to comedy at the crisis point in the
subject’s relation to desire, perhaps even in order to avoid the fulfilling
marriage and acknowledging that frustration (husband or wife as comic
object) is preferable to fulfilment (husband or wife as the ultimate end
point of desire). One could put this in terms of the symbolic and imagi-
nary and suggest that the comic subject opts for a preference for the imag-
inary at the point of a failure in the symbolic, making this kind of laughter
a moment of suturing.
In this way, Modern Times might be more formally the anti-Romeo of
the relationship between the subject and the loved object than was
suggested earlier. In Chaplin’s movie, acquiring the object of desire—
Tramp and Ellen’s meeting and commitment to each other—is the start of
desire, not the end of it nor its fulfilment. Where Romeo and Juliet must
die their tragic death in order to sustain the illusion of their possible fulfil-
ment (much as Slavoj Žižek has playfully argued of Titanic), Tramp and
Ellen walk into the sunset with a desiring future ahead of them (in Fiennes
124 A. BOWN
2006). Each of them fails miserably on numerous occasions in their pur-

suit of food, work, a home and happiness, but each laughs continually at
the other and both are able to comically continue. Most importantly,
unlike Romeo and Juliet each is not each the objet a for the other, but
allows the objet a to exist elsewhere or to drift between objects, continually
giving up that to which their desiring is directed and allowing desire to
continue on, much like Orso and Osgood do. This kind of comedy, then,
deals with the relationship between subject, object and desire. Such com-
edy emerges when desire becomes “un-set” and the subject is confronted
with the need to re-orient its identity around a new object or around the
failure of the object (the comic object).
These moments of desire-comedy may function via a comparable form of
retroactivity or Nachträglichkeit to that which is found in the anxiety-
laughter of the fascist mock museums. Here too, a new relationship between
the subject and its object appears to have already existed, as the subject is left
with the impression that the former object of desire was not in fact the object
of desire after all, even though before the moment of laughter it most cer-
tainly was. Yet there is also a key difference between the laughter here and
that found in the Nazi mock museums. That laughter relies on the retroac-
tive tricking of the subjects themselves (even if the subject is in on the trick),
so that the object of anxiety (the art work of anti-German sentiment) appears
to be the cause of laughter, hiding the subject from awareness of the fact that
their subjectivity is constructed via its orientation around objects. On the
other hand, in the case of the desire-comedy of Modern Times, the subject
has a psychoanalytic awareness of the way their identity is structured around
objects, troubling the fascist logic of the repulsive or comic object and the
illusion of the pre-existing subject who responds to it. Contrary to the argu-
ments of others, this makes Chaplin’s comedy properly anti-fascist.
In his 2017 book Liquidation World, a significant intervention into
theorizations of laughter, Alexi Kukuljevic discusses the central role that
objects play in the function of comedy. His theory offers a way to negoti-
ate the distinction between the laughter of the mock museums discussed
above and the laughter of Modern Times discussed in the bulk of this chap-
ter. Developing Charles Baudelaire’s idea that “laughter is at once the
token of infinite grandeur and infinite misery” (Baudelaire 2006, 161),
Kukuljevic writes:
Laughter is fundamentally an expulsive movement, an outburst that acts as

a disguise, marking a difference between being and its manner, by distin-
guishing the ridiculous manner of the other. Laughter is the assumption of

a false identity, since it is predicated on the disavowal of weakness, of one’s
own susceptibility to disaster. When one laughs at the flaw in the object, it
is not the object itself but its relation to the flaw that causes laughter.
(Kukuljevic 2017, 59)
While the “fundamentally expulsive” movement in laughter that “dis-

avows weakness” recalls the ideas of abjection discussed here, the final
scene of Chaplin’s movie seems to make the movement with a more
direct knowledge of the process of taking on a false identity. When Tramp
says to Ellen in the final intertitle “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get
along!” it is clear that this is not about having tragically internalized the
individualist and entrepreneurial “hard-working” political discourse of
the 1930s that the phrase seems to parody, but about having realized that
one can assume a false identity in order to keep desire working. It might
be that such moments show that comedy is sometimes misinterpreted as
entirely fatalist, since there is an odd form of comic agency here. In this
moment, comedy protects the subject from their object, disavowing the
subject’s weakness by moving the relationship between the subject and
its objects.
In this regard, laughter is a transitional movement or a process—as
Charles Mauron argued—and as a process it is always to be thought of in
terms of the subject–object relationship. This chapter has considered
whether there might be a relationship between objects of desire and laugh-
ter which is comparable to but antagonistic with that which we can per-
ceive in the relationship between objects of anxiety and laughter. As
Kukuljevic notices, laughter may involve a process by which the subject’s
relation to the object shifts, and this would be valid in both the movement
from anxiety to laughter and in the ideas explored here of a movement in
the relationship between the subject and its objects of desire. We might say
that laughter is never without an object (at the very least, the object of the
voice is present), but also that it never merely responds to existing objects,
as the fascists would claim. Instead, laughter re-orients the subject’s iden-
tity at a crisis point it its relationship to its objects. However, it can either
hide this fact (as in the laughter at the mock museums) or reveal it (as in
the comedy of Modern Times).
In part the points made here are designed to recover psychoanalysis’s
reputation in “laughter studies” linked with what has been called the
126 A. BOWN
“relief” of “liberation” theories of laughter.2 New books continue to asso-

ciate Freud and even later psychoanalytic ideas with laughter as release,
and while those elements exist in Freud’s theorization of laughter, the
points made here show a completely different way in which psychoanalysis
is vital in understanding the subtle functions of laughter in connection to
subjectivity (Stott 2005, 138, 139). Freud himself wrote that “humor has
in it a liberating element. But it has also something fine and elevating, […]
the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be
hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer” (Freud SE 8,
113). Such a comment shows some anticipation of the discussions of this
chapter, which has attempted to show that such implications neglect the
vital role that psychoanalytic ideas can play in exploring the subtle but
important political functions of laughter in relation to subjectivities.
In the context of romantic comedy, in some ways the subject that has
been discussed here, Celestino Deleyto writes that “as Freud argued, humor
is liberating and uplifting”. Deleyto suggests that certain forms of laughter
“turn anxiety into an occasion for joyful experimentation” in this light
(Deleyto 2012, 179). Here the opposite has been suggested, that humour
is not uplifting or inherently positive, as it is so often considered, and that
if laughter is related to “joy” then it may be the fascist kind that involves
collaboration with the powerholders. Rather than seeing laughter as liberat-
ing, I have argued that laughter should be viewed as a process indicating a
shift in the subject’s relationship to its objects, whether of anxiety or of
desire. Both relationships involve a movement, either from desire or anxiety
and into the sphere of comedy. In this regard it might be useful to use the
terms anxiety-laughter and desire-laughter (in this hyphenated way) to
draw attention to the temporality involved in laughter’s functioning. In
both cases, laughter should be seen as a process which re-orients the subject
around new objects and maladies, but this shift in the subject marked by
laughter is neither essentially positive nor negative, neither liberating nor
controlling, and it can work for the fascist as well as for the revolutionary.
2
A relevant text working in the same direction is Frank Ruda’s Abolishing Freedom: A Plea
for the Contemporary Use of Fatalism. The form of laughter discussed in this chapter might
in some ways oppose Ruda’s suggestion of a vital link between comedy and fatalism, on the
grounds that both the comic and the fatalist start from the assumption “that everything is
always already lost” (128), since this laughter works to sustain the subject at a moment of
possible loss, as if laughter protects the last part of the subject. Ruda’s discussion of the link
between freedom and comedy, though, shows how much more is needed than existing ideas
linking psychoanalysis with liberation and relief theory.
References
Baudelaire, Charles. 2006. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London:
Phaidon Press.
Bown, Alfie. 2017. Anxious Laughter: Mauron’s Renversement and Gogol’s
Overcoat. Journal of American Psychoanalysis 77 (2): 163–176.
Chaplin, Charlie (dir.). 1936. Modern Times. United Artists.
Deleyto, Celestino. 2012. Humor and Erotic Utopia: The Intimate Scenarios of
Romantic Comedy. In A Companion to Film Comedy, ed. Andrew Horton and
Joanna E. Rapf, 175–195. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fiennes, Sophie (dir.). 2006. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Mischief Films.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey and others, 24 vols.
London: Vintage.
Frye, Northrop. 1957. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Hajdini, Simon. 2015. The Comedy of the Great Depression: On Chaplin’s
Modern Times. Crisis and Critique 2 (1): 195–215.
Hall, Jonathan. 1995. Anxious Pleasures. London: Associated University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics. Vol II, Trans. T.M. Knox.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon
S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kukuljevic, Alexi. 2017. Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently.
Lacan, Jacques. 2014. Anxiety, ed. Jacques Alain-Miller. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, ed. 1986. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fleiss. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Mauron, Charles. 1964. Psychocritque du genre comique. Paris: Libraire Jose Corti.
Moder, Gregor. 2017. The Impossible Object of Love: Shakespeare, Billy Wilder
and Freud. Problemi International 1 (1): 159–179.
Parvulescu, Anca. 2010. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ruda, Frank. 2016. Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for the Contemporary Use of
Fatalism. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press.
Stott, Andrew. 2005. Comedy. New York: Routledge.
Thomas, Jeannie B. 1997. Featherless Chicken, Laughing Women and Serious
Stories. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In. London: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 8
Where Does Dirt Come From?
Alenka Zupančič
“Dirt is matter out of place”—this is a well-known formula originally used

by William James, and later made famous by the anthropologist Mary
Douglas (2002). As Anne Carson paraphrased it, “The poached egg on
your plate at breakfast is not dirt; the poached egg on the floor of the
Reading Room of the British Museum is” (Carson 1990). This point has
quickly become an important topos in cultural studies and post-modern
theory in general, but especially in post-modern theory of power.
Paradigmatic examples of this line of reasoning are titles like “Taking and
Making Place: The Stuff of Power” (a book chapter in Anderson 2009),
advancing the thesis that “Power is the power of giving place.” Without
denying some importance and pertinence to this kind of thesis, I would
argue—with Freud, who also quotes William James’ saying at some
point—that in the end they are too short. Freud was quite right in insist-
ing that in order for matter (or something else) to become dirt, in the
strong meaning of the term, something more is needed: something of the
order of repression (Verdrängung) has to take place. This is in tune, of
course, with the more general psychoanalytic (Lacanian) stance, according
to which society and civilization are not simply repressive formations,
A. Zupančič (*)
Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana, Slovenia
e-mail: alenka.zupancic@guest.arnes.si

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_8
130 A. ZUPANČIČ
exercising suppression and hence inducing repression (in the clinical

sense); they are also edifices built from repression.1 This is a very impor-
tant point in the context of discussing comedy, too. One could be easily
tempted to use James’ formula in the context of comedy and say, for
example, that dirt as a comic object is “matter out of place.” Why not? It
seems to work in a lot of cases and to nicely encapsulate some aspect of
comedy, as do many other formulas that have been proposed over the
centuries in the discussion of comedy (for example, “to show something
that should have remained hidden,” or the famous Bergsonian formula
“something mechanical encrusted upon the living”). Freud’s ground-
breaking contribution to this discussion2 does not consist in proposing yet
another, truer formula, but in showing how all these formulas remain
insufficient or too vague (descriptive rather than conceptual) if we do not
take into consideration yet another level that structurally motivates what
these formulas describe, and this is what he calls repression. By using the
term “structurally motivates” I want to emphasize that what is at stake is
not any kind of subjective, psychological motivation. Psychology is, strictly
speaking, secondary to repression; it is built on repression. Repression in
the strong sense of the word pertains to structure, to language, and coin-
cides with it (which is exactly why something like joking can be so univer-
sal). In order to emphasize this primal (“transcendental”) level of
repression in relation to its everyday empirical forms, Freud introduced
the concept of “primal repression,” Urverdrängung.3
Act One: Enjoyment without a Room of Its Own

The “dirt” that we will be speaking about here is a particular kind of dirt—
a “spiritual dirt,” as it were—namely enjoyment, enjoyment as a peculiar
substance. So the question is the following: Where does the enjoyment in
1
“So that we have to reexamine the test case, taking as a starting point the fact that it is
repression that produces suppression. Why couldn’t the family, society itself, be creations
built from repression? They are nothing less” (Lacan 1990, 28).
2
Starting of course with his book on Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
3
“We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression,
which consists in the psychical representative of the drive being denied entrance into the
conscious. […] The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivates of
the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come
into associative connection with it. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure
(Nachdrängen)” (Freud 2001, 148).
8 WHERE DOES DIRT COME FROM? 131
comic effects come from? To refer to enjoyment as dirt is not meant in any
moralistic way, but in the sense of something that has the habit of sticking
onto words, things, and actions as their irreducible surplus not made of
the same stuff they are (something “foreign,” heterogeneous to them).
The other important dimension of “dirt” related to enjoyment in jokes
and comedy comes from the fact that it seems “ugly” to take pleasure at
(that is, to “enjoy”) another person’s expense (their supposed deficiency,
misfortune, exposure, ridicule, etc.).
There are people, for example, who object to jokes and joking in prin-
ciple, because the more hilarious the joke, the more hurtful and offensive
it usually is for its butt. According to this argument, the enjoyment expe-
rienced in mistreating or making fun of other people is a bad and ugly
thing, and one should avoid it as a matter of principle. This is not to say
that if we want to be politically correct in this respect, no jokes are allowed;
they are, but only innocent jokes, the so-called abstract jokes, like jokes
about geometrical shapes. If we look up some of these, it becomes obvious
that they do not so much resolve the problem as perpetuate it on their
own ground. Here are two examples:
“What did the triangle say to the circle? Your life seems so pointless.”
“What did the hypotenuse say to the other sides? Nice legs!”
There you have it: aggressiveness, sexism. Those are the very two
tendencies that Freud recognized at the heart of all tendentious—that
is, non-innocent—jokes. True, the remarks do not refer in these cases to
any particular person or group (nationality, race, gender). Yet it is clear
that the offensive reference is already implicit within the “abstract”
jokes. The enjoyment in aggressive or sexual remarks is clearly present
in them, making these jokes less “innocent” than one might want
them to be.
To be sure, this problem with clearly delimiting innocent jokes is the
problem of enjoyment as such: enjoyment is somehow always enjoy-
ment at someone’s expense, even when it does not seem so at first
sight. Consider the classic example of someone driven crazy by the
smell of the neighbors’ cooking (possibly a meal belonging to another
ethnic tradition): they cook—eat and enjoy—in the privacy of their
kitchen, but since their enjoyment has a smell, they enjoy it at their
neighbor’s expense. Or take the example of passive smoking: the more
one wants to confine smokers and their enjoyment to their own clearly
132 A. ZUPANČIČ
delimited space, the more the smoke of their enjoyment has the ten-
dency to find some way out and annoy us. To enjoy is to trespass, which
is why all kinds of regulations proliferate in relation to enjoyment, des-
perately trying to draw a clear line between what is (still) admissible
and what is not. Socially, enjoyment registers as a form of trespassing,
as crossing a limit which is in itself not entirely clear and is difficult to
determine, and which we usually only recognize as a limit in retrospect,
once it has already been crossed. The fact that enjoyment registers as a
form of trespass also means that it usually compels us to choose between
two options: we can either all join together in a common pleasure (and
expel the ones who do not want to partake in our way of enjoying it),
or else we unite in expelling the enjoyer(s). Communities (particularly
in the sense of Gemeinshaft) form themselves by way of excluding some
forms of enjoyment, as well as by (more or less explicitly) enjoining the
partaking in others. The move from Gemeinshaft to Gesellshaft is, to
some extent at least, the move away from enjoyment as a founding
principle of the common toward a symbolic principle. That is a good
thing. Its flipside, however, is that so far it has not found a better way
to tackle the enjoyment which is produced in the midst of the symbolic
exchange and keeps haunting society than to try to regulate it with
more and more suffocating rules and sub-rules, ever new and more
detailed regulations. This is part of the comic aspect of political cor-
rectness. And, it is to be said in passing, the paradoxes it constitutes are
also an important source of inspiration for the increasing number of
“legal” TV series, such as Boston Legal, to take one of the more inter-
esting examples. Where exactly do my rights end and somebody else’s
begin (in the realm of enjoyment)? This is a fundamental problem of
what is termed the “right to enjoy,” which the Marquis de Sade so
clearly anticipated.
This structural problem of enjoyment is real, we cannot sweep it
under the carpet or under the banner of tolerance. Enjoyment—the
moment it manifests itself as enjoyment—is always out of place, because
it has no place. It only exists at the intersection of the subject and the
other/Other. It does not have “a room of its own,” to paraphrase the
famous title by Virginia Wolf. That enjoyment has no room of its own
also means that it has no form of its own, but sticks on to “other”
forms (actions, words), driving them—and eventually inviting their
repression.
Act Two: The Birth of the Joke from the Spirit

of Smut
Let us now stop at the classical Freudian genealogy of joking. According

to Freud, structurally speaking, the (obscene) joke develops out of what is
called “smut” (Zote), its original scene being that of a man trying to
seduce a woman by obscene talk, speaking about sexual facts and relations
(including the excremental in the most comprehensive sense). We will see
in a moment how a third person enters this setting and transforms it into
a proper scene of smut, which is defined by Freud as follows: “The utter-
ing of an undisguised indecency gives the first person enjoyment and
makes the third person laugh” (Freud 1976, 144). But this is not yet a
joke. Only when we rise to a society of more refined education, continues
Freud, do the formal conditions for jokes play a part. The smut becomes
a joke and is only tolerated when it has the character of a joke. The techni-
cal method which it usually employs is the allusion—there is some small
replacement that is remotely connected to the vulgar content, which the
listener reconstructs in their imagination into a complete and straightfor-
ward obscenity. The greater the discrepancy between what is explicitly
said (and not said) in the joke and what the listener is led to imagine, the
more refined the joke becomes and the higher, too, it may venture to
climb into good society.
But let us first return to smut—it is worth reading Freud’s account of
it, and of its development (and not only of the development of the joke
out of smut), more closely. Smut, according to Freud, is originally directed
to a particular person, by whom one is sexually excited and who, on hear-
ing it, is expected to become aware of the speaker’s excitement and as a
result to become sexually excited in their turn. However, “Instead of this
excitement the other person may be led to feel shame or embarrassment,
which is only a reaction against the excitement and, in a roundabout way,
is an admission of it. Smut is thus originally directed towards women and
may be equated with attempts at seduction” (144). So, this is a kind of
Urscene of smut and joking: a man speaking “dirty” to a woman in an
attempt to have sex with her. But, as is well known, women tend to resist
this kind of approach; they might blush and thus reveal/confirm their own
excitement, but this is usually all the man will get out of it. Moreover, as
Freud is careful to point out in what turns out to be the first turn of the
screw, “If the woman’s readiness emerges quickly the obscene speech has
134 A. ZUPANČIČ
a short life; it yields at once to a sexual action” (142). Hence, “the wom-
an’s inflexibility is therefore the first condition for the development of
smut, although, to be sure, it seems merely to imply a postponement and
does not indicate that further efforts will be in vain” (142–3). What do we
have here? Almost imperceptibly, smut has changed its place: from dirty
talk aiming at, and leading to, the true goal (sexual intercourse), it has
become something of a goal in itself. If smut is to be smut, if it is to be
fully developed and enjoyed, it needs an obstacle—women at whom it is
directed should not be too ready, otherwise they spoil the fun, so to speak.
They have to resist, yet the problem is—and this is the second shift—one
cannot even count on women to keep the resistance up. In other words—
and to further paraphrase this “primal scene” of smut—women are not
only well known for resisting overt sexual seduction and blushing. They
are also notorious for their inconsistency in this. One never knows if and
when they will change their mind and suddenly say yes; this now becomes
a more serious problem. With women’s (or any empirical target’s) incon-
stancy, the poor smut (who is now the subject of this game) can never be
sure to have enough space to fully perform its act. That is why—this is
Freud again—“the ideal case of a resistance of this kind on the woman’s
part occurs if another man is present at the same time—a third person—
for in that case an immediate surrender by the woman is as good as out of
the question” (143).
This is the point where Freud introduces, for the first time, the famous
“third person” or third instance, which will later play such an important
role in the structure of any joke. When it comes to jokes, we are no longer
dealing with the immediate presence of the second person (who remains
there only as the joke’s target or butt). The crucial role is taken by a third
person (which we usually refer to as to the other or second person—that
is the one to whom the joke is told). For a joke is not a joke if it is not told
to someone and if this someone does not confirm it as a joke by laughing
at it. It is only at that point that a joke—“retroactively,” so to speak—
becomes a joke; prior to that it is not fully, ontologically constituted as a
joke. In other words, we are dealing with an extremely significant concep-
tual point in Freud’s text, a point in which Lacan will later recognize no
less than a first outline of his concept of the (big) Other: the third is not
simply yet another person, but represents a qualitative emerging of a new
dimension, the symbolic field, which determines what exactly it was that
one person said to the (empirical) other. In a dialog between two people,
the big Other is always there as the “third.” And since we are dealing with
a point of such conceptual significance, it could be very instructive to see

in what office exactly the instance of the third appears here. It appears in
the office of providing a solid obstacle to an immediate satisfaction (of
sexual need), as well as in the office of providing a wall alongside which
smut can fully resonate and develop. This is to say that a whole new kind
of enjoyment begins or, even more precisely, the enjoyment proper (as
always-already another enjoyment) only begins here. The logic is not sim-
ply that of replacement: it is impossible to get it, so try to satisfy yourself
with what is here (enjoy the smut). Rather, it is a whole new it that starts
here. This is also to say, of course, that the most direct, vulgar smut is
already a circumvention (satisfaction via circumvention); yet, and above
all, this means that circumvention itself can be a direct means of that par-
ticular kind of pleasure called enjoyment (jouissance). The “third person”
(the obstacle) is the intrinsic condition of this enjoyment (differently from
the way the obstacle functions in the dialectics of desire, the intensity of
which increases with the presence of obstacles and with the inaccessibility
of the object).
Although some of Freud’s remarks seem to point in this direction, we
would thus be wrong in understanding the difference between a piece of
smut and a joke as simply suggesting that there is some direct, original
enjoyment at work in smut, made impossible/inaccessible by the restric-
tions imposed by our culture (civilization), but nevertheless obtained
(regained) by the detour of jokes (by means of allusion and other tech-
niques). Contrary to this, one is forced to recognize that non-directness—
or, in more general terms, culture—is at work already in the most vulgar
smut. This does not mean, however, that there is no difference between a
joke and a piece of smut; it rather means that we have to look for it else-
where than in the opposition between an immediate and non-immediate
satisfaction.
Act Three: The Fold of Satisfaction

As a matter of fact, Freud also articulates an “intermediate link” between
smut and a joke, which he describes as smut pronounced in the absence of
a woman (or, more generally, in the absence of its object). Whereas, for
example, we notice in “inns of the humbler sort” that it is not until the
entrance of the barmaid that smuttiness starts up, the situation is different
at the higher strata of society: here, the presence of a woman brings the
smut to an end, as the men “save up this kind of entertainment, which
136 A. ZUPANČIČ
originally presupposed the presence of a woman who was feeling ashamed,

till they are ‘alone together’” (143).
What happens in the passage from smut to joke is thus the follow-
ing: the (importance of the) third person, the listener, comes to the
foreground, whereas the object of the smut in its physical presence
retreats to the background and finally fully disappears. But we must not
forget that the third person only appears as the listener of smut (com-
parable to the listener of a joke) in a second step, while it first appears
in Freud’s account as an obstacle fixing the inconstancy of the object—
it fixes the unreliable oscillation of the object in the position of the
“impossible.”4
What is interesting in Freud’s (re)construction is precisely how the
instance of the interdiction of enjoyment (of its exclusion as impossible) is
at the same time precisely the place of emerging of another enjoyment—
the enjoyment of talking about this impossible enjoyment; that is, the
enjoyment in the obscene talk as such. This topological coincidence is
indeed crucial. The addressee or the social partner of this talk is also the
one who introduces and supports the very impossibility of a (hypothetical)
immediate satisfaction. And this is far from insignificant in both the
dynamics of smut and in the telling of jokes.
If we scrutinize the dynamics of smut in this way, we notice that “imme-
diate satisfaction” appears—already the first time—as lost. Yet this “loss,”
this minus, this negativity is not simply a mythological reference to a phan-
tasmatic mode of full satisfaction, in comparison with which all other,
accessible satisfaction fades; instead, it is the very condition, place, and
scene of the emerging of any empirical satisfaction. It is clear that even if
we move a step “backwards” from smut to sexual intercourse as such, we
4
On the other hand, Freud also talks about the obstacle on the side of the object: “The
obstacle standing in the way is in reality nothing other than the woman’s incapacity to toler-
ate undisguised sexuality, an incapacity correspondingly increased with a rise in the educa-
tional and social level” (144). At work here is obviously some conceptual difficulty—we have
seen that this very obstacle is also said to be much too unreliable. So much so that it would
be possible to say that what makes a woman an obstacle at this level is not so much her inflex-
ibility, as it is the fact that she is not altogether up to the task of the obstacle. In other words,
the problem is neither simply that women resist too much, nor that they do not resist
enough, but rather that in such a scenario of face-to-face seduction both possibilities are
there; the other oscillates, manifests some lability—in short, there is no law here that one
could count upon. In this respect, the entrance of a third person represents a replacement of
one (kind of) obstacle with another, the passage from empirical inconsistency (powerless-
ness) to the symbolic impossibility/interdiction.
are quickly led to realize that even here we are not dealing simply with
pure and immediate satisfaction. For also at this level satisfaction already
presupposes many things and always-already appears at the place of its own
minus. Enjoyment is generated at the place of the impossible. Even more
succinctly put: enjoyment is generated out of its own impossibility. This is
not about two different kinds of enjoyment: the minus of a “first one” is
and remains an inherent part of the armature of the “other” enjoyment. If
the enjoyment, such as we know it, is always (already) mediated and indi-
rect, we also have to add that the very instance of mediation—through
which satisfaction “folds” and thus acquires the character of something
mediated—is not simply the medium of speech. (That is why we encoun-
ter in speech itself the same kind of possible opposition between the
immediate and non-immediate: we can either pronounce a given word or
find a way of saying/implying it by means of other words.) The instance
of mediation is the minus itself: enjoyment becomes enjoyment when it
folds over its own impossibility. And it folds with the help of the signifier.
The signifier is not a cause of the loss of an immediate satisfaction (as some
of the theses of early Lacan would seem to suggest), but rather a means of
handling it with the negativity which is constitutively at work in the satis-
faction as such. The presupposition that in nature, “with animals,” there
exists a possibility of a full and unproblematic satisfaction is in itself phan-
tasmatic. Yet again, this does not mean that there is no difference between
animal and human; it means that we have to look for it elsewhere, and that
it involves the difference in response to the inherent deadlock of satisfac-
tion. The response constitutive of human beings is the redoubling of the
negativity itself. What Lacan calls the signifier is nothing but the structure
of this redoubling, its material existence, which as such opens the space of
another (and only) satisfaction: to the drive as satisfaction that takes place
“between two walls of the impossible.”5 What is thus at stake is not simply
that the signifier derails the instinct, grafting and contaminating it with an
entirely different logic; rather, it is that the “entirely different” is the hori-
zon and scene which opens when that which is most intimate, the most
proper to instinct, appears as the material structuring of the signifier. In
other words: we get the drive when the instinct folds over its own
negativity.
5
This is Lacan’s expression, to be found in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
(Lacan 1979, 167).
138 A. ZUPANČIČ
Act Four: The Surprise

We need to have all this in mind when speaking about the work of jokes.
What exactly is it that a joke does? Could we not say that the most elemen-
tary description of its work is that it carries out, with the help of well-
chosen signifiers, the folding of the enjoyment over its own negativity/
impossibility? And that—in most cases—it carries it out as a folding over of
the sense (producing another, unexpected sense)? This last emphasis consti-
tutes perhaps the crucial difference to smut, and in this respect Freud is of
course right: smut puts itself in an immediate relation to the thing it
“says.” It says something that agreeably excites the speaker. Listeners can
join this excitation in saying/hearing certain words or not. But at no point
is there any doubt about what these words “mean”; if the listeners laugh,
they do not confirm the meaning of what is said, but the given mode of
enjoyment. If, on the contrary, they turn away in disapproval, they signal
their unwillingness to accept this mode of enjoyment. When we are deal-
ing with jokes, the situation is different, since the enjoyment largely
depends on meaning and on its permutation, which needs to be recog-
nized and approved by the listener. It is only here that we are at the level
of the signifier proper, even if what is at stake is not always the meaning of
a word (and the folding over or permutation of this meaning), but can also
involve a permutation of the meaning of an entire situation, set of rela-
tions, and so on. We could say that what distinguishes the signifying order
is neither simply the meaning/significance nor simply the absence of all
“intrinsic” meaning (the famous “arbitrariness of the signifier”), but pre-
cisely the folding of the meaning/sense.
The addressee of a joke thus plays a double role: they embody the
obstacle to an immediate satisfaction, while at the same time they confirm
with laughter (testifying that the joke works) that this same obstacle has
been surmounted, successfully outwitted, and that an unexpected satisfac-
tion occurred. The addressee of a joke is like a strange watchman, atten-
tively watching where the satisfaction will occur, what path it will take. On
the one hand, if they see or anticipate this point, the joke will not work;
they will say to the teller of the joke something like “I see where this
leads” or “I know this joke,” and the joke will be stopped short. With
laughter that follows the surprise, on the other hand, the addressee of a
joke confirms that they have been successfully tricked and that the satisfac-
tion occurred at an unexpected place. Now we can also see quite clearly
that, in order to explain the “game” of the telling of jokes, we actually no
longer need the hypothesis of the interdiction of a preexisting satisfac-

tion—for the interdiction is directly present in this game itself. The obsta-
cle does not forbid some (substantial) other satisfaction; what it forbids is
for the liaison between satisfaction and meaning to accomplish itself before
its eyes, so to speak. It only admits it as a surprise (something that hap-
pened while we were looking the other way). This and nothing else is the
meaning of the non-immediacy that separates a joke from smut. When we
are dealing with smut, the listener “looks” at the place where the satisfac-
tion is being generated—they are a direct witness to this generation. The
“higher threshold of civilization” at work in joking implies, on the other
hand, that its listener does not witness the emerging of the satisfaction;
they watch, but do not see it—thanks to the technique of joking which
managed to surprise them. They only notice the satisfaction when it is
already “too late,” when it has already occurred and surprised them; and
they testify to its occurring at an unexpected place. They are a witness to
the fact that, as a witness, they have missed the “essential.”
This factor of the unexpected, of surprise, is at work not only in jokes,
but also in comedy and its cultural stratification. The higher we climb the
ladder of “culture,” the stronger the demand for the element of surprise
becomes. And everything is admissible here, including the surprise result-
ing from the fact that what happens is precisely what has been expected.
However, there are also important differences between the structure of a
joke and that of comedy, and in the context of our present discussion the
following is the most obvious one: as opposed to telling a joke, comedy
can work many times over, it can repeat the same “surprise” and yet still
work. What could we attribute this fact to? We know that a joke will not
work for us a second time. However, we can find some satisfaction when
this same joke is told, in our presence, to someone who does not know it
yet. This satisfaction is of a slightly different order—it is the satisfaction
(pleasure) taken in observing how the other is (also) surprised by an unex-
pected satisfaction. And could we not say that comedy makes a strong
claim to precisely this kind of pleasure, and that its specific “dramatic”
structure, staging, (almost) always implies two things at the same time: the
process of generating pleasure in surprise and a kind of spectral analysis of
this same process? In other words, comedy always shows us also, and per-
haps above all, how the Other does not cover the entirety of its own field.
It shows us how the Other—as the symbolic instance of the obstacle, and
not simply as another person—is easily caught in the trap of desire, and is
led to follow with its gaze one leg, so to speak, while the other leg scores
140 A. ZUPANČIČ
the goal. Moreover, with its spectral analysis comedy shows us that even
when the joke is told to me personally, the surprise in the joke is always the
surprise of the Other. This, perhaps, is comedy’s strongest thesis: the sur-
prise (of the subject) is always the surprise of the Other. Although, practi-
cally speaking, I am the one who has to be surprised by the enjoyment, the
latter can only surprise me by surprising the Other (the “gate-watcher”).
My satisfaction follows upon the surprise of the Other or coincides with it,
but does not exist prior to it.
Immediately related to this we could also risk the following thesis: com-
edy does not derive its efficiency from repression (Verdrängung), at least
not primarily. So long as surprise exists on the basis of repression, the latter
is of course among the conditions of comedy. Yet at the same time comedy
is also a stretching out, a decomposition of the structure of surprise, of its
automatic functioning, and in this sense it lends its voice to the satisfaction
that escapes the repression; that is, to satisfaction without repression.
Epilogue
In order to better spell out this structure of comedy, let us conclude by
taking recourse to a splendid example, a stand-up masterpiece by Rowan
Atkinson, which actually accomplishes the passage from smut to joke and
comedy right in front of our eyes.
Atkinson comes on stage dressed in a traditional English teacher’s out-
fit, holding a class register in his hands, and addresses the (real) public as
his pupils, checking their presence at the beginning of the class. Everything
(his posture, pronunciation, etc.) is very “English,” formal, serious,
detached—all the more reason for us to burst out laughing already at the
first name he calls, namely “Anus.” He calmly continues: “Arse Bandit,
Bottom, Clitoris” (followed by the unavoidable “Where are you,
Clitoris?”). As the stand-up act continues, following the letters of the
alphabet, we get to hear one “dirty thing” after another. Atkinson coldly
pronounces the “names,” occasionally making an additional pun or witty
teacher-like remark. (For example, he scolds the public for laughing wildly
after he calls the name “Fist-up” by the classic remark: “Come on, grow
up, will you!”) And he concludes with a short “lecture” about how smut
and cheap toilet humor have spread around the school, and how it will be
necessary to put an end to this. He concludes by scolding his pupils for
their behavior, calling their names out in combinations that produce no
less than perfect examples of the lowest toilet humor and smut. It would
be in vain to try to reproduce this brilliant stand-up act, so instead of

doing this, we instead recommend to readers who have five minutes to
spare to take a look at it on YouTube.6 Others will have to take our word
for it: the act works perfectly and undoubtedly presents one of the peaks
of Rowan Atkinson and of (stand-up) comedy in general.
The reason this example is particularly relevant in the context of our
debate is clear. Atkinson uses absolutely minimal “technical” means and
produces maximal results. As a matter of fact, the only technical means is
that, on the face of it, there are no technical means to speak of. Rendered
in the form of an “objective” description, Atkinson only stands there and
pronounces dirty words, pieces of smut. Yet of course, the secret is in the
way he does it. But how exactly does the whole thing work as a joke and,
more generally, as comedy? Could we not say that in spite of saying it all
out loud explicitly, he produces the effect of allusion, innuendo—as if he
were in fact hinting at something dirty? When the first direct word appears,
“anus,” we do not laugh simply on account of the contrast with the pro-
verbial English reserve, but rather because it all sounds as if the teacher
said something which alludes to anus. In other words, the trick of
Atkinson’s act consists in the following: he takes the “dirty” words, makes
them sound proper (by presenting them as names), and, in a third step,
allows us to recognize the allusion to dirt and obscenity in them. It is as if
we were watching in reverse the process of producing satisfaction/surprise
in joking: first the result (the alluded-to content that we usually need to
“reconstruct”) and then the roundabout path leading up to it. It would be
difficult to find a better example of spectral analysis in which we are amused
by the very way satisfaction is produced.7 The tautology is thus only appar-
ent, since in fact we do not return to the same place where we started.8
6
Following this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOjbo74Hq-k (Atkinson
1981–6).
7
In view of this we could perhaps propose the following hierarchy of comedy: in a bad
comedy, you just say “arse.” In a better comedy, you find an ingenious way of alluding to it.
In the best comedy, you (find a way to) say “arse” as a way of alluding to it. This is what
Atkinson succeeds in doing and this is what is most comical in the whole act.
8
Of course, we could also say that no tautology is just a tautology, and that by repeating
the same (general) notion we always already introduce some sort of interval, whereas “pure
tautology” is actually closer to what is called pleonasm. As an example of comic tautology
(although unintended), we can take the following statement by a Slovene football player: “I
would like to thank my parents, especially my mother and my father.” This statement is genu-
inely comical and we are not laughing simply at the linguistic incompetence of the speaker,
even if the latter played its role and made it possible for the “wit” to find its words.
142 A. ZUPANČIČ
The empty space that gets circumscribed and created by that kind of
procedure/structure is precisely the space of enjoyment, the enjoyment’s
“room of its own.” However, this “room of its own” is at the same time a
public, common space; namely, the very scene of the comic interaction.
The price for the enjoyment of getting a room of its own is, paradoxically,
its deprivatization (it is never a private room). It can no longer function as
our own most secret/hidden pleasure, and it is no longer useful for the
purposes of personal investment. The enjoyment here is not the glue of
the community, but rather its form or scene.
If we thus return to our opening remarks, we can say: if enjoyment, by
definition, has no place of its own and only exists at the very intersection
between the subject and the other/Other, in comedy this intersection
itself becomes the scene, the place, the room of action. In comedy, enjoy-
ment gets a room of its own, yet it also turns out that the room of enjoy-
ment can only be a common room, or else it is not.
References
Anderson, Jos. 2009. Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces.
London: Routledge.
Atkinson, Rowan. 1981–6. No One Called Jones. Rowan Atkinson Live. Video
Capture of a Stand Up Show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
tOjbo74Hq-k.
Carson, Anne. 1990. Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire. In
Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek
World, ed. David Halperin, John Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin, 135–170.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo. London: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
———. 2001. Repression. In In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. London: Vintage.
Lacan, Jacques. 1979. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
———. 1990. Television, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan
Copjec. New York: W. W. Norton.
PART III
Screening Comedy
CHAPTER 9
Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority

in The Boss of It All
Benjamin Noys
Introduction: The David Brent Effect

The relationship between comedy and authority is notoriously unstable.
Comedy offers the means to expose and unmask authority, puncturing its
pretensions and bringing it down to earth. In this case, comedy has a sub-
versive and critical effect. Yet comedy can also reinforce authority by provid-
ing it with a necessary flexibility and capacity to reinvent itself. This is the
case with the equivocal function of the Shakespearean fool or the carni-
valesque reversal, which only temporarily suspends power the better to place
a more effective power back in authority (Eagleton 1981, 148). I want to
suggest that in the current moment we witness an uncanny fusion of these
two relations of comedy to authority, the fusion of the master and the fool,
in the figure of the “postmodern boss”. This is the “David Brent effect”,
after the television comedy series The Office, in which the figure of authority
is, at the same time, a clown (The Office 2001–2003). While this might
appear another deflation of authority, in fact we can see a more sinister pos-
sibility: authority in the mode of comedy. Slavoj Žižek (2008) points out:
B. Noys (*)
University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
e-mail: b.noys@chi.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_9
146 B. NOYS
A “postmodern” boss insists that he is not a master but just a coordinator of

our joint creative efforts, the first among equals; there should be no formali-
ties among us, we should address him by his nickname, he shares a dirty joke
with us […] but during all this, he remains our master. In such a social link,
relations of domination function through their denial: in order to be
operative, they have to be ignored. (202)
This leaves us with the difficult question of how to expose such relations
of domination that appear to us in this mode of denial, of how to reveal
the cruelty that disguises itself as comedy.
If we turn to psychoanalysis, we can note that Jacques Derrida (1987)
took Hans Christian Andersen’s short tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
as an allegory of the limits of psychoanalytic procedure (416–419). In the
well-known story, the vain emperor is swindled by two clothiers who
promise to weave him a fine suit out of a material invisible to anyone who
is unfit for his position or particularly stupid. The illusion is sustained by
the emperor’s courtiers and subjects, who pretend to see the suit, until it
is exposed by a child who laughs at the obviously naked emperor. For
Derrida, Andersen’s text is really mocking the claims of unveiling, includ-
ing those of psychoanalysis. The comic irony is that Derrida does not note
that Jacques Lacan, and after him Slavoj Žižek, never cease to invoke the
counter-model of Alphonse Allais, who pointed at a woman and said:
“Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes she is totally naked” (Žižek
1989, 29). In Lacan’s redoubling of unveiling, we find the key to thinking
of comedy and authority through an attention to appearance, rather than
the exposure of “naked” authority. This attention to appearance is crucial
to the analysis of the dissimulation of authority through the comic.
To consider this problem I want to turn to Lars Von Trier’s 2006 film
The Boss of It All (Direktøren for det hele) (Von Trier 2006). Certainly
Lacanians have been attracted to the films of Lars Von Trier and this
attraction is partially reciprocated; as one interviewer noted on visiting
Von Trier’s writing cabin, he found that “[b]ooks—a weighty tome on
Ingmar Bergman, various psychoanalytic titles—are scattered around”
(Husband 2008, my italics). The attention of Lacanians has often fallen on
Von Trier’s thematization of ethical questions through melodramatic rep-
resentations of female sacrifice and excess. Attention has been focused on
the “golden heart” trilogy: Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998),
and Dancer in the Dark (2000) (Chiesa 2006; Žižek 2006, 397, n.31,
163). This interest in female sacrifice has extended into Dogville (2003)
9 SERIOUSLY FUNNY: COMEDY AND AUTHORITY IN THE BOSS OF IT ALL 147
(Chiesa 2007; Denny 2007), and Antichrist (2009) (Chiesa 2012). I want to
depart from this “tragic-heroic paradigm” (Critchley 1999), because The Boss
of It All is itself a departure from that paradigm: a “comedy” and so declared
“harmless as such” by Von Trier (2006). Lacking a central feminine figure of
excess, sacrifice, or jouissance, this “office comedy” (Von Trier 2006) departs
from the grand themes of his other films—with their invocations of
Christianity and the passion—and appears as a deliberately minor effort.
In brief, the film concerns a Danish computer company whose owner,
Ravn (Peter Gantzler), wants to sell the business to a rebarbative Icelandic
businessperson Finnur (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson). Unfortunately, to do
this Ravn needs the permission of the overall owner of the company—“the
boss of it all”. The reason this is unfortunate is that “the boss of it all” is a
fiction created by Ravn to take responsibility for all the harsh decisions he
has had to make over the years. In order to proceed to sell the company,
Ravn lands on the ingenious solution of using an unemployed avant-garde
actor Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) to play “the boss of it all”. The comedy that
follows turns on exactly how this role of fictional authority is to be played,
but what could be more trivial than a film about office politics?
The turn to film, and a comedy at that, might seem a gesture worthy of
comedy, considering the seriousness of the issues. We might, however,
wish to pause before dismissing simple appearances. When Lars Von Trier
declares the film “harmless as such” (Von Trier 2006), he does so in the
character of the occasional, and deliberately jarring, Brechtian narrator, in
a similar fashion to his role as narrator in his television series Kingdom
(Von Trier 1994). As this narrator he goes on to add that the film we are
about to see is not political, not worth a moment’s reflection, and is pok-
ing fun at “artsy-fartsy” culture—while pointing out that we can see his
reflection in a crane shot of the outside of the office building (Von Trier
2006). We are entitled, as good psychoanalytic viewers, to be suspicious of
such disavowals, and in aiming not to be taken in by appearances we can
judge Lars Von Trier an unreliable narrator. Licence is then granted to ape
the style of Freud’s paper “Negation”: “Or: ‘You ask who this person in
my dream can be. It’s not my mother.’ This we amend: ‘So it is your
mother’” (Freud 2005, 89). Amending Von Trier, we can say that The Boss
of It All is not harmless, but dangerous, worth much reflection, deeply
political, and highly avant-garde. But this is only a first reversal.
If we are to be truly good psychoanalytic viewers, we should also recog-
nize the efficacy of appearances. To “never be deceived by appearances”
has a double sense: to distrust appearances and seek some underlying
148 B. NOYS
truth, or to take so-called appearances as the very site of truth. It is that

second sense that I take as the true path of psychoanalysis, one that (coin-
cidentally—if we believe in coincidence) corresponds exactly to that of the
Hegelian dialectic as parsed by Fredric Jameson (2006): “stupid stereo-
type, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or
‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so
that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all”. It is this dialectical pas-
sage that, I will argue, is the model for how we should analyse this film,
and also the best mode in which to pose and analyse the disavowals and
forms of contemporary authority that take the form of comedy.
In particular, the lesson psychoanalysis offers is that authority is never
quite where we expect it to be, and this is both comic and serious. Writing
on comedy, Alenka Zupančič (2008) reminds us:
What Lacan and Hegel share in this respect is that they both take this dimen-
sion of the Other extremely seriously—not as a subjective illusion or spell
that could be broken simply by saying out loud that “the Other doesn’t
exist” (just consider how this common theoretical mantra coexists perfectly
well with all sorts of secret and not-so-secret beliefs), but as something
which, despite its nonexistence, has considerable material effects in which it
does exist. (17)
I would only be tempted to add one thing: it is not despite its nonexis-
tence, but because of its nonexistence that the Other has material effects.
So, pointing out that the Other does not exist, that the emperor has no
clothes, is to reinforce the effect of authority. Rather, particularly in the
face of the comic forms of “soft” or “postmodern” authority, we have to
attend more closely to this seeming “nonexistence” and its effects. It will
take an office comedy to teach us this lesson.
Outsourcing Authority
To follow the twists and turns of Von Trier’s film, which follows a permu-
tational logic reminiscent of Pasolini’s Theorem (Teorema) (Pasolini 1968),
is difficult. The result is a complex and at times dizzying exchange of roles
and actions, typical of comedies. To trace this “logic”, I will pattern my analy-
sis on the basis of Jameson’s (2006) parsing of the dialectic: from “stupid
stereotype” to “essence” and then finally back to the “reality of the
appearance”. What we are tracking here is, to use one of the key signifiers
of The Boss of It All, the “outsourcing” of authority. The comic effect,

which is at the same time very serious, is that authority is never where we
expect to find it, but it still continues to function. It is not enough to
believe there is no “boss of it all”, but instead we need to trace the patho-
logical effect whereby our denial reinforces the fantasy that there is
such a figure.
Stupid Stereotype
Zupančič (2008, 90) notes that the comic situation—especially the com-
edy of mistaken identities, of which The Boss of It All is a supreme exam-
ple—is structured by the suspension of the (Big) Other, which permits the
play of identities. This takes place here by the supposedly temporary sus-
pension of the authority of the boss of the firm, Ravn, as the actor Kristoffer
enters to play “the boss of it all”. Of course, Ravn has really been “the boss
of it all” all the time, but he displaced his unpleasant decisions and dubi-
ous practices onto the fiction of “the boss of it all” to maintain his own
image as a soft-hearted and reasonable boss. This is the perfect structure,
as we will see, of “postmodern” authority. In fact, despite the fact that
Ravn seems to have suspended his own role as secret Big Other, he still
believes he “pulls the strings” of Kristoffer by his expertise at writing the
legal contracts that bind and limit Kristoffer’s performance. Like Wagner’s
Wotan, according to Žižek (in Žižek and Dolar 2002, 136), Ravn could
be considered to be a “God of contracts”. Kristoffer, playing “the boss of
it all”, is merely the puppet of this “God”, of the true boss of it all, Ravn.
In taking up this position, in believing in his own displaced authority,
Ravn places himself in the position of the classic non-dupe: he errs in
underestimating the power of fiction and appearance. In believing himself
to be the supposedly consistent (big) Other, guaranteed by law, Ravn will
reveal his own true appearance of authority.
This suspension of the Big Other is also reflected in the formal con-
struction of the film. In filming Von Trier employed (or claimed to
employ1) a computerized process called “Automavision”. As he explains:
Basically I make the frame how I’d like it to be in the film, and then we push
this button on the computer and we get given six or eight randomized set-
1
In his critical Guardian review, Peter Bradshaw (2008) has suggested that we take the
whole “Automavision” process with a large pinch of salt.
150 B. NOYS
ups—a little tilt, or a movement, or if you should zoom in. It’s supposed to
make the image imprecise. (in Muss 2006)
His reason for choosing this process is that it robs the filming process of
human intention. The effect for the viewer is one of jarring “jumps” and
seeming “mis-framings” of the action—to quote Von Trier (2006), as nar-
rator again, “it looks a bit weird”. A self-described “control freak”, Von
Trier claims that by using this process “I’m fighting against my will to
control” (in Muss 2006). Yet beneath this seeming abdication of author-
ity, he also suggests he had another motive: to keep the actors from steal-
ing scenes or being able to be sure of camera position. We hardly need to
refer to the legendary stories of Von Trier’s cruelty to actors to sense that
this formal decision itself incarnates exactly the play of authority posed by
the film’s narrative—as with Ravn, the appearance of abdicating authority
should arouse proper suspicion.
The first appearance of authority within the film certainly corresponds
to “the stupid stereotype”—this is the first attempt by Kristoffer to play
“the boss of it all”. Initially Kristoffer is only supposed to have a brief role:
he will meet the Icelandic businessperson Finnur Sigurdsson and his trans-
lator, sign over the power of attorney to Ravn, and be on his way.2 The
pretensions of this self-important actor are on full display in his actorly
pauses that confuse the Icelandic translator, his anti-naturalistic style, and
his inability to master even the basics of the script. Matters go awry when
the stubborn and rude Icelandic businessperson Finnur refuses the
arrangement to finish dealing with “the boss of it all” and merely deal with
Ravn. Finnur quotes a supposed ancient saga to the effect that “He who
deals with stooges deals with nobody” (Von Trier 2006) (of course thereby
ensuring he deals with a stooge, Kristoffer, a “nobody”). Inadvertently,
then, Kristoffer has to be retained, and also he inadvertently reveals his
presence to the “inner six”—the key “seniors” of the business, each of
2
Von Trier commented in an interview for Future Movies:
The fact is that we have a lot of Icelandic people who are buying most of Copenhagen
right now. For 400 years, Iceland was under the Danish Crown. All the Icelandic
people hate the Danes in that sense. They have freaked themselves out about the
Danes. There is this scar from these 400 years that is rightfully there. (in Anon. 2008)
On the recent Icelandic financial crisis, see the report by Haukur Már Helgason (2008).
whom believes that he is “the boss of it all” who has taken decisions that
have negatively affected them.
Ravn is forced to confess to Kristoffer that “the boss of it all” has never
existed; it was a fiction invented because he did not have it in him to be
company president. Kristoffer now willingly takes up the role until the
deal is completed, signing a strict contract with a non-disclosure agree-
ment. His performance, however, does not improve. Lacking any knowl-
edge of what the company does, he lurches from one highly embarrassing
social gaffe to another. At his first meeting with the six seniors he is
punched by the depressive Gorm, who prefaces his outbursts of violence
with statements concerning the muggy autumnal weather in the country.
In the face of this violence, Kristoffer tries to take control: he decides to
play “the boss of it all” as a harsh and dictatorial figure. The results are
catastrophic. In the first technical conference he fails to grasp any of the
company terminology, humiliates the overly sensitive senior Nalle, and
makes another senior Nelle cry by declaring her sales figures “shit”. The
damning verdict on his performance is delivered by Lise, the human
resources (HR) representative, which he mistakes for HA—Hell’s angels.
She tells him he has a “credibility problem” and that she and the others see
through his “lousy acting”. Unimpressed by Kristoffer’s defence of his
own anti-naturalistic avant-garde acting style—“the point of comedy now-
adays is to reveal the comedy”—she goes on to say she does not believe he
is gay; completely puzzled by the last statement, Kristoffer calls an emer-
gency meeting with Ravn on neutral ground.
Essence
At this point, nicely after a third of the film, we (fortuitously) shift towards
the second stage of the dialectic: the revelation of the “underlying reality”
of authority. What is revealed when Kristoffer sees Ravn is that Ravn has
created different versions of “the boss of it all” for each of the six seniors:
only Lise’s, for example, is gay. His ostensible reason for this is that it cre-
ated a “good vibe” in which “the boss of it all” belonged to each of the
seniors. Ravn goes on to advise Kristoffer to stop trying to subdue, con-
trol, and dominate, and instead say “yes” to the six—this being easier. In
this scene we have the revelation of Ravn’s own management style: the
perverse “postmodern” refusal to embody any authority at all as the mode
of authority. This nullified authority is nicely conveyed by Ravn’s final
piece of advice concerning information technology (IT) jargon, when he
152 B. NOYS
explains that “When they say ‘outsourcing’ they mean ‘off-shoring’”. The
fact that the difference between these phrases is inexplicable indicates the
hollow authority of constant agreement and encouragement. We might
say we have passed from outsourcing authority to off-shoring authority…
Returning to the workplace, Kristoffer puts Ravn’s advice into play, and
immediately regains credibility by correcting Nalle’s use of “outsourcing”
to “off-shoring”, and then by saying yes to everything. This affirmative
management style soon descends into farce when he comes to deal with
Lise, who still supposes he is gay. By the simple method of saying yes to
everything Lise says, Kristoffer finds himself fulfilling her fantasy of “the
boss of it all” as a macho pig who will take her over his desk, which he
proceeds to do. Here we have a rather exact probing of the relation to
fantasy, which, as generated by Ravn and the projections of Lise, is fulfilled
by Kristoffer through the expedient of affirmation. The theatrical, or
filmic, scene of fantasy merely requires that we take our place in a role and
is indifferent to who is in that place.
By the method of continuing to agree with everything the seniors say,
Kristoffer also finds out that “he” (as “the boss of it all”) has proposed
marriage to another senior, Heidi A. This will be revealed as another ruse
of Ravn’s, enacted to keep Heidi at the company. What we find in these
scenes is the revelation that internal to the “postmodern” outsourcing or
off-shoring of authority is the “essence” or “underlying reality” of fantasy
qua organization of jouissance. To be more precise, what we find revealed
is the fantasy of the primal father described by Freud in “Totem and
Taboo” (1913). There Freud argues for the reality of the primal father as
the one who once possessed all the women in the horde, which is to say all
the jouissance, and whose “arbitrary will […] was unrestricted” (1985a,
289). The unlikely figure of Ravn is the “cuddly” postmodern incarnation
of the primal father, organizing the jouissance and possessing all the
women he wants in the firm by the manipulation of the “higher” figure of
“the boss of it all”. Rather than the classically cold and mechanical seducer,
here we find the manipulative and pseudo-emotional “postmod-
ern” seducer.
It is exactly at this point that Von Trier makes another narratorial inter-
vention—“no comedy without breaks”, as he puts it. His interruption is
to introduce a new character, the actor Kristoffer’s ex-wife Kisser. She is an
ex-leftist who is now attorney for the Icelandic businessperson Finnur
Sigurdsson, and Kristoffer is soon forced to explain to her that he has
become a stand-in for “the boss of it all”. She quickly informs Kristoffer
that he is wrong if he think Ravn has been constructing this fiction inno-
cently: “By blaming all this shit on this boss you can appear likeable and
noble.” She goes on to explain that Ravn is selling the company from
under his co-workers, and so defrauding the six seniors of their shares.
Troubled, Kristoffer uncovers the various manipulations of Ravn (in
the character of “the boss of it all”): he retained Heidi by the promise of
marriage; overruled Gorm on project development; undermined Nalle’s
confidence; stopped Spencer’s Danish lessons to prevent him gossiping in
the corridors; encouraged Lise to have sex with him; got the six to “loan”
him 25,000 Krone each; and sacked Mette’s husband, who then commit-
ted suicide by hanging himself with a printer cable as he could not stand
to be excluded. This left Mette a nervous wreck, who screams every time
the copier is used. Ravn’s image as the “postmodern” boss of group hugs,
company songs, and his image as a “cuddly teddy bear” finds its essence,
its support, in the arbitrary cruelty of an unfettered exploitation of jouis-
sance. In this way, he really does instantiate the violence of the primal
father, but, again, at one remove.
True Appearance
If the film were to end on this scene of exposure, or to follow that expo-
sure with Ravn’s immediate confession and contrition, then it would be
considerably less interesting, considerably less psychoanalytic, and consid-
erably less funny than it is. Such an ending would, of course, conform to
the cliché of psychoanalysis as the revelation of malign authority lurking in
every kind-hearted gesture. Instead, to be truly psychoanalytic and to
truly grasp the appearance of authority in the guise of the comic, one final
turn of the screw is required. Ravn, meeting Kristoffer on a merry-go-
round, is unapologetic: he claims he is the one who “gives and gives” to
the seniors and remains unappreciated by them. Ravn also gives Kristoffer
power of attorney to make the final deal.
During the final meeting to confirm the deal, Kisser, in her role as
attorney for the Icelanders, reveals that the other employees will be sacked,
with the exception of Ravn, and also lose any compensation for their rights
to the company’s mysterious best-selling product, the Brooker 5. Kristoffer
now feels morally that he should stop the deal going ahead, which he does
by inflating the selling price, and so breaking the agreement. This can only
be a temporary delay, so Kristoffer extracts the sole concession he can:
getting Ravn to sign a contract that he will confess to the six seniors his
154 B. NOYS
role in defrauding them. The problem is that when Ravn does start to
confess his plan, he can only then blame it on “the boss of it all”; that is,
Kristoffer. Ravn’s casuistical defence is that he has fulfilled the “contract”
to confess, because it did not specify that he could not blame someone
else—as he says, “law is an extremely exact science”.
Without any options left, trapped by the contract he has signed,
Kristoffer takes the advice of his ex-wife: to outwit Ravn at his own game.
He realizes that Ravn wants to be loved, to play the cuddly teddy bear.
Hence, Kristoffer invents “the boss of the boss of it all” to take responsi-
bility for “his” (i.e. Ravn’s) decision to defraud the six. Of course, this is
literally true: Ravn is “the boss of it all” and “the boss of the boss of it all”.
Zupančič (2008, 105) notes that in comedy:
The path to truth leads through fiction. Or, more precisely: we do not get
to the Real by eliminating the symbolic fiction, the mask, and looking
behind it, but by redoubling the symbolic fiction, the mask, by putting
another one on top of the already existing one.
We “shoot too soon” if we think matters should end with the revelation of
Ravn as fantasmatic primal father with his obscene monopoly on jouis-
sance. Instead, we have to pass through the redoubled fiction that this
primary outsourcing of authority entails: Ravn is both cuddly teddy bear
and cruel “boss of it all”. In fact, this result is already in place for the
attentive when we note that in his absence “the boss of it all” has been
played by a toy teddy bear. This bear is not so much a Winnicottian tran-
sitional object as a Lacanian objet petit a, the realization of a perverse
enjoyment.
Kristoffer redoubles the symbolic fiction by playing “the boss of it all”
as an even more exaggerated version of Ravn: as generous and kind, and
giving the six the work outing Ravn had denied them for years by saying
“the boss of it all” would not agree (although this outing is to a particu-
larly bleak-looking seaside). The strategy works: deprived of the role of
cuddly teddy bear, Ravn is forced to express his disgust at the expense of
the outing, the reason he had prevented it. In this way he brings together,
only briefly, his two modes of authority, but the truth of the effect cannot
yet take place. This requires the final scene of the selling of the company.
Again to out-trump Ravn’s sentimentality Kristoffer invites all the six
seniors and plays the scene as soap-opera kitsch. Giving a speech praising
Ravn for his selflessness, Kristoffer eventually causes Ravn to break down
in tears and really confess that he has always been “the boss of it all”. It
turns out that Mette had known all along, the senior most cruelly treated
due to the suicide of her husband as a result of Ravn’s actions. Mette for-
gives Ravn, as do the other seniors. Now Ravn says he will not sell the
company, and we have the typical comedy happy ending.
This is Lars Von Trier, however, and when Ravn says he will correct the
sins of the past, that he has some “off-shoring” to see to, Kristoffer cor-
rects him: “outsourcing!” Kristoffer is working to a different logic: not the
logic of authority that operates in a sentimental dialectic of cruelty and
forgiveness, but the logic of his avant-garde acting and his “master”
Gambini; Alenka Zupančič (2008, 71) points out that comedy often oper-
ates through “combining, in one scene, two different, incompatible reali-
ties”. The Boss of It All has played on this throughout by combining
different incompatible realities of identity, but now we can perceive that
the true clash is between the soft and soppy “authority” of the postmod-
ern boss and the truly and openly cruel authority of the artistic “master”.
Kristoffer refuses to annul his power of attorney so that Ravn can retain
the company. To refer to what he initially said to Ravn: “The character is
my law. And the script is my court” (Von Trier, 2006). This initially pre-
tentious and self-aggrandizing claim has now come true, as the legal
authority of Ravn has, finally, been suspended by the “higher court” of
artistic authority. Kristoffer tries to think “in character” and assess what
“the boss of it all” would really decide.
Initially Kristoffer decides not to sell. The Icelandic businessperson
goes into a terrible rage and says that the whole business is as absurd as
Gambini. Kristoffer’s interest is piqued; it turns out Finnur is a fan of
Gambini’s work and so Kristoffer signs the contract for a fellow follower.
Zupančič notes that the heroes of comedy “go a step further than heroic
characters who are ready to sacrifice everything for their cause, they do not
even perceive it as a sacrifice” (2008, 68). The “sacrifice” of Kristoffer for
the cause, abandoning the seniors, is not perceived by him. We might say
that “the boss of the boss of it all” is no longer Ravn but Gambini. Using
the terminology of Alain Badiou (2001), we could even say that here an
“artistic truth” clashes and overturns the soft cultural economy of “serv-
ing the good(s)”. The articulation of two elements—business and act-
ing—has ended in one final moment of comic overturning and the
re-evaluation of the symbolic Other. We end with the six seniors packing
up and leaving, while Finnur, his translator, and a chastened but still
employed and rich Ravn sit down to watch a performance by Kristoffer of
156 B. NOYS
the three-hour monologue “The Chimney Sweep in the Town without

Chimneys”. Lars Von Trier’s (2006) final narratorial voice-over states:
“Those who got what they came for, deserve it.”
Between Two Masters

What do we deserve? Alenka Zupančič argues that the suspension and re-
instantiation of the Other in comedy is not a conservative operation of
closure, but the opportunity for the re-evaluation of the Other. Again to
quote and adapt Zupančič: “the final return of the Other (from its suspen-
sion) is far from reaffirming the Other (the symbolic coordinates) with
which the [film] begin[s]” (2008, 93–4). We can certainly see that this is
true of The Boss of It All. The (Big) Other we began with was the “post-
modern” authority of Ravn as split between his cuddly appearance and his
cruelty through his second appearance as “the boss of it all”. In Kristoffer’s
signing of the contract, this mode of deflected, disavowed, outsourced, or
off-shored authority is brought back to its originary outsourcing. In a
parody of Nietzsche, we could say this is a classic case of “become what
you are”: Ravn has to inhabit his own fiction, his own appearance, as “the
boss of it all”. He is rewarded for his cruelty and is forced to not give way
on his desire.
This re-evaluation of the Other in the figure of Ravn as “the boss of it
all” reveals the crucial role of law in his outsourced authority. Ravn’s mas-
tery of contracts is what preserved his “hidden” power over Kristoffer and
allowed him to pull the strings. Although this is reversed when he gives
Kristoffer power of attorney, in fact Kristoffer’s decision to sell the com-
pany benefits Ravn and fulfils his original desire. What he “loses” in this
transaction is his appearance as the kind and cuddly teddy-bear “boss”. So,
power lies, it seems, finally in the power of law, and more precisely in the
power of attorney. What I am tempted to call a “psychopathology of
everyday authority” would then, at least for capitalist modernity and post-
modernity, be a psychopathology of law. Lacan remarks that “the essence
of law [is] to divide up, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as
jouissance” (1999, 3). While we may have been led astray by Ravn’s man-
agement of jouissance in terms of his sexual manipulations, we can now see
these as a result of the effect of law.
To point out the fundamental and constitutive illegitimacy of law, its
relation to jouissance, may not be sufficient. After all, the lesson of “Totem
and Taboo” is that the murder of the primal father is the crime that founds
the law and the guilt shared between the brothers. This action does not
abolish the law or the super-ego, but outsources it through its internaliza-
tion and so exacerbates it. Rather than the rebellion against the localized
father, we now have an internal law operating in each of us. The psycho-
analytic refusal of antinomianism therefore leaves it in a position that may
certainly appear to be conservative. To put matters in a deliberately naïve
fashion, The Boss of It All may demonstrate Ravn’s cruelty, but the film
ends with the fulfilment of that cruelty: there appears to be no happy end-
ing for the six unemployed and defrauded seniors. Ravn still benefits and
still performs his original intention. While the cruelty of his authority may
have been revealed, while he may have been forced to act according to his
desire, the result does not appear to be that ethical.
I would suggest that Ravn does lose something: his appearance. He
loses his inner distance to the role of “the boss of it all”, finally collapsing
together his true authority. The difficulty is that this might still not feel
very satisfactory. This punishment appears only to restage an allegory of
authority. Revealed or not, we do not appear to be any nearer to any real
alternative to abusive authority. I do want to suggest that something
important does take place here. In the redoubling of the symbolic staged
by the film, we find that the Real is not situated as an exterior or transcen-
dent moment, for example located in Ravn’s “inner core” of cruelty.
Instead, as Zupančič notes (2008, 106), the redoubling produces the
Real, or reveals it, as the moment of minimal difference3:
we get a reality that is slightly out of place in relation to itself, a reality that
is simultaneously ahead of itself and behind itself, a reality that is at the same
time anticipating and lagging behind itself. The shift opens up the space for
the symbolic Other as immanent to the given situation (as opposed to the
Other constituting its framework or outer horizon).
Where does this get us? The redoubling and the reinvention of the Other
stage the cruelty of outsourced authority as lying in its appearance. “The
boss of it all” is not brought down to earth, if by earth we mean brute
materiality, but down to the “earth” of appearance as the site of material
effects. This gives us, I would suggest, some traction on the sense of
3
This concept of the “minimal difference” is discussed at length, and with reference to
Hegel, by Žižek in Organs without Bodies (2004, 60–74).
158 B. NOYS
authority that is no longer simply outsourced as an ideal or transcen-

dent instance.
Is there, however, any real alternative to this postmodern “soft” author-
ity? The only alternative canvassed in the film appears to be the meta-
cruelty of the artistic master Gambini. It is Kristoffer’s fidelity to the
avant-garde master that overturns, momentarily, the logic of exchange and
strips away Ravn’s sentimentality. The difficulty is that this “alternative” is
highly problematic. The authority of this master is in rather precise alli-
ance with business and law; that is, with the sanction of the Icelandic
businessperson and with Kristoffer’s power of attorney. It is also a business
of men. While Kisser initially stays for the performance of the monologue,
as does Heidi A., who still seems to hope to marry Kristoffer, Kisser says
“Forget it. It’s Gambini”, and they both leave. Also, while Ravn is crest-
fallen he remains employed and his only “suffering” is to have to watch
the performance. Therefore, while the Other may be made immanent,
brought down to earth, we are left “between two masters”.
Conclusion: The Cold Master

To return to my epigraph, Žižek (2008, 202) follows up his statement on
the authority of the “postmodern” boss with a suggestion on how we are
supposed to deal with this deflected and outsourced authority:
Paradoxically, in such a situation, the first act of liberation is to demand from

the master that he act like one: one should reject false collegiality from the
master and insist that he treat us with cold distance, as a master.
Now, this would seem the precise way in which The Boss of It All deals with
the “postmodern boss” Ravn incarnates. Under the pressure of Kristoffer’s
fidelity to the “cold master” Gambini, Ravn is forced to play “the boss of
it all” and his sentimentality is excised. But, as we have seen, this also
reveals something problematic in Žižek’s advice. In making the master act
as a master the coldness is revealed, we may see the minimal difference, a
reality “out of joint”, but this appears to close up into the instantiation of
a new master. Is it really better to be made unemployed by the master act-
ing as a master?
I would suggest that some surreptitious work is being done here when
Žižek calls this “the first act of liberation”. What this implies, but leaves
hanging, is a second act that will, presumably, make a more radical
reakage. Leaving this unspecified is, for me, the sign of a neuralgic point
b
in the articulation of psychoanalytic ideology critique. After all, for ideol-
ogy critique to be anything more than an exercise in knowledge, in the
construction, precisely, of the non-dupe or the “subject supposed to
know”, it must be able to make possible a shift in the very terms of our
symbolic coordinates. The difficulty, in part, is that often this shifting
seems to be taken as a return to previous forms of authority and mastery.
This is the case for Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978),
with its call to return to paternal authority, or, more recently, John
Milbank’s (2009) call “to modify paternalism”. If the postmodern “mas-
ter” fails, or is only a pseudo-master, then the only way seems to be back
to a “proper” master.
At times Žižek, for example, seems to flirt with this argument, as in his
invocations of the superiority of the traditional parental injunction versus
the “soft” persuasive and intrusive postmodern parent. Of course, Žižek
and Badiou (2008a) both talk of the need to reinvent discipline in new
forms that can take the measure of postmodern authority, but they rarely
seem to specify what form this would take. In fact, often they seem haunted
by a certain nostalgia, not least the one mocked in The Boss of It All: the
nostalgia for the “passion for the real” incarnated in the artistic avant-
garde (Badiou 2008b). In this way, we could say, this comedy is even more
unsettling. I remarked that we seem left “between two masters”, but we
could add between the inadequacy of both, in the space of the morbid
symptom of an old dying authority and a new authority refusing to be
born (to adapt Gramsci). The question remains: how can we take the “sec-
ond step” that would imply the reinvention or traversal through the “bad
new” of the postmodern master?
In the case of psychoanalysis, the possibility of the reinvention of
authority is given through the end of analysis, which, in Lacanian terms,
makes possible a coordination of the lack in the subject with the lack in the
Other as the opening of a moment of freedom or renegotiation with our
own ideologically overdetermined fundamental fantasy. While even here
we might query just how “radical” this reinvention is—do we trade one
master for another?—we can also note the difficulty that this is an indi-
vidual solution. How is it possible to imagine such an activity as collective,
political, and cultural?
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud at once indicated the
existence of a “cultural super-ego” and the possibility of “a pathology of
cultural communities” (1985b, 336, 339). The “special difficulty” Freud
160 B. NOYS
identified for this task was a lack of a control group for comparison: “[f]or
a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder
no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere”
(1985b, 338). Of course, it is perfectly possible to suggest means by which
we could find standards for comparison: historically, transculturally, or
immanently, for example. What rather also appears as a “special difficulty”
is the lack of agents to carry this analysis out. Freud, after all, may be con-
tent with the “Munchausen effect” by which certain individuals can pull
themselves up by their hair from a pathological community through psy-
choanalysis. But, presuming the absence of mass psychoanalysis, if we are
to make ideology critique anything more than a variant of cultural pessi-
mism or cultural criticism, then we have to answer the question of the
agency or agencies who might do something with the “minimal differ-
ence” of the immanent Other.
The difficulty is that the very skill by which psychoanalysis probes and
realizes the lures and ruses of ideology seems to exactly erase that possibil-
ity. This returns us to the aporia I noted in opening this analysis, and
which has recently been restated by Slavoj Žižek (2012, 18−19):
Lacan unveiled the illusions on which capitalist reality as well as its false
transgressions are based, but his final result is that we are condemned to
domination—the Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic
order, so the attempts to overcome domination only generate new figures of
the Master.
Of course, we could counter that Lacanian psychoanalysis is not Frankfurt

school-type pessimism, in that it always leaves an irreducible discordance
that can be politically activated. But I do not think that answer is satisfac-
tory, unless we can articulate the potential agential dimension of change
on which such Lacanian-inspired ideology critique is premised and which
might actuate such a potential. Without this actuation we risk remaining
with a consolatory fantasy that things could always be different, that we
are never fully subsumed by power and capitalism, but with no means to
do so. If “the boss of it all” proves to be pervasive, then how could we
rearticulate a new relation of authority and jouissance? That is the task that
confronts us and, personally, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
References
Anon. 2008. The Boss of It All: Interview with Lars Von Trier. Future Movies,
February 29. http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=237.
Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics, Trans. Peter Hallward. London and New York: Verso.
———. 2008a. “We Need a Popular Discipline”: Contemporary Politics and the
Crisis of the Negative. Critical Inquiry 34 (4): 645–659. https://doi.
org/10.1086/592538.
———. 2008b. The Century, Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge and Malden,
MA: Polity Press.
Bradshaw, Peter. 2008. The Boss of It All. The Guardian, February 29. http://
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/feb/29/worldcinema.comedy.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. 2006. Lacan with Lars von Trier: Tragic Transgression and
Symbolic Reinscription. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2):
49–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250601029192.
———. 2007. What Is the Gift of Grace? On Dogville. Film-Philosophy 11 (3):
1–22. http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/120.
———. 2012. Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex. Film-
Philosophy 16 (1): 199–212. http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-
p/article/view/877.
Critchley, Simon. 1999. Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic
Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity:
Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, 217–238.
London: Verso.
Denny, David. 2007. Signifying Grace: A Reading of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville.
International Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (3). http://www.zizekstudies.org/
index.php/ijzs/article/view/54/154.
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. Le Facteur de la Vérité. In The Postcard: From Socrates to
Freud and Beyond, Trans. Alan Bass, 413–496. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 1981. Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism.
London: NLB.
Freud, Sigmund. 1985a. Totem and Taboo. In PFL 13. The Origins of Religion,
Trans. James Strachey and ed. Angela Richards, 43–224. London: Penguin.
———. 1985b. Civilization and Its Discontents. In PFL 12. Civilization, Society
and Religion, Trans. James Strachey and ed. Angela Richards, 243–340.
———. 2005. Negation. In The Unconscious, Trans. Graham Frankland and
Introduction by Mark Cousins, 87–92. London: Penguin.
Helgason, Haukur Már. 2008. Iceland Sinks. London Review of Books 30 (22): 25.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n22/haukur-mar-helgason/iceland-sinks.
162 B. NOYS
Husband, Stuart. 2008. Lars Von Trier: Finally, The Boss of It All? Daily Telegraph,
February 14. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3671259/Lars-
von-Trier-finally-The-Boss-of-it-All.html.
Jameson, Fredric. 2006. “First Impressions.” Review of The Parallax View, by
Slavoj Žižek. London Review of Books 28 (17): 7–8. https://www.lrb.co.uk/
v28/n17/fredric-jameson/first-impressions.
Lacan, Jacques. 1999. Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and
Knowledge (1973–1973), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and Trans. Bruce Fink.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Lasch, Christopher. 1978. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W. W. Norton.
Milbank, John. 2009. The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not
Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek. In The Monstrosity of Christ, ed. Creston
Davis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Muss, Lucy. 2006. Slave to Cinema. The Guardian, October 20. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/film/2006/oct/20/londonfilmfestival2006.
londonfilmfestival.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (dir.). 1968. Teorema. London: BFI, 2007. DVD.
The Kingdom. 1994–1997. Created by Lars Von Trier. DR.
The Office. 2001–2003. Created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.
Produced by Ash Atalla. BBC.
Trier, Lars Von (dir.). 2006. The Boss of It All. DVD.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
———. 2004. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. London:
Routledge.
———. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.
———. 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. New York:
Routledge.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 10
Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence

and Comedy in Buster Keaton’s The General
Lisa Trahair
The Stoics say that when the planets return to the same celestial sign, in length
and breadth, where each was originally when the world was first formed, at set
periods of time they cause conflagration and destruction of existing things.
Once again the world returns anew to the same condition as before; and when
the stars are moving again in the same way, each thing which occurred in the
previous period will come to pass indiscernibly [from its previous occurrence].
For again there will be Socrates and Plato and each one of mankind with the
same friends and fellow citizens; they will suffer the same things and they will
encounter the same things, and put their hand to the same things, and every
city and village and piece of land return in the same way. The periodic return
of everything occurs not once but many times; or rather, the same things
return infinitely and without end. (Nemesius 1802, 309–311)1
I would like to thank Lone Bertelsen, Alison Ross, Mick Carter and Gregory
Flaxman for commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter. A much earlier
version, entitled simply ‘The General: C. Bruckman, B. Keaton, 1926’, was
published in Gandini (2011).
1
Nemesius was a bishop and Platonist philosopher writing in 400 AD. Quoted from Long
and Sedley (1987, 309).
L. Trahair (*)
University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: l.trahair@unsw.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_10
164 L. TRAHAIR
As the story goes, Joseph Frank Keaton was nicknamed ‘Buster’ by his
godfather Harry Houdini after surviving a fall down a flight of stairs at the
age of six months. Apparently, this was the only occasion that, bursting
into tears, Keaton communicated any sign of pain. In his autobiography
My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Keaton relates ‘feats’ that became more
impressive as he advanced in years. His childhood was a litany of misad-
ventures: when he was just shy of three he was sucked out of a window by
a hurricane and whipped along the street until he was rescued by a passer-
by; he crushed his finger in a clothes wringer one day and split open his
head almost the next when a brick he had tossed into a peach tree
rebounded on him.
His ‘luck’ on stage was no kinder. At three years of age he joined his
parents in the ‘medicine show’, a horse and wagon affair that interspersed
variety acts with advertisements for miracle cures. Joe and Myra Keaton
modified their routine to include their son by performing a multitude of
physical abuses to his small body. Keaton recalls how the act quickly devel-
oped ‘a reputation for being among the roughest on the circuit’, his alco-
holic father ‘undertaking a series of interesting experiments’ with him,
carrying him across the stage and dropping him, wiping the floor with
him, tossing him through the scenery, into the wings, and down into the
orchestra pit. These public performances supposedly provided Joe with
the occasion to punish the boy for any outstanding off-stage misdemean-
ours (Keaton 1982, 12–21). But Buster was adamant that ‘like any kid’ he
enjoyed the rough and tumble and that his father had not a skerrick of
cruelty in him. The only reason he did not express the pleasure he derived
from these abuses was that the audience laughed less when he did.
Keaton’s placid endurance of the most aggressively hostile physical and
social situations would become a recurrent theme in his feature-length
films. In Our Hospitality he tests his wits against a river coursing violently
through a ravine; in College he acquires the physical skills of an Olympian
to challenge his peers’ perception of him as a swot; and in Steamboat Bill,
Jr. he resubmits to the hurricane of his childhood to emerge triumphantly
from its fury off his own back. Keaton thus inspired biographers and critics
to regard his real-life calamities as precursors to the extremity of his comic
persona’s adventures, as if he were compelled to repeat his capacity to
withstand physical abuse over and over, even to the point that he broke his
leg while shooting Electric House, had a serious allergic reaction to the
straw used to break his fall from the second storey of the house in One
Week, nearly drowned when he was swept over a waterfall in Our Hospitality
10 STOICISM, CAUSALITY, DIVINE PROVIDENCE AND COMEDY IN BUSTER… 165
and actually broke his neck under the weight of a deluge of water that
gushed from the hose of a water tank in Sherlock Jr. Biographies of Keaton
cast the details of his life as an endurance test. The persona of his films is
widely regarded as stoical to the last.
In his most celebrated film, The General, Keaton plays Johnnie Gray, an
apparently insignificant train engineer who saves the South (albeit tempo-
rarily) from invasion by the Unionists during the American Civil War.
Keaton aptly describes his persona as ‘the indomitable little man facing
what seem impossible odds’ (Keaton 1982, 133). It is as if all the lessons
of his life, both in reality and in comic performance, were test-runs culmi-
nating in this fated adventure.
The duel-like structure that organises the epic scale of the film similarly
permeates the melodrama. The opposition between the North and the
South is miniaturised in a second breach in communication which divides
the film’s society. Johnnie’s application to join the Confederates is rejected
without disclosure of the reason why. Shunned by his girlfriend, Annabelle
(Marion Mack) and her family, and deflated, Johnnie forbearingly returns
to his job as a train driver. Some time later his train is hijacked by the
Northern army, leading Johnnie to pursue the culprits by whatever means
he can find. Once drawn into enemy territory, Johnnie learns both the
details of a planned offensive against the South and that Annabelle has
been taken captive. Now doubly determined and almost infinitely more
resourceful, he rescues his beloved engine and the girl in time to warn the
Confederates of the impending attack. Johnnie’s heroic actions are duly
recognised by his peers and the film ends with Johnnie, having been
appointed to the rank of lieutenant, standing in front of his train with his
girlfriend at his side and his fellow soldiers saluting as they pass.
Certainly, at first glance Keaton’s character embodies stoicism in the
popular sense of the word. Just as the Stoics were once known as the great
men of stone, Keaton’s comic persona was often nicknamed ‘the great
stone face’, as Jean-Patrick Lebel affirms in the title of the first chapter of
his book on Keaton. Keaton’s commentators have recognised the ethic of
his characters’ kind of heroism in terms colloquially associated with Stoical
doctrine. Robert Benayoun describes Keaton as ‘the fatalist, whose shell
protected him from the harsh blows he stoically endured’; and Tom Dardis
subtitled his biography of the comedian ‘the man who wouldn’t lie down’
(Lebel 1967; Benayoun 1983, 77; Dardis 1979). They have also observed
the character-driven basis of Keaton’s plots, noting how they are propelled
by his persona’s hard work, determination, physical endurance and self-
166 L. TRAHAIR
sufficiency. Stanley Cavell similarly describes his persona’s ‘undashability’

in the face of adversity (Cavell 1988, 175). Keaton’s characters’ lack of
facial expressivity and inwardness certainly make his persona the antithesis
of Charles Chaplin’s sentimental tramp, Harry Langdon’s baby and
Harold Lloyd’s affable boy next door. Affectlessness combines with indus-
triousness in films like The General (1926), One Week (1921), The Scarecrow
(1920) and The Navigator (1924). Nevertheless, some of these characters,
particularly the wealthy ones, are not quite as stoical as his critics perhaps
would have us believe. More than anything, it is his personas’ indefatiga-
bility in the face of unrelenting adversity that makes him most deserving
of the appellation. Keaton’s stoical qualities are evident from his second
two-reeler One Week, where his character persists in building a do-it-
yourself house for his new wife despite his rival’s continual efforts to undo
his achievements. In features like Battling Butler (1926) and The
Navigator, his personas’ ignorance and stupidity combine with his love of
a girl to land him in situations where he has to not only overcome obsta-
cles, but achieve great feats to demonstrate his worthiness. Similarly, in
The General, Johnnie’s exhibition of stoical qualities is often at the behest
of his love interest(s).
While Keaton’s character’s forbearance of misadventure and hardship,
whether of his own making or thrust upon him, provides evidence of his
adherence to the common-sense conception of stoicism, the question I
want to consider here is the extent to which the more specific tenets of the
philosophy of Stoicism—the systematic thinking associated with the Stoic
school of philosophy that flourished in Ancient Greece and Rome—are
implicated in his work. Should the characterisations of Keaton as stoic
cumulatively demand that the nickname ‘the great stone face’ be taken
more seriously? Is an ethic of Stoicism being explored in these films? Or is
it rather the case that by the early twentieth century Stoicism has become
the object of comedy? And why, in whichever is the case, would this be so?
Traces of a slightly deeper current of Stoical doctrine can be found in
critical treatments of Keaton’s oeuvre and centre on a conception of ethics
that derives in the first instance from the physical universe. In this respect,
Lebel’s emphasis on Keaton’s ‘ethic of action’ and Benayoun’s characteri-
sation of Keaton as ‘a comedian of deliberate attention’ and ‘intense
reflection’, ‘leading to an immediate physical conclusion’ (Lebel, 74–75;
Benayoun, 18), both share strong affinities with a Stoical conception of
the world. But there is also scope within the comic dimension of Keaton’s
films to raise questions about the dualist conception of the universe, most
explicitly in relation to the stringency of the Stoic division between the

corporeal and incorporeal dimensions of metaphysics.
In the analysis that follows, I tease out how Keaton’s film The General
expresses, performs and confronts Stoical ideas by showing how Keaton’s
comportment can be comprehended in terms of the Stoic formulation of
passion and reason; how the concrete intelligence that Benayoun alludes
to above, and that Noël Carroll explicitly relates to Keaton’s character’s
work ethic, playfully illustrates a Stoic conception of impressions (see
Carroll 1990); and how the director’s orchestration of the physical uni-
verse, of natural causality, everlasting recurrence, fate and divine provi-
dence, shares significant affinities with the Stoic cosmos. What follows is
thus an attempt to provide a more meaningful reading of Keaton’s charac-
ter’s actions and his comic dimensions than is yielded by a superficial iden-
tification of a character trait or even a psycho-biographical interpretation
of its aetiology. Taken as an historico-philosophical perspective on reality,
philosophical Stoicism offers a systematic conception of the universe—a
philosophy complete with its own ontology, physics, logic and ethics. I
want to suggest that there is more to Keaton’s stoicism and that examin-
ing his work in relation to the ideas advanced by the Stoic philosophers
allows us to understand his mode of comportment as implicated in par-
ticular ideas about the physical world and how to live in accordance
with nature.
Philosophical Stoicism
To what extent does the philosophy of Stoicism conform to our everyday
conception of the term and what does it add? The OED defines the stoic
as ‘[o]ne who practises repression of emotion, indifference to pleasure or
pain, and patient endurance’, and stoicism as the conduct or practice of
‘austerity, repression of feeling and fortitude’. Society generally admires
the stoic because of his or her2 strength of character and external compo-
sure, capacity for perseverance, stalwartness and indefatigability. This pop-
ular understanding of stoical behaviour retains those components of the
2
Porcia Catonis is the only historical example of a female Stoic philosopher that I can find,
but popular female stoics would include such people as Florence Nightingale, Mother
Theresa, Joan of Arc and Elizabeth I. Female stoic philosophers of the twentieth century
include María Zambrano, Myrto Dragona-Monachou, Julia Annas, Gretchen Reydams-
Schills and Martha C. Nussbaum. More recently, Lloyd (2008) and Grosz (2017) have
reviewed the insights of the ancient school of philosophy.
168 L. TRAHAIR
philosophical doctrine that propose that virtue derives from the judicious
detachment of pressing emotional entanglements. There is thus a conflu-
ence between the popular sense of the term ‘stoic’ and the doctrine of
Stoic philosophy around the notion of austerity, the problematic nature of
passion and the sufficiency of virtue for happiness. The Hellenistic phi-
losophers, however, also subscribed to the much more radical views (the
so-called Stoic paradoxes) that nearly everyone is a slave, that there are no
degrees of separation between freedom and servitude (one is either free or
one is a slave), that all vices are equally evil, and that the universe governed
by divine providence cyclically undergoes conflagration and rebirth.
Philosophers of Stoicism generally concur that these views only really
make sense when considered in the context of Stoic physical theory and,
indeed, that Stoic physical theory to some extent diminishes the shocking
impact of claims about freedom and servitude and virtue and vice in par-
ticular (see Baltzly 2008). That said, in this chapter I endeavour to show
also how Stoic freedom relies on the sage’s ability to supplement the cor-
poreal existence of passions and affects with an understanding of what
incorporeal subsistence has to offer.
One of the reasons philosophical Stoicism is of more than just a passing
interest to the study of cinema is that the Stoics were committed to a phi-
losophy that prioritised the physical universe as a causal structure that was
fundamentally rational. While the laws of physical reality have long been
subject to investigation by science, and the knowledge gleaned from such
investigation continues to drive the reproduction of the world in accor-
dance with a civilising will, it is arguable that the technological capacity of
cinema allows humanity for the first time to turn the physicality of reality
into an art-form that surpasses its theatrical and literary counterparts in
reflecting in significant and imaginative ways on the organisational struc-
ture that lies at the heart of the world’s being.
Although strictly speaking monistic, Stoic philosophy also employs fea-
tures of dualism to make sense of the cosmos. The first Stoic division is
between two principles: active and passive. These opposites organically
combine to produce a balanced and self-regenerating universe. The pas-
sive principle refers to the state of the material substrate. The active prin-
ciple is known as pneuma (breath) and permeates all things, living and
non-living, from the most elemental level of matter to the most complex
organisms. It operates as the constituting and determining force in them
and is identical to cause, reason and God. While the material substrate is
passive, pneuma is the tenor that holds the body together and is respon-
sible for how it acts on other bodies.
Significantly, the causal law that endures in the physical world is also an
expression of divinity. As a philosophy that is grounded first and foremost
in an interpretation of the physical world that makes causal law consonant
with the divinity of nature, Stoicism envisages reason as physical rather
than symbolic and as immanent rather than transcendent. For the Stoics,
God is the craftsman of changing substance.3 But this God—Zeus—does
not stand apart from nature. The order of nature is divine because God is
causal law. And causal law is reason. Reason thus understood is not in the
first place the rational thinking of human beings. Most significantly, reason
has nothing at all to do with the word. It is not the word of God, but the
action of God; not the word as God, but action as God. God is thus imma-
nent in all things, including ourselves. As breath he is the active principle
that shapes matter into form. He is not simply linked with reason, but is
one and the same as reason.
At a very broad level, then, Stoicism would provide a means of contem-
plating the significance of cinema’s presentation of the physicality of the
world by allowing us to think through the complexity of the causal struc-
tures that it takes it upon itself to deal with. Somewhat more narrowly, it
is also pertinent to our understanding of action cinema, of films such as
Keaton’s, that emphasise the actions of bodies on other bodies, and the
reactions to such actions.
The Stoics make a second division between corporeals and incorpore-
als. Corporeals or bodies are not just physical entities, but include the
active and passive principles that subtend bodies, the soul and even quali-
ties such as wisdom. Importantly, the Stoic theory of causality states that
only corporeals can be regarded as causes. Incorporeals are effects.
Corporeals exist, whereas incorporeals merely subsist. There are four
classes of incorporeals: sayables (lekton), the void, place and time.
Moreover, unlike our contemporary thinking of causality, and consistently
with this last point, an effect is not conceived as a future cause. These Stoic
3
Sextus Empiricus writes: ‘(1) The substance of what exists, they [the Stoics] say is without
motion from itself and shapeless, needs to be set in motion and shaped by some cause. (2)
For this reason, as when we look at a very beautiful bronze we want to know the artist (since
itself the matter is in an immobile condition), so when we see the matter of the universe
moving and possessing form and structure we might reasonably inquire into the cause which
moves and shapes it into many forms. (3) It is not convincing that this is anything other than
a power which pervades it, just as soul pervades us’ (Against the Professors 9.75–76 (SVF
2.311), cited in Long and Sedley 1987, 269). The divine or God is the self-moving power,
itself without cause, ‘which moves matter and guides it in due order to generations and
changes is everlasting’ (ibid.).
170 L. TRAHAIR
divisions are very interestingly put in play and modified in the thought of
Spinoza and Deleuze. To some extent, they set us on the way to under-
standing the two later philosophers’ interest in qualities and properties, in
Spinoza’s insistence on the distinction between causal determinism and
noncausal correspondences and in Deleuze’s concentration on the con-
cepts of the event and time as the incorporeal ‘sense’ of being.
In what remains of this chapter, I consider the nature of Keaton’s physi-
cal causalities and their corporeal and incorporeal ramifications as they
relate to four Stoical themes: (1) reason and the physical universe; (2)
impressions and impulses; (3) fate and everlasting recurrence; and (4) cau-
sality, fate and divine providence.
Reason and the Physical Universe

Siegfried Kracauer, in seeking to emphasise the cinematic medium’s affin-
ity for the physicality of reality, argues that the protagonist travels through
vast expanses of the physical universe as through a chain of causes (Kracauer
1997, 63–64).4 Deleuze’s analysis of Keaton’s cinema is particularly atten-
tive to this chain of causes, but he is careful to give this chain a dynamic
nuance. The epic dimension of the ‘large form’ of the action-image which
he uses to conceptualise the workings of the Keatonian imaginary has
strong Stoical resonances. The large form is an organic representation
‘endowed with breath and respiration’, expanding toward milieux ‘accord-
ing to the states of the situation’ and contracting from ‘the demands of
action’.5 Deleuze thus assures us that the diegetic world in this kind of
cinema is a living active thing, and active in all of its parts, as if during the
expanding breath, or pneuma, the state of affairs, or situation, encom-
4
Kracauer explicitly mentions Griffith, but his point holds for Keaton as well as other
directors of action cinema.
5
Deleuze (1986, 142). Deleuze’s conception of milieu or situation at first sight appears
quite different from the Stoic conception of place as incorporeal and not causal. For Deleuze,
the milieu or situation is composed of qualities and powers, indeed forces, suggesting that it
too has a physicality that actively challenges the character. The Stoics are quite clear that
qualities and powers belong to bodies as causal entities. Incorporeals, like place, time, say-
ables and the void may have attributes, but attributes in themselves are effects not causes.
While Deleuze is careful to distinguish between the situation as the organic pole of the
action-image and the action, duel or binomial as the active or functional pole of the action-
image, this does not quite correspond to the Stoic division between active and passive. The
organic is not strictly speaking passive. It is still implicated in the breath or pneuma and dis-
plays the tenor or holding together associated with the active principle.
passes all of the parts, and the milieu acts upon its components and during
the contracting breath an active force locates itself in particularities and
works through them. Deleuze also writes of the action-image as operating
in the order of secondness, as dyadic in structure, insofar as it details
actions and reactions, actions and situations, the action of bodies on
other bodies.
As a cinema of action, Keaton’s films take a concrete interest in the
ramifications of the action of bodies on other bodies and large sections of
his narratives make spectacles of physical causalities. From the Keaton
character’s attempt to build his first home in One Week, right through to
the river that nearly drowns him in Our Hospitality, the storm that literally
sweeps him off his feet in Steamboat Bill, Jr. and the ocean liner that
socialises him by demanding his direct engagement with the elements of
the physical world in The Navigator, Keaton’s films obsessively demon-
strate the terms of his character’s engagement with corporeal existence.
The General is no exception in its focus on the central protagonist’s
ingenious appropriations of the physical world that surrounds him to
overcome the obstacles set before him. The action that would make this
film famous begins when Johnnie’s train is stolen by the Northern Army
during a brief layover for refuelling. From here on, we are treated to the
details of Johnnie’s unrelenting exertions to retrieve his engine and return
to the South. Step by step, he commandeers increasingly viable vehicles
for his mission, first chasing his ‘General’ on foot, then by bicycle, then on
a handcar and finally in another engine. Every step along the way of the
large arc of narrative movement is presented as a precisely delineated series
of actions that either move him closer to his goal or hinder him in some
way. At the same time, the plot enumerates each and every effort by the
Northern Army to hamper his encroachment on them and to block the
South’s means of communication.
Convergent montage intertwines images of two parties, Johnnie and
the Northerners, undertaking two independent series of interactions, at
the same time that they reduplicate themselves with respect to one another.
We thereby feel the Northerners’ desperation to make it back to their ter-
ritory and the urgency of Johnnie’s need to catch them before they suc-
ceed. The chase is thus a representation of ‘a duel’, or, more abstractly,
what Deleuze calls a binomial, but it stands apart in its elaborate and
concrete depiction of the interactions between physical bodies within each
of the series. Moreover, the physical being upon which Keaton trains our
attention is not just that of the antagonists who dominate the story, but
172 L. TRAHAIR
the machines they have at their disposal and the physical environment in
which they move. With unparalleled virtuosity, the director alerts us to
multiple interventions in the physical world by delineating various acts of
sabotage: villains cut telegraph wires, tamper with the track alignment,
bombard the track with sleepers, delink train carriages, set them on fire
and so forth. At one level, these actions would appear to identify the cau-
sality of machines with that of the physical environment, as if the latter
were just an infinitely transformable machine in waiting, the landscape
passively offering its matter to bring about the convertibility of objects.
But, the landscape also resists such action and direction, and opposes the
men’s desire. The physical universe actually establishes a chain of causes
that throw Johnnie off course—the handcar jumps the track, the bicycle
wobbles along until it is rendered inert by the terrain with which it enters
into partnership, the water funnelled through the hose from the tank
drenches him. The terrain that flanks the train line, the bridges, intersec-
tions and diverging tracks—these are the corporeal causes that testify to
the motion of designing nature.
The profilmic world has both active and passive elements, but passive
and active do not necessarily translate into physical mobility and
immobility. The train track is inert, but active in connecting two geo-
graphical locations and in its participation in the machinery of transpor-
tation. In other words, the track has qualities that circumscribe the
operations/causalities of the physical universe. Its linearity, for example,
is the cause of both the connection between locations and the movement
of the train.6 This linearity also means the track intersects with itself and
lends itself to interruption. It can be crossed by obstacles, moved, bent
and fissured. Such are the qualities that make the action of the protago-
nists possible.
The single line of the train track is both the source of the unity of inter-
actions and the continuity of the two independent series: on the one hand,
the Northerners and the train they have hijacked, and on the other, Johnny
and the various vehicles he sequesters. The series are independent because
in each the protagonists interact with the track and the landscape which
embeds it. Another way to put it would be to say that the antagonism
between competing parties is mediated by the train line and passes through
6
As in the race between the tortoise and the hare, it is the conditions of the line imposed
by an idea of time that cause the paradoxes to emerge.
intermediate and independent objects. In this way both sides engage with
the causal structure of the physical universe.7
Indeed, the status of the two ends of this line—the North and the
South—are inversely hostile and hospitable to the antagonists. For the
Northerners the South is hostile and has the propensity to treat them
badly, so they adjust by operating through subterfuge and stealth, pre-
tending to be civilians and then Confederate soldiers, and seizing moments
to perform their acts when the world around them is distracted or inatten-
tive, such as when the train stops for refuelling and the engineer performs
his personal ablutions while the passengers alight to seek sustenance for
themselves. Correlatively, Johnnie’s safety is assured in the South, even if
he is caught in a web of misunderstanding, because it is an environment in
which he is at home, and as long as he is prepared to engage in hard work
he can function in masterful ways. In the North, however, he must adopt
the same strategies that the Unionists used in the South to hide and dis-
guise himself and complete his actions by stealth. Moral virtue aside, here
he operates outside the law because of the causality that inheres in the
territory he transits.
Impressions and Impulses
In Stoical doctrine, ethical perfection is realised by living in accordance
with nature and is expressed by the conceptual persona of the sage. But
the Stoics also have to account for the existence of inadequately thought-
out actions in the ‘autopoiesis’ of the cosmos qua God. The Stoics do so
by distinguishing between the wise sage and the imperfect human being
(slave) and by calling upon their second duality between the corporeal and
the incorporeal to show how impressions can be incorrectly formulated
and result in actions that are out of step with nature.
The question of Johnnie’s perfection is considered in relation to his
two loves: his engine, eponymously named The General, and his sweet-
heart Annabelle. It is the latter of these passions that first presents insur-
mountable difficulties for him. The reversal of fortune begins when their
7
Today we describe the kind of warfare that endeavours to inflict harm on its opponent by
engaging with independent physical causalities as terrorism, forgetting that this kind of inge-
nious violence deployed for aesthetic purposes is the stuff of comedy. We should not, how-
ever, be surprised by the correspondence between the eruption of the comic and terroristic
methods, as long as we agree that at least part of the comic is the expression of the uncon-
scious, most particularly expression, not thought.
174 L. TRAHAIR
intimacy is interrupted by her brother arriving home with news of the

Unionists’ most recent incursion into Southern territory and his plan to
enlist. Taken with the heroism of both her brother’s and her father’s inten-
tion to join the Confederates, Annabelle forgets about Johnnie altogether.
As she stands in the doorway twisting her handkerchief with proud anguish,
the camera cuts to an utterly impassive Johnnie, who is literally unmoved
by the news. As he remains perched on the settee, wearing a near-vacant
expression on his face, Annabelle fixes her gaze on him and insists he follow
suit. Johnnie obediently hops to and races to the enlisting office.
The sequence that follows simultaneously provides the first evidence of
Johnnie’s indomitable spirit and the details of its undoing. Scrutiny of
these events and the misjudgement that spirals outwards to encompass all
his impending social interactions demonstrates that Johnnie, unlike the
Stoic sage, is not altogether wise in making decisions. At the same time,
the sequence comically delineates the Stoical conception of wisdom.
Sagacity is determined by the nature of assent to impressions. While the
ordinary person assents to impressions as a result of both opinion and
knowledge, the sage does so only on the basis of knowledge. Moreover,
the sage’s knowledge entails strong assent to impressions (or deliberate
choice) that firmly derive from existent things and that have been ren-
dered clear and distinct, rather than from figments of the imagination or
passion.8 The use of impressions by the Stoic sage are, as Deleuze notes,
like ‘quasi causes’ that attune the sage to incorporeal effects or what he
calls events (Deleuze 2004, 166). Conversely, beings who are not rational,
such as animals and children, respond directly to impressions by means of
action without taking this step of assent.9 Adult humans, by contrast, con-
sider the status of the ‘impression as a whole’ by taking into account the
8
An impression (phantasia) is caused by an impressor (phantaston). An object or impressor
engenders an affection upon the soul that is called the impression. As well as distinguishing
between the impression and the impressor, Chryssipus, according to the Greek doxographer
Aetius, also observes the difference between the impression, the imagination (phantastikon)
and the figment (phantasma) (Aetius in Long and Sedley, 237). Whereas the impressor that
causes the impression can be determined, in the case of the imagination no impressor exists.
The impression here is still described as an affection, but also as an ‘empty attraction’. Aetius
gives the example of a shadow-boxer striking his hands against thin air. The figment is what
we are drawn to in the imagination’s empty attractions. It is the fancy of the mad and the
melancholic (ibid.).
9
This allows us to postulate a clear distinction between madness and stupidity in the stoic
system, where the mad are attracted to figments, while the stupid respond without appropri-
ate attention to either the status of the whole or the relation between the content of the
affect and what it appears to represent (Brennan 2005, 262).
relation between the content of the impression and their broader knowl-
edge of the state of affairs (Brennan 2005, 262). By using the faculty of
reason to decide whether or not to assent to an impression, adult humans
are self-determining creatures. When an impression is assented to, the
Stoics speak of an activation occurring and the soul being moved.
Assenting to an impression is also known as following an impulse, and
sages are on this basis once again distinguished from ordinary people. Of
the three kinds of impulse that the Stoics delineate, one is identified only
with sages, one is exclusively used by non-sages and the third is available
to everyone.10 The impulses of the sage come from reason and are thought
through language or ‘propositionally articulated’ (Brennan 2005, 265).
Impressions that can be responded to by rational impulses and that cor-
relate with proposition-like statements are sayables. Sayables are not utter-
ances themselves, which are corporeal, but a species of incorporeals. They
are not themselves causal entities and thus do not act directly on bodies
(Long and Sedley, 164). They are not the qualities of bodies (which are
still corporeal), but attributes or predicates that can either be true or false
(Long and Sedley, 165). It is important to heed this point of Stoic phi-
losophy because of the attention that the film gives to the physical conse-
quences of Johnnie’s poor judgement. It is not the corporeal thing itself
that makes him decide how to act, but his impression of it. The impulses
of ordinary people derive from emotions or passion and are called ‘pathê’.
They are unreasoned and not based in knowledge but in desire. The third
kind of impulse is that of selection and deselection. Both sages and non-
sages avail themselves of these. Selection and deselection are undertaken
in relation to things to which we are or should be indifferent. One ratio-
nally orients oneself towards indifferent things because they can be com-
bined with other indifferent things to generate something that is good.11
The sage, however, is differentiated from the slave by his or her capacity to
10
But it is important to note here that both humans and animals are understood to have
impulses and at one level even the same impulses, which are those of nature. Animals and
humans both share the impulse of self-preservation and appropriate themselves (Diogenes
Laertius in Long and Sedley, 346), or take ownership of their constitutions and their bodies,
as a means to this preservation, where appropriate has both the sense of property ownership
but also of affection, of ‘an affective disposition relative to the thing which is owned or
belongs’ (Long and Sedley, 351).
11
There is a correspondence here between the impulses that originate in passion and emo-
tion and Freud’s concept of the pleasure principle, and those that are based on either reason
or selection and deselection and the reality principle (Freud 1984). There is also scope for
both the fetishist and the humourist in these behaviours towards indifferent things.
176 L. TRAHAIR
distinguish between impulses that derive from knowledge and are for the
good and affective impulses that derive from emotions and passion. That
ordinary people act on impulses that are both rational and emotional,
while the Sage acts only on those that are reasoned, has implications for
the Stoical conception of ethics. To act according to reason is to be virtu-
ous, whereas to act according to one’s passions is to engage in vice.12
Stoicism’s detractors have often objected to its purported ideal that the
aspirational sage must learn to repress his or her passions and emotions.
Attention to the writings of the Hellenistic philosophers suggests that this
is not quite right.13 Rather than repressing their passions or emotions,
sages both base their decisions on knowledge and reasoned judgement, so
that their feelings are excluded from play, and take care to avoid situations
where they cannot depend on reason to prevail over them. ‘Even in dreams
or intoxication or depression’, the sage is required to be vigilant against a
mental impression slipping by that has been insufficiently tested (Long
and Sedley, 344).
If it looks like Johnnie’s initial indifference to the war augurs well for
his bid to be considered sagacious, it is not as if he has used his powers of
selection and deselection and taken his time to decide its pros and cons.
That his decision is made under Annabelle’s direction and with the added
encouragement of a goodbye kiss suggests that it is hardly based on
detachment and indifference.
It is by way of these finer points about impulses that derive from reason,
emotion and indifference, and the difference between conventional and
sagacious responses to impressions, that we can comprehend Johnnie’s
actions in the film and hence his adherence to and departure from Stoical
values. While Johnnie, as we have said, is not himself a sage, he does make
conceptualisations of Stoicism legible. The Stoic system may well speak of
the knowledgeable and ever-wise sage, but it is addressed to real, fallible
and hence imperfect people. Johnnie is definitely the latter. The comic
dimension of the film draws on the Stoic differentiation between how the
12
We thus see how tightly bound ethics are from the outset into the generation of Stoical
concepts. Indeed, the Stoical system was famously compared to an egg, where the yoke is
physics, the white ethics and the shell logic, about which Deleuze makes some lovely cracks,
including one about Humpty Dumpty. See Deleuze (2004, 162).
13
Epictetus, for example, observes that ‘the would-be honourable and good man’ should
be well trained with regard to (a) desire and aversion, (b) proper function regarding impulses
and repulsions and (c) taking care in assenting to his impressions of the world (Epictetus,
Discourses, 3.2.1–5, in Long and Sedley, 344).
ordinary person, acting out of passion, fails to live in conformity with

nature, while the wise person or sage succeeds. Whereas sages make wise
decisions based on careful reasoning, sound knowledge and a dispassion-
ate assessment of the situation at hand, and have the capacity to both cor-
rectly discern the difference between the impressions the world presents
and the truth of its existence, ordinary people are prone to judging their
impressions of external reality incorrectly because they are diverted by
internal conditions—most detrimentally by their passions and emotions.
Sages thus exercise freedom in making wise decisions and this further
affords them immunity from misfortune. In this way the sage’s virtue
results in happiness. Because ordinary people are slave to their passions,
they are hindered from living conformably with nature. Ethical perfection
means living in conformity with nature.
Encouraged by the forwardness of Annabelle’s parting kiss, Johnnie
hightails it to the enlisting office. The director’s emphasis in this sequence
is on demonstrating Johnnie’s physicality by his launching into a series of
deliberate movements, but also on their passionate causes. We see Johnnie
bursting suddenly into the bottom of the frame of the township’s bustling
street, bolting up the road and barely hesitating before shooting off to the
right. A quick cut shows Johnnie racing into the bottom of a second frame
of shop fronts, before dashing to get ahead of two men who have nearly
arrived at the doorway to the office. Once inside, Johnnie, having too
avidly dogged the heels of the man who opened the door, is momentarily
thrown off track, but such is his determination not to be bested that he
recaptures the head of the queue with a leapfrog onto one table and a
nimble hop over another.
Undeterred by physical obstacles, Johnnie is initially no less dissuaded
by inopportune eventualities. When the enlisting clerk takes advice from a
senior colleague that Johnnie ‘is more valuable to the South as an engi-
neer’ and refuses his application without telling him why, Johnnie sum-
mons all of his reasoning skills to argue his case. Dismissed a second time
and forced from the frame, a bewildered and dejected Johnnie evaluates
his impression of what has come to pass. Images simultaneously operating
in the registers of action and affection now give way to those of perception
and cognition. By miming out a series of propositions to either affirm or
negate, Johnnie speculates about the precipitating causes of this sorry
state of affairs. Standing in a two-shot, with the man who was behind him
now in front of him vulgarly holding his certification papers, Johnnie
compares his body size and musculature to that of the successful applicant.
178 L. TRAHAIR
While conceding his relative shortness, he affirms his potential strength

by pummelling his pectorals and pinching his biceps. A second successful
applicant, more diminutive and delicate than he, however, compels him
back to the office window for another try. Now abandoning the most
virtuous kind of propositional reason, but nevertheless retaining his syn-
thetic skills of selection and deselection, Johnnie, with hat cocked to one
side to hide his face, provides the clerk with a false name and different
occupation. He almost succeeds in his bid, but the clerk’s boss discerns
that something is amiss. The clerk snatches away Johnnie’s hat, crossly
motions to him to stop wasting his time and points him towards the exit.
Johnnie’s fourth attempt to join the war effort is not at all virtuous—this
time he steals the requisite documentation from another man. The
clerk’s boss, now well primed to the prospect of Johnnie’s transgres-
sions, intercepts him and hauls him back to the window to return the
papers, and in no uncertain terms, definitely without respect for his value
‘to the South’, drags him to the doorway and boots him out on
his behind.
This sequence’s emphasis on the relation between Johnnie’s impres-
sions and the course of action he follows makes it clear that even though
the impressions themselves are not causal, they are physically mediated.
Actions are motivated by assessments and interpretations that are incorpo-
real. Like the sage, Johnnie has engaged in the procedure of making
decisions on the basis of impressions.14 His physical exertion at the begin-
ning of the sequence—conveyed in a continuous series of shots in which
his body functions as the projectile that moves between and unites con-
tiguous space—evidences Johnnie’s stoical determination in the popular
sense of the word and, indeed, him making every effort to reason things
through in accordance with the Stoic doctrine. The second half of the
14
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze suggests that the relation between impressions and assent
is more complex than this, but for the sake of argument I am ignoring him in this instance.
The obscurity of the Stoic theory of representation, such as it has been handed down
to us, is well known: the role and nature of assent in the sensible corporeal representa-
tion, as something borrowed; the manner by which rational representations, which
are still corporeal, derive from sensible representations; above all, that which consti-
tutes the character of representation, such that it may or may not be ‘comprehensi-
ble’; and finally, the scope of the difference between representation-bodies, or
imprints, and incorporeal events-effects (between representations and expressions).
(164)
sequence shows the other characters’ refusal to recognise him in such

terms. Annabelle’s father and brother convey their umbrage at Johnnie’s
refusal to ‘get in line’, while Annabelle, humiliated by her boyfriend’s
seeming cowardice, vows to have nothing more to do with him until he is
in uniform.
His love lost and reputation besmirched, at the end of the sequence
Johnnie sits on the shaft between the wheels of his engine, utterly dejected.
So engulfed is he in his misery, he barely notices that the wheels have
begun to turn, nor that he is being carried away by the train. His submis-
sion to the train’s momentum presents Johnnie as a slave—by contrast,
Stoic sages’ comportment towards reality is directed precisely to prevent
them being overrun by momentum, whether their own or that of the
world around them.
At the level of the perception-image, it is nevertheless evident to the
audience that Annabelle and her father and brother have even less wisdom
than Johnnie when it comes to judging impressions and acting on impulse.
Privy to the causes that have led them to misjudge Johnnie, we naturally
side with him. Yet considered in the cold light of day, the diminishment of
the esteem in which Johnnie is held at the beginning of the film—exempli-
fied by the two little boys who, in awe of him driving a train, follow his
every move—results from him allowing himself to be driven by passion.
The enlisting office sequence’s alternating rhythms of momentum and
blockage suggest that Johnnie’s action, while reasoned in relation to the
obstacles he encounters, is nevertheless fuelled by a desire that is not
entirely his own. The Stoic distinction between different kinds of impulses
would thus admonish Johnnie for being driven to enlist in the army in the
first place not by a considered assessment of the politics of the war, or of
his capacity to contribute to it in a meaningful way, but because he is
enamoured of and intimidated by Annabelle. A Stoical assessment of the
ethical dimension of this sequence would find that Johnnie’s failure to
satisfy Annabelle’s demand involves the moral failure of everyone. When
Johnnie tries to excuse himself to Annabelle, the insufficiency of his words
to the cause of his rejection leads to more wrong impressions. Indeed,
Johnnie’s failure to exonerate himself through words shows their inade-
quate representation of real causes, and Annabelle refuses to listen to him
in any case. It is precisely Johnnie’s ‘all too human’ qualities, however,
that will open the way to his possible redemption and make the audience
root for him in the combat to come.
180 L. TRAHAIR
Keaton’s Stoicism, Fate and Everlasting Recurrence

Now exercising sagacious wisdom, Johnnie excludes his feelings from play.
He forgets about Annabelle and goes about his business as a train engi-
neer. Johnnie’s engagement with the world of objects offers him recom-
pense for the much more difficult world of interpersonal relations. This is
not to say, however, that he does not encounter setbacks in the physical
universe as well, merely that his action when it entails simply the action of
bodies on other bodies is not as complicated as when he has to deal with
the order of impressions.
In The General, everything that happens happens again. For example,
early in the film, Johnnie gets rid of the two little boys who have followed
him from the train to Annabelle’s house because they cramp his style, only
to have two much larger ones (Annabelle’s father and brother) descend on
the scene. Johnnie expels the little boys from Annabelle’s parlour and then
he is expelled from the recruiting office. Johnnie loses his girlfriend and he
loses his train. He gets one back and then the other. He uses the same
strategies to elude the Northerners that they have just used to elude him.
And Annabelle is subjected to the same ridicule and humiliation on the
return journey that Johnnie has suffered on the outward one. These rep-
etitions are on the one hand formal and mildly comic, but they also inscribe
a reality in which the Keaton character, much like the man himself, is
compelled to confront the same problems again and again, implying a
kind of cyclical existence in which the present repeatedly poses a series of
equivalences to which he must respond. Repetition is not just something
that occurs between lifetimes, then; conflagration and rebirth are intramu-
ral. Keaton’s childhood subjection to punishing forces is thus transformed
into an active determination to confront the fancy of fate for perpetuity.
Whereas Henri Bergson, in his essay on laughter, aligns repetition with
the inelasticity of the machine to distinguish one of the predominant fea-
tures of modern comicality (Bergson 1999, 65), the symmetries we find in
Keaton’s films amount to something more than the mere mechanical
encrusted upon the living. When Deleuze argues that Keaton appropriates
the machine by making himself part of it—and there is no better example
of this than the image on the cover of this volume of essays—he suggests
that this is an ethical commitment. The integration of the man in or with
the machine reconciles the small with the infinitely big (see Deleuze 1986,
173–177), and thus translates democracy’s ethico-political aim of recon-
ciling the individual with the totality. Keaton’s use of repetition, while
unarguably a trope of slapstick and thus in the service of conventional

comic purposes15—simultaneously evokes a world governed by fate. It is
thus arguable that Keaton allies himself with the machine not only because
of its mechanistic potential, but because it affords him a comportment
that allows him to function within the kind of causal nexus that the Stoics
called fate. Indeed, in the Stoic cosmology repetition only looks like a
mechanised process; it is in fact the self-transformation of God (Long and
Sedley, 279).
Another way to interpret this inexorable pull towards prior events is by
reference to the Stoic concept of everlasting recurrence. The concept
comes from Stoic physics, but its logic has ethical implications. Everlasting
recurrence first of all describes the circular conception of time observed in
the cyclical movement of celestial bodies. In Stoic cosmology, just as the
stars and planets return periodically to the same position in the night sky,
the self-regeneration of the world is believed to be subject to a succession
of cosmic cycles. The world emerges from the conflagration, evolves in
accordance with reason’s activation of passive substance and is completely
destroyed in a subsequent conflagration, only to emerge anew as passive
substance. Because God, causal law, nature and reason are one and the
same thing, the world is both perfect and bound to evolve in exactly the
same way as it did on its previous emergences. As Nemesius writes: ‘For
again there will be Socrates and Plato and each one of mankind with the
same friends and the same fellow citizens; they will suffer the same things
and they will encounter the same things, and put their hand to the same
things, and every city and village and piece of land in the same way’ (Long
and Sedley, 309).
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze, writing about Nietzsche’s rein-
vigoration of the concept in the eternal return, calls it ‘the brutal form of
the immediate’ (Deleuze 1997, 7)16: ‘whatever you will, will it in such a
15
It is the woman this time who is the butt of the joke. When Annabelle is taken hostage
by the Unionists, she is gulled into thinking that Johnnie has come to rescue her, when it was
in fact his other beloved that catalyses him into herculean dynamism with such an excess of
resolve that he will spare no physical resource available to him. Annabelle also takes a beating
(so to speak) on the return journey. This is not only apparent in the ungainly way Johnnie
loads her into the sack and tips her out again, but when, as if in a bid to trump her show of
moral superiority at the beginning of the film, Johnnie belittles all of her efforts to participate
in the mission while aggrandising his practical skills and physical superiority. This is, however,
subject to another, once again democratising twist, because we know he has made compa-
rable mistakes on the outbound journey.
16
In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he calls it an affirmation of necessity (Deleuze 2006, 28).
182 L. TRAHAIR
manner that will also will its return’ (Deleuze 1997, 7). But in The Logic of
Sense (published the year after Difference and Repetition), Deleuze renders
the Stoic sage the equivalent of a Zen master to emphasise further how the
meeting of physics and logic in the everlasting recurrence opens up the
third, ethical dimension of Stoic philosophy. Deleuze himself goes further
than simply concurring with the Stoic doctrine that time is incorporeal to
argue that the Stoics in fact had not one, but two conceptions of time.
There is the corporeal time of the present and the incorporeal time of the
everlasting recurrence. There is the time of causes and the time of effects:
Thus time must be grasped twice, in two complementary though mutually

exclusive fashions. First, it must be grasped entirely as the living present in
which bodies act and are acted upon. Second, it must be grasped entirely as
an entity infinitely divisible into a past and future, and into the incorporeal
effects which result from bodies, their actions and their passions. Only the
present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and the
future. But only the past and future inhere in time and divide each present
infinitely. These are not three successive dimensions, but two simultaneous
readings of time. (Deleuze 2004, 8)17
The second reading of time derives from the everlasting recurrence and
by ‘reading’ it the sage’s thinking contemplates effects. The ethical dimen-
sion of Stoic philosophy emerges on the basis of the ‘impact’ of this idea
of cyclical time, which is to say incorporeal time, on the otherwise timeless
corporeality of the present. For the promise of return is what makes us
ethically responsible to the present.18 Because the past and future do not
17
This is of course what plays out in the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise.
18
Marcus Aurelius:
Even if you were to live three thousand years or thirty thousand, nevertheless remem-
ber that no one loses another life than this which he is living, nor lives another life
than this which he is losing. So the longest comes to the same thing as the shortest.
For the present is equal for all, and so what is passing away is equal; and this shows
that what is being lost is merely a moment. No one could lose what is past or what is
future. For how could anyone deprive him of what he does not have? Always remem-
ber, then, these two things: one, that everything everlastingly is of the same kind and
cyclically recurrent, and it makes no difference whether one should see the same
things for a hundred years or for two hundred or for an infinite time. Two, that the
longest-lived and the quickest to die have an equal loss. For it is the present alone of
which one will be deprived, since this is the only thing that he has, and no one loses
what he does not have. (Long and Sedley, 310)
exist, but only subsist, they are not subject to causal intervention. Such
thinking underpins Marcus Aurelius’ meditation on the cyclical inevitabil-
ity of death and its implications for presence. Death, he says, is not the loss
of future existence (the life one would have had) but the loss of the pres-
ent. By virtue of the Stoic subscription to the subsistence of everlasting
recurrence, the Stoic privileging of the actuality of presence, the present-
ness of the present over the virtuality of time, issues an injunction to rec-
ognise that one has only one life to live, that no other life is available. One
cannot have done things differently. There are no second chances, no
groundhog days. The Stoic sage positions himself (or herself) at the junc-
ture of two images of time: one is the pure present, the other the eternal.
His wisdom involves both understanding the pure incorporeal event ‘in its
eternal truth’ and willing its embodiment and actualisation ‘in a state of
affairs and in his own body and flesh’ (Deleuze 2004, 166). Indeed,
Deleuze likens the sage to the mime who traverses the limitlessness of past
and future ‘all the way to the smallest present of a pure instant which is
endlessly subdivided. This is how the Stoic sage not only comprehends
and wills the event, but also represents it and, by this, selects it’ (167).
Causality, Fate and Divine Providence

[T]he bowman must reach the point where the aim is also not the aim, that
is to say, the bowman himself; where the arrow flies over its straight line
while creating its own target; where the surface of the target is also the line
and the point, the bowman, the shooting of the arrow, and what is shot at.
(Deleuze 2004, 166)
While Keaton’s stoical persona invites comparison between the fallible

little man and the wise sage, Johnnie is not a sage and he is not a righteous
figure. Yet he devotes himself to the life delivered up to him in a consis-
tently attentive way. The Stoic sage, like the Zen master described above,
wills the perfect coincidence of all dimensions of reality and in so doing
identifies with the eternal recurrence of all things. He or she believes in
and wants to participate responsibly in divine providence. Indeed, divine
providence and fate are the same thing seen from different angles, or, bet-
ter, two perspectives on the causal structure of existence. While the eternal
recurrence understood as fate is the future that traps me in the past, divine
providence conceives of ‘the unity of causes’ that constitute the ‘cosmic
present’, ‘the aggregate of bodies taken as a whole’, as a ‘perfect mixture’
184 L. TRAHAIR
(Deleuze 2004, 163). For the Stoics, believing in the interconnectedness

of causal determinism, fate and divine providence is a way of being free.
Even while the future is predetermined, the sage exercises freedom by
behaving responsibly in the present so as to play a part in the orchestration
of the best possible world. The sage therefore does not begrudge his or
her fated existence, but identifies with the providential unfolding of nature
through the linkage of causes. Stoicism does not propose dour resignation
towards the future, but an obligation to live in the best way possible. As
Lloyd puts it, freedom was ‘the achievement of a good life’, rather than a
precondition for it (Lloyd, 94). Furthermore, divine providence does not
imply a transcendent God orchestrating events and intervening on behalf
of individuals to bestow rewards on those whom he loves. Rather, the
Stoic God is a pantheistic immanent power that animates substance. As
Dorothea Frede explains, ‘[t]he complicated causal network will always
follow the same pattern not because there is a divine plan laid out in
heaven, but because it is the only the rational development that things can
take’ (Frede 2003, 205, my italics). God is reason understood as ‘the nec-
essary order of the cosmos’, the chain or sequencing of causes (Lloyd, 91).
The Stoics were famous for devising a multitude of different kinds of
real causes: sustaining causes, antecedent causes, containing causes, pre-
liminary causes, auxiliary causes and joint causes.19
In Stoic metaphysics sustaining causes are on the side of providence,
while antecedent causes are those by which fate operates. From the per-
spective of individuals whose life unfolds before them, antecedent causes
are triggering causes (Long and Sedley, 343). Antecedent causes comprise
a sub-group of joint causes, inasmuch as they are not complete and pri-
mary causes but auxiliary and proximate ones. They allow a change to
occur even if they do not exclusively cause it. Auxiliary and antecedent
19
Sustaining causes come from nature and hold together the bits and pieces of natural
bodies. The breath is one such sustaining cause, and the parts of body such as cartilage and
ligaments and tendons comprise the sustaining causes of the unified body. In crafted objects
the sustaining causes are the clay or gypsum or lime. Containing causes comprise the matter
of the sustaining causes, the ‘externals whose function is to produce some change in the
body, whatever the change may be’ (Long and Sedley, 335). Preliminary causes and complete
causes (the latter equivalent in fact to sustaining causes) are distinguished on the basis of
whether their removal will eliminate the effect: the removal of a preliminary cause will not
eliminate the effect, whereas the removal of a complete cause will remove the effect. Auxiliary
causes assist sustaining causes by intensifying them to bring about an effect, and a joint cause
can exist without a sustaining cause by acting jointly with other causes.
causes are, for example, the conditions or qualities of the body or bodies
that will allow a change to take hold. But insofar as they give rise to the
event, these changes are also effects that subsist in temporal and spatial
contingencies. It is precisely these kinds of causes that Keaton, the direc-
tor, makes use of to produce the sense that Johnnie’s life, despite all of his
self-determining exertions, is simultaneously utterly fated and governed
by divine providence.
In The General, as in Keaton’s other films, there are as many fortuitous
circumstances that work in Johnnie’s favour as there are concatenations of
events that conspire against him. The most dramatic confirmation of
‘divine providence’ contributing to Johnnie’s good fortune occurs in the
sequence where Johnnie shows himself to be the comic inversion of
Deleuze’s Zen master. The Unionists have hijacked The General and
Johnnie is chasing them in another engine with a cannon trolley attached.20
Johnnie’s first attempt to strike his enemies is unsuccessful: he skimps on
the gunpowder and the cannon ball barely makes it out of the cannon; in
Lebel’s words, the ‘cannon belches its projectile in a niggardly fashion’ (Lebel,
123). On his next try, Johnnie feeds the hungry mouth of the cannon with
the whole tin of gunpowder. But as he heads back to the engine, his foot gets
caught in the hook that couples the cannon trolley to the tender, and in free-
ing himself from this entanglement, Johnnie also untethers the cannon trol-
ley. The distance between the cannon and Johnnie’s train grows progressively
at the same time as the cannon lowers its aim to point directly at him. A cut
to a perspectival shot emphasises the danger Johnnie is in, leaving us in no
doubt as to the cannon’s new target. Another cut to an extreme long shot
shows that the two engines and the cannon have lined up. Both the
Northerners’ and Johnnie’s trains approach the vanishing point of the image,
while the cannon creeps into the bottom of the frame, still malevolently
trained on Johnnie. All is saved, however, when a bend in the track snatches
Johnnie’s engine from the cannon’s line of fire at the precise moment it dis-
charges, thereby also providing a clear route to his Northern enemies.21
20
In dealing with the complexity of causality that Keaton deploys here, I am ignoring the
illogicality that doubtless also contributes to our enjoyment of the sequence, which is that if
Johnnie is successful in his venture the cost will be the injury, even complete destruction, of
both of his beloveds.
21
A gag of the same kind is repeated later in the battle on the river bank, when Johnnie’s
faulty sword flies from its handle and lands fortuitously in the back of an enemy sniper who
had been picking off the Confederate soldiers one by one. As ‘luck’ would have it, the precise
arrangement of bodies in time and space in both cases ensures the missile hits its target.
186 L. TRAHAIR
Fate and divine providence are thus the broad determinations that
alternately make use of Johnnie’s capacity to be affected. The Stoics would
not call this luck, coincidence or chance, which would obscure the real
operation of causality. What we attribute to luck or chance, the Stoics
argue results from a non-evident cause that holds together numerous
antecedent causes (White 2003, 140). In our example from the film, ante-
cedent causes include Johnnie finding the cannon in the first place, attach-
ing it to the train, not feeding it enough gunpowder on his first attempt,
getting his foot caught in the chain, unhooking the cannon trolley and so
on. These proximate causes combine with others that are auxiliary: the
displaced hook gravitates to the ground of the track and impacts the
fluidity of the trolley’s movement; its hiccupping on the track increases the
load of the cannon so that it is likewise pulled to the ground just as the
trolley loses its forward momentum. Doubtless there would be a multi-
tude of other non-evident antecedent causes that the film does not detail
but that we can imagine—whatever interactions have occurred among the
Northerners that cause them to be where they are, the nature of the physi-
cal terrain that caused the track to be built just so—and they would
be unending.
Conclusion
The Stoical emphasis on physicality as a belief in causal determinism or fate
inheres in Keaton’s comedy as a preoccupation with disclosing the many
corporeal causes according to which events come about, and attests to the
preciousness of individual existence and the circumstances which form it.
This disclosure is simultaneously metaphysical and ethical, just as it was for
the Stoics. The Stoics were not interested in the apparently inexplicable
and irrational ordinances of fate, but in understanding causality as reason
and developing skills to ensure that correct assessments of circumstances
could be made so that one could live conformably with nature. Keaton’s
rendition of a fateful universe inhabited by a figure whose mode of appre-
hension is not always wise returns to and tests the recommendations of
Stoical comportment to show the impossibility of harnessing reality and
rendering it predictable. The Stoic investment in a rational, causal order
was not itself predicated on the belief that the world was or could be har-
monious from all angles, or was lacking in the treachery and momentum
to overrun individuals. Belief in fate as causal determinism does not mean
that events will not strike an individual as random or contingent. Indeed,
commentators on Stoicism suggest that the emphasis on necessity and fate

is a direct response to the vagaries of existence that saw individual fortunes
change overnight (the life and death of Seneca are a case in point here).
Lloyd, for example, notes that ‘[f]or the Stoics the conjunction of design
and necessity provided a bulwark against fear and vulnerability in a world
subject to chance’ (Lloyd, 77). In this respect at least, Keaton’s comedy
does not ridicule Stoical ideals, it embraces them.
Silent cinematic comedy was fascinated with physical causalities and
from the inception of cinema directors sought to make a spectacle of them.
Compared with the earlier physical comedies of Mack Sennett’s Keystone
films, where pure passion both confronted the materiality of nature and
was inseparable from it, in Keaton’s films both corporeal existence and
civil society have increased in complexity. Philosophical Stoicism in this
respect allows us to distinguish between the different natures of Johnnie’s
corporeal and incorporeal encounters. In The General it is the realm of
intersubjective communication that first of all complicates everything,
while the world of objects relieves Johnnie of the former’s challenges at
the same time as providing strictly causal ones to approach head on.
Keaton’s generation of comedy out of the concatenation of events rests
on the director’s orchestration of the perfect contingency of time and
space, his adherence to what Deleuze calls the ‘art of surfaces’ and the
‘display of events at the surface’, that characterises Stoic humour (Deleuze
2004, 11). Considered in relation to the Stoic doctrine, Keaton’s cinema
takes the incorporeal dimensions of space and time and gives them body.
As such, time and place cease to be the neutral dimensions in which things
happen that they were for the Stoics. Instead, the spatio-temporal con-
tinuum becomes a divisible schemata; time loses its neutrality to provide a
perspective on causes and to make the effects of causes operative. As infi-
nitely divisible, able to be subordinated to the will, subjected to revers-
ibility, protraction, contraction and repetition, the spatio-temporal
continuum becomes one of the abiding ‘constraints’ of the cinematic
medium. Like the sage, Keaton the director divides time to open the world
to thinking and willing. It is as master of causes and effects that Keaton the
director creates new unities between time and space to assist in the victori-
ous triumph of his character ‘against all the odds’.22
The characterisation comes from Deleuze (1986, 173).

22
188 L. TRAHAIR
References
Baltzly, Dirk. 2008. Stoicism. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Revised
February 2008. http://plato.standford.edu/. Accessed on 16/5/10.
Benayoun, Robert. 1983. The Look of Buster Keaton, Ed. and Trans. Randall
Conrad. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Bergson, Henri. 1999. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Trans.
Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Copenhagen: Green Integer.
Brennan, T. 2005. The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, Fate. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Carroll, Noël. 1990. Buster Keaton, The General and Visible Intelligibility. In
Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman.
Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1988. Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Dardis, Tom. 1979. Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down. London:
Virgin Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1997. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum.
———. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2004. The Logic of Sense. London: Continuum.
Frede, Dorothea. 2003. Stoic Determinism. In The Cambridge Companion to the
Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1984. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In On Metapsychology: The
Theory of Psychoanalysis, Trans. James Strachey. The Penguin Freud Library,
Vol. 11. London: Penguin Books.
Gandini, Leonardo, ed. 2011. Il cinema americano attraverso i film. Rome:
Carocci editore.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics and the Limits of
Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Inwood, Brad, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Cambridge:
Keaton, Buster. 1982. My Wonderful World of Slapstick. New York: Da
Capo Press.
Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality,
63–64. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lebel, Jean-Patrick. 1967. Buster Keaton, Trans. P. D. Stovin. London: Zwemmer.
Lloyd, Genevieve. 2008. Providence Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Long, A.A., and D.N. Sedley. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. Volume 1:
Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge:
Nemesius. 1802. De natura hominis. Halle: C. F. Matthaei.
White, Michael J. 2003. Stoic Natural Philosophy (Physics and Cosmology). In
The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood. Cambridge:
CHAPTER 11
Bad Cops
Todd McGowan
Though comedians often make fun of the law and comedies often target
officers of the law for their mockery, the law itself does not seem funny.
No one laughs when legislatures enact new laws or while reading the his-
tory of past legal decisions. Historically, this shows up more conspicuously
in tragedy than in comedy. In Greek tragedy, the foundational law contra-
vening incest destroys Oedipus, while Antigone’s heroic act involves con-
fronting the law of the city laid down by Creon. In Shakespeare’s tragedies,
Hamlet struggles with the edict of the paternal law, and Brutus must vio-
late the law in order to save it by killing Julius Caesar. The law is a neces-
sary feature of tragedy because the tragic character confronts the limit that
defines human finitude (like the incest prohibition or the paternal law) and
then transcends it. The law exists for the tragic character to exceed in the
act of becoming tragic, but tragedy does not concern itself with law as such.
No tragic hero offers us insight into the structure of the law. Antigone’s
defiance of the law does not bespeak any preoccupation with it. Her con-
cern is her act, not the nature of the law that prohibits it. We can see this
same absence of concern in every tragic figure, even Hamlet, who goes
further than any other in obsessing about whether the law is just or not.
T. McGowan (*)
University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
e-mail: todd.mcgowan@uvm.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_11
192 T. MCGOWAN
Hamlet’s ruminations on the law that his father lays down represent his
defiance of this law (which demands immediate action), every bit as much
as Antigone’s decision to bury her brother defies Creon’s law. Both acts
posit the law as a tool for asserting one’s transcendence, not for investigat-
ing. For investigations into the law, one must turn from tragedy to com-
edy. In contrast with tragedy, comedy is preoccupied with an investigation
into what the law actually is. What it discovers is that the structure of the
law is a comic structure, which is why so much comedy delves into the
nature of the law and its effect on those who try to deal with it. Comedy
is drawn to law because law is comic.
The comedy of the law derives from its relation to enjoyment. On the
one hand, the law interdicts enjoyment. This is evident in the foundational
law—the prohibition of incest—and all the particular laws that govern
social life. The incest prohibition bans the ultimate enjoyment in order to
forge social existence (Lévi-Strauss 1969).1 In light of this prohibition,
one cannot just remain within one’s private domain and enjoy sexual sat-
isfaction there, but must venture out into the world to find a partner.
The problem quickly arises that this prohibition prohibits what is oth-
erwise impossible. There is no ultimate enjoyment, not even incest, in
which one escapes lack altogether. The purpose of the law’s prohibition is
not to put an end to enjoyment, but to create a social bond through the
enjoyment that the law makes possible. In the act of prohibiting the
impossible object, the law develops pathways through which the subject
can enjoy itself alongside other individuals also subjected to the same pro-
hibition. The more that the law prohibits, the more potential the subject
has to enjoy itself, because it uses the prohibition of enjoyment to create
avenues for enjoyment (Lacan 1991).2
1
Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies the structuring role that the law prohibiting incest plays in
forming the social order. Without the break in nature that this law enacts, no society would
be possible. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, “The prohibition of incest is where nature transcends
itself […]. It brings about and is in itself the advent of a new order” (Lévi-Strauss 1969, 25).
2
This is what Jacques Lacan is getting at when he rewrites Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s famous
dictum from The Brothers Karamazov about the enjoyment unleashed by the absence of
God. As Lacan puts it, “If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite
evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist then nothing
at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day” (Lacan 1991, 128). The
more prohibitions that we have, the more possibilities for enjoyment. If I am never permitted
to go to the movies, seeing Avengers: Infinity War (Russo and Russo 2018) might unleash
unparalleled enjoyment. If no such prohibition exists, I will find myself barely able to stay
awake.
11 BAD COPS 193
The law is inherently contradictory. It prohibits enjoyment not in order

to eliminate it, but to make it possible. The imposition of law takes some-
thing from the subject and produces a lack in the subject. But at the same
time, it creates the possibility for the subject to become excessive in a way
that would be impossible without the law’s interference. We laugh at the law
because it continuously delivers excess alongside the lack that it produces in
the subject. This intersection of lack and excess is the comic moment.
Nothing highlights this comic intersection like the law (McGowan 2017).
The prohibition of enjoyment defines the law. But even the most mun-
dane laws limit possible enjoyment, even if they do not do so as dramati-
cally as the incest prohibition. Laws against theft restrict my ability to
enjoy my neighbor’s computer; laws contravening drug use obstruct my
ability to enjoy an opium-induced high; and speed limits bar my enjoy-
ment of fast driving. The Decalogue is nothing but a list of possible sources
of enjoyment that I cannot access if I give myself over to the command-
ments. I cannot find satisfaction in worshipping graven images, using the
Lord’s name in vain, or bearing false witness against my neighbor. I even
lose the private satisfaction of coveting my neighbor’s wife if I remain
within the law’s constraints. Every law demands the sacrifice of enjoy-
ment, which is why the law produces a subject of desire or a lacking subject.
Of course, the law and especially the agents of the law are not pure.
Police officers and judges can become corrupt and transform the restric-
tions of the law into sources of excessive enjoyment. This occurs when
police officers sell the drugs that they confiscate or when they use their
position to enhance their own satisfaction. There are innumerable stories
of police corruption, but perhaps the most egregious account of police
excessiveness occurs in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), in which
the lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) immerses himself in a life of total debauch-
ery and corruption. He loses money gambling, frequents prostitutes, uses
illegal drugs, drinks to excess, steals money, and so on. But most impor-
tantly, he uses his position as a police lieutenant and his relationship to the
law to enhance this debauchery rather than to limit enjoyment. In one of
the film’s memorable scenes, he pulls over a teenage girl in her car and
demands that she act out performing fellatio in order to avoid arrest. He
demands, “Show me how you suck a guy’s cock.” As she reluctantly dem-
onstrates, he masturbates alongside the car. This type of excess clearly
violates the law’s prohibition on enjoyment, and everyone would admit
that this type of police behavior is not appropriate. The bad lieutenant is a
figure of excess who operates within the restrictiveness of the law.
194 T. MCGOWAN
But the bad lieutenant is not funny. When he demands that the teenage
girl demonstrate her fellatio technique or when he loses thousands of dol-
lars gambling, no spectator would laugh. In fact, there is not a single
humorous moment in the film, despite its constant depictions of excess.3
The problem is that the bad lieutenant’s excesses simply magnify the
excesses of the law itself. Just as no one laughs watching the police shoot
unarmed black individuals, the bad lieutenant lacks comedy because he
fails to reveal how the law’s excess produces a corresponding lack. If we
saw him demand that the teenage girl demonstrate fellatio and then saw
his penis become caught in the window of the car, this would be comic.
Doubling down on the law’s excesses produces terror, not comedy. The
comedy of the law requires a revelation of the failure that exists within the
excessiveness of the law. The excessiveness is not funny, but the cop who
strives to be the would-be perfect cop always is.4
Hands Are Never Too Clean

The problem with the law—and the cause of the law’s comedy—is that the
law does not just interdict. Its interdictions of enjoyment always produce
a surplus enjoyment that the law purports to bar. The criminal disobedi-
ence of the law is not the only form of enjoyment that the law licenses. It
is not even the privileged form. As a result of the law’s intervention, one
can enjoy not the act of transgressing the law, but also the act of obeying
it. The site of the prohibition is at the same time the site that produces the
prohibited enjoyment. There is no law that escapes this paradox and that
can prohibit without engendering an excess of what it claims to prohibit.
Of course, no one enjoys not murdering, not kidnapping, or not rob-
bing a bank. Doing these things seems more enjoyable than not doing
them (save perhaps kidnapping). But everyone has felt the enjoyment of
3
When I saw this film as a graduate student, I did not find much amusement until after the
film ended. As I exited the movie theater, I ran into a conservative professor who had a hor-
rified look on his face. He said to me, “That certainly was a bad lieutenant,” before turning
and quickly exiting the theater. The comedy of this response lies in its understatement. After
the incredible excesses depicted on the screen, the professor’s response seemed entirely insuf-
ficient and lacking.
4
In the history of comic cinema, there are several iterations of the cop or other authority
striving for perfection but thereby revealing the inherent failure of all policing and authority.
The locus classicus for this figure is the unnamed Bloomingdale’s Salesperson (Eugene Levy)
in Serendipity (Peter Chelsom 2001), who guards the clothing counter with an iron fist.
11 BAD COPS 195
having perfectly obeyed a teacher’s instruction, stuck to a demanding diet,

or silently condemned others for disobeying the speed limit while enjoying
one’s own obedience of it.
The figure that reveals how this structure works in the obsessional neu-
rotic who compulsively obeys the law in order to produce enjoyment
through the restriction itself. The obsessional understands that the law’s
restriction of enjoyment operates also as a source of enjoyment, which is
why obsessionals commit themselves fully to obedience. The obsessional
obeys excessively and discovers satisfaction through this abandonment of
direct enjoyment rather than through the pursuit of it.
When obsessionals wash their hands three times after going to the bath-
room, they are following the social rule, enforced since childhood for
most, that everyone should wash their hands after this activity. Obsessionals
take their obedience of the ritual too far. Rather than just obeying and
washing their hands once thoroughly, obsessionals repeat the activity that
the law commands. By performing this act three times, obsessionals evince
their recognition that the restriction of enjoyment is itself enjoyable. They
enjoy following the law that restricts enjoyment (by prohibiting one from
avoiding the tedium of washing one’s hands) because they follow it
excessively.
The great example of an obsessional ritual in the contemporary world
does not come from movies or television or literature, but from sport.
Tennis champion Rafael Nadal has an extreme obsessional ritual that he
must go through before every serve (thus hundreds of times per match).
This ritual involves cleaning the line (when the match is on clay courts),
adjusting his hair, pulling at his shirt, tugging at his shorts, and then
bouncing the ball a specific number of times. Nadal’s excessive ritual can
lead to time violations that could potentially affect the outcome of his
matches, but the ritual is essential to his success.5 It is comic because he
excessively performs the restrictions of a law that, though he places it on
himself, is nonetheless a law.
The excessive performance of the ritual is comic. It follows the precise
structure of comedy by producing a moment when the subject responds
to its lack with an excessive action. We laugh at the repeated performance
of this ritual, because this is a moment where the intersection of the law’s
restrictiveness and its excessiveness becomes visible. This intersection of
restriction and excess occurs in the formation of the law and in every
5
As I write this, Nadal is the top-rated player in the world.
196 T. MCGOWAN
moment of its existence. Even if police officers are not washing their hands
multiple times when they return to the station, the law always creates the
excess that it purports to bar. We even create the law in order to have
access to this excess. Whereas language responds to lack with excess, law
produces lack excessively. The corruption within the law is not the result
of a few bad lieutenants, but the excessiveness of the law’s functioning.
Obsessions are funny rather than satisfying because their excess, far
from relieving the subject’s sense of its own lack, inherently exacerbates it.
The obsessional ritual is a response to the law. The more that I give in to
the obsessional ritual, the more I feel like I have not done so well enough.
One can never successfully execute the ritual, which is why one feels com-
pelled to repeat it. In the excess of the repetition that produces a lack, it
becomes comic.6
The law demands that subjects restrain from enjoying themselves and
embrace their status as lacking, but at the same time it offers them a path
to enjoyment through obedience. One can always seek enjoyment through
disobedience, but the real enjoyment lies in the renunciation that comes
from obeying. The pleasures of the Marquis de Sade pale in comparison
with those of Rafael Nadal. The key to the law is the point at which lack
(giving up enjoyment) and excess (enjoying too much) come together.
This is the reason for the law’s comedy. Perhaps obsessional neurosis exists
only to illustrate this dimension of the law for us.
The Critique of Pure Obedience

In order to understand the relationship between law and comedy, we must
reverse our usual way of thinking about the law and excess. On the one
hand, the law clearly interdicts various forms of excessive behavior: one
cannot drive too fast, marry multiple partners, use illicit drugs, assault
one’s neighbor, or spend money that one does not have. The result is a
lacking subject, a subject that cannot act just as it pleases. Whenever we
obey the law, we are in a position of lack. But on the other hand, as the
example of the obsessional shows, the law’s interdictions of excess them-
selves produce not just lack, but also their own form of excess. Subjects do
not just obey the law; they obey the law excessively—which is to say, they
6
The obsessional ritual follows the logic of the superego: the more I capitulate, the more
it demands from me. This is why obsessional rituals do not become less involved over time
but more so.
11 BAD COPS 197
enjoy their obedience. Though there are occasions when one simply obeys
by, say, not murdering one’s teacher, most of the time excess accompanies
obedience. The problem is that the enjoyment that the law creates makes
it almost impossible to obey without excessively obeying. That is, when it
comes to the law, it is hard to avoid acting comically.
Because law always introduces the factor of enjoyment, it is impossible
to obey the law perfectly. One either obeys too much or not enough.
Driving highlights this dilemma more than any other activity. If a police
officer follows me while I am driving, I can arouse the officer’s suspicion
in one of two dramatically opposed ways. Either I can go too fast and dis-
obey the law, in which case I am likely to receive a traffic citation. Or I can
drive too slowly and evince too much obedience, by which I will cause the
officer to suspect that I am drunk or guilty of some other crime. There is
no perfect speed to drive that will not potentially trigger the police offi-
cer’s suspicions, because there is no way to respond to the excess of the
law without invoking enjoyment.7
The encounter with the law disturbs subjects to such an extent because
it produces an alchemy of lack and excess, which is also the structure of
comedy. If the law simply created lacking subjects, they would be able to
deal with this lack and even decide when to transgress the law’s prohibi-
tions. But it is impossible to respond to the law in this reasonable and
detached way. The introduction of excess necessarily complicates how the
subject responds. Obedience ceases to simply involve restriction and
instead produces even more enjoyment for the subject than the transgres-
sion of the law. Most subjects obey rather than disobey not out of fear of
repercussions, but due to the enjoyment that this obedience provides.
Even if they do not go to the lengths of the obsessional, they nonetheless
head down this same path.
The enjoyment associated with the law’s interdiction derives from its
senselessness. Though most laws have a sense and seem reasonable—a
speed limit of 25 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood, the ban on
murder, the restriction on selling cigarettes to minors, and the laws against
theft, for instance—the law itself is nonsensical. If it were not, the subject
7
This is why the police in the United States so often pull over drivers for the crime of
“driving while black.” When they see a black driver, officers often assume that either the
excessive obedience or the disobedience of the law has a clear tie to enjoyment. If non-black
drivers experience the impossible choice of obedience or disobedience when trailed by the
police, the situation becomes exponentially more dangerous for the black driver.
198 T. MCGOWAN
would not enjoy its obedience and thus would not excessively obey. The
nonsensical status of the law is the source of the enjoyment it produces.
Were the law to make sense entirely, it would not trigger the subject’s
enjoyment. Enjoyment is always the enjoyment of a point of nonsense,
enjoyment of what does not fit within the order of the symbolic structure
(Copjec 2002).8
The nonsensical status of the law stems from its absence of any ultimate
foundation. When we search for the root of the justification for law, we
discover only a tautology: we must obey because we must obey. Like the
final reason that a parent gives to a child who continually asks about the
reasons for a specific rule, the law’s final justification is “because it says
so.” Law founds a social order, and no genuine founding gesture can have
a justification in the previous state of affairs. The law relies on a nonsensi-
cal point because this is the only way that it can escape a self-referential
labyrinth of infinite attempts at self-justification, like a dictionary that
defines words through other words that eventually loop back to the
original ones.
This absence of an ultimate justification for the law is why all attempts
to provide such a justification for the institution of law rely on the fantas-
matic construction of a state of nature prior to the emergence of law. In
the case of Thomas Hobbes, the reason for the institution of the law is the
violence that exists without its presence. Without law, according to
Hobbes, there is a war of all against all. He writes, “during the time men
live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that
condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against
every man” (Hobbes 1994, 76). Like many other philosophers of the law,
Hobbes constructs this fantasy of what predates the law in order to show
why we should obey. This account is necessarily fantasmatic because it
comes after the fact of obedience, and its vision of a war of all against all
exists only with the backdrop of the subject’s relation to the existing law.
Even Hobbes cannot know how people lived when they lacked “a com-
mon power to keep them all in awe.” His conception takes obedience and
the current state of society as its starting point and works backward to
justify this obedience.
8
As Joan Copjec puts it, “jouissance flourishes only there where it is not validated by the
Other” (Copjec 2002, 167). Even though the social order depends on the central point of
nonsense, this point remains outside its control, which is why it is a site of enjoyment.
11 BAD COPS 199
The law prohibits just for the sake of the prohibition, not for the sake
of any teleology like ending the war of all against all, as Hobbes assumes.
The law is its only justification, and this justification always comes after the
fact. Once a subject has submitted itself to the law, the justification for the
submission become apparent, but prior to the submission no justification
is possible.9 There is no reason why individuals should submit to the dic-
tates of the law in the first place. One submits because the law demands,
not because the law offers a reason to submit.10 But it is precisely the
senselessness of the law’s structure that provides enjoyment in excessive
obedience. Enjoyment occurs at the point where sense breaks down. The
law offers the subject continuous opportunities for an encounter with this
point of nonsense.
The comedy of the law emerges out of its nonsensical status. The law
governs a world of sense, and yet it is fundamentally nonsensical. The fact
that sense depends on nonsense—this contradictory coincidence of oppo-
sites—is the essence of the law’s comedy. Law is funny because it exces-
sively produces lack, but it does so because it institutes a regime of sense
on the basis of a signifier of nonsense. Hobbes’s rejection of the nonsensi-
cal status of the law leaves him incapable of comedy. But this is also what
attempts to link the law to knowledge necessarily miss.
The Lack of Knowledge

One of the fundamental projects of Spinoza’s philosophy is showing how
the law’s prohibition always has a sense (Spinoza 2001). He wants to
remove the nonsense of the law, which he deems a product of our limited
perspective on it. For this reason, we should call Spinoza the great anti-
comic philosopher. However, the move he makes is a temptation not just
9
The installation of the law effectuates a process that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit or retro-
activity. Though the law comes later temporally, it has the effect of resignifying the era that
gives rise to it, which is why Hobbes can assume the existence of a natural state of war prior
to law coming along.
10
Even Socrates, who devotes his entire existence to questioning, accepts that one must
submit to the law because it is the law. This is the predominant idea in the Crito, the penul-
timate dialogue of recounting the death of Socrates. In this dialogue, Crito and other friends
of Socrates come to him with a plan for escape so that he can avoid the death penalty.
Socrates claims that in the end one owes obedience to the law even if one disagrees with it.
He says, “one must obey the commands of one’s city and country, or persuade it as to the
nature of justice” (Plato 1997, 45). Though Socrates grants the individual the right to per-
suade the state to change the law, if this persuasion fails, obedience must be categorical.
200 T. MCGOWAN
for Spinoza, but for everyone who thinks about the law. It entails a failure
to understand the law as comedy. There is, for Spinoza, no such thing as a
nonsensical law or a prohibition not backed by knowledge. The law is not
excessive but reasonable.
Though the law produces a lacking subject, the lack that it requires is
required for the subject’s own good. Rather than being nonsensical at its
core, the law has a clear purpose: the happiness of those it enjoins to obey.
As Spinoza sees it, the law is nothing but a sensible suggestion that directs
us away from what would harm us and toward what would do us good.11
By theorizing the law in this way, he loses touch entirely with the excessive
dimension of the law and thus with its inherent comedy. The law is no
laughing matter in Spinoza’s thought.
Spinoza’s philosophy has the salutary effect of freeing us from prohibi-
tion. He does so not by eliminating law, as one might expect, but by
interpreting it as a form of knowledge.12 In his brief book on Spinoza,
Gilles Deleuze takes this as Spinoza’s central philosophical preoccupation.
He discusses the rereading of Adam’s original sin, where Spinoza inter-
prets the interdiction of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil as a piece of sensible advice rather than a nonsensical prohibition.
But Adam, like most subjects confronted with the law, is unable to under-
stand. Deleuze writes, “because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that
God morally forbids him something, whereas God only reveals the natural
consequence of ingesting the fruit” (Deleuze 1988, 22). God does not
really prohibit Adam from eating the fruit, but issues a command in order
to assist Adam in avoiding an encounter with a bad object, with an object
that would have deleterious effects on him. Adam’s mistake does not lie in
eating the fruit, but in the fact that, as Deleuze puts it, “he interprets
God’s word as a prohibition” (23). God’s law merely articulates that the
fruit is poisonous. This is the case not just with foundational laws like that
11
If we knew to orient our desire properly, there would be no need for the law. The law
compensates for the limitations of human finitude, which enables us to imagine doing with-
out it. Spinoza states, “Now if men were so constituted by nature as to desire nothing but
what is prescribed by true reason, society would stand in no need of any laws. Nothing would
be required but to teach men true moral doctrine, and they would then act to their own
advantage of their own accord, whole-heartedly and freely” (Spinoza 2001, 63). Freedom
for Spinoza implies freedom from the necessity of the law.
12
To put it in the terms of Jacques Lacan, Spinoza breaks down the divide between S1 (the
master signifier) and S2 (knowledge). Every master signifier is just knowledge passing itself
off as a master signifier.
11 BAD COPS 201
which governs eating the forbidden fruit, but with all laws. Law, in
Spinoza’s philosophy, makes sense and is there to help us along in the
world. We have every reason to obey its strictures. It is only our misinter-
pretation of law that sees nonsense in it.
By doing away with the idea of a nonsensical law or a prohibition,
Spinoza hopes to unleash the possibility of joy. Suffering under prohibi-
tion and the dream of its transgression, we miss the joy of life itself. But if
there is a joy of life itself, no subject has ever had access to it.13 Joy or
enjoyment depends not on perfect knowledge but on nonsense—and the
excess that nonsense provokes. The attempt to see the law as good for us
or as reducible to knowledge actually eliminates what makes the law enjoy-
able and comic.
When one eliminates the nonsense of the law in the way that Spinoza
does, one refigures the law as a trap that one cannot escape. If all laws
make sense and do not involve any nonsense, then resistance to the law
is futile. The comedy of the law is the possibility of breaking from the
law’s hold on us. It is not just that comedy creates distance, but that it
allows us to access the point of the law’s vulnerability, the point where it
relies on the heterogeneity of nonsense. Without the point of nonsense,
the law would function in the form of panoptic power without a gap.14
The reliance of the law on nonsense produces the comedy of the law, but
it also opens up the path to toppling it. This is a path in the greatest liter-
ary work devoted to the law. Thank God Franz Kafka managed to avoid
Spinoza’s influence. If he had been a follower of Spinoza, Kafka would
never have written The Trial, which is the definitive work on the comedy
of the law.
Law on Trial
The difficulty of thinking about the law as inherently comic stems from
the relationship that comedy and comedians typically take up to the law.
Most comedians operate at a distance from the law and often target the
13
In a similar vein, Alexandre Kojève rightly notes that Spinoza’s philosophy leaves noth-
ing unanswered save the possibility of someone writing it. He states, “the Ethics explains
everything except the possibility for a man living in time to write it” (Kojève 1947, 354).
14
In this sense, there is a through line from Spinoza’s conception of law as entirely sensible
to Foucault’s nightmare of the panopticon of total surveillance. Gilles Deleuze is the vanish-
ing mediator between these two positions.
202 T. MCGOWAN
law as the object of their comedy.15 Political leaders regularly receive ridi-
cule from comedians who imitate them or mock their individual foibles.
When those in power try to make jokes, they almost always come across as
either forced or simply unfunny. Though those in power have historically
employed comedians (often known as fools) to amuse them, comedy itself
seems subversive in relation to the law. But the relationship of comedy to
the law is much more complicated. The comedy that subverts the law
actually pales in comparison with the comedy of the law. This is the singu-
lar insight of Kafka.
Kafka is the great comedian of the law. In The Trial (1956), Kafka illus-
trates the law’s excessiveness and shows how this excessiveness accompa-
nies the law’s restrictiveness. The novel associates the excessiveness of the
law with its absence of sense rather than with, as we might expect, the
overzealous application of the law. It begins with Joseph K.’s arrest. The
key occurrence in the novel lies in Kafka’s refusal to divulge the reason for
this arrest to Joseph K. or to the reader. This absence of sense continues
throughout the novel. Not only does Kafka keep both K. and the reader
in the dark about the nature of K.’s crime, but he also extends this lack of
sense to all aspects of the trial. Despite his best efforts, K. can never gain
any insight into how the court functions or even when he is supposed to
report to the authorities for the judiciary process. Though Kafka does not
provide the reader with more information about the law than K., he does
not write the novel in first-person narration. The third-person narration
suggests that the senselessness of the law is not just the result of K.’s lim-
ited perspective, but inheres within the law itself. There is no one behind
the law who really understands and who provides it with a sense. Instead,
nonsense permeates the law even as the law gives the social order a sense.
Just after the police initially come and inform him that he is under
arrest, K. receives a message that he must report to the court on Sunday.
This message—and the scene that ensues—reveals more than any other
moment in the novel the comedy inherent in the law. The sequence shows
that the law is replete with gaps: the message is completely ambiguous
(and does not even provide an exact time for the appointment), and the
court itself is hidden in an anonymous building that looks just like the
tenements that surround it. K. guesses that he should appear at nine in the
15
In recent memory, Lenny Bruce is the preeminent example of a comedian taking up an
adversarial relationship to the law, which resulted in his conviction on obscenity charges just
before his death.
11 BAD COPS 203
morning, and when he enters the building he has to search for the Court
of Inquiry, which does not even have a sign indicating its location. Inside
the building, there is no information about what room the court occupies.
K. must search throughout the building until he finds it hidden away on
the fifth floor behind an anonymous apartment. While K. remains outside
the Court of Inquiry, it is a minimalist entity that appears indistinguishable
from its surroundings and thus is almost impossible to find. When he
enters, however, the excessiveness of the law quickly overwhelms him. The
difference between the law’s external appearance and its internal function-
ing—between its lack and its excess—is the source of its comic status.
When he finally arrives at the Court of Inquiry, K. finds himself amid a
situation that he cannot understand. Kafka places the reader in K.’s posi-
tion, despite the third-person narration. Rather than asking the location of
the Court of Inquiry, K. asks about someone named Lanz. Despite the
opaqueness of this question, a woman in the building tells him that he
should enter the room in front of him. Once inside, he sees two throngs
of people speaking among themselves and not noticing his entrance. But
when the Examining Magistrate sees him, he scolds K. for his tardiness.
The teeming crowd makes it impossible for K. to stand before the
Examining Magistrate without pushing against the table in front of him
and possibly knocking the Magistrate from his platform. After K.’s initial
defiant response to the Magistrate’s comment about his lateness earned
the applause of one of the groups in the room, his response to the
Magistrate’s first question about his occupation earns him their guffaws.
When the Magistrate asks K. if he is a house painter, he responds that he
works as a bank clerk. One side of the crowd laughs so hard that even K.
himself begins to laugh, without having any idea about the source of
the humor.
Kafka offers no suggestion why K.’s statement revealing his occupation
is funny, and this absence of information bespeaks the nonsense at the
heart of the law. Though K. and most of us think of the law as reasonable,
it exists for the sake of the enjoyment that it produces, not for the sake of
creating a just or equitable society. From the moment K. enters the court-
room, he believes that the two groups of people represent two distinct
positions relative to him. When he speaks, he recognizes that he earns
applause from one side and silence from the other. But near the conclusion
of his speech, K. sees the two factions begin to intermingle, suggesting
that every capacity that K. has for judging the nature and intention of the
law is inadequate.
204 T. MCGOWAN
Kafka does not simply present the law as nonsensical, however. He also
sexualizes it in order to emphasize its excessiveness. A man begins groping
a woman during the middle of K.’s speech in front of the court, and no
officials attempt to end it. The crowd actually blocks K. from intervening
to stop the incident and restore order. The disorder of this sexual assault
leads to K.’s recognition that he has no understanding at all about how the
law functions. When he returns to the Court of Inquiry for what he
assumes will be the continuation of his trial, K. finds no one there except
the washerwoman who was assaulted the previous week. Again, she offers
insight into the excessiveness of the law, this time by allowing K. secretly
to examine the law books. When he opens the first book, he does not find
a list of laws and their justifications, but rather obscene pictures. The law
books are pornographic because the law itself, like pornography, is exces-
sive. Though actual law books do not contain lewd pictures, Kafka’s pre-
sentation of the law as a site of excess and a site of absence captures
perfectly the structure of the law and the source of its comedy.
Like most of us, K. does not see the comedy of the law because he views
it as a substantial entity, a self-identical entity. He believes that there must
be someone behind the workings of the law who really knows why the law
acts in the way that it does. He tells the court, “there can be no doubt that
behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case,
behind my arrest and today’s interrogation, there is a great organization at
work” (Kafka 1956, 45). If there were “a great organization at work,”
then the law would have a clear sense and would lack comedy. But the law
has no ground that supports it. Its declarations must create the ground
that authorizes them, and this paradox is the source of the law’s comedy.
K.’s lack of a sense of humor prevents him from recognizing this paradox.
Kafka allows the reader to laugh at the law in a way that K. cannot, and it
is this failure that dooms him throughout the novel. K.’s inability to dis-
cover the comedy of the law is not an isolated failure. This is an inability
that most of us share, because we fail to see how the law is not self-identical
but contradicts itself. This is what we would see if we paid more attention
to police officers, especially as they figure in comedies.
Eating Doughnuts
The comic image of the police officer captures perfectly the contradictory
status of law itself. All police officers harbor excess because they have a
license to kill in the course of their duty upholding the law. All police
11 BAD COPS 205
fficers are potentially the bad lieutenant. The police can respond to crim-
o
inal situations excessively without any repercussions. The synecdoche for
the police officers’ excess is the gun that most of them carry. At any time,
this gun can serve to express the law’s excess relative to the social order
that it governs. In contrast with other subjects, the police officer is not
subject to the law, but exceeds its restrictions by serving as its representa-
tive.16 The police officer is the point at which the enforcement of the law
reveals how the law exceeds itself. For instance, in order to proscribe mur-
der, the law must endow a police officer with the prerogative to kill. This
figure is inherently one of excess, which is not in itself comic.
The police officers’ excess renders them ripe for comedy. All that one
must do to create a comic cop is to show the officer’s excess correspond-
ing to lack. Revealing the excessive cop as a lacking subject is always funny.
The image of a police officer stopping for doughnuts generates comedy by
highlighting the banal and stereotypical desire that animates this figure of
excess. The desire for a doughnut testifies to the police officer’s lack, espe-
cially when this desire blocks the performance of the officer’s duty.
The history of cinema relies on the trope of the comic cop as much as
any other. Though Charlie Chapin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd
dominate the comic world of silent cinema, the first genuine comic figures
were police officers—the Keystone Cops created by Mack Sennett.17 They
predate the emergence of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. In a series of films made
between 1912 and 1917, Sennett depicts the Keystone Cops as the source
for incredible comedy. They had the starring role in a small series of short
films, but these films created a pattern for the comic cop that has endured
throughout the century following their initial appearance.
The paradigmatic Keystone Cops film is The Bangville Police (Henry
Lehrman 1913). In this film, the Farm Girl (Mabel Normand) calls the
police when she hears strangers in the barn. She barricades herself in the
house and calls the Police Chief (Fred Mace). From his initial appearance,
the Police Chief is the source of comedy. The phone call startles him, and
as he tries to get dressed to respond to the call, he tumbles around the
room and allows the window to bang down on his head when he looks out
16
The inherent excessiveness that we associate with police officers explains why juries
almost never convict them of crimes even when the evidence is overwhelming.
17
There is a link between the Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin. They appear as second-
ary characters in Chaplin’s first feature-length comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Sennett
1914). It is likely that this film is also the first feature-length comedy in the history of cinema,
though such claims can never be made with complete assurance.
206 T. MCGOWAN
to call to the other officers. As he drives to the house, the police car breaks
down and shoots steam everywhere, so that the cops who go on foot to
the house arrive before the Chief in the car. In the end, however, all of
their efforts come to nothing, because there is no crime. All that they wit-
ness is the birth of a new calf at the farm. Here, the individual failures of
the law are funny, but the final joke is its ultimate uselessness.
The Keystone Cops are not the endpoint of police comedy in cinema.
They set the standard that many emulate—from Easy Street (Charlie
Chaplin 1917) and Ask a Policeman (Marcel Varnel 1939) to A Shot in the
Dark (Blake Edwards 1964) and Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham
1977) to Beverly Hills Cop (Martin Brest 1984) and The Heat (Paul Feig
2013). In each case, the films derive humor from the excess of the law
inherent in the figure of the cop encountering the lack of subjectivity itself.
Police officers are prime targets for comedy because they often reveal
the comedy of the law itself when they identify too fully with it. Or in
police comedy, we see how they continue to act just like other subjects
despite being identified with the law. The achievement of the comedy The
Heat is that it depicts both of these relationships of the police to the law
in its two main characters. The film shows FBI agent Ashburn (Sandra
Bullock) partnered with local Boston police officer Mullins (Melissa
McCarthy) in order to capture a notorious drug kingpin operating in the
Boston area.
The comedy in the film derives from the contrast between the two
characters in their relation to the law. Ashburn overidentifies with the law
and outshines all of her fellow agents. Her excessive devotion to the law
highlights the lack in her existence outside her work as an agent. She has
no romantic partner, no friends, and no social life. She does not even have
her own pet, but instead lures the neighbor’s pet into her house to fill this
lack. Her ability to do her job without a hitch leaves her without col-
leagues, friends, or even a pet. The excess of the law generates comedy
through the lack that it produces.18
While Ashburn is too excessively a police officer, Mullins does not take
up the part enough. Despite belonging to the police force, she does not
dress, act, or talk like a figure of the law. She is overweight and dresses
worse than any of the criminals she pursues. She curses at her captain and
18
The contrast between Ashburn and the bad lieutenant is that Ashburn’s excesses as an
investigator have a clear corresponding lack that the film highlights, whereas Bad Lieutenant
keeps the cop’s excesses apart from any lack.
11 BAD COPS 207
mocks the size of his balls, lives in a broken-down apartment, and drives
an old jalopy. And yet, her departures from typical police comportment do
not affect her ability as a police officer. In one of the film’s funniest scenes,
a man hiring a prostitute mistakes Mullins for a drug dealer and thus fails
to recognize her as a threat. Like Ashburn, she is the most capable police
officer at her station. Mullins uses her lack to work as a more effective
officer, while Ashburn becomes lacking because of her hyper-
professionalism. They are both comic figures, but their intersection multi-
plies the comedy.19
The comedy of the police derives from the comic status of the law: it
demands lack through the imposition of excess. It is impossible to respond
to this demand without having recourse to excess as a subject. But the
situation for the police is even more difficult. Police officers are perfect
targets for comedy, because they must carry out the excess of the law with-
out revealing themselves as lacking subjects. Any time that they do so, a
comic moment will erupt, as when Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers)
finds himself undercover at a nudist colony in A Shot in the Dark, or when
Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) trails a line of toilet paper out of
his pants in Smokey and the Bandit. In such scenes, we see how the exces-
siveness of the law must manifest itself through a lack.
The police rarely play a vital role in tragedy. While Brabantio’s soldiers
do come to bring Othello to justice in Shakespeare’s play and while other
figures of authority jail Iago later in that same play, they do not serve a
tragic purpose. Tragedy cannot offer an exploration of the law, because it
is predicated on the tragic hero’s disdain for the limit that the law repre-
sents. Comedy, in contrast, derives from the ambivalence that the law
introduces. Just as the law is comic, comedy needs the law. The excess of
law produces lacking subjects, but their inability to respond to law without
turning to excess themselves generates a comic situation.
If the police are the perfect comic figures, it is because there is no way
to act as a perfect representative of the law. One always goes too far or not
far enough, and this inevitable failure to hit the proper mark in relation to
the law is always comic. It is not a coincidence that the greatest comic
novel of the twentieth century enacts a struggle with the law. It is also not
a coincidence that Kafka was unable to complete this novel. With the law,
19
Ashburn and Mullins function like a chiasmus of police comedy. For Ashburn, excess as
a police officer produces her social lack, while for Mullins, her social lack produces her excess
as a police officer.
208 T. MCGOWAN
one never knows whether one has hit the mark or not. One could always
say more, but one always also stops short. The best joke necessarily
ends too soon.
References
Brest, Martin. 1984. Beverly Hills Cop. USA.
Chaplin, Charlie. 1917. Easy Street. USA.
Chelsom, Peter. 2001. Serendipity. USA.
Copjec, Joan. 2002. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Trans. Robert Hurley. San
Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.
Edwards, Blake. 1964. A Shot in the Dark. USA.
Feig, Paul. 2013. The Heat. USA.
Ferrara, Abel. 1992. Bad Lieutenant. USA.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan, Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing.
Kafka, Franz. 1956. The Trial, Trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir.
New York: Schocken.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Ed. Raymond
Queneau. Paris: Gallimard.
Lacan, Jacques. 1991. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, Trans. Silvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lehrman, Henry. 1913. The Bangville Police. USA.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Ed. Rodney
Needham, Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney
Needham. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
McGowan, Todd. 2017. Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Needham, Hal. 1977. Smokey and the Bandit. USA.
Plato. 1997. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. In Plato Complete Works, Ed.
John M. Cooper, Trans. George Maximilian Anthony Grube. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett.
Russo, Anthony, and Joe Russo. 2018. Avengers: Infinity War. USA.
Sennett, Mack. 1914. Tillie’s Punctured Romance. USA.
Spinoza, Baruch. 2001. Theological-Political Treatise, Trans. Samuel Shirley.
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Varnel, Marcel. 1939. Ask a Policeman. UK.
PART IV
Performing Comedy
CHAPTER 12
Richard Pryor, the Conedian
Alexi Kukuljevic
A conedian is what Jorge Luis Borges could term an imaginary being. In

the Preface to the 1967 edition to his modern bestiary, The Book of
Imaginary Beings, Borges reminds us that the book is structurally and
thus “unavoidably incomplete,” and capable of infinite growth. He invites
prospecting readers “in Columbia or Paraguay to send us the names, accu-
rate description, and most conspicuous traits of their local monsters.” The
monsters that Borges has in mind could include “Prince Hamlet, the
point, the line, the surface, n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes,
all generic terms, and perhaps each one of us and the godhead. In brief,
the sum of all things—the universe” (Borges 1969, 12). In what follows,
I propose to include the monstrous hilarity that is a Richard Pryor—that
singular creature I am calling a conedian—in this bestiary.
* * *
In the online version of Hilton Als’ article “Pryor Love: The Life and
Times of America’s Prophet of Race,” there is a series of black-and-white
photographs that accompanies the text, documenting one of Richard
Pryor’s early, largely improvised, stand-up routines performed in the East
A. Kukuljevic (*)
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_12
212 A. KUKULJEVIC
Fig. 12.1 A conedian belongs to the humaniry, screenshot, 2018 (Courtesy of

the author)
Village. The caption reads: “Pryor riffing and digressing in 1964 at Café
wha?: ‘No one was funnier, dearer, darker, heavier, stronger, more radical,’
Lily Tomlin says of the retired conedian. ‘He was everything. And his
humaniry was just glorious’” (McCluskey 2008, 245–267) (Fig. 12.1).1
Like slips of the tongue, there are typos and there are typos. Arising
from the muddle of language’s enactment as the froth of its debris, a typo
can signify something (as when the “r” of “bark” finds itself a “l”), it may
signify nothing (apart from the lapse of the editorial gaze), or it may sig-
nify some nothing, returning us to the oddness of its place. In this instance,
I initially took the above typographical error—humaniry—for some noth-
ing: a brilliant portmanteau construction. I simply passed over the “n” of
conedian, pulled along by meaning’s deceptive lure. Whereas the missing
piece of “m” did not at first register, the “r” of humaniry stuck out. The
“r” registered; or, rather, the “t” slumped over. Having lost its verticality,
the limp typographical form of the “r” made my eye stumble, but it did
not register as an error. A bit of stupidity, perhaps, like a joke that falls flat,
1
The essay was originally published as Hilton Als, “A Pryor Love: The Life and Times of
America’s Comic Prophet of Race,” The New Yorker, September 13, 1999. https://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/13/a-pryor-love. For textual citations of this essay, I
refer to the following edition: “A Pryor Love: The Life and Times of America’s Comic
Prophet of Race (1999)” (McCluskey 2008, 245–267).
12 RICHARD PRYOR, THE CONEDIAN 213
but not an idle mistake; the “r” seemed right at home in being out of
place. Its impropriety seemed proper: the evidence of wit’s willing effort
to eschew language in the hope of designating a singularity; in this case,
the aberrant form of Richard Pryor’s strange comic substance tasked
impossibly with somehow containing this pile of attributes—funny, dear,
dark, heavy, strong, radical. Far from embodying something human, all
too human, Pryor’s comic art comprises a universe populated by singular
and vulnerable creatures, a humaniry, unable to lean, let alone rely, on the
generalization: humanity. If most comedians belong to the commonplace
of humanity, then Richard Pryor is no comedian; he is a conedian. The
conedian says: I belongs to the humaniry.
“R” is for Richard, marking his other than human place. “N” is here an
“m” that is missing that part that completes it. “N” here names the
division of the “m,” presenting the place that the comedian occupies as
an absentee.
* * *
Most subjects can count on being human, or at least being recognized as

such. Lily Tomlin’s assertion of Richard’s “glorious humanity” seems
geared at reassurance. Having worked with him closely on “Juke and
Opal,” which aired on NBC in 1974, Tomlin no doubt saw at first hand
Pryor’s improvisational abandon, his total commitment to the thing pre-
sented, his identification with the object that could threaten his very
being, leaving the place of his subject fully exposed. And this vulnerability
made him something unhinged, but hopelessly dear, even sweet.2 One of
his closest friends and longtime collaborators, Paul Mooney, notes
Richard’s childlike innocence, his at times total lack of pretense, that
makes his narcissism, which would otherwise be insufferable, somehow
forgivable, soliciting the desire to protect Richard from himself (Mooney
2009). He is the kind of figure who would go in to rob a store only to so
2
Pryor confessed that he was in “awe” of Lily’s performances, of their strange sensuality.
Here is Als: “Sensuality implies a certain physical abandonment, an acknowledgement of the
emotional mess that oozes out between the seams that hold our public selves together—and
an understanding of the metaphors that illustrate that disjunction. (One of Tomlin’s early
audition techniques was to tap-dance with taps taped to the soles of her bare feet.) It is dif-
ficult to find that human untidiness—what Pryor called ‘the madness’ of everyday life—in
the formulaic work now being done by the performers who ostensibly work in the same vein
as Pryor and Tomlin” (McCluskey 2008, 249).
214 A. KUKULJEVIC
thoroughly fumble his role that the shopkeeper himself, exasperated,

would end up showing him how to hold and cock the weapon just to get
the stickup over with.3 “Nothing comes off real smooth, just when I think
it will,” he tells David Fenton, “I’m just doomed…” (Felton 1974).
A sense of doom pervades the whole of Pryor’s performances, even
those early performances in which he was vying with Bill Cosby (two years
his elder) to be a “cross-over” comedian. Wearing the incongruity of his
being on his sleeve, he sympathized with the dereliction of things, the
uneasiness of being a thing that must suffer the indignity of having to
mean something: a worm condemned to the fisherman’s hook. Pryor con-
structs a comical subject that suffers from its sense: unable to hook the
worm, let alone cast the line, without feigned nonchalance. For he identi-
fies too closely with the worm doomed to the fate of being fish bait.
Brilliantly staging a conversation between two worms in a can, in an
appearance on Ed Sullivan, October 9, 1966, Pryor has “Herbie,” a
tough, wizened old worm, tell his hysterical companion that he “has one
chance in a million… to wiggle with a limp.” One has to move a limb that
one lacks, assuming the form of absence (an injured limb) whose presence
puts that form of the subject (a worm) into question: a worm then that is
not a worm, appearing as a worm that lacks that which makes it desirable,
thus slipping from the gaze of the human who seeks to hook it.
Rather than speaking of his “humanity,” Tomlin could have referred to
Pryor in the same terms that she refers to “some of the very real characters
from her past”: “They were all like humans,” she tells David Felton
(McCluskey 2008, 216).4 To be like a human is to be not quite a human.
This creature may bear a likeness to humanity, but stripped of all human
pretense this creature does not measure up to its form: a human without
its humanity. A mussel without its shell. As the French might say, a moule
3
I am here alluding to both David Felton’s account of Pryor’s fumbling attempt to load
and cock a recently purchased weapon and an early episode in Pryor’s life (Felton 1974).
After having dropped out of school in the eighth grade, he joined up with some hoodlums
and at one point they tried to rob the local store. Catching him with his hand in the till, the
shopkeeper simply scolded him, telling him never to return and that he was going to tell his
father (Pryor 2018, 60).
4
Her statement in its entirety runs as follows: “They were all like humans. Everybody had
these incredible highs and terrible lows, everybody was afraid of something. They could be
real petty and ugly, or they could be just real beautiful and uplifting and have wonderful little
quirky moments where they made you laugh and other moments where you just hated them.
And I saw that nobody knew anything. Nobody knew any answer to anything” (McCluskey
2008, 216).
without its moule; a form (moule: mussel/form) without its form. Some
thing, perhaps, not too pretty to look at, that has come undone, but whose
fragility and imperfection make it “real beautiful,” “quirky,” and “won-
derful.” A ruinous puddle of existence, this thing that speaks is uncertain
as to who let alone what it is.
“Pryor embodied,” Als writes, “the voice of injured humanity”
(McCluskey 2008, 251). Humanity again, but this time injured. The met-
onym is appropriate: “injured humanity speaks…” But let us put the full
stress on the injury, this adjectival wound, that makes a hole in this form.
If form indicates the “wholeness” of humanity, the injury inflicts a wound
on the “w”—this letter is lopped off like a limb, leaving a phantom in its
place that marks its absence: the hole that is left. If the human was posi-
tioned in relation to its humanity, this letteral loss positions the human in
relation to a present absence: the hole as the absence of the whole. The
hole speaks in injured humanity. It serves to separate the whole from the
form of its wholeness. No longer a part, a human has no share in human-
ity; such a subject becomes an absentee and the hole that remains (marked
by the voice of injury) leaves it, the subject, deformed. When the “w” is
missing, when it is an absentee, we can speak of the humaniry: the form
that injury takes when it succeeds in making its lack of form into an object
of absence, embodied in the senseless being of a laugh, like a letter that has
been misplaced.
Richard Pryor may be like a human, but he is certainly not just a human.
Or perhaps just that: a human and nothing more. Just a human without
pretension to humanity. We should not be too quick to recognize human-
ity in the voice of injury, as if the creature’s conformity to this vague gen-
erality could suffice to grasp its singularity. Apart from the occasional
lapse, Pryor did not find humanity particularly endearing. Freud only did
on occasion; Nietzsche certainly did not. Mel Brooks, who does not hesi-
tate to call Pryor the greatest comic of all time, likens him to the
Übermensch.5 However, his genius rather derives from his sensitivity to
being an Untermensch. Here Als is spot on when he identifies Pryor’s
“self-loathing” as being that feature that makes him so “interesting.”
5
“‘Richard has almost Nietzschean ideals of what is good, what is powerful, what is supe-
rior,’ says Brooks. ‘He just reports terribly accurately and does not stretch. When he does a
junkie or he does a drunk, he does ’em fuckin’ right on; I mean, that’s it. He gets all the
nuances; he gets the breathing right. You say, “I know that guy, that’s true.” And that’s
blindingly brilliant and amazing’” (Felton 1974).
216 A. KUKULJEVIC
Pryor’s first memory, after all, is being vomited on by his drunk aunt
Martha (Pryor 2018, 33).6 Als writes:
Given how much he did to make black pride part of American popular cul-
ture, it is arresting to see how at times his blackness seemed to feel like an
ill-fitting suit. One gets the sense that he calls himself a “nigger” as a kind of
preemptive strike, because he never knew when the term would be thrown
at him by whites, by other blacks, or by the women he loved. Because he
didn’t match any of the prevailing stereotypes of “cool” black maleness, he
carved out an identity for himself that was not only “nigger” but “sub-
nigger.” (McCluskey 2008, 252)
Als suggests that this identity is a protective mechanism, a “pre-

emptive” strike that inoculates the subject to the determinate form of its
appearance. He preemptively separates who he is from what he is, separat-
ing the hole that marks his deformity (the manner of his appearance) from
the form that places it in relation to the whole—that is, humanity—and
gives it recognizable or meaningful shape. It is the singular power of his
comedy to lay bare this cut between the who and the what. A human with-
out humanity.
In this sense, he is perhaps the greatest inheritor of Jonathan Swift’s
misanthropic wit: “the true initiator” of an attitude that André Breton
defines as that of black humor. “Swift’s eyes were, it seems,” Breton writes,
“so changeable that they could turn from light blue to black, from the
candid to the terrible,” and it is his capacity to internalize a truly contra-
dictory range of feelings that allows him at once to love the human, but to
truly hate humanity (Breton 1997, 4). As Swift writes in an infamous let-
ter to Alexander Pope:
I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love
is towards individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love
Counsellor Such-a-One, and Judge Such-a-One: so with physicians—I will
not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest.
But principally I hate and detest the animal called man, although I heartily
love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I
have governed myself for many years. (Swift 1801, 37–38)
6
He follows up this revelation with the following joke: “Family is a mixed blessing. You’re
glad to have one, but it’s also like receiving a life sentence for a crime you didn’t commit”
(Pryor 2018, 33).
Swift pits the proper name against the generality of their form, their
so-called humanity. This allows Swift to uncouple his hatred of the
Anthropos from a cynical desire to capitalize on the fragility of the “topsy-
turvy creature.” If the form of humanity afflicts this creature with a ten-
dency to aspire to little more than “the Possession of being well-deceived;
The Serene Peaceful State of being a Fool Among Knaves,” Swift’s com-
mitment to the singular manner of its appearance imbues his misanthropy
with a keen sense for injustice (Swift 1958, 174). As Breton duly notes,
“The man who more than anyone despised the human race was no less
possessed by a frantic need for justice” (Breton 1997, 4).
Similarly to Swift, Richard Pryor does not concern himself chiefly with
what this thing called a Richard is. He is too schooled in the comical
device of the slip, the trip, or the fall to be deceived by its form. The who
that trips is out of step with its what. The passage from humanity qua form
to its singular manifestation, a human, does not consist in a leap, but a
vertiginous fall. And as comedy teaches: the one who falls never lands on
their feet. The comic animal cannot maintain its verticality. As Jerry
Lewis—one of Pryor’s early influences—suggests at the beginning of his
film Cracking Up, staying on one’s feet assumes that one can get a grip.
The place of the human that makes it slip defines a form that does not
conform to its humanity. In a parenthesis, Benjamin says this of Kafka:
“Being an animal presumably meant to him only to have given up human
form and human wisdom from a kind of shame—as shame may keep a
gentleman who finds himself in a disreputable tavern from wiping his clean
glass” (Benjamin 1969, 144).
* * *
Pryor’s sense of reality was too exceptional to be accepted as such. Even as

late as 1977, Joyce Maynard could author a New York Times article in
which she writes, “Pryor has been given to saying that he was raised in a
brothel, which is evidently not the case” (Henry and Henry 2013, 6).7
Her “evidently” offers no evidence. Perhaps, she presumed that if it could
indeed be the case, then she should not and therefore would not find him
funny, since that him would be too serious to be a laughing matter. In an
interview with Ebony magazine after the release in 1967 of Harry
Belafonte’s documentary A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in
7
See also Maynard (1977).
218 A. KUKULJEVIC
America, Pryor was asked about his upbringing and he answered candidly
that he was raised “in a house of prostitution” until the age of 15. The
interviewer responded that she was “shocked by his lie.” Breaking into
“hysterical laughter,” and implored to be serious, he responded: “Your
serious and my serious are two different seriouses” (Saul 2014, 170).8
Pryor’s “serious” is too serious to be taken seriously.9 Yet, Pryor’s
refusal to disavow the “too serious” makes his performance a challenge to
the very form of seriousness. “People think I’m funny,” Pryor would say.
“But that shit ain’t true. I ain’t funny. I’m a serious mother” (Saul 2014,
256).10 Comedy will not be situated as an exception to the serious, but
concern itself with the seriousness of the exception. It is one of Pryor’s
convictions that the utterly “serious” can only be approached through
humor, since humor, particularly black humor, refuses the meaning that
the form of seriousness assigns to a traumatic event.
Like Pryor’s recasting of Dracula’s fear of the cross, as an “allergy to
bullshit,” Pryor’s comedy is allergic to pretense. In an extract from his
performance on Ed Sullivan from November 27, 1966, he does an imper-
sonation of a snob whose face passes through a series of forms of snobbish-
ness, each more contorted than the next, before the gesture’s “snobbish”
significance begins to implode on itself (Fig. 12.2).
The snob’s heightened pretense to refinement, as Pryor imagines him
standing in judgment of his own clumsiness, is pushed to an exaggerated
extreme, finally collapsing into idiocy. By exaggerating the snob’s formal
pretense, he lays bare the way in which the subject manifest (the snob)
depends upon the form of its manner (snobbishness). Destroying this
dependence, the snob having lost its pretense collapses into a series of
deformations: from manner to mannerism to full retardation. Without its
pretense, it loses the unity of its form, it decomposes. The truth of pretense
8
See “Beyond Laughter: zany comic Richard Pryor seeks to solve his own enigma” in
Ebony, September 1967, 87, as cited in Saul (2014, 170).
9
Pryor is interested in the way in which truth can put into question one’s belief in it. In
Furious Cool, David and Joe Henry report a story that Eldridge Cleaver tells of how the Black
Panther Party was given a car by a white man in Berkeley that had Florida license plates.
“Once, an Oakland cop stopped him demanding to know who’s car it was. Cleaver told him
that a white man from Florida had donated it to the Black Panther Party. ‘You expect me to
believe that story?’ the cop said. ‘No white man in his right mind would give the Black
Panthers a car.’ Cleaver had a ready reply. ‘Maybe this white man is crazy’” (Henry and
Henry 2013, 116).
10
From “John Williams interview with Claude Brown,” recorded July 29, 1983, Box 171
John A. Williams Papers, University of Rochester, as cited in Saul (2014, 252).
Fig. 12.2 The ultimate in snobbism (Ed Sullivan, November 27, 1966), 2018
(Courtesy of the author)
thus lies in its inadequacy; that is, the inadequation between the form of its
manner (snobbism) and the manner of its form (its material inscription).
In the second of three interviews with Barbara Walters, who made a
career on the pretense of being serious, she says:
Walters: When you’re onstage…see, it’s hard for me to say. I was going
to say, you talk about niggers. I can’t…you can say it. I can’t say
it.
Pryor: You just said it.
Walters: Yeah, but I feel so…
Pryor: You said it very good.
Walters: …uncomfortable.
Pryor: Well, good. You said it pretty good.
Walters: O.K.
Pryor: That’s not the first time you said it. (Laughter). (McCluskey
2008, 251–252)
220 A. KUKULJEVIC
Pryor makes Walters uneasy in her own fluency, her pretense to finding
it “hard to say.” He makes us focus on her disavowal—“I was going to
say” and “it’s hard for me to say”—which rhetorically creates a space
where she can say it without saying it, placing her at ease, because she is
“uneasy” saying it. What Pryor makes her avow, however, is not just the
fact of what she says (“you just said it”), but the pretension of her diffi-
culty: “You said it very good” and “That’s not the first time you said it.”
Pryor himself would attribute his sensitivity to bullshit to growing up
in Peoria, Illinois, raised in large part in the home of his grandmother,
Marie Carter Pryor Bryant, which doubled as a brothel. She was the
Madame, who he called “Mama,” and whose reassuring wisdom ran as
follows: “They can kill you, but can’t eat you.” Perhaps, she had Dick
Gregory’s joke in mind: “Last time I was down south I walked into this
restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said: ‘We don’t serve
colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people.
Bring me a whole fried chicken’” (Haggins 2007, 18–19). The recurrent
figure of the bully in Pryor’s work throws into question his grandmother’s
axiom: “After school I’m going to bite off your foot! And he usually had
an old shoe in his mouth.” Humiliation for Pryor serves the function of
dismemberment.
* * *
Pryor’s suspicion of the notion of the “human” came in the fourth grade
at Irving Elementary School. Pryor recalls giving a girl he had a crush on
a “scratchboard”—a version of Freud’s Wunderblock (mystic writing
pad)—as a gift, “a token of his affection.” Her father stormed into the
classroom the next day, asking the teacher which “‘little nigger’” gave his
daughter the present. On Pryor being identified by the teacher, the father
yelled, “‘Nigger, don’t you ever give my daughter anything’” (Pryor
2018, 51). This experience, Pryor stresses, of utter humiliation “cut six
inches off” his self-esteem, providing him with an object lesson in the
occlusion that structures the form of humanity’s appearance. “That was
my indoctrination to the black experience in America,” Pryor writes. The
absence of the signifier “white” between “my” and “daughter” puts the
assumption of Richard’s “humanity” in question by putting the form of
his appearance into question. Forced to fill in the missing signifier, a young
Richard becomes painfully aware of what he is not allowed to share, and
what he will not be allowed to forget, namely that missing signifier,
“white,” that makes his difference count for nothing, making his belong-
ing to humanity provisional. Marked as a “black” his share in humanity’s
wholeness can be rescinded, just as the signifier of her “whiteness” can go
unremarked; she is just a little girl, unquestionably human.
Pryor describes this episode as the symbolic institution of his social
place. The N-word here functions as a signifying cut that has no meaning,
but institutes his place through an excision: “If I was four and half feet tall
then, the girl’s daddy cut six inches off. Zap. Six inches of self-esteem
gone.” Indiscernibly material and spiritual, the place he occupied was
forcefully vacated by the word’s violence, leaving a hole, a six-inch gash, in
the form of his appearance. If before this encounter he could say “My eyes
didn’t see any one color” (my emphasis), after it he could say “I knew what
was what” (Pryor 2018, 53). To know what is what is to know how to
“see” the absent presence of the “one,” which allows for the formal deter-
mination between what appears and what does not appear. To apprehend
“what is what” is a peculiar idiom that equates knowledge with vacancy,
tautology. To know what is what is to apprehend the formality that struc-
tures a given situation: organizing what can be said and what cannot be
said, seen and unseen, the necessary and the contingent. If it is necessary
to maintain the form of humanity, this form is secured only through a
violence that positions a black subject in its place, making it sustain the
difference between symbolic and real. The violence serves to protect the
invisibility of being white, its spiritual place, its pretense to invisibility. To
see the humanity in somebody is to see right through them, to treat them
as colorless, as a stand-in for white. To know what is what is to know that
humanity includes you provisionally.
The intercession of her father cuts the presumption of a relation, serv-
ing to protect the form of his daughter’s humanity. His provisional place
as human has been liquidated. He is not a human who is black, but as
black he can be summarily stripped of the form of his humanity. Excised
from the propriety of his place, he can no longer presume to own the for-
mal place of his existence. He is made to appear improper. The structural
and necessary illusion of being properly placed is laid bare, but only
expelled from consciousness through a violence that forces the eye to avert
its gaze from the ruinous puddle of existence. The aim of humiliation is to
strip the subject of its form. The accident of form can become accidental,
rendering “necessary” what is in fact irreparably contingent.
The impropriety of his place as black makes the form of his appearance
radically precarious. His contingency, being black, can be made contingent,
222 A. KUKULJEVIC
while her contingency, being white, is made necessary. What is implied by

the girl’s father’s statement, and institutionally reinforced by the teacher’s
failure to put that discourse in question, is a difference in value between the
human and humanity. This arbitrary, and wholly contingent, difference is
supported by a qualitative accident (white/black), whose opposition can
only be produced through the production of accidents: where black’s rela-
tion to the form of its appearance is made accidental. As Pryor jokes with
deadly seriousness:
Cops put a hurting on your ass man. They really degrade you. White folks
don’t believe that shit, don’t believe that cops degrade… [breaking into his
white voice whine] “Ah come on those beatings, those people were resist-
ing arrest. I’m tired of this harassment of police officers.” Cause the police
live in your neighborhood, see. And you be knowing them as officer
Timson. [Back to a slightly deeper white voice] “Hello officer Timson,
going to go bowling tonight? Ah yes, nice Pinto you have… huhuhaah.”
Niggers don’t know ’em like that. See white folks get a ticket. They pull
over. “Hey, officer nice to be of some help, eh oh”… Nigger’s gotta be like,
I-am-reaching-into-my-pocket-for-my-license… ’cause-I-don’t-wanna-be-
no-motherfuckin-accident! (Pryor 1974)
The white’s relation to the cop is one in which they can structurally
share a joke, where officer Timson can make fun of the white man’s Pinto.
One’s class position can be poked fun at, but the positionality of the Pinto
owner does not make him a target. The accidental, the car one drives, does
not lead to an accident. Yet, the black, precisely because he can always be
positioned as “a nigger” by officer Timson, has to forgo the ease of the
joke, assuming a staccato rhythm to ensure that each gesture is in place,
any suddenness of movement is reduced, enunciating his language with
utter precision in an effort to guarantee that each phoneme achieves maxi-
mal clarity and distinctness. The presence of the cop forces language to
become purely indexical, a language of signs whose referential play must
be stripped of all ambiguity. For language to slip, as signifiers are inclined
to do, entails that the accidental can become an accident, making the form
of blackness accidentality. To walk, or to talk, without slipping is an
impossible recipe, and one which eliminates all humor. The very possibil-
ity of Witz, of the joke, must be liquidated, since its play marks the subject
for death and the black subject becomes the literalization of the signifier’s
vocation, the literalization of the accidental in the form of an “accident,”
and where the slips that make funniness possible become deadly serious.
Subject to signifiers that can excise the place of one’s existence, the
body must perform an impossible choreography, as if the body itself could
become the invisible thread that stiches the signifier to the signified, seal-
ing the body’s conformity to the sign. The subject who inhabits such a
body is forced to say: I am nothing but what I say, officer. I speak without
an unconscious, because everything that is meant can be included pre-
cisely in what I here say. No slips, no room for laughter, or playful banter:
language must assume an air of deadly seriousness, but it is this deadly
seriousness that becomes the stuff of Pryor’s comedy. The failure to elimi-
nate the possibility of the joke marks the subject for death, and all too
literally, making black humor tragi-comic. Pryor’s humor strives to elimi-
nate the conditions of the joke and erects its comic edifice on the failure of
this elimination. His comedy is black, and literally so, since it articulates
the problem of being black. The joke is then something that is always not
funny, making Pryor a comedian who is a “serious mother.”
To assume the formal necessity of the accident, this could be the for-
mula for comic thought, and this is how Pryor himself describes his dis-
covery of the singular exigency of the joke:
I wasn’t much taller than my daddy’s shin when I found that I could make
my family laugh. It happened outside the house at 313 North Washington,
in Peoria, Illinois, where I lived among an assortment of relatives, neigh-
bors, whores, and winos—the people who inspired a lifetime of comedic
material.
I was a skinny little black kid, with big eyes that took in the whole world
and a wide, bright smile that begged for more attention than anybody had
time to give. Dressed in a cowboy outfit—the only range rustler in all of
Peoria—I sat on a railing of bricks and found that when I fell off on purpose
everyone laughed, including my grandmother, who made it her job to scare
the shit out of people. From that first pratfall, I liked being the source of
making people laugh. After a few more minutes of falling, a little dog wan-
dered by and poo-pooed in our yard. I got up, ran to my grandmother and
slipped in dog poop. It made Mama and the rest laugh again. Shit, I was
really onto something then. So I did it a second time.
“Look at that boy! He’s crazy!”
That was my first Joke.
All in shit.
And I’ve been covered in it ever since. (Pryor 2018, 27–28)
Slipping in shit is perhaps funny, but it is Pryor’s repetition of this slip-

page that makes it comical. Laughter often accompanies derision and
224 A. KUKULJEVIC
laughter often erupts from the site of the subject’s division, the fall that
positions the one who slipped in the relation to the other. But comedy
separates the place of derision from the person derided and the comic
subject is the null occupant of this place. The joke registers an incongruity
that positions the subject (“Look at that boy!”) in the place where the
signifier’s hold gives way (“He’s crazy!”). Yet, this space is introduced
through the repetition of the slipped place where the subject suddenly
went missing. The comic subject discovers itself as an absentee, hacked to
pieces by the laughter that dismembers language and prevents its compo-
sure. Only a speaking subject laughs, but one cannot laugh and speak. The
comic subject lacks composure. Pryor thus discovers that rather peculiar
power to cover oneself in shit: not in order to become—that is, identify
with being—an object of derision, but becoming absentee. The comic
subject no longer stands on firm ground because he has lost his feet.
* * *
Richard Pryor is a subject that seemed singularly capable of putting the

form of its appearance in question. Early on in his career he garnered the
reputation of having “the most elastic face in show business.” James Alan
McPherson formulates this strikingly well: “The face gives the impression
of never being comfortable enough to come to rest inside itself”
(McCluskey 2008, 202). We cannot identity Pryor with the manner of his
appearance, but the void of his presence. One of his Laff Records record-
ings is after all titled: Who me? I’m not him? (1977). Assuming an incon-
gruity between the who and the how of his appearance, what appears is
never him, but an other that occupies his place.
His impersonations are not imitations, nor are they caricatures. They
mark the singularity of the being who speaks. As he tells McPherson:
“I couldn’t do it just by doing the words of the person,” he says. “I have to

be that person. I see the man in my mind and go with him. I think there’s a
thin line between being a Tom on them people and seeing them as human
beings. When I do the people, I have to do it true. If I can’t do it, I’ll stop
right in the middle rather than pervert it and turn it into Tomism. There’s a
thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at. If I didn’t do characters, it
wouldn’t be funny.” Here Pryor pauses. “When I didn’t do characters,
white folks loved me.” (McCluskey 2008, 203–204)
If he is not a person who does impersonations, but an impersonator

who happens to be a person, then the person who he is, Richard, is itself
an impersonation. As an impersonator he is not a person. He separates
himself from the form that having a personality proscribes. In his perfor-
mances he assumes multiple personae, shifting between multiple roles
within a single routine (such as “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Mankind,” “Hank’s
Place,” or “Prison Play”), lending voice to animals, objects, or even stag-
ing dialogue between different organs within his own body, as when he
does an impression of a heart talking to a brain in the same body. His stag-
gering ability to do impressions stems from a peculiar drive to exaggerate
the place of his own absence.
Positioned as an it, the other speaks him, and the revelation of his
absence is as miraculous as hilarious. His comic practice is a recurrent
meditation on this it. Assuming the place of his own absence, he assumes
the deformity of his manner of appearing. In one of his early performances
on Ed Sullivan, Pryor plays himself going to “kill class” in the army, told
at one point to “wipe that smile off your face” (Fig. 12.3).
Fig. 12.3 Wiping a smile off his face (Ed Sullivan, December 17, 1967), 2018
(Courtesy of the author)
226 A. KUKULJEVIC
With a gesture of his hand, he literally wipes the smile off his face, pro-
ducing an uncanny effect of flat, contradictory expression, tending toward
the expressionlessness while nonetheless seeming to be tense with the
energy of the effaced smile. Exaggerating restraint, the expressionless is
expressed through the forced removal of the smile. The effaced smile is
neither absent nor present. Rather, he presents its absence, as a vacant
impression that has become one with the face’s surface. Yet, its absence
now strains the face’s form. This absence has become the singular feature
of his face’s featurelessness. Not not a smile, Pryor separates the smile
from the form of its appearance, separating it from its place, presenting the
absent place of the vacated smile. It is not nothing, but certainly not
something. It is….
In an early interview with Ebony magazine, Pryor is asked:
Did the comedian ever think of not making it in show business? “I never
thought about not making it” he says. He meditates on the it! “But the it
has nothing to do with show business. The it that I have been trying to
make is me.” There is a pause. The intense young man speaks. “Who am I?”
(Saul 2014, 170)11
Pryor will often play with this type of shift of stress: from giving a tip to
a cabbie to tipping over the cab. In this case, it serves to decompose the
continuity between “it” and the conventional form of the phrase’s mean-
ing. Pryor’s meditation could indeed be a gloss on Freud’s Wo es war, soll
ich werden. His meditation on the “it” serves to unsettle its significance:
whether it is an object or a subject in question. If the I is in question (Who
am I?), it is because the object that assumes its place, a me, only serves to
mark a vertiginous hole. Pryor shifts the stress of the discourse away from
the object addressed—making it in show business—to the it that remains
stubbornly indeterminate, lingering despite the specification of the object.
“Show business” becomes the business of here showing the it. The it on
display is “Richard Pryor.” But if the me is made, then who is the I? The
significance of the it shifts from “making a name in the business” to the
object–subject: the making of a Richard Pryor.
The business of making people laugh, the job of a comedian, Pryor sug-
gests, demands that he make a display of himself. In this interview, he plays
11
From “Beyond Laughter: zany comic Richard Pryor seeks to solve his own enigma,”
Ebony, September 1967, 90, as cited in Saul (2014, 170).
the fool: running into the intersection to direct traffic, playing at being a
cop and getting a ticket for his impression, or assuming the role of a direc-
tor of a documentary film on dogs, training his 16 mm camera upon a turd.
Playing at being a director in order to direct our attention to the object,
to the piece of shit: not the object upon which one slips, but the one who
slips on the object. The object on display is the subject that is radically
unsettled in its appearance and thereby unsettling. His laughter does not
serve to dispel the discomfort, but to heighten its effects. He is not not a
comedian. A him unsettled: he is a conedian. We must speak of Richard
Pryor’s unsettled me.
By not settling into his appearance, he makes place for his own vacancy.
By assuming his vacated place, others speak him. More than Sloppy, who
as Dickens writes in Our Mutual Friend “is a beautiful reader of the news-
paper” for his capacity to “do the Police in different voices,” Richard
Pryor does not do impressions; he is not a comic who impersonates.
Rather, he is an impersonator who does comedy. By saying I am an imper-
sonator, he relates to himself as an alien object; one who does not say I am
Richard Pryor, but, as he says strangely in the first chapter of his autobiog-
raphy, “Me, Richard Pryor, a human being” (Pryor 2018, 25). A human
unable to assume the form of its appearance, he is unable to say: I am a
human being, because I belong to humanity.
Al Bell, the head of Memphis-based Stax Records recalls seeing a per-
formance in which Richard impersonates himself having been slipped
some acid by a white person. “‘I couldn’t believe what I saw,’ says Bell.
‘The story he was telling as he played out the character was really penetrat-
ing as far as black people are concerned.’ At the end of the routine, as the
guy was coming down, his last line was, ‘Nigger, come out of that black
skin and be black, nigger’” (Henry and Henry 2013, 132). To mark the
identity of the out-of-place by refusing to assume the form of one’s appear-
ance, while nonetheless assuming the place of one’s identity—this is a
comedy that makes being an I uneasy, assuming its vacant place through
the displacement of the forms that determine its appearance.
* * *
The need for a laugh is pathetic, even desperate. And the singular cruelty
of the profession of the comedian is that they become dependent upon the
laughs or lack of laughs that determine their being. The need for a laugh
is a fool’s anxiety; the life of one who is at the sovereign’s disposal. The
228 A. KUKULJEVIC
fool must walk a thin line between exposing the sovereign’s faults without
calling into question his place. To borrow a formulation of LeRoi Jones,
the fool can indeed point out that the king is naked, but when he begins
to “remark on how badly the king is hung” he crosses a line (Jones 1998,
183, as cited in Saul 2014, 136). The fool is not to be foolish. The tragedy
of the fool appears in this identification that makes him disposable. The
fool must constantly disavow who he is, that is, who he is compelled to
be… he must not take himself seriously, that would be foolish. This is the
fool’s dilemma: he must be funny, but not foolish. He must not over-
identify with his function; he must play the fool without being a fool. Let
us recall the man from Picardy. Montaigne writes:
Everyone has heard the story of the man of Picardy for whom, on the
scaffold, they presented a wench, offering (as our justice sometimes
allows) to save his life if he would marry her. He, having looked at her for
a while and noticed that she was lame, said: “Tie up, tie up! She limps.”
(Montaigne 1948, 34)
To take seriously the form of foolishness, this is a formula for comedy

that unsettles the identity of the subjects summoned to think the logic of
its dis-located form. Here comedy emerges not from the “place of punish-
ment” but that punishing place, assuming the pure form of foolishness. If
the man from Picardy chooses death, it is perhaps because the condemned
subject has learned how to wiggle with a limp, making the form of foolish-
ness not so foolish after all.
References
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, Ed. Hannah Arendt,
Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Borges, Jorge Luis with Margarita Guerrero. 1969. The Book of Imaginary Beings,
Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Breton, André. 1997. Anthology of Black Humor, Trans. Mark Polizzotti. San
Francisco, CA: City Light Books.
Felton, David. 1974. Richard Pryor: This Can’t Be Happening to Me (Inspired by
a Screenplay by the Comedian). Rolling Stone Magazine, October 10, 1974.
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/this-cant-be-happening-
to-me-19741010.
Haggins, Bambi. 2007. Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul
America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Henry, David, and Joe Henry. 2013. Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World
that Made Him. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Jones, LeRoi. 1998. Home: Social Essays. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press.
Maynard, Joyce. 1977. Richard Pryor, King of the Scene-Stealers. New York Times,
January 9, 1977.
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas, ed. 2008. Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a
“Crazy” Black Man. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
de Montaigne, Michel. 1948. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Trans. Donald
M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mooney, Paul. 2009. Black Is the New White: A Memoir. New York: Simon
Spotlight Entertainment.
Pryor, Richard. 1974. “Niggers vs Police” (Track # 10). In That Nigger’s Crazy.
Memphis, TN: Stax Records/Warner Brothers.
———. 2018. Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences. Los Angeles, CA:
Barnacle Books.
Saul, Scott. 2014. Becoming Richard Pryor. New York: Harper Perennial.
Swift, Jonathan. 1801. The Works of Rev. Jonathan Swift, Vol. 14. Great Turnstile,
Lincoln Inn Fields: Luke Hansard.
———. 1958. A Tale of the Tub. To Which Is Added “The Battle of the Books” and
the “Mechanical Operations of the Spirit” Eds. Adolph Charles Guthkelch and
David Nichol Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
CHAPTER 13
Comedy as Performance
Gregor Moder
Performance is a kind of repetition. Going to watch a theatrical perfor-

mance usually implies that one is about to see one of the many repetitions
(executions, performances) of the same performance (play). A perfor-
mance, for instance a staging of Hamlet, is rehearsed many times before it
is performed in front of the audience, and so it seems that repetition is the
very medium in which the performance exists. However, this only amounts
to the claim that performance is something that is repeated, or that a per-
formance (on the stage) repeats something, without informing us about
that which is being repeated. Within this framework, repetition is purely
external to what is essential in a performance, merely a matter of the
arrangement of the performance, because it is not particularly important
whether a performance has one more or one fewer repetition. But the
claim that I want to discuss here is much stronger: namely, that to perform
is, in a way, to repeat, and that repetition—in the sense of execution—
makes up part of the very “something” that is performed. If we accept this
stronger claim, then we no longer understand theatrical performance
merely as a presentation or a representation of a construct, but rather as
something that is only possible insofar as it is performed for an actual audi-
ence and in that act. Performance is an act of creation, and not merely the
G. Moder (*)
e-mail: gregor.moder@ff.uni-lj.si

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_13
232 G. MODER
execution of something already created. Performance art or live art, which

continues to challenge our conceptions of performing arts in general,
exists only in its being performed; it thus inhabits precisely the feature of
the performance as repetition that I want to underline here. If perfor-
mance is a kind of repetition, then repetition itself can no longer be seen
as an innocent operation over that which it repeats—the original—but
rather as something that is inscribed in the very essence of the original.
Both as a literary practice as well as a practice of performance, comedy
is almost synonymous with repetition, depending on it at many levels.
Gags and taglines tend to reoccur throughout the play or live perfor-
mance, becoming running jokes. A whole subgenre of comedy relies on
the procedure of mistaken identity, usually involving twins separated in
infancy by an abduction or in a shipwreck, creating great confusion when
they end up, by chance, in the same city. Even the simplest procedures like
that of imitation (impersonation) involve repetition: the imitator mimics
the original in voice, gestures or phrases, but at the same time produces a
difference, so that the imitation is clearly recognized as such, to comic
effect. It seems that successful imitation depends, somewhat paradoxically,
not only on being as similar as possible to the original, but also on being
recognizably different from it. As the legend has it, Charles Chaplin once
entered a competition as to who could best impersonate Chaplin, but
failed miserably and finished only in 20th place. Even if this story were
true, it would only attest to Chaplin’s greatness, for one is hardly in the
position to impersonate one’s own stage persona: Chaplin is perfectly sim-
ilar to Chaplin, of course, but it is precisely for this reason that it would be
hard for the audience to notice any difference.
The question of the difference produced in repetition is our central
interest in this chapter. In the case of running jokes, for instance, the line
that keeps being repeated during the course of the comedy (although a
similar argument can be presented for the running physical gag) produces
the highest comic effect when at a crucial moment it changes its meaning,
so that in the new context the same words mean something completely
different, or when the line is suddenly used by a person who is least
expected to say it.1 As for the procedure of mistaken identity, the highest
1
There are countless examples of this procedure, but the classic one is perhaps to be found
in The Satyricon, in an episode recounted by Eumolpus about his seduction of an ephebe in
Pergamon. This lustful episode is usually interpreted as an inversion of the relationship
between Socrates and Alcibiades—the teacher and the student—as described in Plato’s
13 COMEDY AS PERFORMANCE 233
comic effects are produced when it is not only the other people who are
confused about the identity of the person they are talking to, but when
that person begins to question his or her own identity, such as famously
happens to Sosie in Molière’s Amphitryon. But what would be the mini-
mal difference in the repetition required to produce a comic effect? Blaise
Pascal suggests the following formula: “Two faces which are alike, neither
of which by itself makes us laugh, together make us laugh by their similar-
ity” (Pascal 1995, 23). According to Pascal, it is enough for the lookalikes
to be placed together and a comic effect is already produced: their same-
ness and difference are immediately present. Mladen Dolar comments on
Pascal’s sentence by drawing a direct link between the question of comic
repetition and the metaphysics of the One splitting in Two: “So ultimately
this is neither a two nor two ones, but a split one, where both parts can
neither be counted as two nor made one. The comical object emerges in
their very split” (Dolar 2017, 582–583). A similar point can be made also
with regard to the metaphysics of repetition and difference that interests
us here. The paradox that produces the comic effect in Pascal’s minimal
example of two similar faces lies in the fact that the difference that we
perceive is not a difference of quality—after all, the faces appear similar,
not different—but a purely formal numerical difference—there is only one
(distinct face), but in two copies.
There seems to be another, perhaps even deeper mechanism at work in
Pascal’s example. A human visage is not simply a thing among things, and
Pascal’s example would not work with the juxtaposition of, for instance,
two similar cabbage heads; in any case, a cabbage head is hard to distin-
guish from another cabbage head. But the human face is a different case
altogether: the face is the very locus of a person’s identity, his or her unique
feature which even serves as the main evidence in the process of official
identification. Dolar is sure to consider this and recalls the comic tradition
of mistaken identity and the case of the chance meeting of twins, separated
in infancy. Pointing out, however, that twins are two persons neither of
Symposium: Alcibiades complains about Socrates’ disinterest in having sex with him, and thus
ends up praising Socrates’ virtue. Eumolpus, however, is a very different kind of teacher. The
young charge of Eumolpus does not give himself up easily, though, and warns Eumolpus,
when he is being particularly persistent, that he should just go to sleep or the boy will “tell
the father.” In a comical turn of events the seduction is nevertheless successful, so much so
that the youth ends up waking Eumolpus several times during the night, wanting more.
Finally, Eumolpus is too tired to go on and orders the boy to fall asleep, lest he will “tell the
father” (see Petronius 2011, 85–87).
234 G. MODER
whom could be considered the original and neither a replica, Dolar con-
cludes: “One could say: it is in the nature of identity to be mistaken for
identity. There is a mistake involved in every identity that the mistaken
identity only brings to appearance” (Dolar 2017, 586). In short, Dolar’s
argument is that comedy does not simply deal with an exemption to the
general rule of identity, merely examining marginal cases where the rule
seems to be broken; on the contrary, comedy makes apparent the paradox
that sustains the very concept of identity. Dolar’s take on the question of
identity is basically the Lacanian one: (a person’s) identity is constituted as
a mistaken identity. For Lacan, human subjectivity does not inhabit the
conscious self of a person (one’s ego), but is, rather, a subject of the
unconscious; thus, the fact that we identify with our conscious selves
implies a procedure of “mistaken identification.”
Another look at the question of difference produced in repetition shows
that the comic procedure of mistaken identity reveals a structure which is
homologous to that of performance art. Performance art (or live art)
rejects the representational scheme of the original idea on the one hand
and the performance (execution, realization) on the other hand, so that
the originality only exists in its performance (execution, realization). The
same kind of logic is what sustains the mechanism of comedy. For com-
edy, originality never resides on a plane above the material plane of appear-
ances. That is not to say that comedy simply does away with originality, so
that everything that remains is just another copy, or a copy of a copy, a
simulacrum of a simulacrum, an imitation of an imitation. Rather, origi-
nality somehow inhabits its own imitations. To employ the language of
philosophy, comedy is a genre of immanence. I believe that the best
example of this logic can be found in the much-discussed opening
sequence of the film classic To Be or Not to Be (directed by Ernst Lubitsch,
1942). The sequence takes place just before the German invasion of
Poland, on the stage of the Polski Theater in Warsaw. The troupe is
rehearsing for the premiere of their anti-Nazi satire play “Gestapo,” but
when a minor actor playing Hitler enters the stage, the rehearsal is stopped.
The producer Dobosh thinks the actor lacks the je ne sais quoi needed to
be a convincing Hitler. Trying to explain what Hitler should look like,
Dobosh points to a Hitler portrait hanging on the wall. However, as the
actor immediately explains, that picture was taken of him—of the actor,
and not of the original Hitler as one might expect! It seems that here again
we have two copies, two imitations of each other—the actor and the por-
trait. The “Hitler who looks like Hitler,” however, is not to be found some-
where else, sitting in an office in Berlin, for instance, but instead emerges
in the very difference between the two copies of the same.2 This obviously
takes us back to Pascal’s example of two similar faces. Comedy shifts the
status of the original—in this case, the original, the real Hitler—so that it
no longer exists in a place beyond its appearances, its copies, its imperson-
ations, its repetitions, and can only emerge in and through them: as if they
embody the original. In a comedy, the repetition does not simply copy the
original, it rather performs the original.
We can now formulate our first thesis: comedy depends on the logic of
performance. The fundamental comic operation is performance, even if
the comic genre in question does not belong to performing arts in the
usual understanding of the term. This is because comedy makes an under-
lying metaphysical claim which can be formulated as follows: something—
a relation, an identity—may be said to be true only insofar as it is performed.
In other words, a thing may be said to be this or that only insofar as it is
presented and recognized as such. This allows Robert Pfaller to argue that
comedy, in its embrace of “the actual, the represented, the appearance, the
obvious,” takes the materialist philosophical position (Pfaller 2006, 203).
In comedy, performance is the touchstone of truth; only what is per-
formed, manifested, actualized may be considered true. At the same
time—and this is of course the source of comic complications—if some-
thing is performed, manifested, or made apparent, it must by that token
be true. For comedy, truth is of the order of the “theatrical”—in an
emphatic, almost ontological sense, which perhaps could not be said of
tragedy or of other dramatic genres.
The Clown and the Coat

Let us take a closer look at a series of examples that develop this point on
the level of comic practice. An interesting and excellently executed exam-
ple can be found in Slava’s Snowshow, a mixture of a clown performance
and a circus spectacle. Directed and produced by Vyacheslav Polunin, it
was first staged in 1994 and won several awards and nominations. The
closing scene of farewell is perhaps the most remarkable scene of the
performance.
2
See also a slightly divergent explanation in Zupančič (2008, 36).
236 G. MODER
The clown is preparing to depart by train. He takes a brush and starts

gently sweeping a coat hanging on a stand. Perhaps in order to make
cleaning the sleeve easier, he puts his right arm into the sleeve and
continues. But after making one or two strokes with the brush, he sud-
denly perceives his own arm in the coat as foreign to him, as an arm
belonging to someone else—to the person in the coat. He immediately
freezes and the music and the entire atmosphere abruptly change. The
situation quickly escalates to the extreme when the hand in the coat, fin-
gers stretched out as if they are about to clutch, starts rising toward the
clown’s neck. This is the first point in the scene that invites commentary.
We are clearly witnessing a case of One splitting in Two. For the audience,
the split is comic, as it is obvious that the clown is mistaken, that there is
no other person in the coat and that he seems to be frightened of himself.
The clown mistakenly identifies his own body part as part of a foreign
body. However, it is not simply the question of the body: the arm in the
coat seems to have an agency of its own, appearing to be possessed by
another subject. The clown’s subjectivity itself is split in two. In a way, this
is the purification of the Sosie scene from Amphitryon: Sosie required the
appearance of someone else, someone who looked just like him—in his
case, the god Mercury—to be persuaded that he is not himself, or that his
subjectivity is split in two. Our clown, on the contrary, did this entirely on
his own. The alienation of a part of one’s self appears as something menac-
ing to the clown: the hand in the coat is reaching for the clown’s neck as
if in an attempt to choke him. But when the hand finally reaches the
clown’s neck, it merely adjusts his shawl and even plays with it. The clown
smiles kindly at his self, which has been alienated into the coat. The coat-
hand—after a short tiff with the clown—takes the brush from the clown’s
(other) hand and starts cleaning him with it. Instead of the clown brush-
ing the coat, we see now the coat brushing the clown. The scene changes
into a tender love scene, only to be interrupted a moment later by the
whistle of the train set for departure. The clown hastily picks up his suit-
case and rushes toward the train. But then he stops and returns to the
coat, puts his right arm through the sleeve again and emotionally embraces
the person in the coat. The clown is obviously taking the farewell hard; the
coat’s hand caresses him and pats him on the back.
And then the scene delivers another great comic twist. During the
embrace, the clown closes his eyes while the “person in the coat” tries to
secretly stick a letter into his pocket. The clown’s clothes are, apparently,
too complicated and the letter will not go in. At that moment, the clown
tears himself away from the embrace of the coat-hand, thus breaking the
illusion he himself created, and takes the letter quite unceremoniously
(with his free hand) and sticks it in the pocket, only to then quickly fling
himself back into the embrace of the coat, as if nothing had happened. It
is interesting that when the clown thus interrupts the scene, to great comic
effect, the illusion is dispelled but at the same time also deepened. It
becomes very hard to decipher who exactly is supposed to be fooled by the
performance. The fact that the clown stops pretending for a moment
should, according to the rules of logic and nature, reveal to the clown not
only that the coat wants to secretly plant something on the clown, but also
that the coat is not an independent person after all, and that this whole
procedure is just a show. But the clown continues with the scene as if noth-
ing had happened; and after a while, he is “surprised” to find a farewell
letter in his pocket and proceeds to reading it with tears in his eyes. Comic
characters being fooled precisely by the trick with which they wanted to
fool someone else is a very frequent tool in the comic tradition. But here,
the matter is doubly complicated, since the “other” that the clown wants
to trick is… the clown himself. The clown pretends to help himself trick
himself into believing that there really is another person in the coat.
The scene ends when the clown finally walks across the stage and boards
the train. He waves goodbye to the coat from afar. Then again something
happens that changes the parameters of the situation: quite without the
clown’s help, the sleeve of the coat miraculously rises, the coat thus returning
the farewell. The scene ends. An illusionary mechanism, a very thin rope or
something similar, was probably used for this final trick, but it is curious that
this procedure at the same time dispels the illusion so painstakingly crafted
before by the clown, as well as raises it to another level. The coat no longer
functions as the clown’s alienated subject, as an alienated part of himself,
but has actually become someone else, or something else, and certainly
takes on a completely independent subjectivity. This farewell is therefore a
farewell from the undomesticated part of himself, and at the same time a
farewell from comedy. The final moment of the scene can be considered
moving, poetic or perhaps a bit melodramatic, but by no means comic.
Rather, it makes manifest that which according to Freud is implied by every
farewell in the emphatic sense of the term: mourning. What we have before
us is a very precise, a purified form of mourning of the loss of an object.
Dolar’s argument that the comic object emerges in the split between
two ones seems to be fully confirmed in the example of the coat scene; in
fact, the coat scene makes the entire process of splitting one into two ones
238 G. MODER
clearly observable. It is very instructive for our discussion that this is a

scene of departure, of farewell, of separation, of detachment. We can
make two related points with regard to this. Firstly, the split which is at
stake in the discussion of the object of comedy can be understood as
structurally analogous to the split involved in a farewell. A farewell
between two persons, obviously, implies a separation of two individual
subjects, but a farewell is also a process where an individual must reckon
with his or her own emotions. In a way, a farewell by definition implies
also a farewell from oneself, a departure from one’s own investments and
engagements; in short, a separation from a part of one’s own self. In this
specific sense, the coat scene in Slava’s Snowshow manages to capture the
essence of a farewell; the idea that the farewell implies recognizing a part
of one’s own self as foreign is not so ludicrous after all—though only a
clown would take this literally. And secondly, this example shows that
once the detachment of the object is complete, the scene is no longer
comic. When the coat makes the final gesture of waving without the aid
of the clown, when the farewell and the separation it implies are thus
finally reciprocated by the object itself, independently from the clown, the
scene is complete and the comic performance is resolved; the trauma of
separation has reached the stage of reconciliation. The comic effect of the
scene is thus related to what we could call the parasitic nature of the
detached self; that is, to the fact that the other self is actually not com-
pletely detached from its host self.
Let us analyze the idea of performance in this scene. Who is the per-
former and who is the audience? There are multiple layers at stake: the
scene is not simply a performance of an actor in front of an audience. In
fact, the basic premise of the scene is that the performance does not fully
begin until there is a second level of performance involved—that is, until
the arm in the sleeve of the coat begins to move as if independently—so
that the second-level performer is the hand and the second-level audience
is the clown himself. Things get even more complicated when the clown
breaks the illusion of this performance within a performance by helping
his alienated hand put the secret letter in his pocket. As noted earlier, this
break in the illusion actually serves to establish another, even deeper illu-
sion: the illusion that the clown must pretend to help his performed self in
order to successfully deceive himself. This wonderfully complicated mise
en abyme of self-deception is resolved at the end of the scene, where the
final illusion is used to dispel all others and return us to the primordial
theatrical situation between the performer and the audience. The comic
sequence thus takes place between two points: between the first alienation
of the hand and the final gesture of goodbye. This sequence produces
comic effects by recreating the split between the performer and the
audience within the subjectivity of the performer himself. The performer
is the audience of his own performance, sucked into his own illusion. Our
clown is not only pretending that he is someone else; on a deeper level, he
is also pretending that he is not someone else—in other words, our clown
is pretending that he really is himself.
This allows us to formulate our second thesis. One of the basic forms of
the comic performance is the performance of the self; to an extent, this is
already implied in the claim that for comedy—as well as for Lacanian psy-
choanalysis—an identity is always a mistaken identity. The thesis formu-
lated in terms of performance, however, exposes a certain theatricality, a
kind of performativity involved in the constitution of subjectivity. The
point is not simply that any authenticity is always a performance of authen-
ticity, or that what we may consider to be our authentic self is simply one
of the possible masks that we can hide behind in our relations with others.
In other words, the point is not that we are always performing some kind
of social role, depending on the social stage we find ourselves on. The
point is, rather, that there is in fact something authentic about our subjec-
tivity, it is just that it does not have the consistency of a person; if we are
authentic it is not because we sustain ourselves as concrete individuals
beyond the particular roles we play in our daily routines—this is precisely
what is inauthentic about our subjectivity. We are only authentic inasmuch
as we can become what we pretend to be. In other words, and comple-
menting the idea of the performativity of truth: if there is such a thing as
the authenticity of the subject, it does not rest in some interior beyond the
opaque walls of individuality; rather, it exists only in its performance
(execution).
The Split Subject and Ideological Interpellation

The comic procedure of the clown—often performed by Polunin him-
self—is a special case of redoubling, a special case of repetition which pro-
duces a difference within the same, and establishes a self as a performed
self. This procedure was, of course, not invented by Polunin; it has always
been part of the comic tradition. It is close to ventriloquism, which sepa-
rates the voice from the mouth of the person and places it in an object,
usually a doll, or also in a hand. The coat scene is thus a case of ventrilo-
240 G. MODER
quism without the voice, a kind of ventriloquism in mime. And in general,

it follows the premise of the split subjectivity elaborated in Molière’s Sosie.
In the Middle Ages, Polunin’s procedure was well known to court jesters,
who are often depicted as having heated conversations with a mirror, or
with a doll in their own image. Erasmus’s own copy of the first edition of
In Praise of Folly is noted for marginal drawings by Hans Holbein the
Younger, and among them we can find the image of a fool pointing his
finger at the bauble which carries the face and the crown of the fool him-
self. In modern times, this procedure is often used in comedic series,
where a hand or a sock puppet is used as the alternative self of the per-
former. Let us take a closer look at two further examples.
An instance of an almost evil, but still clearly comic, parasitic mini-self
can be found in an episode from the successful British sitcom Coupling
(“Jane and the Truth Snake,” Coupling, season 2, episode 5, UK, 2001).
Jane, a slightly mad featherbrain, loses her job as a traffic reporter and so
she decides to try her hand at presenting a children’s TV show. Her sup-
posed skill is the animation of a snake sock puppet that she puts on her
right hand, but the problem is that the snake quite directly tells what it
thinks about her friends and even about Jane herself. When her boss offers
to take her back as a traffic reporter, the snake speaks out, calling her boss
names and claiming that he keeps looking up Jane’s skirt and that he has
always been interested only in her breasts. At some point, Jane’s friend
intervenes and takes the sock puppet off her hand—but the “snake” does
not give in, it still acts as Jane’s other self, now embodied in her right hand
without the mediation of the sock, as if directly implanted in her flesh. At
the moment the sock comes off, the snake cries “I’m naked” and hides
under Jane’s blouse. It is Jane’s extension that has alienated itself from her
and speaks against her own will.
A similar example can be found in the US television series 3rd Rock from
the Sun. The main characters in the series are four extraterrestrials who
have assumed human form and live among humans as a normal family. The
main character is called Dick Solomon and is played by the critically
acclaimed John Lithgow. In the fifth episode of the first season (“Dick,
Smoker,” 1996), Dick starts smoking and is consumed by the bad habit to
the point that he wants to smoke everywhere, even when he is at the den-
tist’s. When they tell him that it is not allowed, he goes to the stairway of
the building, but the door closes behind him and he gets locked out before
anyone can save him. Coming to terms with his situation, and perhaps out
of boredom, Dick starts singing bucolic songs, which leads to a twist: in his
singing gusto, he lifts his hand above his face and quite accidentally notices
the shadow of the hand on the wall. At that moment, he recognizes his
own hand as another person and lets it sing a refrain. Dick and his new self
praise each other’s singing. But later on things get complicated and the
hand becomes increasingly more confident and sarcastic. At the very end,
when Dick’s clownish brother Harry finally finds him, it is the hand who
answers first, not Dick. It is not quite clear anymore who is the parasite and
who the host, who is the actual bearer of subjectivity.
Considering Dick’s parasitic self which has invaded his hand, we can
analyze the operation of the human subjectivity in general. Mini-Dick
emerges at the moment Dick looks at the wall where he sees the shadow
of his hand. As a kind of mirror image, a person’s shadow is actually already
a perfect model for the split self, being both dependent on and indepen-
dent of him or her at the same time. In Dick’s case, the shadow has an
especially important task, since it is precisely with its help that Dick recog-
nizes his hand as something alienated; or, more precisely, the alienation
takes place through this recognition, as this recognition. Dick’s gaze at the
shadow has a performative role: the shadow serves as a mirror in which he
sees the difference between his two selves. This logic brings us to Louis
Althusser’s theory of the emergence of the subject, the theory of ideologi-
cal interpellation. For Althusser, an ideological subject emerges in the act
of recognition of oneself as the obvious, unquestionable addressee of the
call of the other. One of Althusser’s examples of interpellation is a scene
taking place behind a closed door:
To take a highly “concrete” example, we all have friends who, when they
knock on our door and we ask, through the door, the question “Who’s
there?”, answer (since “it’s obvious”) “It’s me”. And we recognize that “it
is him”, or “her”. We open the door, and “it’s true, it really was she who was
there”. (Althusser 1971, 172)
An ideological subject emerges as a result of recognizing something

quite obvious: the identity of oneself with oneself. Althusser devised this
formula by drawing from the premise of Lacanian psychoanalysis which—
as noted above—considers the recognition of oneself as imaginary recog-
nition, as a case of mis-recognition; the mistake consisting of understanding
the conscious self as the seat of human agency. In a way, this is implied in
what Dolar declares with regard to comedy, namely that “it is in the nature
of identity to be mistaken for identity.” We could say that the reason why
242 G. MODER
Althusser’s examples of ideological interpellation appear so comic, or at

least theatrical, is because the concept of the subject in Althusser’s theory
of ideology overlaps with the subject in comedy: something is recognized
as true only and precisely insofar as it appears or is performed as true.
Let us compare Althusser’s example with what happens at the conclu-
sion of the sequence in the example from “Dick, Smoker.” At the moment
when Dick’s brother Harry comes looking for him, we see Dick unshaven
and sleepless, sitting on the floor, arguing loudly with his hand. Of course,
Dick is losing the argument (and his mind). At that moment, we hear
Harry’s voice behind the door.
Harry (behind the door, unseen voice): Dick, is that you?

Dick (through his hand): Harry?
Harry: Dick?
Dick (now as Dick, excited): Harry, open the door, open the door!
Harry (after a pause): How do I know it’s really you?
Dick: It’s really me!
Harry: Well, you would know that! (opens the door)
At first sight, the scene of recognition seems the exact opposite of

Althusser’s example. Harry heard and recognized Dick’s voice and Dick,
too—obviously—immediately recognized Harry. Their initial position is a
position of mutual recognition. So far so good, but then things get com-
plicated. Dick asks Harry to open the door, but Harry quite unexpectedly
asks how he is to know that it really is Dick behind the door. In this, Harry
is acting as a detective, demanding that a suspect prove his identity. It
seems the most silly and bizarre question one can imagine in this situation,
for, after all, it was Harry who was looking for Dick, and it was Harry who
heard and recognized Dick’s voice coming through the door. This seems
to be a scene of a completely unsuccessful interpellation. Instead of ideo-
logical recognition as the recognition of the obvious, the obvious sud-
denly appears as highly questionable. However, we could argue that the
comic scene only renders visible the mistake that resides at the core of the
ideological identity. It is not so much that Harry doubts that he is talking
to Dick, but that he doubts whether Dick is really Dick. In other words,
Harry is not asking whether the person behind the door is Dick or some-
one else, but whether Dick really is Dick.
If Harry’s question “How do I know it’s really you?” seems to be ask-
ing for some evidence that the person claiming to be Dick really is Dick,
then the result of this police investigation, this procedure of identification,

is even more surprising. Dick does not attempt to prove his identity by
referring to some document; and he does not reveal some secret shared by
Dick and Harry. Instead, Dick simply reaffirms the obvious: “It’s really
me!” Surprisingly, Harry is perfectly satisfied with this answer. He responds
as if Dick actually did reveal a secret known only to Dick (“You would
know that!”). Ideological interpellation is thus not dismantled, but only
redoubled. The seemingly failed ideological interpellation turns out to be
a very clear case, even a paradigmatic case, of recognizing that A=A, that
Dick really is Dick. In fact, Dick’s recognition perhaps shows Althusser’s
point even a bit more clearly than Althusser’s own example. How so? In
Althusser’s example, one could object and argue that when people in front
of a door say “It’s me” to reveal their identity, they do not actually utter
an entirely empty and superfluous phrase, since we can thus hear their
voice and recognize them on the basis of its specificity. They could in fact
say anything and the result would be the same: we would hear their voice
and on the basis of this recognize them just as well as if they showed us
their ID card. The scene from 3rd Rock from the Sun dispels this objection.
Harry knows all along that it is Dick behind the door—he has heard his
voice and recognized it. Dick’s claim that he really is Dick is therefore
precisely the empty obviousness that Dick needs to utter to produce him-
self as a subject.
From Performative Sentences to Catachresis

As the examples demonstrate, the confirmation of one’s own identity is
never an innocent gesture. This is because ideological interpellation is per-
formative: what may seem as a mere case of stating the obvious is actually
a productive, performative operation. To be sure, the term performance
here does not denote a form of conscious performing or pretending. We
are not discussing the idea that one simply “performs” one’s identity
based on a combination of personal wishes and social codifications. Here,
the term performance denotes that the ideological subject does not exist
before it is recognized or identified as such. That which ideology performs
does not exist anywhere else but in the performance itself.
In his classic lectures published as How to Do Things with Words, J. L.
Austin preliminarily lists several examples of what he calls performative
utterances; that is, sentences which cannot be said to be true or false, yet
are also not nonsensical: “I do” as uttered in a marriage ceremony, “I
244 G. MODER
name this ship the Queen Elizabeth” as uttered in a christening of a ship,

“I give and bequeath my watch to my brother” as occurring in a will, and
“I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow” (Austin 1962, 5). He calls them
performative sentences or performatives because they do not only describe
an action, but are themselves actions. It turns out, as Austin explains, that
there is always a performative element in even the most obviously
descriptive statements, and so he adapted his initial distinction. However,
for the purposes of this chapter, the idea of a performative sentence is quite
adequate. What interests us here is that many of this type of statements are
linked to a ceremony (a marriage, a christening) or might require some
other form of official sanctioning, a more or less formal contract between
the participant parties (a promise, a bet). In fact, as Austin explains, there
are only a few current terms that cover the group of sentences he has in
mind, and the one that comes closest to the group as a whole is a legal
term, namely: the term “‘operative’, as it is used strictly by lawyers in
referring to that part, i.e. those clauses, of an instrument which serves to
effect the transaction (conveyance or what not) which is its main object,
whereas the rest of the document merely ‘recites’ the circumstances in
which the transaction is to be effected” (Austin 1962, 7). In a legal contract,
only a few clauses are operative or have a performative nature, while most
of the clauses are statements of facts or descriptions, and yet it is clear that
the operative clauses are the main objective of the contract. What I wish to
emphasize with regard to performative sentences as described by Austin is
that they are bound to the operation of some social institution or
convention, although this institution might be a purely moral one, such as
a promise to a friend. In short, what Austin describes as a question of the
philosophy of language is in principle equally important to the domain of
social philosophy—to the domain that interested Althusser. When Althusser
argues that ideology exists not in the consciousnesses of individuals, but in
their actions as inscribed in rituals or ceremonies of social institutions
(ideological apparatuses, as Althusser calls them), is his argument not
strictly parallel to Austin’s argument that performative sentences are not
merely descriptions of actions, but actions themselves? In this precise sense,
ideological operation is performative: actions of the subject are not a result
of his or her ideas; rather, the ideology a given subject belongs to exists in
his or her actions, even if those actions are performed in bad faith.
This brings us to the final question of this chapter: can the comic object
help us understand the functioning of ideology? Do comic examples dis-
cussed here reveal something relevant to the theory of ideology? Can
comedy—a genre so tightly linked to language and culture and their spe-
cific historical moment that it is perhaps best suited to becoming an
ideological genre par excellence—can comedy perhaps even serve to dispel
the ideological charm? To help us tackle this question, let me borrow from
Social Choreography, where Andrew Hewitt discusses the relationship
between ideology and aesthetics. Hewitt upholds the materialist premise
and rejects the idea that aesthetics and artistic practice are wholly indepen-
dent from the political and economic reality in which they appear. But
Hewitt also does not want to reduce all aesthetics to mere ideological
reflection of economic relations. Instead, he proposes a move that is
strictly homologous to Althusser’s criticism of the usual understanding of
the relationship between base and superstructure in Marxism. For Hewitt,
choreography is not a metaphor of economic relations, but rather its cata-
chresis, functioning similar to the rhetorical trope where we refer, for
instance, to the leg of the table as its “leg,” without there being any other
suitable term for it:
If there is, after all, no “proper” term for what we “improperly” refer to as
a table’s “leg,” the very referentiality of language itself comes into question.
Whereas metaphor makes sense out of what it finds, this catachresis actually
brings into being what we might ordinarily presume to have preceded it—its
referent. Likewise, choreography is not just another of the things we “do”
to bodies, but also a reflection on, and enactment of, how bodies “do”
things and on the work that the artwork performs. Social choreography
exists not parallel to the operation of social norms and strictures, nor is it
entirely subject to those strictures: it serves—“catacritically,” we might
say—to bring them into being. (Hewitt 2005, 15)
According to Hewitt, social choreography is neither a mere metaphor

for the economic practice nor completely independent of it. Rather, it is its
catachresis: by reflecting reality it in fact produces reality. Thus, economic
reality is not primordial to its ideological appearance; in fact, it is only
through ideological appearance that the economic reality truly
becomes reality.
We argued above that ideology is performative in the sense that it actu-
ally produces the subject which it seems only to address in its hailing.
Borrowing from Hewitt, we could say that ideology proceeds as catachre-
sis. This is a procedure we can observe in comedy, too. Comedy depends
on the logic of performance precisely in the sense that what it performs or
246 G. MODER
makes apparent does not preexist the performance or manifestation itself.

Insofar as comedy depends on repetition, it is a catachrestic repetition, in
the sense that the original it is supposed to merely repeat actually exists
precisely in the repetition. In comedy, the appearance does not obscure
the truth, but brings it forth. But while ideological interpellation and
comedy share the same procedure, which may be referred to as performa-
tive or catachrestical (or “catacritical,” as Hewitt formulates it), this should
not lead to the assumption that they are inseparable, or even that comedy
must necessarily serve ideology. In fact, comedy—construed in the broad-
est sense—might actually serve as the most suitable tool against ideology
precisely insofar as it shows us that identity as such is performed; insofar as
it shows us a crack in the natural and spontaneous assumptions of our
mind by doubling them and thus producing a minimal, purely formal dif-
ference toward them.
References
3rd Rock from the Sun. 1996–2001. Carsey-Werner Company, YBYL Productions.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster.
London: New Left Books.
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words, Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Coupling. 2000–2004. TV Series. Hartswood Films.
Dolar, Mladen. 2017. The Comic Mimesis. Critical Inquiry 43 (Winter): 570–589.
Hewitt, Andrew. 2005. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and
Everyday Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lubitsch, Ernst (Dir.). 1942. To Be or Not to Be. Romaine Film Corporation.
Pascal, Blaise. 1995. Pensées and Other Writings, Trans. Honor Levi. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Petronius. 2011. The Satyricon, Trans. J. P. Sullivan. London: Penguin.
Pfaller, Robert. 2006. The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic: The
Aesthetic Effects of the Thought Experiment. In Lacan: The Silent Partners,
ed. Slavoj Žižek, 198–216. London: Verso.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 14
After Death Comes Humor: On the Poetics

of Alexander Vvedensky
Keti Chukhrov
Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) was a poet and dramatist, a legendary figure

of Leningrad culture, a principal member of the OBERIU group, Union of Real
Art, founded in 1928. Together with Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky
and Andrey Platonov, Vvedensky is one of the most radical innovators of the
Russian language. He considered his own poetry a more powerful critique of
reason than Kant’s. Vvedensky wrote several books for children. He was arrested
in 1931 for belonging to the anti-Soviet faction of children’s writers and was sent
into exile until he was released in 1936. In 1941 he was arrested again after
being unable to board a crowded evacuation train. With other prisoners he was
evacuated from Kharkov to Kazan and either died of pleuritis on the way or was
accidentally shot by the guard. A substantial bulk of Vvedensky’s writing was
lost. An important part of it was preserved due to the invaluable efforts of
another member of the OBERIU group, Yakov Druskin. His complete works
were published in 1993, edited by Michail Meilach (Vvedensky 1993). His first
translation into English appeared in 2013, edited and translated by Eugene
Ostashevsky (Vvedensky 2013).
K. Chukhrov (*)
Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_14
248 K. CHUKHROV
The poetic and dramatic writing of Alexander Vvedensky surpasses any

interpretations and analytical observations; it annuls attempts at analysis or
comprehension. This happens not only because his pieces are nonsensical;
the principal reason that makes these texts evade comprehension and
interpretation lies in the fact that Vvedensky treats his works, his own
poetic propositions, pejoratively, as if they were unimportant trifles. They are
significant because of what they desperately try to articulate. In this chapter,
we will therefore trace the “fantastic” poetics of nonsensical humor.
Dramatization After the End of Time

The majority of interpretations of Vvedensky’s dramatic poetry rely on the
poet’s eschatological treatment of time and the apophatic rendering of this
eschatological condition. They consider his poetry via negative categories
dominant in his pieces: death, arrest of time, void, anemia.
Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga describes the poetics of the
OBERIU1 via the mortified organism, anemia of speech and frozen time.
Composer Vladimir Martinov too considers Vvedensky’s poetic diction as
the practice of negative (apophatic) theology. The founder of the alterna-
tive rock band Auctyon, Leonid Fedorov, who in 2005 composed an
album Besonders based on Vvedensky’s poems, built all his compositions
on the intonation of grieving and panikhida.2 As a result, humor and non-
sense remained outside the meaningful and pathetic mysticism, the
grounds for which definitely exist in the texts of Vvedensky, but which,
nevertheless, are not the main context for it. The theatre director Jurij
Ljubimov in his Go and Stop the Progress (2004), a spectacle at the Taganka
theatre based on the texts of OBERIU, followed the same path, having
actually staged a sort of ceremony of mourning. In short, most of the time
Vvedensky’s texts have been enacted with the utmost seriousness, whereas
1
OBERIU—Objedinenie Realnogo Iskusstva—Union of Real Art, founded in 1928 by
Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. An avant-garde collective of artists, poets, philoso-
phers, theorists, musicians; many of its associates were arrested in the 1930s. They positioned
themselves as the radical left. OBERIU became known for provocative performances and
readings in the poetics of nonsense and the absurd. The group’s actions were treated as
extreme even by some members of the avant-garde, such as Nickolay Zabolotsky. Moscow
conceptualists considered OBERIU’s activity and its agents as their predecessors. The docu-
mentations of the group’s meeting can be traced in the diaries of Jacob Druskin (1999) and
Leonid Lipavsky (1993).
2
Leonid Fedorov, Vladimir Volkov. Besonders. Released 2005, Ulitka Records, Moscow.
14 AFTER DEATH COMES HUMOR: ON THE POETICS OF ALEXANDER… 249
the reputation for humorous absurdity was delegated mainly to the texts
of Daniil Harms.
All these interpretations are justified. Biographies of Alexander
Vvedensky and Daniil Harms reveal them being a prey to the Stalinist
regime. Vvedensky’s pieces teem with horror, awareness of an inevitable
death which in his plays often takes place as execution. The content of
Vvedensky’s dramatic poetry constantly revolves around a certain cata-
strophic node: the world has disappeared, time has stopped, the words
have been reified and become things, they are being used as objects and
are being set randomly beyond any syntactic logic or grammatically biased
proposition. The things in their turn happen to be indistinguishable one
from another. This is because in comparison to the attempt to compre-
hend what time and death are, differentiations are unimportant.
There are plenty of examples of such apocalyptic conditions in
Vvedensky’s pieces. Yet, it is exactly in the mode of dying and the proxim-
ity of death that the tropes of humor and laughter emerge to their utmost
in Vvedensky’s texts. Indeed, fear and horror dominate the situation, but
despite this they are immediately surpassed by almost athletic gestures of
mocking death—death is rather more ludicrous than tragic. Or rather, the
dimension of the tragic cannot be accessed without humor and the
naughty, anarchic plastic:
And now my ending is dying

Heading towards leaden field
Glancing around the very last moment
Laughing the very last laughter. (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1, 85)
Or:
He will answer: my name was Ivan

And I once died under divan [sofa]. (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1, 93)
You show me please the glass

In which one sees the dog Polkan fuss
Barking and barking and barking.
I tell before dying, I won’t be lying,
I’m ill and ill as a kid
Carrying on my head three hundred scarfs
and handkerchiefs. (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1, 78)
* * *
250 K. CHUKHROV
The majority of Alexander Vvedensky’s writings are plays. As already men-

tioned, the poetic articulation of Vvedensky is not grounded on writing
(écriture) or even speech, but on an almost infantile frolicking and playing.
This child’s play component turns the distribution of poetic dictum
between the protagonists into naughty acting rather than contemplation
or a lyrical rumination. In order to launch poetic speech, instead of talking
about something, one has to commit acts and moves that at first sight are
completely senseless, but which, in fact, embody a childish thirst to ran-
domly and anarchically enact a play.
The arrest of time and the end of the world are thus not the ultimate
goals and ends, but rather the starting points in Vvedensky’s poetics. It is
at this point that humor and circus athletics—even when enacted by dying
protagonists or post mortem—emerge. What happens is not an apocalyp-
tic fading away of time and the death of protagonists, but a playful game
that starts in all its acrobatic amplitude precisely after declaring all types of
ends—the end of the world, of life and of time. Consequently, the end has
to be understood as an ontological threshold; in fact, without reaching
such a threshold, neither poetry nor art can be embodied.
If for Stephane Mallarmé the nullification of the world facilitates the
new linguistic vocabulary of poetic symbolizations, for Vvedensky the nul-
lified condition of the world rather fosters the alternative modes of being
and plastic tricks: it triggers another, post-linguistic, theatrical after-world.
This world exists in the regime of supra-time and supra-being. Vvedensky’s
theatre begins from torpor and consternation (as is the case with the plays
of Samuel Beckett), when nothing remains of life—either human beings
and their life, or history and time. But precisely this eschatological turning
point instigates the rigor of playfulness. This athletic and humorous rigor
is in a way an affective reaction to the proximity of mortification, to the
blankness of “nothing.” Yet, exactly in the conditions of such nullification,
with the halted chronos and emptified space, one still finds the slight “dra-
matic something” that can paradoxically be continued, even when such a
continuation seems impossible and fantastic.
Vvedensky’s plots are surprisingly simple, if not primitive: “someone”
is located “somewhere” and goes and moves “anywhere,” or does “some-
thing,” quite like in the nursery rhyme text-books. Yet, it is out of such
blankness, devoid of narrative and story, that Vvedensky’s theatre evolves.
The complete collapse of identity, time, place, connection with the pres-
ent moment enables nevertheless the launch of the neo-time, neo-place,
neo-intonation of the trans-temporal, ideal terrain, in which the moves of

actors coincide and become literal with the poetic emissions.
Athletics, Acrobatics, Circus

In mentioning the rigor characteristic of Vvedensky’s pieces, we mean that
instead of an image, metaphor or description of any internal psychic mood
or state of mind, he applies the physical amplitude of gestures and acts.
Somebody or something is described not via this or that mode of sensation
or idea, but through what one does, or what one incessantly becomes. (It
is not a coincidence that in critical reviews of Vvedensky, which to a con-
siderable extent led to his arrest, his poetics was often compared to
superficial juggling.)
Thus, the leitmotiv of arrested time that one comes across in all of
Vvedensky’s pieces coexists in his poetics with the extraordinary physical
rigor of his protagonists. These actions remind us at first sight of the
“empty acting” (pustoe dejstvie) practiced by Russian-Soviet conceptual
artist Andrey Monastyrsky and his “Collective Actions” (Monastyrsky
2011, 18–20). The performative acts of pustoe dejstvie are often simply
nonsensical physical moves, which are futile, absurd and ridiculous: with-
out any goal a group of people draw a suitcase hanging on a rope toward
the peak of a hill, they excavate a book dug in a year before, make a record
of who goes out of the forest and appears in sight and in which order. As
Monastyrsky himself claimed, these actions, despite their kinetic activity,
are “empty,” quite in the vein of a Zen paradigm, according to which one
cannot perform or effectuate anything. Nothing happens in the world,
despite the dynamism of the committed acts and gestures. Yet, Vvedensky’s
standpoint is slightly different. Along with the comic nonsense of what
happens, Vvedensky’s nonsensical acts are nevertheless meant as hyper-
meaningful. If Monastyrsky implies ineffability of any meaning—no mat-
ter whether by means of linguistic or physical expression—Vvedensky
makes the kinetic effectuation of a nonsensical act itself a proper, full-
fledged goal of an utterance; in the same vein as pragmaticism, where the
act equals itself in all its literalness and does not any more bear any loss in
connection with the fact that it failed to communicate the proper mean-
ing. Unlike the apophatic actions of Monastyrsky and “Collective Actions”
departing from negativity, the acts in Vvedensky’s poetry are affirmative.
These acts are nonsensical not because they are boring and futile, but
rather because they are too fantastic to be enacted or thought of; they are
252 K. CHUKHROV
so unthinkable that it will never occur to anyone not only to perform

them, but even to imagine them performed.
Let us list a few of them:
The candle was cutting the hair of intelligent fish (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1,
49)
The cactus will rise—the flute will descend (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1, 54)
the bee was flying as the niece (vol. 1, 55)
The tutoress was reading by means of a heel (vol. 1, 67)
Alas there stood a lamentable chair/and on the chair was seated a village
(vol. 1, 77)
The glass is barely nodding/and is becoming a lingering touch-me-not
(vol. 1, 79)
Two birds being one owl/were flying over the broad sea/and talked
about themselves/
just as some sort of casual indigenous Indians (vol. 1, 88)
the bird sat down on a bed/and took the waltzes and laced them (vol. 1,
89)
The gods whined amiss/and jumped into the abyss (vol. 1, 97)
It is hard to overlook the kinetics and rigor of these acts. Along with
being absolutely unconditioned and causeless, they demonstrate the
amplitude and spectacularity of acrobatic movements in some sort of cir-
cus stylistics. The protagonists leap, fall, somersault, fall out of doors and
windows; they fly, swim, rush, crawl, hit and scream. Such acts of para-
doxic clownery and spontaneous joyousness that evolve alongside the
uncanny and tragic events are a syndromatic component of numerous dra-
matic works—from Shakespeare to Beckett. But in the works of Vvedensky,
the acrobatic amplitude and gymnastic plastics of protagonists and objects
are added to clownery.
Just to list a few more examples of this fantastic acrobatic amplitude
from Vvedensky’s play Certain Quantity of Conversations:
Already after death the protagonists of the mentioned play sail in the boat,
exchanging the oars every second “with such speed that their wonderful
hands were not seen” (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1, 205)
Over the wardrobe walked the whistling groom (199)
Two merchants roamed over the swimming pool, in which there was no
water, while the bath-man was sitting under the ceiling (206)
The first: Quite funny. Will you shoot yourself, drown or hang?
The second: Don’t laugh! I am running around to end myself up asap.
The third: What a crank. He is running around the statues. (203)
As already mentioned, such inhuman rigor and vitality might be a

psycho-physical reaction to approaching death; in such a situation the out-
burst of plastic force and energy functions as an affective resistance to
catastrophe, when the difference between the gesture of flinging a rope
around one’s neck to hang oneself and the trick of an acrobat-equilibrist,
hanging on a rope under the ceiling, is very slight. As one of the protago-
nists of the same play says: “When one dies, one cannot play cards. That’s
why let’s better play cards right away” (200).
Topographic Distances and Leaps

I forgot existence, I again contemplated distance (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1,
vol. 1, 163)
The distance from one word to another one is of course a flower (181)
Being mainly concentrated on acts, gestures, moves and performative

subversions, Vvedensky ignores all that constructs lyricism and sensuality
in poetry—metaphors, definitions, oral and prosodic glossolalia. This is
because he ignores the timing of the poetic line; his utterance and emis-
sion of paradoxes take place in eschatological non-time.
Nikolay Zabolotsky, when critiquing the anemic rhythm in Vvedensky’s
poetry, explained this feature by the elimination of feminine endings in
Vvedensky’s poetic line. He wrote:
You deliberately narrowed your activity, when you limited the terrain of
applying phonetic means. I mean rhythm, the consonant and the vowel
setups, as well as intonation. You use the first two elements occasionally,
but you never apply the last two ones. According to Khlebnikov the femi-
nine vowels mainly serve to soften the masculine “noise”, but you can
hardly neglect the femininity of the vowels. Only a vowel can make the
verse sail and trumpet; the consonants lead to the underworld noise. The
shift of intonation makes the poem glisten and thrive with “blood”.
Monotonous intonation turns it into the lymphatic liquid, devoid of
mucosa, “the face” of the verse becomes then anaemic. (Zabolotsky
1993, 127)
254 K. CHUKHROV
Yet exactly by making the verse anemic, Vvedensky managed to evict

from Russian poetic dictum all that was connected with the volume, the
contour and the sensuous “flesh” of an image. It is due to feminine end-
ings that in the Russian language the stress on one vowel intensifies and
prolongs a certain vowel, but reduces the others. The stressed vowel
becomes the node of individuation and of embodying the image by oral
means. It sets the speech apparatus so that with the additional prolonga-
tion of the vowel by means of a stress, a specific orality appears, which
acoustically creates the sensuously perceived bodies and images. The stress
“caresses” the oral contour of a word. This effect produces prosody and
proposition in which sounds, meanings, words stand close to each other as
welcome relatives; such an effect inscribes into verse the unique sensuous
orality of an author. Vvedensky’s verse evicts this syndrome from the
Russian language so that prosodic form acquires the utmost abstractness,
becomes blank and incorporeal. Yet, the clash of the incompatible mean-
ings in his poetic line is hardly a variation of a metaphor, as Zabolotsky
would insist in his critique of Vvedensky. Michail Meilakh’s thesis about
ellipsis as the principal trope of producing a nonsensical impact is more
justified. But grounding nonsense merely in ellipsis—that is, on the inten-
tional omission of the syntactical components—would mean that the com-
monsensical sentence is potentially reconstructible in Vvedensky’s
proposition. More legitimate then would be Valery Podoroga’s interpreta-
tion, according to which the nonsensical meaning in Vvedensky’s writing
is the transmission of the particles of the world, which broke out of the
“maintenance of language” and clump together without coherence.
Podoroga defines bessmisliza (nonsense)—the act of such clumping—as a
temporal paradox. He writes:
It (the instant of becoming) continues at the expense of intension and not

extension, it clots into itself as the endless curve. And exactly in the second,
when the dissected time clotted, the language loses control over the world.
In this instant, the poetic observer, allegedly, experiences the feeling of
release: s/he perceives the slowed down moves, as if in Zeitlupe, and
discovers their dazzling novelty: the images, sounds, grammatic forms freely
fall on each other, in the rhythm of clotting (slipanie). (Podoroga 1993, 147)
* * *
The poetic line in pre-avant-garde poetry, even when it was most innova-
tive—for example, among acmeists and symbolists—was always nonethe-
less built on semantic coherence, grammatic consequentiality, even despite
the radical renewal of imagery and language. This condition was some-
thing that was taken for granted. The avant-garde and particularly the
experiences of futurism and zaum (the absurd/pilpul) brought into the
Russian poetic line the rupture, interruption, refusal of automatic coher-
ence in rhythm, prosody, phonetics and semantics. But, if for Kruchenykh
and other zaumniks the struggle with the automatism of poetic speech was
mainly taking place in phonetics (and hence semantics), Vvedensky was
not so much interested in phonetic experiments; nor was he preoccupied
by estranging the meaning, turning it into zaum (anti-sense) as the goal
of poetry.
Yet, the main trait correlating Vvedensky with the futurist poets,
especially with Mayakovsky, is in positing semantic ruptures between
meanings and things topographically, as geographic distances. Semantic
leaps conditioned by topographic breadth and scale are instigated by
the cosmological dimension of the poetry of both Mayakovsky and
Vvedensky.
Such gapping between meanings, cast away from each other not
only semantically but topographically, is different from the gradual,
“warm,” step-by-step weaving of meanings in acmeism. Yet,
Mayakovsky, as well as Khlebnikov, still acts in the grip of metaphor,
although a very radicalized one. Vvedensky’s nonsense breaks com-
pletely with meaning. Not only does he reject the previous automatic
lexical and syntactic concatenations, but he establishes new, absolutely
fantastic and paradoxical ones: horses with palms; birds with hands;
flowers which look to the right; double-seated princes; geometry of
underwear; villages sucking the song; wind which is a chair; air which
is a neighbor.
The semantic elements are distanced from each other so that the gaps
are not simply qualitative, but quantitative too; that is the reason why the
distance can be perceived topographically and even geographically and
cosmologically. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva and the OBERIU
writers were the first in Russian poetry who saw the proposition from this
topographic, anthropometric (ascending, descending, moving) and plan-
etary point of view. Due to the semantic ruptures, the automatic flow is
constantly undermined by the intrusion of the unexpected sign; an error
256 K. CHUKHROV
in the conditions of equilibrium, according to the theorist of the OBERIU

Yakov Druskin (Druskin 1993b, 94–99).3
As Druskin wrote in his diary, between two words or two sounds there
is an eternity (Druskin 1999). In creating the semantic rupturing that as
well reveals extreme topographic and planetary distancing between mean-
ings, Vvedensky has no equal: numbers—oar; double-seated princes; the
death—death’s hedgehog; the sea—a round zero; the cramped hair will
take off—trading as a merchant; the city of Galich—momentaneous finger
(Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1–2).
Bessmissliza (Nonsense) as a Paradox of Temporality

Vvedensky’s nonsense, unlike the zaum (anti-sense, pilpul) of the futur-
ists, does not apply neologisms or any abstract sound combinations. It is
not surrealist nonsense either, dealing with hallucinations in the frame-
work of phantasmatic automatism or the optical unconscious. The non-
sense of the OBERIU and especially that of Vvedensky is not a mode of
automatic writing. Rather, bessmisliza functions as distorting sense and
semantics because of abnormal conditions in the ontic domain, in the very
empirical domain of being—because of the mutations of temporality,
space, quantity and quality.
As Yakov Druskin’s diaries testify, nonsense is not simply an absence of
sense or its distortion, but a hyper-sense, which makes it coincide with the
trope of humor. Such sense can only be acquired via the transcendence of
sense as such. In our daily world it is not only impossible, but also
incomprehensible: it is impossible to understand how the instant can be
eternal; or how one can experience eternity in the conditions of time.
Consequently, marking each case of such an impossibility of the transcen-
3
Yakov Druskin (1902–1980), Russian philosopher, art theorist, mathematician, theolo-
gist, pianist, musicologist, an informal member of the OBERIU group in the 1920s and
1930s. A disciple of N. O. Lossky, he was an ideologist of the OBERIU group, its theorist
and biographer. Druskin outlived all other members of the group and, despite the harshest
years of the Leningrad blockade, managed to save the archive and most of the manuscripts
of the OBERIU members. Although he was isolated from European colleagues, when philo-
sophic research was attacked in the post-revolutionary years of repression, Druskin devel-
oped his own philosophic edifice close to Kierkegaard and Husserl. As his principal
gnoseological premise he claimed abstaining from judgment and provided a new approach to
the issues of free will and predetermination. His philosophic oeuvres are gathered in his
Diaries (Druskin 1999).
dent dimension can only be nonsensical. And it is then the very impossibil-
ity of sense that becomes the sense.
In such a system of signification, the sign disposes with the necessity of
constant place in a constellation or a proposition, or it falls out of the
established semantic sets of both regular quantifications and
qualifications.
As Druskin writes, in Vvedensky’s poetry almost in all phrases the prin-
cipal thing is “the error amidst the flow of thought” (nebolshaia pogresh-
nost v uslovijakh ravnovesia). This, as Druskin argues, facilitates an
objectless severity of spirit and “twisted” speech (kosvennaya rech), free
from warm-heartedness (Druskin 1993a, 169).
In such mutated sets “the many” can appear as “one.” According to
Druskin, this can happen when one sees one and the same dream many
times, or when the past moment recurs again and again. As Druskin claims,
in any, at first sight, logically coherent binary constellation, such as “this
and that,” “the immanent and the transcendent,” “father–son,” “simulta-
neous–alternate,” the quantitative and numeric logic is in fact not com-
monsensical and discreet at all. For example, God is both “one” and “two”
(father = son) and the other way round: “father = son” is “two” but “one”
as well. Hence, “two” equals “one,” but at the same time it does not equal
“one.” “That” can be identical with “this,” but at the same time it is dif-
ferent from it; it can be con-temporary with it, but as well non-temporary.
For instance in Vvedensky’s poem “God May Be Around,” the protago-
nists exist both before and after death (Druskin 1993b, 94–99).
With those examples, Druskin proves that in time as the mode of dura-
tion, change and differentiation can be ignored. What is important in time
is not its mechanics of dispersal, but its eschatological reification, its
becoming the ingrown static object.4
These violations in the set of quantities belong to what Druskin defined
as “a slight error in the conditions of equilibrium.”
The utterance in Vvedensky’s poetry is organized so that each new
word and its meaning launch a new semantic direction. It means that
movements are constantly askew. According to Druskin, a similar approach
toward undermining the equilibrium by means of an error we encounter
in the 12-tone dodecaphony of a new Viennese school. In the case of
dodecaphony one can treat each sound as a slight error in the absence of
4
Druskin defines an instant as the only opportunity of interrupting time with eternity. The
task of an artist is, in searching for the instants, to prevent falling into time.
258 K. CHUKHROV
tonality, when the equilibrium balancing this “error” is the dodecaphonic

series.5 In the 12-tone composition each further sound is not in a coherent
bond with the previous one; it does not continue what had been started;
in it every further sound is a new numeric appearance; it is new, because it
does not have a tonal key as any forerunning basis. Similarly, in Vvedensky’s
dramatic verse each next semantic element in his “series” provides “a new
numeric.” Hence the contingent leaps from one meaning to another that
create the effect of nonsense.
As Druskin writes, “If two words are connected and move in the same
direction, then the second word will not signify anything anymore.” That
is why it makes no sense to have propositional logic and coherence. In
Vvedensky’s sentences there is no subsequent meaning, there is only
another “now.” Vvedensky rejects the teleology of time. As stated in
Druskin’s “Classification of Dots” (Druskin 1993b, 95–99), the direction
then is not continued, but is superseded by a new direction, creating a sort
of a “zigzag.”
Conversely, the regular poetic utterance, no matter how metaphorically
charged it is, moves in one and the same direction; it has a beginning and
an end of its developing pace not only in linguistic expression, but in
imagination too. In other words, it follows a figuration aspiring to the full-
fledgedness of meaning, even when this meaning is metaphorically and
syntactically transformed.
Coherence and smooth sequence are impossible because there is no
possibility of flow in time; time is not an incessant continuity, but it is an
endless interruption and fragmentation, which can be stopped by an extra-
temporal moment—a moment as a sign of eternity—or by death as the
principal event of time.
Describing the fragmentation in the movements of a running mouse,
Vvedensky comes to the following conclusion: movement is not solid and
integral. There are no integral acts denoted by verbs, such as “sat down,”
“stood up,” “went out,” or “walked” (Vvedensky 2013, 74–75). But each
of these acts, due to the absence of any continuity between them, gets
segmented. Consequently, there is no possibility of exerting an integral,
5
In dodecaphony the hierarchic construction of tonality (tonic, dominant, subdominant)
is cancelled, as long as in a 12-tone series each sound functionally equals the other. The
dodecaphonic series becomes the formant of composition instead of the previous tonality,
and forms within itself the logic of inter-serial gravity. Yet, the system of gravities in the
12-tone series is newly formed in each concrete composition and not preliminarily as in the
tonal system.
meaningful and signifiable physical move or act that could be defined by

any concrete verb, fitting it as a constant denotation. This is why each turn
of an act is a new move and a new beginning, when the previous act is not
in any way recognizable and leading to the next one.6
As Druskin writes in his “Heralds and Conversation”: “Time between
the two instants is blankness and void: the lost end of the first instant and
the expectation of the second one. Meanwhile the second moment is
unknown” (Druskin 1993a, 91).
The signifier in Vvedensky’s poetry is emptied from the predictable col-
locations and contexts because the things of the world themselves have
lost this ontological and ontic contextualization. That is why it is not clear
what the thing that an eye sees and registers is: is the tree that one sees
really a tree, or the eagle really an eagle; or are they things at all?
In “The Conversations” recorded by Leonid Lipavsky, Vvedesky says7:
I doubted, that, for example, a house, dacha, tower can be unified by the
notion of a building. Maybe the word “shoulder” is much better combined
with the number 4. I practiced those things in poetry and proved their via-
bility. And I got convinced in the falsity of previous links. (Lipavsky 1993, 16)
Vvedensky describes his poetics of signification in “The Gray

Notebook”:
Objects are like children that sleep in the cradles.

Like stars that move in the sky just a little.
Like drowsy flowers that soundlessly grow.
Objects are like music, they stand in place….
And I saw a house, like winter, diving.
And I saw a swallow signifying a garden. (Vvedensky 2013, 70)
6
“Let the mouse run over the stone. Count only its every step. Only forget the word every,
only forget the word step. Then each step will seem to be a new movement. Then, since you
rightfully will have lost your ability to perceive a series of movements as something whole,
which you had wrongly called step (you were confusing movement and time with space, you
erred in superimposing them one over the other), movement as you see it will begin to break
apart, it will arrive almost at zero. The shimmering will begin. The mouse will start to shim-
mer. Look around you: the world is shimmering (like a mouse)” (Vvedensky 2013, 74).
7
Leonid Lipavsky (1904–1941), Soviet writer, philosopher and poet. Member of the
OBERIU group. Together with Yakov Druskin, he is considered to be a theorist of the
OBERIU movement; in the 1920s and 1930s OBERIU members gathered in his apartment.
Like Kharms and Vvedensky, he wrote for children in the 1920s. His most well-known philo-
sophic oeuvre is Investigation of Horror. He went missing at the Leningrad front in 1941.
260 K. CHUKHROV
And further:
A tree lies flat, a tree hangs, a tree flies. I cannot determine which. We can-
not cross it out, nor can we touch it. I do not trust memory or imagination.
Time is the only thing that does not exist outside us. It devours everything
that exists outside us. Here falls the night of the mind. Time rises over us
like a star. […] Look, time is now visible. It rises over us like zero. It turns
everything into zero. (Vvedensky 2013, 71)8
* * *
Interpreting the notion of nonsense, Gilles Deleuze defines it as an ideal

play, which cannot be played “either by human, or God. It only can only
be thought as nonsense” (Deleuze 1990, 60). Nonsense is understood
not as the absence or lack of sense, as in the classical absurd (Albert Camus,
Eugène Ionesco, or even Samuel Beckett), but as an act of such a bestow-
ing of meaning when it is, on the contrary, in excess. In this case, the sense
is cast and lodged as if by a throw. The nonsensical sense is not the primary
cause, but is the outcome—not a phenomenon, but a positional effect
(Deleuze 1990, 67). As already stated, the meaning in Vvedensky’s poetic
line starts anew with each word, by means of a new throw. The words are
not to denote something, but are in a way naming one another. They are
effects, functioning as proper, non-household names. Let the “flower” be
called “Andrey” or “a jerk”; let “the earth” be named “lynx”; let “the
number” be named “the oar”; let “the sick man” be called “the wave” and
“the glass”—“the touch-me-not” and so on.
To repeat again, according to Deleuze, with the normative proposition
the meaning of a signifier (a word) is explicated by the signified (the
thing); in a sentence or a definition, the signifier is explicated by another
noun (word, sentence, verb, situation), when “n1 is n2 which is n3.” For
example, “Alice is a girl”; “Snark is the nickname of a character.” Whereas
8
In his text “Zero and Zeero” (Nol’ i Nul’), Daniil Kharms compares the circle with the
ideal form, with zero as the ideal number. He writes: “The symbol of a zeero is 0, whereas
the symbol of a zero is a circle. In other words, zero is a circle. Our imaginary solar row can
only be adequate to reality if it stops to be a straight line, but has to bend and curl. Ideally
curling procedure should be constant and in case of incessant continuation the solar row will
then turn in a circle. […] Try to see in a zero an entire numeric circle” (Kharms 1993,
116–117).
in nonsense the noun is repeating, reenacting its own self; it is constantly

renaming itself as n, and therefore it “leaps” on another noun, as if it were
its own meaning, while it is not; as if the next semantic unit has to be the
meaning of the previous one out of the blue, out of the audacity and
impertinence of the throw. For example, Snark will be Budjum. “The
spring” will be “prison” and so on. Then the signification formula is “Nn”
(Deleuze 1990, 67).
The effect of humor, of the extremity of comedy, emerges due to such
a machine of nonsensical namings. Meanwhile, to produce this kind of
humor, it does not suffice to say something ridiculous or absurd. As it was
already remarked, Vvedensky’s humor, even when it borders on clownery,
always evolves in the proximity of death, or precedes the death of a pro-
tagonist and immerses itself in temporal blankness in which the aforemen-
tioned modes of signification are practiced. Humor, on the one hand, has
a tragic genesis; on the other hand, it shifts aside, moves away from trag-
edy. Life, things, acts lose causal grounding and find themselves in some
sort of zero gravity. In this case death itself is deprived of its pathetic pur-
port, and appears to be nothing but a pantomimic prank.
To Talk About Catastrophe Rendering It Askew

Why should we get upset and grieve when someone was killed. We did not
know any of them, and they all died anyway. (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 1, 64)
It is considered that Vvedensky, as well as other members of the

OBERIU, were remote from politics. Indeed, if one compares their texts
with the dramaturgy of Brecht or the poetry of the Russian avant-garde,
they seem to be demonstratively indifferent to the political construction of
society and its agendas. However, one should not forget that the period of
the OBERIU comradeship coincides with the harshest years of the Stalinist
purges. The early Soviet project of emancipation ended up with show trials
and repressions.
The political engagement of the avant-garde, the striving to build a new
society, was hijacked by the institutions of totalitarian management. This
tendency is so obvious already in the late 1920s that the memory of the
recent political optimism of avant-garde cultural politics instigates ironic
mockery. On the other hand, the closure of early Soviet political optimism
automatically brings poetic speech to metaphysics, a meta-world, and as a
result to the negative dialectics and poetics of a catastrophe. Many pieces
262 K. CHUKHROV
by Vvedensky, especially the later ones, such as “The Christmas Tree at the
Ivanovs” (1938) or “Some Quantity of Conversations” (1937–1938), are
the most poignant and tragic testimonies to this social catastrophe.
Vvedensky was arrested in 1931 and spent several years in exile (until
1936). However, he did not describe repression in a way similar to that of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov. If he had, this would have
become a historical document from a victim and a witness. He chose the
poetics of humorous nonsensical paradox, which enabled him to be more
powerful than his inevitable political fate when resisting it was impossible.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Logic of Sense, Trans. Mark Lester. London: Athlone Press.
Druskin, Jakov. 1993a. Materials for the Poetics of A. Vvedensky. In Complete
Works in 2 Volumes, A. Vvedensky, ed. M. Meilakh and V. Erl, vol. 2.
Moscow: Gileya.
Druskin, Yakov. 1993b. “This and That”; “Classification of Dots”. Logos 4: 94–99.
———. 1999. Diaries. Vol. 1. St. Petersburg: Academichesky Project.
Kharms, Daniil. 1993. On Time, Space and Being. Logos 4: 102–124.
Lipavsky, Leonid. 1993. Conversations. Logos 4: 7–75.
Monastyrsky, Andrei. 2011. Catalogue of Personal Exhibition in MMOMA.
Moscow: V-a-c, 2011. С. 18–20.
Podoroga, Valery. 1993. On the World’s Shimmering. Logos 4: 139–150.
Vvedensky, Alexander. 1993. Complete Works in 2 Volumes, Eds. Michail Meilakh
and Vladimir Erl. Moscow: Gileya.
———. 2013. Invitation for Me to Think, Trans. Eugene Ostashevsky and Matei
Yankelevitch. New York: New York Review Books Poets.
Zabolotsky, Nikolay. 1993. My Objections to A. Vvedensky, the Authority of
Bessmisliza (nonsense). Logos (4): 125–127.
CHAPTER 15
Asking for It: An Exchange between

In this performative exchange, psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman and artist

Vanessa Place enact the classic comedy double act, playing straight man and
comic to confound not just the idea of a proper response, but the impossibility
of a proper question. Executed in the form of a quasi-academic dialogue, the
two circle the concept of comedy as performance in the inevitability of per-
formance as inherently comic. Seltman, a practicing analyst, enjoins Place,
a practicing criminal defense attorney, by way of the prop––the slip of the
tongue that is fundamental to “getting” both the law and its joke. Place
argues that her use of voice and language casts ideology into a set of sculp-
tures, capable of consideration. Seltman dissents, counseling that things are
not as different as they may seem. Seltman evidences a skepticism toward the
liberties assumed by Place and the potential echoing of violent repetition.
Place refuses the impact of her violence by cartoonishly surviving its conse-
quences. The interview is effectively a consultation between two professions
bound to a code of ethics and toward a more imaginary telos, with an unruly
third. The fundamental ethical mandate of the psychoanalyst is to outwit
the censor in order for the patient to confess freely, while the fundamental
C. Seltman (*) • V. Place

New York, NY, USA

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_15
264 C. SELTMAN AND V. PLACE
obligation of the lawyer is to serve as a mouthpiece so the client can keep their
mouth shut. The artist suspends language as a rhetorical intervention into
its functional production and obscene assimilation, rendering audible that
which is otherwise absorbed without friction. For Place, context is consent;
for Seltman, consent may be contingent on content. If the artist’s perfor-
mance is a mimesis without a truth, the analyst’s performance is that the
truth is mimetic. The point is never to clarify or resolve, but to keep the ongo-
ing contronymic appointment.
* * *
Cassandra: In your forty-five-minute performance piece, “I’ve got this

really funny joke about rape,” you tell a series of rape jokes primarily
selected from websites displaying crowd-sourced offensive humor. The
piece is not easily recognized as in the comic “genre.” Does this perfor-
mance at all resemble the traditional model of stand-up?
Vanessa: The stand-up comic acts as a performance of the close-natural:
the routine is memorized, recited off-script as if impromptu; there’s typi-
cally a partially improvised banter with the audience before and during the
set to create an intimacy; there are often pauses between bits for a sip of
something; there is an ongoing engagement with the audience’s response,
a performed reaction to their laughter or lack thereof. Heckling is an overt
prompt; comedy in this way acts as call and response. None of this appears
in my work. I do not engage at all with my audience beyond watching
them, I am always clearly reading from a scripted text, I do not react to any
reaction, and need no drink. The stand-up comic asserts their humanity or
the humanity pinking their comedy. I stress the blankness of its violence.
C: The sole resemblance is the joke itself. Pure content. Your body is
present but nothing affective is made available. How does this lack of
attunement impact the audience?
V: My audience is thrown back on itself; put another way, the material
has to be considered in a sculptural sense, as something cast into being in
this room via this language, rather than pre-packaged content for chuck-
ling, which can be easily exported. Of course, I am also the audience in
this site specificity, which is why we watch each other, to see what each
other will do. We are performers on both sides of the stage, signified as
such in the rape joke performance when the lighting source shifts direc-
tion from me (the traditional performer’s position) to them (I am backlit,
becoming only a black silhouette, and they are now in the spotlight). The
comic object is not so much the joke but that the joke is on.
15 ASKING FOR IT: AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN CASSANDRA SELTMAN… 265
C: The shift of light mimics the shift that happens in the joke—the
punchline shifts the primary script of the set-up to a secondary one (Raskin
1985). As a result, the audience becomes psychically, and in this case
visually, implicated. A spotlight can be an interrogation; it reveals by force
of light. What can be seen when the light shifts to the “audience”?
V: That the audience is the performance of the joke.
C: Are you shifting light here? Revealing me to be the performance of
the interview?
V: It’s funny because it’s true. True because it’s funny.
C: So my laugh is an endorsement of the joke’s truth?
V: Or its creation.
C: What are the implications of creating truth in this way?
V: The comedic implication is that rather than looking for the structure
of comedy in the analysis of content, the structure of comedy becomes
purely, visually, sonically structural. This is a philosophic implication in
that the object of comedy is itself: comedy is the production of a truth;
that is, it is a philosophic production in the classical sense. Which is to say
through echoing. Comedy does not have to be funny, obviously, to be
comedy. The comic here is the mimic that does not fall into mimesis as the
semblance of truth but rather mimesis as truth. The truth of Echo.
C: Zupančič (2008), building on Lacan, outlines conservative comedy
as the elaboration of the gap between the ideal and its realization. On the
other hand, subversive comedy reveals the failure within the pure ideal
itself. Would you consider the latter form to be an operation in your
performances?
V: I would, and do, though I’m not convinced there’s a difference
between them, except by way of emphasis. Or perhaps surface, or even the
structure of the classic joke itself. The set-up is the creation of the ideal
and the intimation of its realization, the punchline the reveal of its latent
failure. Prompting that funny part of the bit where surprise typically sub-
stitutes for what would otherwise be disappointment. The easiest example
of this is the anti-joke (sometimes delightfully referred to as the “German
joke”), the joke that rounds the comedy circle structurally without any
funny business but the business at hand (i.e., “What do you call a black
man flying an airplane? A pilot.” “Why did the blonde kill herself? A com-
bination of low self-esteem and substance abuse.”). What Zupančič calls
conservation to me is merely the front of the mirror, the subversion being
the leaden part where the mirror reminds itself it is a mirror. My perfor-
mances in this sense are comedic, though arguably not comic. To put it
another way, when I tell a rape joke, am I not “asking for it”? And if I ask
for it, it cannot be rape.
C: If mirror begets image and image begets photograph, can we think
about the joke as a photograph? Where is Barthes’ studium and where is
the punctum? Does this framework apply to a rape joke (Barthes 1981)?
V: But is it not the case today that photograph begets image as mirror?
That part of the joke here is what would be, in a classic Freudian sense, the
puncture of the punchline, which is another way of thinking of the punc-
tum, but the logic of the joke reveals that punctum is part of studium and,
at the risk of going one better, vice versa. Barthes wrote at a time when
photographs were recordings of an event, but now the event is the record-
ing. Our imaged meals may or may not be eaten, and are shared via media
not mouths; we rarely look as we do when we look in our selfie-mirror,
there’s the angle for one thing, high or low, something that smacks of
angels and devils and naught in between except us pinheads, quite Blakean,
and that’s funny too; and our punctums are as soft and round and unindi-
viduated as our kneecaps when it comes to rubber hammers.
C: Is the punctum of the rape joke the same as with any other joke?
How does the rape joke differ from other kinds of jokes—or is it the exem-
plary case of the joke in general?
V: We can quickly identify the rape joke as the Ur-joke that enacts the
joke form itself, in all its theoretical permutations. The rape joke scores
across the board, neatly illustrating, for Bergson (2008), the mechanized
man within the man-as-animal; for Freud (1976, see also McGowan
2017), of course, the obscene discharge of repressed hostility/violence;
for Zupančič (see also Owens 2016; Boucher 2016), the concrete impos-
sibility within both rape and its gag. The last one is particularly prickly,
because in this the rape joke discloses the non-consensual side of the comic
and the consensual demand of the rape. I use “demand” here in the French
fashion, because I’m always asking for something. In other words, the rape
joke works like a rape insofar as we don’t consciously consent to comedy.
Things “hit us” as funny. We can suppress a laugh, but we cannot refuse
its tickle. The rape, by comparison, seems to be a demand posed by the
rapist that can never be answered by his victim because his victim is not the
person to whom the demand is addressed. Put another way, if she could
answer, she would say “yes,” and then there would be no rape, the demand
remaining unmet. So if we take Freud (1976), for example, it’s easy
enough to see how every rape is structured like a joke. And if we take
Zupančič, for another, we see that every joke binds the unconscious to its
own impasse. Which is why so many punchlines have to do with literaliz-

ing language: “I take ‘the rapist’ out of ‘psychotherapist.’”
For my own purposes, I think that the meta—and its anagram “meat”
is exact—of the comic is revealed not so much as a content-based split or
chiasmic relationship between presumptive opposites and asides, but
rather as a trilectical relationship between text, subtext, and context.
Comedy posits a frictive structural engagement, a refusal of reconciliation,
whereas tragedy harmonizes, unifies. And what is a rape joke if not a work
of friction?
C: In the trilectical relationship, how have shifts in context and plat-
form affected the joke? I’m thinking of the many transitions from its
source, to your voice and body, to your social media presence, to the LP,
to another form of audio, to different performance venues, to the book.
How does the change in platform stabilize or destabilize the correspond-
ing points of the triangle?
V: “Yes” is the only answer to this. Because context is contextual, so the
text read occurs in one’s own voice in one’s own head, and the text heard
is heard then necessarily in another voice, but a voice, in my case, that can-
not be so reliably traced to its point of origin. Like the ventriloquist, I
throw my voice, but my dummy is myself, like the ventriloquist. Like the
dummy, I’m spoken through, so I do as I’m said. Like, I should probably
add as an aside, the ideal criminal attorney. If this occurs in the context of
a physical LP, which is also forthcoming from me as a sound art object,
then the voice is a voice-over, taking on the timbre of what Michel Chion
(Chion and Gorbman 2008; see also Silverman 1988) calls the acousmêtre,
but can be properly considered the acousmaître, the voice of authority,
authority acting as unmitigated capacity because, as a voice is disembod-
ied, it becomes god-like in its transcendent properties, at least in a louche
Kantian, burning-bush Judeo-Christian way. I would again say as an aside
that this is particularly the case in my case, and by “case” I refer to the
legal sense of a trial or process that applies the law to a set of statements,
and the corporeal sense of the body as an indexical envelope, and every
envelope gets its recipient, as the case may be, because, as I have said
before—and you see how liquid echo truly is—all gods rape. And that’s
funny because of the consensual nature of primary context. We agree, you
see, to be—here.
C: Yes, my very name is the case of rape by a God, and a rape that then
equips her voice with the future. But it is a voice that lacks persuasion.
Perhaps too embodied, it cannot be thrown and therefore it can never be
a transcendent and God-like voice. Unlike you, she can only speak and not
be spoken through.
Taking the premise that your voice by its nature applies the law, how
does your performance of joke differ from your performance of legal text
and testimony?
V: It doesn’t differ at all. Just like your name acts as a bad gag where
the voice speaks but cannot be heard—which is the other face of the the-
istic voice and its impossible demand both to be attended to and to not
understand. But you are right, the mythic Cassandra is not an acousmaître
because she speaks the truth, or the voice of the law, from the position of
the subject, which is an intolerable—and tragic—conjunction. The differ-
ence between Cassandra and Jesus is that Jesus was a stand-up comic, the
set-up being that he was believed just enough to be executed and disbe-
lieved just enough to be executed, the punchline being, naturally, the res-
urrection as the final joke, the volte-face, to the longer bit about
incarnation. Context is also good in this comparison as it reintroduces the
play of opposites and the cuntishness of the comedic.
By cuntish, I mean both the obscene and contingent, but also the space
within which the phallus may be held, so the phallus is thrown into relief,
in both senses there as well, and even a third sense, by way of escaping the
two-dimensionality of sex and what does not pass as ideology; that is, the
ideological kernel that may become stuck.
C: Are the sexes at play in the comparison of Cassandra and Jesus? Is
the comedian not a successful phallic prop and Cassandra the tragic failure
of the phallus? Is there a cross-gendered aspect to your performance of the
jokes, which are told from a male perspective and produced among men?
Are there any rape jokes told from a female perspective, and if so, who
laughs? Is there a gendered reaction to the jokes among your audiences?
V: Let’s work backward and see if we can undo any hope of conclusion.
The reaction to a joke may always be gendered, just as the reaction to
anything is gendered, because we react in our given corporeal and gen-
dered envelope. Cuntish and phallic by turn: in the rape joke performance,
all the jokes are told from a female perspective, as much as the voice ema-
nates from a female body, and all from a male perspective, as much as the
text emanates from the men. This is that fricative aspect, again, as well as,
we could add here, the introduction of the Real by way of the voice that
does not comport to its logos. Because the logos is the point of origin that
we originate and ignore. Maybe the fun fact is that I just end up being the
phallic woman.
C: Does your female body serve as an alibi for the violence of the joke?
At what point does it become construed as violent versus a relief from
violence? What is the relationship between repetition and injury—does
repetition in your work repeat trauma or create banality and distance?
V: You are asking me to be the audience. You tell me.
C: I would have to say both, and that it depends on the irreducible
singularity of the individual listening—if that’s not too much of a thera-
pist’s cop-out. As a lawyer then, may I ask when, if ever, does a joke
become potentially illegal—a sex crime, a hate crime, an illegal obscenity?
Is it a structural aspect of the joke that triggers the law or is the joke
caused by the law? Does it stand outside the doors of the law?
V: The construction of your question casts you in the position of the
lawyer, though you also called the cops, which makes me suspect that
you’re a prosecutor. If we assume, for purposes of the defense, that a joke
is never a violation of the law but a constituent part thereof—and that this
may be why there is no other profession as liable to the joke as the law—
then we are—I want to avoid Kafka, as if this is possible—perhaps neither
out nor in, but about and after. In other words, which is another lawyer
trick or trait, being on this or that side of the door is less significant as a
philosophic matter, though it may be quite important as a matter of mate-
riality. That you think of speech as capable of physical violation or a crime
complet is the interesting part: that speech could ever be obscene, when
the obscene is the provenance of image and after-image, is fascinating. If
we believe, as I think all good lawyers believe, that the law is, like our-
selves, nothing but language, then the illegal is simply an excuse to call the
cops. People very much like to call the cops, though in the case of the
offensive joke they more enjoy donning the uniform. To be a cop and a
lawyer, of course, is to be an judge-executioner.
C: As a matter of materiality, I’d like to return to the idea of repetition
in the piece. Why are jokes so often repeated, memed, or viral—is the joke
viral? I’m made curious by the idea that one can repeat or retweet a joke
alongside a caption or warning and this then does not reassert its cruelty.
Are warnings and framings coextensive with the joke’s efficacy? Are warn-
ings an invitation to read, are they funny? Do they make rape jokes risqué
again after they had become banal? I am asking you to speculate here, but
hopefully not asking you to be the audience.
V: In the speculative mode, then, let’s say that Marx is wrong, or is
wrong now: that for the contemporary, the first time is farce, the second
time tragedy. Like current American politics, you think it’s funny until it’s
said again, and again, and again, and then tragedy comes to play. Here I’ll
split trilectically, again, for within the context of the comedic forum, the
comedy club, the man with a mic, and so on, repetition sets up the joke as
such. This is why jokes build in a stand-up set, and a good set features the
“callback,” the return to an earlier joke coupled with its elaboration or just
its torque. The frame itself is the warning or caption; if the forum is not
self-nominating, such as social media or the holiday meal, the warning or
caption creates the frame. This is why your dad, like all American dads,
begins a terrible joke with “Here’s a terrible joke.” If offense is then taken,
that offense can be met with an argument about context versus content;
to wit, the famous “it’s just a joke.” Consent lies in repetition, context,
and the agreement of parts.
When I performed my legal texts at the Whitney Biennial, the museum
put up trigger warnings that said the performance included accounts of
rape and sexual violence—the Whitney really knew how to pack a poetry
gig. But more to the speculative point, what happened was that poetry
became, for a moment, dangerous. Poetry had not been dangerous in
America in decades. Art has always had the capacity to be considered dan-
gerous. Which means that with this warning, and only through this warn-
ing, does poetry become art. Similarly, in my rape jokes work, there’s no
comic context: it’s an art piece. There’s nothing inherently funny about
art, and entertainment is certainly not a given. So the repetition of the
joke undoes the batting of the frame—it’s really not funny. Or, as the joke
goes: “Tickling. Rape for beginners.”
C: Is there a difference between thinking about these fora as platforms
and thinking about them as media? How can all this reckon with the struc-
tures of medium/media/mediation in general? Is the joke a social
medium? Anti-social? Solipsistic?
V: You say solipsistic as if it were a bad thing, when it’s all we’ve ever
got. Given that platforms are always media, and vice versa, just as the
joke is a social medium and social media are a joke. More than one
doe-eyed and determined interrogator has asked me whether my rape
jokes are just another rape. Leaving aside the earlier point about every
rape being structured like a joke, which is a joke itself, there is some-
thing interesting about how rape is conceptualized as an object here,
and, more to our point, how comedy is—as a fact about something, or
an object in fact, rather than as an objection, which is an interpretation
of something capable of being seen another way. It’s terribly anti-
social, as the medium goes, to admit to facts—or the kinds of facts that
we are discussing here—as either viewpoint or worldview, as contin-

gent—that is, on the information currently available—which means
acceptable. To me. See the beginning of this answer. But what do
you think?
C: What are the consequences of conceptualizing comedy as an object?
Does it give us certain permissions and certain restrictions? Can we take it
inside ourselves if it’s an object? And if so, is its objecthood what gives it
the ability to be experienced as rape? If the joke as object, and objectivity,
is fact rather than opinion, then are the pain and affect (response and
attunement) of the response a lie? Is the joke necessarily against
interpretation?
V: An object is necessarily sculptural, by which I mean not that it’s
three-dimensional, but that it occupies both positive and negative space.
By occupies, I mean that it is thrown into being by way of the play between
these two spaces. As I think of my practice as essentially sculptural, lan-
guage doing the throwing. I’m not interested in permissions, which are by
definition and default restrictive, but in this casting, because this is what
makes us the context, the host, the hostel, which is why we may feel its
presence so keenly and unhappily. The ear being the one orifice we cannot
close, then it would seem our very penetrability to language, especially
sonic language, is the predicate for its existence as object proper. The joke
cannot then be against interpretation but always, as noted, after interpre-
tation: after in the sense of post-, in the sense of in-the-manner-of, in the
sense of after-word, in the sense of after-thought, in the sense of that
which remains, like an after-taste, which may be less or more pleasant, but
is always sepulchral.
C: Are the positive and negative spaces conscious and unconscious
spaces, respectively? In that sense, wouldn’t the joke be not before or after
interpretation but the interpretation itself?
V: And I would argue these spaces of consciousness are also spaces of
what could be called collective consciousness, un- and otherwise, other-
wise understood as ideological, as social, as psychoanalytic, as philosophic.
The joke is an interpretation, but the usual fiction is that an interpretation
cannot come with a before and an after if there is no uninterpreted point
of origin, yes? The joke itself is an interpreted creature, like Frankenstein
if everyone was, as everyone might be, Frankenstein; that is to say, if we
think of ourselves less like a one-man act playing to an empty room and
more as the empty room playing to the one-man act. Although that man’s
also a no-show—or at least we’re still waiting for him to go on.
C: I suppose there is a before and after insofar as consciousness is a

wonky clock—every event being too soon or too late, as we see with the
timekeeping rabbit of Alice in Wonderland. This must be why we are the
empty room waiting for the man to come on. But just like we can have a
surface without a body or a memory without an event, can’t we have an
interpretation without an uninterpreted origin?
I’m curious about the mechanism of throwing in the performance—
your voice is thrown and the language is doing the throwing as well. The
result is the sculpture. Why does the performance require or desire a
throwing away from your body? Is this the same gesture as throwing paint
on canvas? Must something always be thrown to make art?
V: Yes, if we agree, as we seem to be perilously close to agreeing, that
interpretation is after origin, in the senses previously itemized. My body is
thrown away and into, it seems, like the ventriloquist and the dummy,
there’s that hand up the bum with the sense of sound and sense coming
from somewhere it’s not—would you go so far as to agree with me?
I like this. Art is vomit. And we are dogs, happy to lap it up.
C: I would not agree, for the greater good of maintaining this as a piece
of friction.
Whose hand is in whose bum here? Does the hand perform the dual
task of stimulating the speech and animating the erection? Is there a hope
of intercourse or just indiscriminate ejaculation?
Maybe it is not vomit we are lapping up.
V: Are you making a joke out of this interview? Yes, yes, yes. And the
gag of the bulimic is also an ejaculation, yes?
But let’s go back to go forth. Because if, as we do seem to agree, com-
edy is the friction in the machine, then does its recuperation or rehabilita-
tion only come by way of the tragic? That bit where art forgets that it’s
supposed to be just the imitation of life and becomes a decision, or when
mimesis falls into thinking itself philosophy.
C: If I could make a joke out of this interview I would consider it a suc-
cess. One can only hope.
Yes—I’m interested in the role that shock plays here as an affect. If art
is just mimesis, why so much shock? There seems to be more shock in
response to a true imitation than when a decision/philosophy is offered.
Do jokes ever shock you? Are you surprised by what shocks others—are
people more or less shocked in 2018? What is the function of all this shock
in response to mimesis?
V: This is very good. The shock in response to mimesis as the shock of

the Real in the midst of realism. People cry a lot at my performances.
More people walk out. In London, a woman walked out and later
confronted me, apparently having spent two hours crying in the WC. She
said, “look at what you did to me.” I said that I had not done anything to
her, that she had a profound response to an aesthetic event. I don’t know
what people want from art, though it seems that most people don’t want
that. Maybe the shock serves also as a kind of batting around the event
itself. Jordan Wolfson’s piece at the 2017 Whitney Biennial suffered from
this: it was ninety seconds of watching an animatronic doll (puppet) be
beaten with by Wolfson with a bat in virtual reality. If it had been ninety
minutes, it would have gotten onto something like mimesis; that is, poetry.
Ninety hours, and it would be the thing itself; that is, philosophy.
C: So now I have to ask, is the difference between poetry and philoso-
phy simply durational?
V: More aspirational, if properly done.
C: We have returned again to repetition, which I know is discussed
multiple times elsewhere in this collection. What does the endless repeti-
tion aspire to be? Or does it just aspire to be? If we can say that the Real is
a certain kind of being, it always loves to have its moment. When you as
the subject conjure the Real, you are seen as responsible for what you have
conjured. What projections are then invited and received? Should we be
responsible for what we conjure?
V: Responsibility is rather grand, isn’t it? Like a kitten, it comes clawed
and cute, eliciting honorable intentions, but so often ends up in a sack
with a stone. Maybe the most we can aspire to is accountability. Much
drearier, with the requisite cold metal taste of duty. I am accountable for
what is conjured by and through me, even unwillingly. Perhaps especially
unwillingly.
C: How does your unwilling accountability impact the performance as
a piece of art?
V: It’s not my performance, it’s yours.
C: You’re a pain in the ass.
V: This seems to be a popular, and not unfounded, opinion.
C: In some ways it’s more a film than a performance or poem, in that it
creates a space for you to insert yourself in. What you want is to reveal the
drive behind desire. There’s an object in desire. There’s no object in
the drive.
V: That’s an interesting approach to film, one certainly embraced by

pornographers and film theorists. And how an installation piece should
work, and how sculpture actually is, but we forget to see ourselves seeing
the object, walking around it like so many mobile sculptures. But of
course, you’re right in that porn always reminds you (if it’s any good) that
you’re watching, and there’s always room for another insertion. For while
desire is prompted by the lure of the object, drive is the one with the rod.
Prods and rods—the subject as the buggy for the unconscious. And where
there’s a buggy, there’s bound to be buggery.
This reminds me of one of my jokes: At some point, isn’t all sex
consensual?
C: Yes, the drive repeats for the sake of it. It goes on for the sake of
going on, much like a long series of rape jokes. Anyone watching can see
we all injure ourselves over and over again for fun. Maybe you just want to
show people a good time? On the location of the object, I’d like to ask the
deceptively simple question begged by the title: What is the object of com-
edy? Is there only one?
V: Darling, I hope so. Just the one, like Koons’ blue ball, or the idea
that Venus de Milo is missing her arms, when they have never been there
as far as we’re concerned. Just the one, like the Real. Which may be the
object of comedy. To put it another way, whistling while walking through
the graveyard isn’t funny, but the graveyard whistling as you walk past is
hysterical. Especially if it’s a wolf-whistle.
C: The missing arms! The object that never was. We can only desire
insofar as we have lost, and can only enjoy what we don’t have, which is
why desire only exists where fantasy exists. A Lacanian understanding of
trauma suggests that a traumatic experience is not a moment of loss, but a
confrontation with the non-existence of the object of desire, which is the
Real as you say, and the object of your comedy. In thinking about fantasy
and desire, I can’t help but think about capitalism. I know you’ve per-
formed in the US as well as Eastern and Western Europe and Russia. Do
you find differences in response to your work in relation to the type of
government under which you are performing?
V: Absolutely, and here it could be hypothesized, unsympathetically,
that we get the government we desire, and there are places (such as
Ljubljana, Tallinn, and Paris) where the reception to my work is much
more philosophical in the sense that it is welcomed as discourse, an event
of some considered call and response, and Marxism is held in these places
in different ways, but is closely held, whereas those places (such as London
and many large cities in the US—I don’t have any experience in the other
locations) where there is a fundamentally unambivalent relationship to
capitalism, especially in its current instantiation, the work is met with a
thumbing up or down, like a product review. In other words, the American
reception frequently devolves into whether one “likes” rape jokes, though
it sometimes descends into the stupider stance of arguing that if one likes
rape jokes then one likes rape. I say stupider, but the problem is that it’s
not stupid enough. Because everyone likes a rape joke, at some point, just
as everyone likes rape, as long as they get to select its circumstance. Prison
rape is fine if you’re Genet, or you don’t like the guy. Or, as I say, rape isn’t
funny, unless there’s a clown. And there is always a clown.
C: Unambivalent is a good word to use—maybe that is the heart of the
problem. Freud illuminated the role of totemism in the repression of
ambivalent feelings. Unable to be tolerated, these feelings are projected
outwards onto the totem as scapegoat. Somehow comedy finds itself at the
intersection of these strange economies—the economy of the uncon-
scious, the economy of capitalism, and the economy of (expressed and
unexpressed) affect. Are these all one economy? Are you the scapegoat? Is
the joke the totem? How do you understand all this?
V: I’m thinking about the divide in your question between totem and
scapegoat. The scapegoat is a sacrificial animal, whereas the totem has its
own animus that will carry on. Transcendence, if we can whisper this. If
both these phenomena are driven by death, then the answer to your ques-
tion is yes.
C: Well, the mother must be sacrificed and the child must live on. And
then there’s the taboo.
V: For every totem, a taboo? For every taboo, a totem? To be totem
and taboo, that’s happiness.
“How does every German joke start?

By looking over your shoulder.
How does every good German joke finish?

Your mother looking over her shoulder.”
C: Yes, the totem upholds the taboo. It’s the physical manifestation of
a hereditary marker, passed down in order to distinguish families and pro-
hibit the taboo of incest. Many of the jokes you perform are incest jokes,
the primal betrayal that can’t be sublimated—it’s the “unspeakable” and
it’s spoken through you. Is your performance one of voyeurism? Do you

conjure these primal scenes in order to collect data? After all, a pervert is
much like a scientist.
V: Really? I remember saying to a psychoanalyst friend that the differ-
ence between my work and theirs was that they wanted to improve peo-
ple’s lives. I think that’s the running conceit. Scientists sometimes also
want to improve people’s lives, or at least it’s easier to get grant money
this way. Lawyers just want to win, regardless of lives lost. Artists should
never want to improve anyone, but maybe things, and I don’t care to
improve anyone, though there are things I think could be rather better.
And winning is rare, but nice.
More precisely, if I speak something, is it yet unspeakable? Obviously
not. The act of speaking serves here as a speech act, casting (again) some-
thing into being that was not there before. Incest is evergreen, so perhaps
the primal betrayal is not so much the actual sexual encounter—which is a
betrayal, to be certain, but rather quotidian, if human experience is any
guide—but the betrayal of speaking about incest that fails to reinforce the
totem of the taboo, which means we are always speaking after-incest.
Which I reckon can only happen in an aesthetic context, one that casts the
thing in suspense; that is to say, one stripped of functional morality.
C: Yes, the voice is the betrayal, and I’d like to ask about your voice
when performing. Mladen Dolar writes in Opera’s Second Death about the
staging and aesthetics of the voice, and of course the operatic voice (see
Žižek and Dolar 2002). Although your voice is far from traditionally oper-
atic, perhaps even the opposite, has this form had any influence on the
aesthetic of your voice?
V: Opera is my semi-public love. And Mladen Dolar’s work on the
voice has been essential to me (Dolar 2006). What might be of interest
here is the way that opera uses the harmonics of the voice as a thing of
substance and of materiality, variously deploying these two aspects as sup-
port and subversion. Opera is always about betrayal and the three-way.
The voice in opera is the transmitter of the message and the means by
which the message dissolves into its medium. The voice, its grain, its tim-
bre, its stresses, its optics, works physiologically on the audience as much
or more than that which the voice says. The voice means. And what it
means is always a matter of doubt. Doubt not just because of the afore-
mentioned three-way and the traditional themes of jealousy and rape—
rape in opera being always a violation also of the soprano’s true love—but
because the voice cannot be trusted sonically as it is not a stable signifier.
Similarly, if I may, I could say that my voice is also not to be trusted, it is

a decapitated and obscene voice, the voice that can, in the course of its
articulated violences, simmer into a kind of liturgical harmonics, in which
the old dilemma (pace Freud) is restaged: the lady or the lawyer?
C: You create both a speaker and an actor. There is a certain duplicity
to the performance. Perhaps we don’t trust your voice because as with
analysis, there is a sense of a scene being produced within the more “visi-
ble” scene. We don’t know whether you are setting traps for us or we are
being made to set traps for ourselves. There is a complicity as well as a
duplicity present.
V: Yes. And, what’s worse, it is unclear why you are there. I wonder if
the object of comedy is to put the audience member as the axis of the tri-
angle of our trilectic.
C: Which vertices? What are the coordinates? Do you want to expand
on this at all?
V: I’m not sure I can because it changes. That’s the funny thing about
comedy, it changes. It’s a banal observation, but does work a bit of acid on
the current conceit that our feelings are somehow purer than our ratioci-
nations. But there is precisely that which is mental about all sentiment, as
you well know. And while everyone wants to believe in the bath of ideol-
ogy, they also like to imagine themselves clean and free. Or they insist on
it, like they like to insist they are the end of history. I suppose it’s true, but
that’s another cartoon. And what I would add is that, pace Hume, this is
the usual causal flow.
C: Yes, there seems to be an amnesia central to our survival as a group.
Why must the collective forget?
V: To reconstitute itself as a collective. We are as the jellyfish, or, in
other words, the purpose of erecting a public monument is to have some-
thing to tear down.
C: Inflation and deflation… and castration! In your performance are
you allowing yourself, like a monument, to be that object of transference?
The permission to enact reminds me of Dolar’s thoughts on Greek theatre
being an enactment of philosophy. Is your work, in a way, a return to tra-
ditional theatrical roots?
V: I like the idea that I could “allow” myself to be an object of transfer-
ence. I am, like any piece of proper art or analysis, a point of cathexis
whether I like it or not, permit it or not, though certainly we all volunteer.
The difference between the performer and the analyst is that the analyst
more overtly occupies the acousmatic position, most precisely, generally
speaking, in the larger deployment of negative sonic space. The difference

between the performer and the statue is that while both well know this,
only the performer attempts to change the set list. The difference between
the performer and the philosopher is that there is no difference: a rather
roundabout way of saying that behind the screen of a radical return to
theatre would also be a radical return to philosophy. It’s a Cain and Abel
story where they end up in court; which is another theatre of philosophy,
of course. It’s difficult to order that phrase properly because of Pythagoras
and Plato, the dialogue and the screen.
C: You are by nature a point of cathexis, yes, but there are things we do
that can increase or decrease the transference, and I would argue you’re
guilty of “asking for it.” Or is that always the fantasy of the object of trans-
ference—that they’re doing it on purpose?
V: “Asking for it,” as the woman always is.
C: So it’s only our rape fantasy, you haven’t baited us?
V: I bait you by placing myself in the sphere of your fantasy.
The path of most desire, I suppose. Especially those we deem criminal.
C: You leave the door open.
V: Or at least the window. That’s usually how they get in.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bergson, Henri. 2008. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Trans.
Cloudesely Brereton and Fred Rothwell Rockford. Rockville, MD: Arc
Manor Press.
Boucher, Geoff. 2016. Psychoanalysis and Tragicomedy Measure for Measure After
Žižek’s Lacanian Dialectics. In Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy, ed. Patricia
Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, 156–183. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chion, Michel, and Claudia Gorbman. 2008. The Voice in Cinema. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York:
Penguin Books.
McGowan, Todd. 2017. Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Owens, Carol. 2016. Not in the Humor: Bulimic Dreams. In Lacan, Psychoanalysis,
and Comedy, ed. Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, 113–129.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raskin, Victor. 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Boston, MA: D. Reidel.

Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
Žižek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. New York:
Routledge.
Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
CHAPTER 16
Of Organic Comedies: Interview

with Romeo Castellucci
Jamila M. H. Mascat
Romeo Castellucci is a world-famous director and playwright. His company

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio was founded in 1981. Orestea (una commedia
organica?) was created in 1995 and then reworked and re-proposed twenty
years later in 2015. It is one of the most important works produced by
Castellucci and his company.
In fact, the tragic trilogy allows Castellucci to explore the origins of Western
civilization and barbarism by going back to their mythical sources. As it has
been aptly remarked, “while maintaining the original structure of the trag-
edy divided into three episodes—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and
The Eumenides—developing the saga of the House of Atreus with all its pas-
sion and hatred, vendettas and parricides, Castellucci’s version transforms
the words into an organic body and substance.”1
Organicism and comedy: How do these two concepts evoked by the title of
the play pertain to the piece designed and re-designed by Castellucci? Why is
1
romaeuropa.net/en/festival-2016-en/orestea-una-commedia-organica/.
J. M. H. Mascat (*)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0_16
282 J. M. H. MASCAT
a tragedy—Oresteia—labeled a comedy? What is comical about a tragedy?

And what, in the last instance, is actually comical about a comedy?
In the short interview that follows, Romeo Castellucci shares his view on
comedy and comicality.
* * *
1.
Jamila Mascat: One of the issues that naturally emerged while we—the
editors of the book—were discussing the very notion of the object of com-
edy was the question of how to define and circumscribe comicality. The
effort consisted in grasping the differentia specifica of the comic with
regard to a broader range of similar devices—such as irony, humor, sar-
casm and the grotesque—that in the end turn out to be quite dissimilar
from comedy. Therefore, I would ask you firstly to expand on your own
idea of the comic, beyond comedy as a genre. How would you illustrate
your own conception of comicality and the relationship to the comic that
you developed throughout your artistic practice?
Romeo Castellucci: I believe that the Comic is the highest among the-
atrical disciplines, although I find almost impossible to realize something
worth it. Indeed, the Comic has nothing to do with humor nor with irony
as they both exist and circulate in the media. David Foster Wallace engaged
once and for all in a harsh polemic against [postmodern] irony and espe-
cially against irony in the media (Wallace 1993). The Comic, instead, [has
nothing to do with the media, because] it has nothing to communicate.
2.
JM: Your 1995 show Orestea (una commedia organica?)—from
Aeschylus, Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud and its 2015 remake explic-
itly refer to comedy in the title. Indeed, they mention it in brackets, fol-
lowed by a question mark, and add to it the adjective “organic.” Here
comedy is conceived retrospectively, from the “fourth enigmatic part” of
the Oresteia—the lost satyr play “Proteus,” that “weighs like three trage-
dies”—to the three tragedies composing the trilogy: Agamemnon
(Ἀγαμέμνων), The Libation Bearers (Χοηφóρoι), and The Eumenides
(Εὐμενίδες)—and should be a counterweight to them. This absent/sus-
pended point is where you locate yourself. You write: “What can I say
about the lost Proteus? What can I say about this comedy that could have
counterbalanced […] the whole tragic trilogy? Is there where I stand?” And
the reply you give to yourself is: “Yes, probably” (Castellucci et al. 2001).
16 OF ORGANIC COMEDIES: INTERVIEW WITH ROMEO CASTELLUCCI 283
Could you say more about your own understanding of such a comic
and organic counterbalance to tragedy and how you decided to realize it?
RC: The Comic is the hard core that tragedy tries to dissimulate. The
Comic is not a mask, but the falling of the mask from the face. [In
Comedies] one laughs because of the nudity of the other, the nudity of her
face. [One laughs out of] Shame.
It is quite impressive to realize that in dramatic contests (agones), tetral-
ogies consisted of three Tragedies and a Comedy. What was the power of
Comedy? It is impossible to provide an answer. But when I was working
on Aeschylus’ Oresteia, I thought I should have started from the missing
section: Proteus, the comedy that sealed the tetralogy. I was attracted by
this empty space. And I also thought that Comedy could refer to the low
component of the human adventure or, in other words, to the “Real”: the
body inside the skin, the dark organic body that escapes the light of reality.
3.
JM: In your Notes d’un clown you write: “The Tragic comprises in itself
the tragedy of speech (clown), that once it has entered the track of silence,
makes the comedy” [“Le Tragique contient en lui-même la tragédie de la
parole (clown) qui, entrée sur la piste du silence, fait la comédie”].2 Would
you elaborate on the link between comicality and silence, if you believe
there is any?
RC: There is a link for sure, no doubt. For me, it is Buster Keaton who
brings the Comic to its highest level. It is the abyss and the catastrophe
that are evoked at every shot. And there is nothing to laugh about…
Keaton’s stunned gaze surprises and seizes us while we are laughing and
we shouldn’t because the thing concerns us. There is very little to laugh
[about] when it comes to the Comic. The clown to whom I referred in the
booklet of the Oresteia is the white one, the mute albino, who is opposed
to rowdy Auguste.3 Usually it has a trumpet that he plays melancholically.
This clown has lost his speech. He is so pale that he seems not to have any
blood in his veins. Maybe he is dead. He is comical but doesn’t make any-
body laugh. One remains astonished by the philosophy of the white clown.
As I said, the Comic doesn’t speak and tragedy has the task to let the
2
www.memoire.celestins-lyon.org/var/ezwebin_site/storage/original/application/f338
dc7f3b4006bb4b69bf38354682e4.pdf.
3
Castellucci refers here to the classical Western circus tradition where two main clown
characters appear: the white clown (clown blanc), judicious and melancholic, wearing a white
outfit, and the foolish Auguste, the “red” clumsy clown, wearing enormous shoes and out-
landish colorful clothing.
284 J. M. H. MASCAT
speech emerge, as a cover. But in the gaps between the words the empti-
ness of the Comic appears.
Walter Benjamin argues that catharsis is nothing but the nervous laugh-
ter that lets the Tragic off at the end of the tetralogy. It purifies from the
anguish of the Tragic. But as Benjamin remarks, this is just a nervous
release that has no efficacy. When we leave the theatre of Dionysos we are
full of anguish, but our heart is full of beauty to tears. We are aware that
we have seen “something,” something that is maybe our own gaze.
4.
JM: Is there anything as a comical mechanism par excellence? Or a com-
ical structure par excellence? On the one hand, there seems to be a huge
discrepancy between comedy and tragedy, insofar as tragedy seems to rely
on universal devices that are trans-historical and trans-cultural, while com-
edy seems to be affected by contingent conditionings. To put it in very
simple terms: it is manifest that people don’t always laugh about the same
things everywhere and comical registers are dependent on the cultures
they belong to. On the other hand, do you believe one can think of some
sort of universal trait of comicality? For example an object, a subject, a
plot, a “form” that can identify an allegedly universal comical substrate?
RC: In Tragedy the deed has been already accomplished and it repre-
sents the past (the tribunal embodies the essential mechanics of Tragedy
and Tragedy constitutes its mythical foundations). In Comedy the deed is
about to be accomplished. There is no repair, this is why there is laughing.
The one who laughs feels that she is protected from shame. It is the
shame of being.
5.
JM: In the Poetics Aristotle writes: “Comedy is as we said it was, an
imitation of persons who are inferior; not however, going all the way to
full villainy, but imitating the ugly, of which the ludicrous is one part. The
ludicrous, that is, is a failing or a piece of ugliness which causes no pain or
destruction; thus, to go no farther, the comic mask is something ugly and
distorted and but painless” (Aristotle 1967, 23). Manifestly, Aristotle’s
definition resonates with the traditional understanding of comedy as a
minor genre, the “not-noble” or maybe even the ignoble genre.
What do you think of the relationship that Aristotle’s establishes
between the comical and the “ugly” which is nevertheless “painless”? Do
you believe comedy may relate to beauty or is it condemned to ugliness?
And, above all, can we reverse the idea according to which the comical is
painless and without suffering?
16 OF ORGANIC COMEDIES: INTERVIEW WITH ROMEO CASTELLUCCI 285
RC: Indeed, the highest pain lies in the Comic. The one who is derided
is actually killed by the one who is deriding her. [The historian of ancient
Greek religion] Walter Burkert has been connecting laughter and religious
ritual murder (1987). Laughter would be the masking of religious mur-
der. It is well known his analysis of the “sardonic” laughter that could be
traced back to the habit of the ancient inhabitants of Sardinia who used to
laugh during the euthanasia of the elderly. If I laugh about someone, it is
because I have been spared and I am safe.
6.
JM: If one considers comedy as a language rather than simply as a
genre, one can investigate the specific connotations and inflections of such
a language. For Umberto Eco—The Comic and the Rule (1998)—the
comic, unlike humor that always maintains a subversive value and displays
the capacity to break the rules and the existing codes, is merely transgres-
sive. Thus, the comic only provides a temporary relief from the coercion
of the law; like Carnival it is confined to a limited time; it presupposes the
rule as inviolable and preluded its restoration and its reinforcement. In
other words, the comical exception actually proves the rule. Would you
agree to some extent with Eco’s conception of the comic, or would you
grant the comic a different function, other than the subordinate function
to re-establish the already-existing order?
RC: The Comic portrays chaos. The supreme poetry of Tragedy is an
attempt to provide order to the accident of life. And it is also the effort to
provide life with meaning. The Comic doesn’t bother with order and
meaning, nor [does] it worry about them.
References
Aristotle. 1967. Poetics, Trans. Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Buckert, Walter. 1987. Greek Religion, Trans. John Raffan. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Castellucci, Romeo, et al. 2001. Epopea della polvere. Il teatro della Societas
Raffaello Sanzio da Amleto a Genesi. Rome: Ubulibri.
Eco, Umberto. 1998. The Comic and the Rule. In Faith in Fakes: Travels in
Hyperreality, Trans. William Weaver, 269–278. New York: Vintage.
Wallace, David Foster. 1993. E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
Review of Contemporary Fiction 13:2 (Summer).
Index1
A Amphitryon (Molière), 233, 236

Abjection, 112, 125 Anderson, Hans Christian, 146
Abortionist metaphor, 75–92 Anderson, Jos, 129
Abyss (film), 41 Animal, 217
Acknowledgment, 42–43 impulses, 175n10
Acmeism, 255 satisfaction, 137
Adam, Adolphe Antigone, 191–192
La poupée de Nuremberg, 22 Antinomianism, 157
Adam (Biblical), 200 Anxiety, 111–126 passim
Adam’s Rib, 42 as primal, 113–114
Adorno, Theodor W., 2, 53, 56 Apophaticism (theological silencing),
Aesechylus, 13 248
Aesthetics Appearance, 146–148, 157, 227, 234,
ideology and, 245 246
Agathon, 17 true appearance, 153–156
Alain (philosopher), 97, 102, 103n10, Appropriation, 101
104, 105 Aristophanes, 8, 17, 18n5, 61, 77–81,
Allais, Alphonse, 146 100
Allusion, 141, 141n7 alliance with Socrates, 75–92
Als, Hinton, 211–216, 213n2 Clouds, 75, 81–84
Althusser, Louis, 241–245 Ecclesiazusac, 60–61, 61n2
American Dream, 120–121 Lysistrata, 100n8
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27742-0
288 INDEX
Aristotle, 57, 100n8 Belief, 95–96

Poetics, 19, 284 Bell, Al, 227
Artaud, Antonin, 13 Benayoun, Robert, 165, 166
Art-religion, 62–65, 77–81 Benjamin, Walter, 217, 284
Ask a Policeman (film), 206 Bergson, Henri, 31, 33, 107, 130, 180
Atkinson, Rowan, 140–142 Berkeley, George, 91n12
Auctyon, 248 Besonders (record album), 248
Audience, 78, 83, 179, 236, 264–265 Bessmisliza, see Nonsense
importance to performance, 231 Beverly Hills Cop (film), 206
split with performer, 238 Bickering in marriage, 45–47
Audran, Edmond Binary opposition, 3
La Paupée, 23 Borges, Jorge Luis
Aufhebungen, 53, 65 “Averroës’ Search,” 19
Aumiller, Rachel, ix, 8, 75 Boss
Austin, J. I., 243–244 outsourcing authority, 148–156
Authenticity post-modern boss, 145–160
mask of authentic self, 239 Boss of It All, The (film), 9, 146–156
as performance, 239 outsourcing authority, 148–156
subjectivity and, 239 Boston Legal, 132
Authority, 9, 145–160, 267 Bourdieu, Emmanuel, 43
fusion of master and fool, 145 Bown, Alfie, ix, 9, 111
logic of, 155 Brest, Martin, 206
outsourcing authority, 148–156 Breton, André, 216
underlying reality, 151–153 Bringing Up Baby (film), 42, 46
Automation, 25–29, 31–32, 107 Brooks, Mel, 215, 215n5
Frankenstein, 30 Brown, Wendy
“Automavision,” 149–150 “Resisting Left Melancholy,” 69
Avant-garde Bruce, Lenny, 202n15
OBERIU group, 247–262 Bullock, Sandra, 206
politics of, 261–262 Burkert, Walter, 285
Awful Truth, The (film), 44 Burnycat, Myles, 91n12
B C
Badiou, Alain, 159 Cameron, James, 41
Bad Lieutenant (film), 193, 194, Cannonball image, 6
194n3, 206n18 Capitalism, 160
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2 Capra, Frank, 42, 43
Bangville Police (film), 205 Caricature, 1
Baron anecdote, 4 Carnivalesque theory of comedy, 2, 3
Bataille, Georges, 65 Carroll, Lewis, 13
Baudelaire, Charles, 124 Carson, Anne, 129
Beckett, Samuel, 250 Castellucci, Romeo, ix, 13, 281–285
Belafonte, Harry, 217 Notes d’un clown, 283
INDEX 289
Castration, 25, 28, 100, 105 speechless clown, 283

Catachresis, 245–246 white clown, 283, 283n3
Catastrophe, 262, 263 Cohen, Ethan, 41
Catharsis, 284 Cohen, Joel, 41
Cause and causality, 169–173, 182–186 Colbert, Colette, 45
antecedent cause, 184 Comedies of intrigue, 58
auxiliary cause, 184 Comedy, 95n1
causality as reason, 186 aesthetic effects of, 95
chain of causes, 170 affirmation of status quo, 2
containing cause, 184 ambivalence and, 2, 52
corporeal causes, 186 carnivalesque theory of, 2
vs. correspondence, 170 comedy as performance, 231–246
joint cause, 184 conservative vs. subversive, 265
physical causalities, 171 culture and, 284
preliminary cause, 184 as dialectic, 3
sustaining cause, 184, 184n19 disruptive moment, 8
triggering cause, 184 double act (straight man and
unity of causes, 183–184 comic), 263–278
Cavell, Stanley, 7, 35–48 passim, 166 as fatal, 58
The Claim of Reason, 37 as genre of immanence, 234
Contesting Tears, 35 happy endings, 66, 108
on Emerson, 35 mechanisms at play, 1
Must We Mean What We Say?, 39 as a medium, 7
Pursuits of Happiness, 35, 37, 40, morality and, 2
42, 46, 47 as normative tool, 2
Certainty, 43 objectives, 1
Change, 88–89 Old Comedy vs. New Comedy, 41, 61
Chaplin, Charlie, 9, 112, 116–126, organic comedy, 281–285
205, 205n17, 206, 232 orphan image, 90–92
Chelson, Peter, 194n4 pain and, 284
Christ image, 81, 81n5 principle of success of the most
Chukhrov, Keti, ix–x, 10–11, 247 unlikely, 27
Cinema, 35–48, 168, 187, 194n4, as silence, 283
205, 273–274 skepticism and
interiority of expression, 35 spectral analysis of, 139–140
reading films, 36 stages of, 8
See also Specific films structure of, 3, 139
Claudel, Paul superficiality and, 17, 26, 187
The Humiliated Father, 115 as theology, 97
Cleaver, Elridge, 218n9 tragedy and, 7, 15–34, 37–39,
Clouds (Aristophanes), 75, 81–84 43–45, 57, 284
Clown transformative function, 2
clown and coat performance, 235–239 as transgressive, 285
red clown, 283n3 See also Specific types and techniques
290 INDEX
Comedy logic D
outside of comedy, 97–98 Dangerous Liaisons, 104
Comedy of Aufhebung, 65 Daniderff, Léo, 121
Comedy of circumstances, 61 Dardis, Tom, 165
Comedy of consciousness, 65–68 David Brent effect, 145–148
Comedy of frustration, 61 Death, 13
Comedy of futility, 61 death drive, 32, 108, 109
Comedy of remarriage, 7–8, 35–48 end of time, 249
passim Deception, 96–101, 96n5, 97n5
bickering, 45–47 deceived deceivers, 101–106
Comicality, 2, 13, 52, 58, 61, 65, Deleuze, Gilles, 170, 170n5, 178n14,
68–69, 98–99, 103–104, 107, 180, 200
180, 282–284 art of surfaces, 187
Comical labor, 65 Difference and Repetition, 181
Comic hero, 52, 64–67, 69–71, 92, The Logic of Sense, 182
95n1, 165 on nonsense, 260
self-negation, 66 Zen master, 185
Comic philosophy, 7–8 Deleyto, Celestino, 126
Comic relief, 25, 28, 30, 33 Delibes, Léo
Community, 132, 142 Coppélia, 22–23
Conedian, 211–212, 227 Democritus, 7, 15–16, 16n2, 33
Conflict, 89 Denmark, 150n1
Consciousness, 53–57 Derrida, Jacques, 65, 71, 146
comedy of consciousness, Desire, 29, 111–126 passim, 273–274
65–68 fantasy and, 117–121
thing-for-consciousness, 68 lack of fulfillment, 116–126
unhappy consciousness, 64 technology and, 119
Consent, 13, 267 Desmond, William, 71
and content, 264, 267 Desplechin, Arnaud
and context, 264–267 My Sex Life...Or How I Got into an
Conservative comedy, 3 Argument, 42–43
Context Dialectical movement, 66
consent and, 264 Dialogue, quasi academic, 263–278
Continuity, 56 Dickens, Charles, 227
Conversation, 39–42 Dietrich, Marlene, 20
Copjec, Joan, 198n8 Difference, 233–234
Couple, the, 35–48 passim See also Minimal difference;
comedy of, 43–45 Original, the; Repetition
tragedy of, 43–45 Dirt, 129–142
Coupling (sitcom), 240 definition of, 9, 129
Critchley, Simon, 2 See also Smut
Cukor, George, 42 Discrepancy, 52
INDEX 291
Disproportion, 51 law as comic, 192–196

Divorce, 44 restriction vs. excess, 192–199
See also Comedy of remarriage right to enjoy, 132
Dodecaphony, 257–258, 258n5 structural problem of, 132
Dolar, Mladen, x, 7, 15, 234 Entartete Kunst, 111, 112
Opera’s Second Death, 276–277 Epic, 78
Domination Epictetus, 176n13
functioning through denial, Epistle to Augustus (Pope), 2
146–148 Equality in relationship, 45
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 192n2 Erasmus, 240
Double, the, 64, 77, 89 Erfahrung, 53–56
one splitting in two, 233, 236, 238 Erotic, the, 90, 97, 97n5
twins, 233 Essence, 151–153
Doubt, 43 Eternal return, 181
Doubt vs. certainty, 80n4 Ethics, The (Spinoza), 199–201,
Douglas, Mary, 129 201n13
Dramatic poetry, 58–59 Everlasting recurrence, see Recurrence
Drive, 29, 32, 273–274 Experience, 43, 53–57, 66
Driving while black, 197n7 definition, 54
Druskin, Yakov, 247, 256–259, meaning and, 56
256n3, 257n4 status quo and, 56
“Heralds and Conversation,” Experience of consciousness, 53–57
259–260 Extimate, the, 24
Dunne, Irene, 44 Eyes Wide Shut (film), 41
E F
Easy Street (film), 206 Failure, 69–70
Eco, Umberto, 2 faith, 95
Comic and the Rule, The, 285 Fall, comedy device of, 217, 223
Ed Sullivan, 214 Fantastic, the, 26, 26n16
Edwards, Blake, 206 Fantasy, 152
Effect Farewell
time of effect, 182 split in, 238
Emancipation, 5 Fascist museums, see Museums, mock
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 35, 39 Fate,180–186
expression, 40 necessity and, 187
“Emperor’s New Clothes, The” Fedorov, Leonid, 248
(Anderson), 146 Feig, Paul, 206
Encongruity, 52 Felton, David, 214, 214n3
End of time poetics, 248–251 Ferrara, Abel, 193
Enjoyment, 130–132 Film, see Cinema
circumvention, 135 Finitude, 40, 64
292 INDEX
Foucault, Michel, 201n14 Greek theatre, 18, 77–81

French Revolution, 5 Gregory, Dick, 220
Freud, Sigmund, 7, 19–28, 97, Guillotine image, 5
99–100, 129, 175n11, 215
Civilization and Its Discontents,
159–160 H
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 113 Hajdini, Simon, 118
The Interpretation of Dreams, 113 Hall, Jonathan, 112
on jokes, 134 Halliwell, Stephen, 82n6, 85n8
Jokes and Their Relation to the Hamlet, 191–192
Unconscious, 33 Hanks, Howard, 42
on repression, 129–130 Harms, Danil, 249
retroactivity, 199n9 Head imagery, 5–6
saved psychic expenditure, 98–99 Heat, The (film), 206, 206n18
on smut, 133 Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 5, 8, 148
Three Essays on Sexuality, 113 Aesthetics, 51–52, 57–61, 122
understanding of anxiety-laughter, Berlin lectures, 58
114 Phenomenology of Spirit, 3, 5, 8,
Wunderblock, 220 52–53, 56, 62–67, 67n3, 71, 77
Frye, Northrop, 41, 113 System of Philosophy, 54
Fulfillment, 116–126 Heine, Heinrich, 101
Henry, David, 218n9
Henry, Joe, 218n9
G Hepburn, Katherine, 44, 45
Gable, Clark, 44, 45 Heraclitus, 7, 15–16, 33, 87–88, 91,
Garbo, Greta, 20 91n12
General, The (film), 6, 10, 165–187 theory of opposites, 89
examples of recurrence, 180 Heroism, 165
fortuitous circumstances, 185, Hewitt, Andrew, 245
185nn20–21 Hitchcock, Alfred
Ginsburg, Daniela, 35 The 39 Steps, 97–98, 101–107
Goals, 122, 134 Hobbes, Thomas, 198–199
destroyed by means, 106–109 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 21n11
initial, 105 adaptations from his work, 22–23
pretended, 105 “The Sandman,” 7, 19–34 passim
Go and Stop the Progress (play), 248 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 240
God, 169, 169n1, 173 Horkheimer, Max, 2
absence of, 192n2 Houdini, Harry, 164
rape and, 267–268 How to Do Things with Words (Austin),
self-transformation of, 181 243
Goddard, Paulette, 117–121 Human condition, 40
Grant, Cary, 44, 46, 47 Humor, 1, 2, 65
Great Dictator (film), 112 as subversive, 285
INDEX 293
I J
Iceland, 150n1 James, William, 9, 129
Ideal the Jameson, Fredric, 148
baron anecdote, 4 Janssen, Horst, 105
incongruity and, 4 Jokes, 131–142
Identity, 155, 224, 227, 241–243, addressee, 138
250–251 innocent, 131
as face, 233 limits and, 132
mistaken identity, 232–234, 239 listener, 134, 136
non-identity in a given moment, 89 obstacle, the, 136n4, 139
non-identity over time, 89 slip of tongue, 263
as performance, 246 structure of, 134
questioning, 233 “third person,” 134–136
twins, 233 Jones, LeRoi, 228
Ideological interpellation, 241–243 Jouissance, 152, 154, 155, 160, 198n8
Ideology, 241–244 Juvenal, 16–17
aesthetics and, 245
as performative, 245–246
Illusion, 8, 95–109, 160, 237 K
appearance counts, 104 Kafka, Franz, 201–204
character acceptance of, 97 Kant, Immanuel, 102–103
in painting, 97, 98, 104–105 Keaton, Buster (Joseph Frank Keaton),
politeness, 102–103, 105 9–10, 164–187, 205, 283
transparent illusion, 102 Battling Butler, 166
truth and illusion, 104 childhood, 164
truth of appearance, 104 College, 164
Imaginary phallus, 100, 100n8, 109 Electric House, 164
Immanence, 234 ethic of action, 166, 178
Immediacy, 53–54, 137 The General, 10, 165–187
Impersonation Keaton’s stoicism, 180–183 (see also
repetition and, 232 Stoicism)
Impossible, the, 99, 101, 136, 136n4, My Wonderful Life of Slapstick, 164
137, 192 The Navigator, 166, 171
Imposture, 67 nickname, 165
Impressions, 173–179, 174n8 One Week, 164, 166, 171
Impulse, 173–179, 175nn10–11 Our Hospitality, 164, 171
Incest, 192, 192n2 The Scarecrow, 166
Incongruity, 68 Sherlock Jr., 164
Infinite life, 109 Steamboat Bill, Jr., 164, 171
In Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 240 Keaton, Joe, 164
Intolerable Cruelty (film), 41 Keaton, Myra, 164
It Happened One Night (film), 42, 44, 45 Keitel, Harvey, 193
It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 43 Keystone cops, 205, 205n17
294 INDEX
Kharms, Daniil, 260n8 Lasch, Christopher

Khlebnikov, Velimir, 248, 253, 255 Culture of Narcissism, 159
King Lear (Shakespeare), 38 Laughable, the, 51
Kleist, Heinrich von, 33n21 Laughter, 68–72, 79, 85n8, 85n9,
Knowledge, theory of, 36–38, 98–99, 103, 104
199–201 anxiety-laughter, 112–126
“Absolute Knowing,” 62, 65, 67, desire-laughter, 112–126
68, 71 liberation theories of, 126
definition of knowledge, 91n12 lost subject and, 126n7
experience and, 43 nervous, 284
failed, 87 as process, 125–126
knowledge as perception, 91 religious murder and, 285
knowledge as vacancy, 221 surprise and, 138
Knowledge of Good and Evil, 200 Laugier, Sandra, x, 7, 35
Kojeve, Alexandre, 201n13 Law, 263–278
Kracauer, Siegfried, 170, 170n4 code of ethics, 263–264
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 97 as comic, 10, 191–208; enjoyment
Kräly, Hanns, 21 192–196; justification 198;
Kristeva, Julia, 112 nonsense 198, 199, 201–204;
Kubrick, Stanley, 41 pornography 204
Kukuljevic, Alexi, x, 10, 211 installation of, 198–199, 199n9
Liquidation World, 6, 124 as reasonable, 199–201, 200n11
slip of tongue, 263
Lebel, Jean Patrick, 165, 166
L Leconte, Patrice
Lacan, Jacques, 3–4, 27, 30n19, 100, Confidence trop intimes, 101
118, 129–130, 137, 192, 192n1, Lee, Ang, 41
200n12, 265 Lehrman, Henry, 205
on anxiety, 114 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 192, 192n1
on authority, 146, 148, 159, 160 Lewis, Jerry, 217
on fantasy, 117–121 Liberation, 61
Iamella myth, 90 Libidinal organization, 9
on identity, 234, 241 Life force, 31–32
on jokes, 134 Lipavsky, Leonid, 259, 259n7
Lack, 28–29 Liquidation World (Kukuljevic), 6
Lady Eve, The (film), 42 Lithgrow, John, 240
Langdon, Harry, 166 Living and dead, blurring of, 24
Language, 39–42, 44, 46, 91, 91n12, Ljubimov, Jurij, 248
263 Lloyd, Harold, 166, 187, 205
expression, 40 Lombard, Carol, 20
as inheritance, 39 Louis XIV, 5
reappropriated, 39–40 Lubitsch, Ernst, 7, 17–28, 20nn7–9,
See also Russian language 234
INDEX 295
As I Was Dead, 20n7 Minimal difference, 157, 157n3, 158,

Die Puppie, 20–23, 20n9, 29–33 160, 233
To Be or Not to Be, 108 Misanthropy, 215, 216
Lucian, 16–17 Moder, Gregor, xi, 1, 10, 123, 231
Modernity, 9
Modern Times (film), 9, 112, 116–126
M Molière, 58, 233, 239
Mace, Fred, 205 Monarchy, 5
Mack, Marion, 165 Monastyrsky, Andrey
Mallarmé, Stephane, 250 “Collective Actions,” 251
Man from Picardy, 228 Monroe, Marilyn, 98
Manners vs. matters, 51 Montaigne, 16–17, 33, 228
Mannoni, Octave, 95, 96n4, 97 Moony, Paul, 213
Marriage, 45–47 Munchausen effect, 160
politics and, 47–48 Museums, mock, 111, 112, 114, 124
private vs. public affair, 47–48
See also Comedy of remarriage
Martinov, Vladimir, 248 N
Marxism, 36, 117, 245, 269, 274 Needham, Hal, 206
Mascat, Jamila M. H., x–xi, 1, 8, 13, Negativity, 56, 68
51, 281 comic negativity, 76
Mask, 283 determinate negation, 71
of authentic self, 239 negative space, 92 (see also
masks of fiction redoubling, 154 Abortionist metaphor)
masks of tragedy and comedy, 18 self-negation, 66, 68
Mauron, Charles, 113 via negativa, 58
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 248, 255 Negri, Pola, 20
Maynard, Joyce, 217 Nemesius, 163, 181
McCarthy, Melissa, 206 Neuroticism, 195
McGowan, Todd, xi, 10, 191 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 181, 215
McPherson, James Alan, 224 Nonsense, 3, 72, 198, 199, 201, 204,
Meaning, 56, 68–72, 254–261 254
Mechanical, see Automation as paradox of temporality, 256–261
Mediation, 54 poetics of Vvedensky, 247–262
Midwife-abortionist, see Abortionist Normand, Mabel, 205
metaphor; Midwife image Nothing, 71–72, 78, 250, 251, 254
Midwife image, 8, 75–92 Noys, Benjamin, xi, 9, 145
Milbank, John, 159
Milton, John
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, O
44, 47, 48 Obedience, 196–199, 199n10
Mime, 239 Oberio, 13
Mimesis, 30n19, 264, 265, 273 OBERIU group, 247–262, 248n1
296 INDEX
Object, the, 1, 4, 8, 55, 103 Orphan image, 90–92

as aborted, 75–92 Oswalda, Ossi, 20
of anxiety, 111–126 passim Othello (Shakespeare), 38, 42
butt of a joke, 1 Other, the, 9, 26n15, 29–30n19, 30,
comedy as object, 238, 271, 282 38, 40, 55, 139–140, 148,
death drive, 32 155–158, 198n8
of desire, 115–126 acknowledgment of, 43
illusory, 114 castrated Other, 105
of laughter, 111–126 passim enjoyment and, 132, 142
lost, 115–116 lack in, 159
object-matter, 69 laughter expelling, 111–126 passim
object of art, 77–82 naive Other, 96–101, 105
as sculptural, 271 redoubling, 157
Objectification, 1, 9 reinvention, 157
butt of a joke, 1 symbolic, 155, 157
Objectivity, 54, 61 as “third person,” 134
Object of Comedy, The (Mascat and Otherness, see Other, the
Moder) Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 227
organization, 7–12
Objet, 117
Objet petit, 154 P
Obsession, 195–199, 196n6 Parallax view, 7, 17–18, 34
Obstacle, the, 136n4, 139 Parrhasios, 104
Oedipus Rex, 191 Parvulescu, Anea, 114
Offenbach, Jacques Pascal, Blaise, 103
The Tales of Hoffman, 23 example of two faces, 233, 235
Office, The, 145–148 Pasolini, Pier Paolo
One splitting in two, 233, 235 Theorem, 148
face, 233 Perception, 87–89, 179
Opera, 276–277 knowledge as perception, 91
Oppressed, the, 2 Performance, 1, 7, 10–11, 273, 277
Oppressor, the, 2 comedy as performance, 231–246
Ordinary, the, 45 identity as, 246
Ordonneau, Maurice, 23 ideology and, 245–246
Orestea, 281–282 performed hymn, 78
Orestra, 13 performed speech, 77
Organic comedy, 13, 281–285 performer split with audience, 238
Original, the, 232 quality, 105
appearance and, 234 quasi academic dialogue, 263–278
copy and, 234 as repetition, 231–232
difference and, 232 symbolization, 105
as existing only in performance, 234 throwing in, 272
imitation and, 232 truth and, 239
INDEX 297
Performative sentences, 243–245 Preservation of substantiality, 63, 71

Pfaller, Robert, xi, 8, 27, 29n19, 95 Preservation through dissolution, 52
The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Pretense, 218
Illusions without Owners, 98 Primal father, 154, 155
Phantom figure, 76, 92 Privacy, 35–36, 40
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 3, 5, Protagoras, 87–88, 91, 91n12
8, 52–53, 56, 65–67, 67n3 Proteus, 13
as comedy, 62–65 Providence, 183–186
Philadelphia Story, The (film), 42, 44, Proximity, 42–44
47–48 Pryor, Richard, 10, 211–228
Philosophy childhood, 217, 218
interiority of expression, 35 face of, 224–226
Photogenesis, 40 on family, 215–216, 216n6
Place, Vanessa, xi, 13, 263 humanity of, 212–215
Plato, 7, 30n19, 75 humiliation as dismemberment,
Apology, 85 220–221
Crito, 199n10 identity as protective mechanism, 216
forms and, 79 impersonation, 224–225, 227
Symposium, 17–18, 90, 232n1 improvisation, 213, 213n2
Theaetetus, 77, 81, 85–90, 91n12 misanthropy, 215, 216
Pleasure principle, 175n11 on pretense, 218–220
Pliny the Elder rifting, 212
Naturalis Historia, 97 self-loathing, 215–216
Podoroga, Valery, 248, 254 as wounded, 215
Poetry Psychoanalysis, 26n15, 95, 95n1, 100,
as dangerous, 270 105, 122, 129, 241, 263–278
poetics of nonsense, 254–261 authority and, 146, 148, 153, 159
rhythm in poetry, 253–254 (See also Freud, Sigmund)
Police, 218n9, 222 code of ethics, 263–264
police corruption, 193 comic psychoanalysis, 7–9
police officer as comic, 204–208, See also Dialogue, quasi academic
205n16, 227 Pure life, 107–108
Politeness, 102–103, 105
Polunin, Vyacheslav, 235
Pope, Alexander, 2 Q
Pornography, 204 Quiet desperation, 39
Portrait of Dr. Gachet (Van Gogh), 111
Postmodernism, 148
authority, 149, 158 (see also R
Authority) Rape jokes, 13, 264–278
parenting, 159 as fantasy, 278
See also Boss punctum, 266
Power, 3, 129 taboo, 275
authority and, 145 unambivalence, 275
298 INDEX
Reality principle, 175n11 Self, the, 63–64, 80

Reason, 169–173, 176 phantom figure, 76, 92
physical universe and, 170–173 pure certainty of self, 92
Recurrence, 163, 180–183 self-consciousness, 80n3
subsistence of everlasting recurrence, self-negation, 66, 68
183 transformation of, 56
Reiner, Rob, 41 Self-preservation, 97, 107
Relativism, 87–89 Self-reflection, 100
Religion, 62–65, 77–81 Sellers, Peter, 207
Remarriage, see Comedy of remarriage Seltman, Cassandra, xi, 13, 263
Repetition, 10, 29, 45, 180–183, Senecca, 187
181n15, 223–224 Sennett, Mack, 187, 205
minimal difference, 233 Separateness, see Proximity
as part of original, 232 Serendipity (film), 194n4
performance as repetition, 231–232 Serious, the, 10, 218, 223
violent repetition, 263, 269–270 Sextus Empiricus, 169n1
Repression, 9, 129–130, 130n1, 140 Shelley, Mary, 30
primal, 130, 130n3 Shot in the Dark, A (film), 206, 207
Revolutionary partisanship, 61, 69 Signifier, 137, 138, 200n12, 223, 260
Roche, Mark, 66 Skepticism, 36–39, 77–81
Rokem, Freddie, 18, 18n5 acknowledgment and, 42–43
Rose, Gillian destruction and, 79n2
Hegel Contra Sociology, 57 emergence of subject, 80n4
Ruda, Frank, 126n7 experience and, 43
Ruge, Arnold, 66 knowledge of world, 38
Russian language proximity and, 44
feminine endings, 254 relation to others, 38
radical poetics of, 248–262 Slava’s Snowshoe, 235–239
verbs, 258–259, 259n6 Smokey and the Bandit (film), 206, 207
Smut, 133–142
listener, 134, 136
S object of, 136, 136n4
Santner, Eric, 29 obstacle, the, 136n4, 139
Satire, 2 “third person,” 134, 136
Satisfaction Social Choreography (Hewitt), 245
fold of, 135–137 Societas Raffaello Sanzia, 281
preexisting, 139 Socrates, 8, 17–18, 17n4, 18n5
Satyricon, The (Eumolpus), Alcibiades and, 232n1
232–233n1 alliance with Aristophanes, 75–92
Savoir-fail, 68 as laughing stock, 85n9
Schelling, Wilhelm Joseph, 26–27 law and, 199n10
Screening comedy, 7, 9–10 Some Like It Hot (film), 96–106, 96n5,
Seduction, 133, 152 123
INDEX 299
Space Substantiality, 56, 59, 61, 63

neo-place, 250–251 Subversive comedy, 3
spaces of consciousness, 271 Superego, 95n1
spatio-temporal continuum, 187 Suppression, 130, 130n1
Spinoza, Baruch, 199–201, 200n11, Surprise, 138–140
200n12, 201nn13–14 Surveillance, 201n14
Spotlight, 265 Swift, Jonathan, 216–217
Stoicism, 9–10, 165–187 Symbolic causality, 103n10
active vs. passive, 168–170, 172
corporeal vs., incorporeal
dimensions of metaphysics, T
167–170, 186 Tautology, 141, 141n8
cosmology, 181 of law, 198
dualism, 166, 168 Terrorism, 173n7
ethics of, 166, 176n12 Theatre, 248, 250–253
examples of stoics, 167n2 Thing-itself, the, 56–57, 68
Keaton’s stoicism, 180–183 Things-themselves (way of the world), 57
repetition, 181 3rd Rock from the Sun (sitcom),
Stoic philosophy, 166–170 240–243
theory of representation, 178n14 Thoreau, Henry David, 39, 48
Straus, Leo, 18n5 Tillie’s Punctured Romance (film),
Sturges, Preston, 42 205n17
Subject, the, 4–5, 9, 55, 63, 76n1, 80n4 Time, 182, 182n18, 187
anxiety and, 111–126 passim cyclical, 182
as born, 75–92 images of time, 183
desire and, 111–126 passim neo-time, 250
double, the, 77 nonsense as paradox of temporality,
enjoyment and, 132, 142 256–261
I vs. me, 226 spatio-temporal continuum, 187
lack in, 159 Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro
laughter and, 126n7 Humor in America, A (film),
orphan image, 90–92 217–218
phantom figure, 76, 92 To Be or Not To Be (film), 21, 28, 108, 234
plasticity, 52 Tomlin, Lily, 212, 213, 213n2, 214n4
resilient, 66 Topographic distance, 253–256
to signifier, 223 Tragedy, 7, 95n1, 191
split subject, 239–243 doubling with comedy, 15–34,
Subjectivism, 53 37–39, 43–45, 57
Subjectivity, 8, 28, 59–60, 62, 68, 71, skepticism and, 37, 39
76, 122, 124, 240 as speech, 283
authenticity and, 239 Tragic hero, 52, 78, 79, 95n1, 147, 191
shifts in, 112 Trahair, Lisa, xii, 9
Sublation, 65 Trial, The (Kafka), 201–204
300 INDEX
Trompe-l’ocil painting, 98 end of time poetics, 248–251

See also Illusion poetics of ellipsis, 254
Truth poetics of nonsense, 254–261
as mimetic, 264 poetics of physical acts, 251–253
Tsvetaeva, Marina, 255 rhythm in poetry of, 253–254
Twins image, 77, 87, 88, 90, 92 temporal paradox, 254
“The Christmas Tree at the
Ivanovs,” 262
U
Uncanny, the, 20, 23–28, 23n13, 99,
101 W
Uncertainty, 38–39 Wallace, David Foster, 282
Under-ego, 95n1 Walters, Barbara, 219–220
Union Wedding Banquet, The (film), 41
fear of, 36 When Harry Met Sally (film), 41
Unity, 59 Wilder, Billy
Universal-at-work, 65 Kiss Me, Stupid, 106–107
Universal freedom, 5 One, Two, Three, 108
Universal function of comedy, 3–4 Some Like It Hot, 96–101, 96n5,
101–106, 123
Willner, Alfred Maria, 23n12
V Wilmot, John, 100
Van Gogh, Vincent, 111 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 39, 40
Varnel, Marcel, 206 Investigations, 40
Ventriloquism, 239, 267, 272 Wolfson, Jordan, 273
Via negativa, 58 Woman of the Year, The (film), 45
Violence, 263
See also Rape jokes
Voice, 121–122, 263, 276–277 Z
Von Trier, Lars Zabolotsky, Nikolay, 253, 254
Antichrist, 147 Zaum, see Nonsense
Boss of It All, The, 146–156 Zentropa (film), 104
Breaking the Waves, 146 “Zero and Zeero” (Kharms), 260n8
Dancer in the Dark, 146 Zeuxis (painter), 97, 104–105
Dogville, 146–147 Žižek, Slavoj, 108, 123, 145, 146,
Idiots, The, 146 149, 158–160
Kingdom, 147 Zupančič (with carrot over cs), Alenka,
Von Trier, Lars, 9, 104 xii, 3–4, 9, 29n18, 32, 56, 62,
Vvedensky, Alexander, 10–11, 247–262 103n11, 107, 108, 118, 129,
“Certain Quantity of 148, 154, 157, 265
Conversations,” 252, 262 The Odd One In, 113

The Object of Comedy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Object of Comedy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE

Series Advisory Board

More information about this series at

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Cover illustration: cineclassico / Alamy Stock Photo

1 A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction to the Object

Part I Comic Philosophy 13

2 The Uncanny and the Comic: Freud avec Lubitsch 15

3 How They Fought 35

4 Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness: On

5 The Aborted Object of Comedy and the Birth of the

Part II Comic Psychoanalysis 93

6 The Three Moments of Comedy 95

7 From Objects of Desire to Objects of Comedy in

8 Where Does Dirt Come From?129

Part III Screening Comedy 143

9 Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of It All145

10 Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence and Comedy in

Part IV Performing Comedy 209

12 Richard Pryor, the Conedian211

14 After Death Comes Humor: On the Poetics of Alexander

15 Asking for It: An Exchange between Cassandra Seltman

16 Of Organic Comedies: Interview with Romeo Castellucci281

Rachel Aumiller is a Researcher in Ethics at the Institute for Humanities

Philosophic Critique of Art (European Un-ty, 2011), Pound &£ (Logos,

author of Hegel a Jena. La critica dell’astrazione (Pensamultimedia, 2011).

Lisa Trahair is Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts and Media,

Fig. 12.1 A conedian belongs to the humaniry, screenshot, 2018 (Courtesy

A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction

What makes us laugh and why? Is comedy transformative, reparative, or

© The Author(s) 2019 1

When such a device is used by the dominant party against an underdog,

than a king that believes he is a king.” Paraphrasing Lacan, Zupančič

reveals that a certain kind of pleasure is to be gained at the subject’s

Even though he is evoking cabbage heads, Hegel is clearly discussing

overcoming of a separation and narrates how two lovers eventually and

In Chap. 7, Alfie Bown considers “objectification” as a key function in

Keaton’s film The General participates in and redefines Stoical ideas. In

The Uncanny and the Comic: Freud avec

© The Author(s) 2019 15

almost exactly a century earlier, in 1816, at the heyday of romanticism.

He co-wrote the screenplay with Hanns Kräly, his regular collaborator

years to follow the trauma was forgotten and everything seemed to be

Thus, to follow Freud, it is misleading to focus on the blurred line

mechanical doll then further highlights the mechanical character of “inter-­

extra-natural happens, but in a mode which is neither fantastic nor objec-

This is a wonderful formula: comic relief without relief, a relentless

depth of passion, the infatuation, but the comedy of impersonating the

In this light I would like to consider Lubitsch’s masterpiece: not as the

in a frenzied pursuit of inheritance, the self-engrossed Hilarius, the inge-

How They Fought

Why spend your life in a couple rather than all alone?

© The Author(s) 2019 35

Cavell’s method in his books on film is to demonstrate how seeing and

The relevance of Shakespearean tragedy, of which Hollywood cinema is

a happy resolution of the problem of skepticism. Skepticism is not a matter

From the Tragic to the Comic

The Tragedy and Comedy of the Couple

Skepticism expresses and obscures the loss of a natural proximity to

­ roblematic, that of equality, which makes it possible to be both near and

There is a political resonance to this observation, which brings us to the

The Philadelphia Story

If it is a matter of deciding whether it is better to spend our lives together

as a whole people is in proportion to an ill government, so is one man to an

1 A Head or a Cannonball? An Introduction to the Object

Part I Comic Philosophy 13

2 The Uncanny and the Comic: Freud avec Lubitsch 15

3 How They Fought 35

4 Hegel and the Misadventures of Consciousness: On

5 The Aborted Object of Comedy and the Birth of the

Part II Comic Psychoanalysis 93

6 The Three Moments of Comedy 95

7 From Objects of Desire to Objects of Comedy in

8 Where Does Dirt Come From?129

Part III Screening Comedy 143

9 Seriously Funny: Comedy and Authority in The Boss of It All145

10 Stoicism, Causality, Divine Providence and Comedy in

Part IV Performing Comedy 209

12 Richard Pryor, the Conedian211

14 After Death Comes Humor: On the Poetics of Alexander

15 Asking for It: An Exchange between Cassandra Seltman

16 Of Organic Comedies: Interview with Romeo Castellucci281

mechanical doll then further highlights the mechanical character of “inter-

roblematic, that of equality, which makes it possible to be both near and

c onsciousness by way of repetition and escalation. Like a comic hero, nat-

e verything, including themselves, the victory of their own subjective per-

eneral is based on belief—or, as I have suggested calling it, on an “illu-